One point that's been nagging me throughout the entire Swift Boat affair is that I thought the Vietnam war was pretty well discredited. I thought it was historical fact that our soldiers did some pretty nasty things over there. So then, how were the Swift Boat Veterans successfully using Kerry's criticism of the war against him when most Americans are critical of the war?
Even more importantly, the newest Swift Boat commercial includes a quote from John Kerry's 1971 testimony in which he summarized the atrocities Vietnam vets had told him they'd done in Vietnam. Are the Swift Boat boys claiming that Kerry lied in his summation, that the Vets never claimed to have committed these atrocities? Not at all. They can't call Kerry a liar because his summation was correct.
Salon.com has just published the details of the crimes alleged by the men who spoke to Kerry (excerpts below). It's clear that Kerry's testimony in 1971 was not just accurate, but damn heroic considering the extent of the crimes being alleged. Criticizing John Kerry for speaking out about these alleged crimes is akin to criticizing Abu Ghraib investigators for trying to find out what really happened at that prison.
Oh yeah, I forgot. The Republicans DID criticize folks for trying to get to the bottom of Abu Ghraib, where people were raped and abused not unlike the way they were in Vietnam.
Why is the media not reporting on the REAL ATROCITIES that were alleged to have occurred in Vietnam, and why aren't they demanding the Swift Boat boys either fess up that Kerry told the truth, or shut up?
I've strung together some excerpts from the Salon.com article:
Kerry's April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians ... cut off limbs, blown up bodies ... razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan ... crimes committed on a day-to-day basis ... ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."
Take a close look at what Kerry said to the Senate committee. He was summarizing testimony given publicly at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation of Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in Detroit. One hundred five Vietnam veterans testified there. Seventy-one of them said they were eyewitnesses to war crimes of the sort Kerry later mentioned. Thirteen said that they themselves had committed war crimes.
These veterans testified to rape; to torture and the killing of prisoners; to the torching of Vietnamese homes and whole villages. In sickening detail they filled in the blanks -- as the Pentagon was itself unwilling to do -- to put to work this sentence from a U.S. Army field manual: "Every violation of the law of war is a war crime."
The cutting off of heads -- on Operation Stone -- there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field.
Before we went out on the operation we were told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the villages because we were going to destroy all the villages and we didn't give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and burned them and if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we didn't help them. We just burned the houses as we went.
People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears. The torturing of prisoners was done with beatings and I saw one case where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the ground and he was cut open while he was alive and part of his insides were cut out and they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know they would kill him. And I don't know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese but then they killed him after that anyway."
I looked out across the field and I spotted a Vietnamese woman peasant running away from the ship. I fired a burst of about six or seven rounds into her back before we fired, before we hit the ground. When I was being questioned as to what happened about two weeks later by a captain in my company, I told him what we did and what I did. We both had a good laugh about it. That was pretty much company policy. Also in Hue, during the Tet offensive in '68, I observed American fighters and bombers (Phantoms) dropping bombs and napalm into very crowded streets full of civilians. I don't know how many people were wiped out in that place.
"...kids 4 years old, ranging up to 16 years old, came around the fence to sell GIs cigarettes, or candy, or beg for food, they were CSed. And what I mean is they were gassed. This didn't happen just once, it happened constantly,
We encountered a large amount of civilian population. The civilian population was brought out to one end of the village, and the women, who were guarded by a squad and a squad leader at that time, were separated. I might say the young women were separated from their children and the older women and the older men, the elderly men. They were told at gunpoint that if they did not submit to the sexual desires of any GI who was there guarding them, they would be shot for running away.
Two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP, and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s.
Regarding throwing people out of helicopters, I only saw one incident to this ... There were five Vietnamese people. I do not know if they were civilians, Viet Cong or Viet Cong suspects. Three of them were wounded, had bandages on their bodies and their legs and their arms looked in bad shape. The other two were older men, somewhere around 50 years old. The lieutenant from the armored personnel carrier and the captain from the chopper helped place these people in the helicopter. He got in the helicopter and took off. He got a couple of hundred feet up and three bodies came out.
The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for its October 2003 series about killings committed by an elite U.S. Army "Tiger Force" unit in the course of a seven-month period in 1967. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed -- their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings," the Blade reported. "Investigators concluded that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged."