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.
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.
AMEN
Didn't go to negotiate? Why then did he go? Just to sip wine with old friends?
The ad is about what I've been hoping for, but I wish they'd mentioned that he met the enemy while a commissioned Naval officer then in the USNR Ready Reserve. That's the one thing missing.
Didn't go to negotiate? Why then did he go?
To get his orders - from the enemy.
These are links for the new SwiftVet ad.
Be kind to their bandwidth! Download and watch it from your own computer instead of streaming it multiple times!
You can download it here by right-clicking and choosing "Save".
Windows Media: http://swift3.he.net/~swift3/friends.wmv
QuickTime: http://swift3.he.net/~swift3/friends.mov
RealMedia: http://swift3.he.net/~swift3/friends.rm
MPEG Version: http://swift3.he.net/~swift3/friends.mpg
View the new ad, and then donate again to the Swift Vets.
Thanks for the fresh link. I couldn't get it to run last night...
They keep saying it wasn't a secret, that he told Congress about it. This is a strawman argument. It WAS A SECRET when it happened. He did not tell Congress 'til afterwards!
Good morning GD. How's the wine grape harvest going...
It's a pretty short ad, 30 seconds, I think. Maybe they just wanted to keep it short and hit their main points. The point that he was still a commissioned officer will no doubt come up in the fallout to the ad. I hope it makes it into the media echo chamber.
Excellent Point. Thanks.
It is going well. Earlier there was a lot of panic in getting the harvest in during the hot days.
Now it is semi normal. Warm Indian Summer days and cool nights.
The biggest news is the removal of Mondavi and his sons from Mondavi wines.
The biggest unsaid news is the trend to good lower priced wines by America. Two Buck Chuck has impacted the elitists of the wine industry very hard. The other impact was the implosion of the Clintoon Dot.com millionaires. Most of them can't afford two buck Chuck let alone a hundred $ bottle of wine for lunch and a two hundred $ bottle or two for dinner.
FReeper stockpirate has documented a lot of the VVAW FBI files here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1200950/posts
And there's plenty of info on VVAW's collusion and sympathy with various communist movements on wintersoldier.com, such as this:
http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/staticpages/index.php?page=VVAWFBI
Good thing they're saving their strongest messages till last. More to come...
I don't think the UCMJ applies to civilians acting as civilians, even if they are in the reserves. Does it? It's been a long time, I'm not sure on this one...
You beat me to it...
Did kerry have knowledge in 71/72 (as part of his "negotiations" with the enemy) that a number of POW's would be witheld from repatriation as insurance that the US actually would withdraw and for the "reparations" which were never paid to Vn?
Could this be his final dirty secret?
I think an ad showing him in the North Vietnam Communist Hall of Fame museum would drop him into the mid 20% of support.
Glad I could get it out here.
I couldn't get it to run either.
Recieved it via email, this AM, from a hard case I know. ;)
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