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Tuesday at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted he does not have “access” to the secret deal between the IAEA and Iran on the enforcement of inspections and has only been briefed on the agreements when pressed by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX). Partial transcript: KERRY: “No I haven’t seen it. I’ve been briefed on it. And –” POE: “–But you haven’t read it, you haven’t seen it.” KERRY: “No because it’s in the possession of the IAEA.” POE: “Are you going to read it?” KERRY: “We don’t have access...

The White House did not pursue the nuclear agreement with Iran as an international treaty, because getting U.S. Senate advice and consent for a treaty has “become physically impossible,” Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers on Tuesday. At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Kerry was asked about the administration’s approach of seeking a political accord between governments rather than an international treaty. Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wisc.) recalled Kerry saying earlier in the hearing that if Congress rejects the JCPOA, other countries will in the future not...

Secretary of State John Kerry says he does not know whether the Iranian regime truly wants to destroy America, but views its policy as one “of opposition to us and of great enmity.” When Kerry appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday to defend the Iran nuclear agreement, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) asked him about Tehran’s policy in the light of the “death to America” chants common at events presided over by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hasan Rouhani. […] “Do you think it’s their policy to destroy us?” (Poe said.) “I think they have a...

There is a large group of "walking dead" in our midst . . . and I cannot get them off my mind and heart. We ignored them once, and I pray we won't do it again. If this past presidential election did nothing more than bring to the fore a story that we've not heard . . . we cannot in good conscience ignore it. One, lone soldier, told his story several years ago, and we listened with "bated breath." But recently when the other side of the story was told, we slightly turned our heads and called it politics....

Nov. 15 issue - The attack of the swift boat vets did not catch the Kerry campaign by surprise, not entirely at least. Kerry's operatives had worried from the beginning that some right-wing group would try to use his old Vietnam antiwar speeches against him. In the summer of 2003 the Kerry campaign had quietly made some inquiries with C-Span, asking the cable network not to release old videotapes of Kerry as an angry young vet fulminating about war crimes and atrocities. Portions of his sometimes overwrought testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 could be twisted into...

Honor to the Soldier, and Sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country's cause. Honor also to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause - honor to him, only less than to him, who braves, for the common good, the storms of heaven and the storms of battle. -- President Abraham Lincoln, December 2, 1863 In 1971, a Vietnam veteran wrote a speech defending the honor of the servicemen and women who served in that war and its surrounding theaters of operation. He hoped to present it before Congress,...

For three years as a Military Police Lieutenant Colonel, I was assigned to Headquarters U.S. Army, Criminal Investigation Command, Washington DC. From Dec. 1971 to Jan. 1975 I was responsible for monitoring all war crime investigations conducted by the CID. On Apr 22, 1971 Lieutenant (jg), John F. Kerry, USNR, testified to a Senate Committee concerning supposed war crime atrocities committed by U.S. Military Personnel. He claimed that we: raped; tortured; acted "in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan"; murdered 200,000 each year; and were "more guilty than any other body" of violating the Geneva Convention. The U.S. Navy Criminal...

All, Today's Des Moines Register includes an interview with John Kerry. We can't post from the Register on FR, so I'm writing this up as a vanity. At one point the reporters ask him, "What are the main mistakes you’ve made during your time in public office?" Kerry actually proposes broadening the question to include the period before he entered public office, saying "Oh, gosh. Can I include before I got in? Because that was a big mistake. I mean, how I got in was a mistake." After digressing a bit (to take a shot at Justice Scalia), Kerry explains...

Maine advertisers pull ad over station’s airing of Kerry film PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Several businesses have pulled advertising from WGME-TV in response to the station’s plan to televise a critical documentary about John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activities. The Lee Auto Malls, and the law offices of Joe Bornstein withdrew their advertising indefinitely, according to the Portland Press Herald. Hannaford supermarkets also decided to withdraw advertising, but it reversed its position on Friday. "We recognize that WGME has been placed in an untenable position," spokeswoman Caren Epstein said in a statement. "It was never our intention to politicize this issue...

