More News On Kerry

[FREEBIRD]

Kerry Still Backpedaling on Presence at 1971 Anti-War Meetings
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
March 24, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - Five days after CNSNews.com reported that Democrat John Kerry had attended a 1971 anti-war meeting at which the possible assassination of U.S. senators was discussed, the presidential hopeful is still backpedaling on statements regarding his whereabouts during that meeting.

Kerry at first denied attending the November 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Kansas City, Mo. According to FBI files obtained by CNSNews.com, that 1971 meeting included talk of possibly assassinating U.S. senators. VVAW members discussed targeting then-Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, John Tower of Texas and John Stennis of Mississippi because of their continuing support for the Vietnam war.

Early last week, Kerry's presidential campaign spokesman David Wade told the New York Sun, "Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting." Wade added that Kerry had resigned from the VVAW "sometime in the summer of 1971."

But following the March 18 publication of the CNSNews.com report, in which the FBI files were used to corroborate Kerry''s attendance at the meeting, Wade reversed himself.

"If there are valid FBI surveillance reports from credible sources that place some of those disagreements in Kansas City, we accept that historical footnote in the account of his work to end the difficult and divisive war," Wade said in a statement late last week.

Kerry also retreated from an earlier comment he made in response to a CNSNews.com question about former VVAW executive director Al Hubbard. Kerry and Hubbard appeared together on an April 18, 1971 broadcast of the news show Meet the Press to discuss their anti-war efforts.

But Hubbard, who had passed himself off as a decorated Air Force captain, was later shown to have lied about his military record. An investigation in 1971 by a CBS News reporter revealed that there were no military records showing that Hubbard had either served in Vietnam or was injured there.

When asked about his relationship with Hubbard at a televised press conference two weeks ago, Kerry said, "I haven't talked to Al Hubbard since that week" of the April 1971 Meet the Press appearance.

But after CNSNews.com reported that FBI files and eyewitness accounts from former VVAW members had placed Kerry and Hubbard in the same place on several occasions after the Meet the Press appearance, the Kerry campaign conceded that the senator was also incorrect on that point.

Other news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News picked up on aspects of the stories this week, reporting on the FBI surveillance of Kerry and his group and Kerry's inaccurate assertions regarding when he resigned from the VVAW and the last time he saw Hubbard.

Gerald Nicosia, author of the book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement and a Kerry supporter, told CNSNews.com last week that Kerry was being less than truthful about his anti-war activities.

"I am having some problems with the things he is saying right now, which are not matching up with accuracy," Nicosia said.

"I am in kind of an awkward position here. I am a Kerry supporter and I certainly don't want to do anything that hurts him. On the other hand, my number one allegiance is to truth. So I am going to go with where the facts are, and John is going to have to deal with that," Nicosia said.

Kerry hosted a reception in Nicosia's honor in 2001 when the book was released and praised it as an "important new book [that] ties together the many threads of a difficult period in our history every American should take the time to understand in its totality."

More recently, Nicosia offered some advice for Kerry: "The chickens are coming home to roost, and unfortunately he is starting to backtrack and I personally don't think backtracking is going to work because people are going to go at him and find the discrepancies," Nicosia said.


See Earlier Articles:
Kerry Lying About Anti-War Past, Supporter Alleges (March 18, 2004)
Kerry Says Credibility Not Damaged By Former Comrade's Lie (March 11, 2004)
Kerry-Linked Anti-War Group Can't Bury Deceit (March 3, 2004)

[GunnyL]

Great Post!

[namgrunt]

I can't think of a "nicer guy" for the TRUTH to happen to. He can't even come up with original ideas for his ads. He copies the format used by President Bush. The reported discrepencies noted by his supporter only highlights the dream world Kerry lives inside.

Kerry is a life member of the group which VVAW morphed into, called VVOA (Vietnam Veterans Of America). While they claim not to endorse any candidate, another group called VVOA Foundation, does endorse SwiftBoat John. The "Foundation's" president, a guy named Bobby Muller, has voiced his groups support for the man proud to be standing on both sides of the Vietnam war.

Thats the sort of thought which leaves a warm fuzzy feeling inside, like an overgrown tapeworm running amuck in your guts.

