We waited a long time for this...........

[thedrifter]

I am not one to ask you to forward a web page, but in this case, I will break ranks! This has been a long time coming and needs to be heard now more than ever. It took 30 years for David Horowitz to realize what a lot of knew on the ground in Vietnam. I applaud his courage at a time when it is most needed. Send it on...
David Horowitz Published Oct 2 2001
As a former antiwar activist who helped to organize the first campus demonstration against the war in Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, I appeal to all young people who are participating in antiwar demonstrations on college campuses to reconsider. The hindsight of history has shown that our efforts in the 1960s to end the war in Vietnam had two practical effects. The first was to prolong the war. Since the war ended in 1975, North Vietnamese generals have said that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the battlefield, so they counted on the division of our people at home to win the war for them.
The Viet Cong forces we were fighting in South Vietnam were destroyed in 1968. In other words, most of the war and most of the casualties in the war occurred because the dictatorship of North Vietnam counted on the fact that Americans would give up the battle rather than pay the price necessary to finish it. This is what happened.
The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans is on the hands of the antiwar activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the Communists. The second effect springs from the prolonging of the war, and that was to surrender South Vietnam to the forces of communism. This resulted in the imposition of a monstrous police state, the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese, the incarceration in reeducation camps of hundreds of thousands more and a quarter-century of abject poverty imposed by crackpot Marxist economic plans.
This, too, is the responsibility of the so-called antiwar movement of the 1960s. I say "so-called" because while many Americans were sincerely troubled by the U.S. war effort, the organizers of this movement were Marxists and radicals who supported a Communist victory. Today, the same people and their followers are organizing campus demonstrations against America's effort to defend its citizens against the forces of international terrorism and anti-American hatred responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. I know better than most, about the importance of protecting freedom of speech and the right of citizens to dissent. But I also know that there is a difference between honest dissent and malevolent hate, between criticism of national policy and sabotage of the nation's defenses.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the tolerance of anti-American hatreds was so high that the line between dissent and treason was erased. Along with thousands of other New Leftists, I was one who crossed the line between dissent and actual treason by publishing classified government information in Ramparts magazine. I did so for what I thought were the noblest of reasons, to advance the cause of social justice and peace. I have lived to see how wrong I was and how much damage we did -- especially to those whose cause we claimed to embrace, the peasants of Indochina who suffered grievously from our support for the Communist enemy.
If I have one regret from my radical years, it is that this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within. If patriotic Americans had been more vigilant in the defense of their country, if they had called things by their right names, if they had confronted us with the seriousness of our attacks, they might have caught the attention of those of us who were well-meaning but utterly misguided. And they might have stopped us in our tracks.
I appeal to those of you who are attacking your country, full of self-righteousness, who, like me, might live to regret what you have done. I have lived to see how wrong I was.
-- David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, is editor in chief of Frontpagemagazine.com. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

The Gulf of Tonkin incident ranks as one of the great American foreign policy mysteries of all time. Questions about the incident still remain thirty-eight years after the fact. Did the United States provoke an attack by the Vietnamese? Was there a second attack? Did Robert McNamera and Lyndon Johnson lie to the American people about the whole matter? What is an important answer to these questions is a CIA program named 34 Alpha.

When Hanoi decided to send forces to the South, after the refusal to hold elections by the Diem government mandated by the peace accords of 1954, the United States joined the South Vietnamese with covert land-sea operations. These operatives were to gain intelligence, recruit support and to establish bases of support.

The successes were few and far between as the North Vietnamese caught many of the agents. In January of 1964, Robert McNamara had taken over the operation from the CIA. He sent navy De Sota patrols to support the Alpha-34 operations. The Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were two of the ships that stood offshore and received information from the patrols.

McNamera claimed that the Maddox crew had no knowledge of the raids and the Gulf resolution passed 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate, with only Senator Morse and Senator Ernest Grueling in objection. McNamera now claims that there were De Sota patrols but he did not know it at the time. Is he telling the truth? One man who worked in the Defense department does not think so; he is Daniel Ellsberg. According to Ellsberg:

"Yes, he did lie, and I knew it at the time. I was working for John McNaughton. I was his special assistant. He knew McNamera had lied...Congress was being lied to...I don't look back on that situation with pride."

George Ball, former Under Secretary of State, confirms Ellsberg's allegations. "Many people associated with the war...were looking for any excuse to innate bombing. The DeSota patrols were primarily for provocation. There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into trouble, that would provide the provocation needed."

The result was a disaster for the Vietnamese, for America and for the world. Senator Morse, one of the two people who voted against the resolution said to Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, "Had you given us that information, seven years earlier, in 1964, the Gulf of Tokin Resolution would never have gotten out of Committee."

It is in times like these that we need to understand that governments will lie to anyone, including their own people, if it serves their interests. This is a fact. All throughout the war in Vietnam, the American public was lied to. I knew a man named Joe Miller who was there on one of the support vessels and now teaches Political Science at the University of Illinois. According to Miller, "that was what they were there for, to collect information." History is important because if you don't know anything about history, they can tell you anything and you'll believe them. This is all true.

Sources: New Light on the Gulf of Tonkin, Captain Ronnie E. Ford, U.S. Army
The Pentagon Papers

Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

Times change...Memories remain!
Jane Fonda is being honored as one of the "100 Women of the Century." Hell! I can think of 1,000 Women of the Century, and Jane Fonda isn't on it.
Unfortunately many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our country but specific men who served and sacrificed during Vietnam.

The first part of this is from an F-4E pilot.
The pilot's name is Jerry Driscoll, a River Rat. In 1978, the former commandant of the USAF Survival School was a POW in Ho Lo Prison-the "Hanoi Hilton."
Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJs, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American "Peace Activist" the "lenient and humane treatment" he'd received. He spat at Ms.Fonda, was clubbed, and dragged away.

During the subsequent beating, He fell forward upon the camp commandant's
feet, which sent that officer berserk. In '78, the AF Col. still suffered from double vision (which permanently ended his flying days) from the Vietnamese Col.'s frenzied application of a wooden baton.
From 1983-85, Col. Larry Carrigan was in the 47FW/DO (F-4Es). He spent 6
years in the "Hilton"- the first three of which he was "missing in action".
His wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the cleaned/fed/clothed routine in preparation for a peace delegation" visit. They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his SSN on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: "Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?" and "Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?"

Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper. She took them all without missing a beat. At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge ... and handed him the little pile of papers.

Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Col. Carrigan was almost number
four but he survived, which is the only reason we know about her actions that day.

I was a civilian economic development advisor in Vietnam, and was captured
by the North Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam in 1968, and held for over 5 years. I spent 27 months in solitary confinement, one year in a cage in Cambodia, and one year in a black box" in Hanoi. My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Ban me Thuot, South Vietnam, whom I buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border. At one time, I was weighing approximately 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs.)

We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals." When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was
asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with Jane Fonda. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs were receiving, which was far different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as humane and lenient."

Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a large amount of steel placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane till my arms dipped. I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda for a couple of hours after I was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She did not answer me.

This does not exemplify someone who should be honored as part of "100 Years
of Great Women." Lest we forget... "100 years of great women" should never include a traitor whose hands are covered with the blood of so many patriots. There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Hanoi Jane's participation in blatant treason, is one of them.

Sempers,

Roger