The genie is damn sure out of the bottle now.

[dude1394]

It's out in the open, he's going to have to deal with it now. Like dole said, you can't call everyone a war criminal and then the next minute stand up and say I deserve to be president because I was a war criminal.

kerry's war crimes accusations

It is one of the bigger gambles of the presidential campaign. But with most of the news media looking the other way, John Kerry has been getting away with it so far.

I refer to Kerry's gamble that the news media won't finally take a hard look at his anti-war activities instead of concentrating on his four-plus months of combat-zone experience as a decorated, wounded veteran of the Vietnam War - experience that Kerry incessantly promotes as qualifying him to be president and commander in chief of the armed forces.

There have been occasional, brief news-media references to, but no details of, Kerry's controversial testimony to a U.S. Senate committee. It took place af- ter he opted out of the customary one-year tour of duty under a Navy policy that allowed such an early out if a serviceman so elected after receiving his third Purple Heart.

(The Marines stopped awarding a Purple Heart for a minor wound, even if the Marine received medical treatment. None of Kerry's wounds was serious enough to require hospitalization.)

Let's take a detailed look at Kerry's Capitol Hill testimony. It will, I think, help explain why many Vietnam veterans oppose Kerry's presidential bid.

On April 23, 1971, John Kerry appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, dressed in what appeared to be military fatigues, displaying the ribbons representing his Vietnam War medals (ribbons which he subsequently said he threw over a wire fence onto the Capitol grounds).

Kerry's testimony, widely publicized at the time, included the following allegations, which he offered as facts:

A "Winter Soldier Investigation" (largely financed by actress Jane Fonda) meeting in Detroit a few months earlier heard statements from men who represented themselves to be Vietnam veterans.

Kerry said that "they had 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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam . . . ."

Kerry described such incidents as "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with a full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Such conduct, he testified, reflected "the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do" and was "accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam."

Kerry's four-plus months of combat-zone experience involved his commanding half a dozen men in a "swift boat" crew as a naval lieutenant, junior grade. Yet, his testimony purported to describe atrocities committed by Army and Marine units serving in the jungles of Vietnam.

"The Army says they never leave their wounded," Kerry said. "The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun . . . ."

Is it any wonder that outraged Vietnam veterans have formed organizations like "Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry"?

Kerry could not possibly have seen the things that he repeatedly said "we" had seen. Apparently, he relied on the statements of some of the supposed veterans who attended the "Winter Soldier Investigation" rally in Detroit.

But later research confirmed that in five or more cases, those testifying at the Detroit rally lied about serving in Vietnam and/or about witnessing examples of brutal war crimes.

Enough today about the largely ignored story of John Kerry's testimony to a committee of the U.S. Congress. Next Sunday: the angry reaction of other Vietnam veterans who were as well situated as Kerry, if not better, to know how American forces conducted themselves in the Vietnam War.


• The writer, retired publisher of The World-Herald, may be reached at P.O. Box 27347, Omaha, Neb., 68127. The telephone number is (402) 593-4553.

[Drbio]

Let the spin begin.