Hanoi John: Kerry and the Antiwar Movement’s Communist Connections
During the [Winter Soldier] hearings IPS associate Robert Jay Lifton spoke as the keynote speaker and served on one of the panels. Serving on other panels were Lifton’s coauthor Richard Falk of the Institute for Policy Studies, who had travelled to North Vietnam in 1969; Falk’s IPS associate Peter Weiss, a member of several Communist front groups who had participated in the Bertrand Russell Foundation’s International War Crimes Tribunal and had travelled to North Vietnam in November 1970, and whose wife Cora had collaborated with the North Vietnamese to exploit POW families through the group Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM). . .Legal support for the [Dewey Canyon III] protestors was provided by Ramsey Clark, who had previously assisted the protestors who disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention and was now representing several other Communist front groups. (Clark and another VVAW lawyer, Peter Weiss, would soon join the National Lawyers Guild, the legal bulwark of the Communist Party, in defending the Communist terrorist group the Baader-Meinhof Gang.)
Subversion in the Senate: Kerry's Communist Constituency
Kerry's report on POWs and MIAs noted that POW negotiations between the US and Vietnam had been initiated in the 1960s and 1970s by antiwar groups, notably the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM), cochaired by David Dellinger and Cora Weiss. What Kerry's report failed to mention was that Weiss and COLIFAM had collaborated with the North Vietnamese and Kerry's own antiwar group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in using POWs as hostages to extort POW families into pressuring the Nixon administration to end the war in return for promised POW releases. VVAW leader Barry Romo joined a COLIFAM delegation to Hanoi, and Weiss and other COLIFAM officers sat alongside VVAW leader Al Hubbard on the Coordinating Committee of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, a Communist front group directed by North Vietnam.
I'll be posting another item in the morning which will mention a link between Weiss and Teresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation.
Ping.