Bon Appetit, mes amis! Don't forget your Heinz Ketchup ration coupons.

[thedrifter]

Kerry's Other War Record <br />
His antiwar activities deserve more scrutiny from the press. <br />
<br />
Monday, March 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST <br />
<br />
John Kerry mentions his service in Vietnam so frequently that it...

[thedrifter]

There, according to six eyewitnesses interviewed by the Sun, the plan was discussed and voted down, with Mr. Kerry speaking out against it, although there is disagreement about how narrow the margin of defeat was. On the third day of the meeting, Mr. Kerry and three other people resigned from their posts as national coordinators of VVAW. Historian Douglas Brinkley says Mr. Kerry told him he quit because of "personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy." Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Brinkley that he was a "no show" in Kansas City.

Mr. Camil doesn't dispute the Nicosia book's accounts. "I'm sorry about those discussions now, but they did take place," he says. He says he doesn't remember Mr. Kerry attending the Kansas City meeting. He says he plans to accept an offer from Mr. Kerry's Florida campaign to become an active supporter and was invited to a meeting for the senator last week in Orlando, although the two did not meet face-to-face.

Mr. Nicosia says the incident raises some valid issues. "Was John obligated to go to the police on this?" he asks. "I think if the thing ever got off the ground, Kerry would do something to stop it." Indeed, in June 1971 National Review quoted Mr. Kerry as describing less violent tactics the VVAW employed as "horrible. . . . Ripping out wires from cars, slashing tires--it's criminal. It should be punished."

But did he resign from the group itself at the November 1971 meeting in Kansas City, or just from its national leadership? Two months after Kansas City he represented VVAW at a speech at Dartmouth College. On Jan. 26, 1972, he was at a Washington protest meeting where the New York Times described him as "a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War."

"The question is: Did Kerry quit [VVAW] before Kansas City or did he quit after Kansas City?" Mr. Brinkley told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg. "If he quit after Kansas City, that means he clearly knew about this assassination plot against the senators and never went to the authorities."


Mr. Kerry's memory on all of these issues is very fuzzy. At a Capitol Hill news conference this month he was asked if he thought his credibility had been affected by his close ties to Al Hubbard, a key player in the VVAW, who had appointed Mr. Kerry to the group's leadership. He and Mr. Hubbard subsequently appeared together many times, including on NBC's "Meet the Press." It later turned out that Mr. Hubbard never served in Vietnam, was never wounded as he had claimed, and wasn't the officer he claimed to have been. Mr. Kerry responded that he had not spoken to Mr. Hubbard since April 1971. But the New York Times places both men at an August 1971 VVAW fund-raising party in the Hamptons (on New York's Long Island), and Mr. Musgrave, the veteran who claims the Kerry campaign pressured to change his story, says he recalls Mr. Kerry challenging Mr. Hubbard's credentials at the November 1971 Kansas City meeting.
Normally, one shouldn't make too much of Mr. Kerry's inability to recall in detail events of 33 years ago, even though they were the most formative of his political career. But he has "misremembered" a lot of key facts about the period. The circumstantial evidence indicates that he is desperate to avoid discussion of those days. Two Kerry defenders called Mr. Lipscomb a "liar" on national TV. The candidate's veterans' adviser apparently tried to pressure someone to deny he attended the Kansas City meeting.

The story is unlikely to go away completely. Last week Gerald Nicosia, the historian who first uncovered evidence the FBI tailed Mr. Kerry back in 1971, reported to police that three of the 14 boxes of the FBI files he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act were stolen from his California home and that other individual files from the remaining 11 boxes were also swiped, including documents about Mr. Kerry that Mr. Nicosia hadn't yet reviewed. "Those revelations are lost now, at least to me," Mr. Nicosia told the Associated Press. Someone, either friend or foe of Mr. Kerry, apparently knew what he was looking for.

The ghost of Vietnam and the culture war it has engendered won't go away. Now the controversy over what Mr. Kerry knew and when did he know it has been spiced up by the whodunit of the third-rate burglary of his FBI files. Sounds like a story to me.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110004881

Ellie

[Sparrowhawk]

before he lies to the American people.