Federal News Service APRIL 25, 1991, THURSDAY HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE EAST ASIAN AND PACIFIC AFFAIRS SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE SUBJECT: PROSPECTS FOR NORMALIZATION OF US-VIETNAMESE RELATIONS CHAIRED BY: SENATOR ALAN CRANSTON (D-CA) SEN. CRANSTON: It's now my pleasure to call on Senator John Kerry, who has been a leader in this area as in so many others. And it was a special reason and background for his deep interest in a more sensible policy toward Vietnam. John? SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate this hearing which you and I talked...

Those who dismiss critics of John Kerry's Vietnam service as just a bunch of right-wing Republicans out to advance George W. Bush's cause don't know what they are talking about -- or they are engaged in wishful thinking. Okay, I may have once thought that about the critics, too. But after poring over the large volume of e-mail I received after my Aug. 28 column, "What Matters About Kerry and Vietnam," I don't any longer .....Bill Clinton appointed Coleman to the Pentagon post, in which he served from 1994 to 1998. Somehow, despite our running into each other over the...

VIETNAM WAR VETERAN JOHN KERRY'S TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE, APRIL 22, 1971 Editorial Notes by Dr. Ernest Bolt, University of Richmond   By April 1971, with at least seven legislative proposals relating to the Vietnam war under consideration, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator William Fulbright (Democrat-Arkansas) began to hear testimony. On the third day of hearings, six members of the committee heard comments by John Kerry, a leader of the major veterans organization opposing continuation of the war. Kerry was the only representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) who testified on April...

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

I am looking for sites with videos of Kerry’s testimony to congress in 1971and 72 and any other videos from around the same time. Links to sites will help me with a discussion I’m having with my wife. She hasn’t seen any of them. If good responses are received, this may very well become a single location for all Freepers to collect good web sites on this topic.

Just wondering: Matthews' Hardball segment on 9/9/04 suggested in part that Kerry's testimony didn't really affect the fate of currently held POWs. Even tho that appears to some (like Matthews) as debatable, I'm not so sure it can't be proved that Kerry's testimony did affect their treatment and did affect Nixon's plans to get them home earlier than '73. The National Advertising Council agreed to create and distribute print and radio ads entitled "Send a letter to Hanoi" some time in '71. The idea was to highlight the request of the families, the government and the International Committee of the...

Every time I have heard the replay of Kerry's testimony I am galled as much by Kerry's phony accent as by what he says. Does this bother anyone else? When talks about see "atrocities" and committing "atrocities." Just the delivery makes me want to commit an atrocity.

TIGER FORCE - Ex-officer may face justice for atrocities - Army lawyer calls for war-crime charge By JOE MAHR, BLADE STAFF WRITER Three decades after an Army platoon repeatedly executed unarmed civilians and prisoners in Vietnam, a military lawyer has recommended the unit's former commander be brought up on a war-crime charge. In what would be an unprecedented event, retired Maj. James Hawkins could face a military court-martial regarding his actions commanding a platoon known as Tiger Force that killed hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children 37 years ago, The Blade has learned. As the scope of war crimes...

...we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. ...if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: "But the issue, gentlemen,the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people." But the point is they are not...

Click here to watch the video of the testimony. Click here for the audio. Transcript Thanks to Orange and White Video for digitizing and Short Consulting for the hosting. Anyone else wanting to mirror the files, feel free to contact me. Cross-posted: Our Life

Vietnam veteran-turned-military analyst Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said Thursday that John Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee portraying Vietnam soldiers as "monsters" would have been consider ground for treason charges in an earlier day. "There is deep, deep anger for a man who, if he had done this during World War II, would have been tried for treason," McInerney told ABC Radio's John Batchelor. Noting that two of his brothers also served in Vietnam, where one died, McInerney said, "He betrayed us . . . He betrayed not only my personal family but my [West Point] classmates...