LA Times Editorial: Kerry's (1971) Testimony

[UpInArms]

http://www.latimes.com/la-ed-kerry26aug26,1,2495708.story?coll=la-home-utilities

It turns out that the attack on John Kerry's war record was just Act 1. Now the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (and, miraculously, all the right-wing media) have turned to Kerry's antiwar record. After returning from Vietnam, Kerry became a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a major force in the antiwar movement. In 1971, he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This famous testimony launched Kerry's political career and the talk of him as a future president. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger can be heard fretting about it on the Watergate tapes.

This at least is a real issue, unlike the manufactured nonsense about his war medals. Does what Kerry said back in 1971 disqualify him for the presidency 33 years later?

There is some ambiguity, or purposeful confusion, about the precise objection to Kerry's ancient testimony. Is it something in particular that he said? Or is it the very fact that Kerry opposed the Vietnam War and worked to end it?

Many of those who condemn Kerry for opposing the Vietnam War are too young to have been politically aware during that period. The rest are fighting very old battles. But the fact is that the argument over Vietnam was settled long ago, and a majority of Americans decided that Kerry was right.

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and a related editorial at:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4948025.html

What Kerry did - and didn't - say in 1971

Americans can hold honorably different views about what a young John Kerry, veteran of Vietnam, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 about the war. But those views should be based on what Kerry actually said, not on distorted versions of his testimony being peddled by others, including the ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Kerry did not criticize a single veteran or soldier. He did not accuse a single veteran or soldier of a war atrocity, though he did repeat other soldiers' stories of horror. Kerry's whole purpose was to appeal, on behalf of veterans and soldiers still in Vietnam, for an end to the war. He said, in effect: Look at what your mistaken war has done to us. He spoke movingly and with great concern for both veterans and those still fighting. Below you will find excerpts of his testimony. The entire record can be read at www.c-span.org/2004vote/jkerrytestimony.asp.

What relevance this entire issue has to a presidential election 33 years later is, frankly, beyond me, but to my mind Kerry's testimony reflects enormous courage and conviction on the part of a young veteran just home from war.

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the c-span link is excellent - here is an excerpt:

http://www.c-span.org/2004vote/jkerrytestimony.asp

But for us, as boys in Asia, whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dated to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we can not consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.

In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We are probably much more angry than that and I don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am outclassed here. I know that all of you talk about every possible alternative of getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know you have considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I am not going to try to dwell on that, but I want to relate to you the feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism.

and for more information, here is the Winter Soldier Investigation:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html

from this page:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_02_opening.html

excerpt:

It has often been remarked but seldom remembered that war itself is a crime. Yet a war crime is more and other than war. It is an atrocity beyond the usual barbaric bounds of war. It is legal definition growing out of custom and tradition supported by every civilized nation in the world including our own. It is an act beyond the pale of acceptable actions even in war. Deliberate killing or torturing of prisoners of war is a war crime. Deliberate destruction without military purpose of civilian communities is a war crime. The use of certain arms and armaments and of gas is a war crime. The forcible relocation of population for any purpose is a war crime. All of these crimes have been committed by the U.S. Government over the past ten years in Indochina. An estimated one million South Vietnamese civilians have been killed because of these war crimes. A good portion of the reported 700,000 National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese soldiers killed have died as a result of these war crimes and no one knows how many North Vietnamese civilians, Cambodian civilians, and Laotian civilians have died as a result of these war crimes.

But we intend to tell more. We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders; that created that policy; that set that standard of war bordering on full and final genocide. We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lt. William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide. General Westmoreland said in 1966:

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[DenverDem]

1. So the wrong wing attacks Kerry for being a hero in the war,

then they attack him for being right on the criminality of the war.

Are they trying to throw the election with their idiocy?