[Phantom Blooper]

An Open Letter to John Kerry <br />
<br />
By Larry Purdy <br />
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 26, 2004 <br />
<br />
Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle---before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise...

[Phantom Blooper]

I don’t blame you for criticizing the manner in which U.S. policy in Vietnam was pursued. It was insane. I, like you, returned from Vietnam believing that the war was a mistake. It was a mistake, not because of what America originally set out to accomplish, but because our leaders (Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and those who surrounded them) never mustered the political will to give those who honorably served there the means (nor, eventually any reason) to win. Clearly our leaders lacked belief in the moral certainty of the cause. But I did not; at least not initially. I went to Vietnam because, like most of us, I believed that our country was intent on defending the freedom of an ally against the documented tyranny of a brutal foe. If you did not share that belief, for what possible reason did you volunteer to return?

After realizing that our government had no real intention of winning the war, I, too, returned with the view that no American should have been sent to die in Vietnam under those circumstances. But that conclusion was not weighted down with the vicious anti-American, anti-military, anti-war, pro-Viet Cong, pro-Ho Chi Minh, pro-Communist rhetoric which you not only adopted, but worked tirelessly to promote. More fundamentally, mine was not a conclusion which required a corollary that the Americans who served in Vietnam were, on balance, no better than barbarians. The vast, vast majority of American servicemen didn’t rape, pillage or plunder. They didn’t cut off ears, heads or limbs of enemy combatants. They knew (as you, too, should have known) that such activities were not only wrong but were flatly proscribed and rightly punishable.

For what it’s worth, there wasn’t a day during my entire tour when I didn’t try to leave Vietnam a better, more secure place because of our presence. At the same time, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t hope that any VC who wished me dead would be killed by the swift boat crews, or by the Seawolves, STABs or SEALs, before he had the chance to act on that wish.

I would feel the same were I serving in Iraq today. The difference is this. There is a moral clarity surrounding our mission in Iraq---notwithstanding the difficulties our servicemen and women continue to face---which our nation’s leaders failed to muster when we were serving in Vietnam. It is a clarity which seems to elude you. You seem frozen, as if it were still 1971. You seem incapable of distinguishing the success of America and her allies in removing a brutal dictator in Iraq from our failure to accomplish a similar goal in Vietnam. Or maybe it’s simply the case that, as with Vietnam, you are desiring a similar outcome in Iraq purely for “personal political gain.”

The nation deserves to know.

[Note: Mr. Purdy is a 1968 graduate of the United States Naval Academy who served in Vietnam from December 1969 until December 1970. He was assigned as one of the support personnel with NSA Det An Thoi, the main base for the swift boat group in which John Kerry served in the early part of 1969.]



ENDNOTES:

[1] Thomas Sowell, “Random Thoughts,” www.townhallcom/columnist/thomassowell/printts20040225.shtml (Feb. 25, 2004).

[2] All quotes are taken from the official transcript entitled “Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia,” dated Thursday, April 22, 1971 (pages 179-210) before The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator J.W. Fulbright (Chairman) presiding.

[3] James Webb, “PEACE? DEFEAT? What Did the Vietnam War Protesters Want?” American Enterprise Institute (May/June 1997)(emphasis added), describing a conversation with Sen. McGovern during a break in taping a 1995 edition of CNN’s Crossfire.

[4] It is quite interesting to re-read your descriptions of the promises made to you by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese representatives while you socialized with them in Paris concerning (a) the “release” of our POW’s and (b) the importance of allowing the South Vietnamese people to determine their own future. (page 186) Is it your view that the North Vietnamese lived up to their promises? Have you forgotten the scenes of the NVA tanks rolling into the south in 1975? Was that what you had in mind when you emphasized the importance of allowing the South Vietnamese people “to determine their own future”? Or was staring down the barrel of an NVA tank or AK-47, or being publicly executed by the thousands, or being incarcerated by the hundreds of thousands in political “re-education” camps, or facing the possibility of drowning in the South China Sea in a desperate attempt to escape the North’s tyranny, your definition of “self determination” for the South Vietnamese?