When Will Mr. Kerry Apologize?
By Charles Cole (08/11/04)
As events took a turn for the worse a few months ago in Iraq, President Bush held a press conference at which members of the White House Press Corps, one after another, asked President Bush whether he was “sorry” for his handling of the war in Iraq. Perhaps it’s time for these same journalists to ask another candidate in this year’s election if he might not be willing to apologize for a few things.
Mr. Kerry loves to state, over and over, that he “supports our troops” (in Iraq). So, lets’ examine how well he supported our troops in Southeast Asia after his return from Vietnam. The public record provides a wealth of information in this regard, most notably, his sworn testimony (under oath) before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of 1971.
Kerry claimed that “… thousands of men” had been “given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history”. He added that he and his antiwar veterans were “ashamed” of what they had been “called on to do in Southeast Asia”, and went on to ponder how one can ask a soldier to be “… the last man to die for a mistake?”. The guys in the field must have felt very supported when they learned of Kerry’s statement that: “We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service …” Kerry added that he and his comrades (a noun I purposely use to describe Kerry’s fellow VVAW “activists”) had “one last mission – to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war”.
Just imagine how our combat soldiers still in Vietnam at that time must have reacted to Kerry’s sworn testimony that our forces had committed “crimes on a day-to-day basis”. If this is his record of “supporting our troops”, then why should the American people trust him to “support our troops” in Iraq, or in future military engagements?
As disgusting as his testimony was, there is one aspect to it which is totally shameful. In his remarks before Congress, Kerry recounted stories of Vietnam veterans who, he claimed, had admitted that they “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 a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam…”.
In 1976, Retired Admiral Jeremiah Denton – who spent over seven years as a POW in North Vietnam during the war – wrote a book entitled: "When Hell Was In Session". He documents how every American who fell into North Vietnamese hands immediately demanded the protections of the Geneva Convention. The North Vietnamese answer was always, "You are NOT prisoners of war. You are WAR CRIMINALS! Your own people have admitted this. Therefore, you will be treated as criminals". Although Kerry was not the first to make such outrageous claims, his public testimony in 1971 was delivered at a time when our POWs were still in captivity in North Vietnam. In total disregard for their safety, Kerry testified that “… we are more guilty than any other body of violations of the Geneva Conventions; in the ... torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam”. Kerry’s irresponsible claims served as a de facto validation of the illegitimate North Vietnamese argument that our POWs did not merit the humane treatment required by the Geneva Convention. They used statements made by Kerry and others to justify the brutal torture they inflicted on American POWs in North Vietnam. For his part, Kerry abetted the North Vietnamese in this deception.
Lt. Kerry was trained in the U.S. Military Code of Conduct. He knew, or certainly should have known, the effect of his description of our troops in Southeast Asia as “war criminals”. His reckless disregard for the safety of our troops on the ground, and most especially for the treatment received by our brave servicemen in captivity in North Vietnam, requires that he now, as a candidate for the position of Commander in Chief of all U.S. military forces, explain to the American electorate how he could have made such claims at a time when we had troops in the field and POWs behind the wire. The vaunted Washington press corps should also ask John Kerry if he is now “sorry” for making outrageous claims which were not only subsequently debunked, but which also were used at the time by the North Vietnamese to beat and torture our POWs in violation of the very Geneva Convention which Mr. Kerry claimed to respect so much.
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