Posted on 09/22/2004 6:31:45 AM PDT by handy
The meeting, however, was not a secret. Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of that year. "I have been to Paris," he testified. "I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Provisional Revolutionary Government," the latter a South Vietnamese communist group with ties to the Viet Cong.
Kerry's campaign said earlier this year that he met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the "borderline" of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments. But his campaign said he never engaged in negotiations or attended any formal sessions of the talks.
"This is more trash from a group that's doing the Bush campaign's dirty work," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said. "Their charges are as credible as a supermarket rag."
In an interview yesterday, John O'Neill, an organizer of the Swift boat group and co-author of the anti-Kerry book "Unfit for Command," said it would be "unprecedented" for a future commander in chief to have met with enemy leaders. "It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda," he said.
Thought One: Boy, another great, specific, detail-filled rebuttal from the Kerry campaign! Couldn't they have at least tried to argue that the Paris meeting was innocent, and try to describe what Kerry did at the meeting?
Thought Two: "It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda." Team Kerry better have a good defense to refute that talking point, because if that one sentence comparison breaks through the media static and gets into voter's heads, Kerry will make Walter Mondale look like Bill Clinton.
Yeah, I guess I was. And it seems to me that I read something about Kerry agreeing to coordinate antiwar protests with the NV.
Right? Did I guess?
I really don't know, I'm looking for info here...
You beat me to it...
Well, it can't be repeated enough, so I'm bumping it so it can be heard again.
Could this be his final dirty secret?
Well, I suspect this may be one of many, many, many dirty secrets.
I appreciate that...thanks for the Code.
Is it possible to court martial an officer who is no longer active? Or do we just go the treason route?
I don't know if any of this is prosecutable any more. I'm sure the statute of limitations has run out on most violations... I don't know if treason is exempted from the statute of limitations of not.
But, all in all, I'm not holding my breath for any prosecution of John Kerry. Right now what we need to concentrate on is smothering him on November 2nd.
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