Swifty O'Neill Busted

Of course truth is important, Kerry has the records on his side, we don't know who wrote the reports only who signed them. It kind of defies logic , for instance, that lambert was the 'only' witness to that one incedent but there were 5 boats present.

Brand X wrote:

Of course truth is important, Kerry has the records on his side, we don't know who wrote the reports only who signed them. It kind of defies logic , for instance, that lambert was the 'only' witness to that one incedent but there were 5 boats present.

You're really straining now, Brand X. Its not that there was ONLY one eyewitness, of course - hell, you know as well as I do that just around on these pages here we've together quoted over a handful. It's - way I understand it - that an action report like that requires the signature/approval of one eyewitness. And thus they included one.

Parallel: to be allowed to take part in the elections in state X, you need to turn in 1,000 signatures. So candidate Y turns in 1,100 signatures. Does that mean that "the candidate has only 1,100 supporters"? Can you see where that is nonsense?

Brand X wrote:

CNN's Newsnight played the O'Neill-Nixon tape, with text graphic on screen:

O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.

They all worked along the border because the river runs along the border.

Just found a longer quote from that interview O'Neill did last weekend on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" ... interesting.

Quote:

O'NEILL: You asked about Cambodia. How do I know he's not in Cambodia? I was on the same river, George. I was there two months after him. Our patrol area ran to Sedek, it was 50 miles from Cambodia. There isn't any watery border. The Mekong River's like the Mississippi. There were gunboats stationed right up there to stop people from coming. And our boats didn't go north of, only slightly north of Sedek. So it was a made up story. He's told it over 50 times, George, that was on the floor of the Senate.

So ... O'Neill, in his own words, "worked along the border on the water", but err, he knows Kerry's been lying because, well, he "was on the same river [..] it was 50 miles from Cambodia [and] There isn't any watery border."

Right.

ANOTHER O'NEILL LIE:
While we're on the subject of O'Neill lying, to get a sense of just how dirty he plays, compare the way he describes what John Kerry was doing on the morning of March 13, 1969 with the account in Michael Dobbs's careful examination of the subject in Sunday's Washington Post.

O'Neill on "Hannity and Colmes" last night:

Quote:

[Kerry]'s admitted first he actually wounded himself in a very minor way when he was playing around with a grenade that morning when he was throwing it around, throwing it in a rice field.

Dobbs on Sunday:

Quote:

As they were heading back to the boat, Kerry and Rassmann decided to blow up a five-ton rice bin to deny food to the Vietcong. In an interview last week, Rassmann recalled that they climbed on top of the huge pile and dug a hole in the rice. On the count of three, they tossed their grenades into the hole and ran.

Evidently, Kerry did not run fast enough. "He got some frags and pieces of rice in his rear end," Rassmann said with a laugh. "It was more embarrassing than painful."

While on a dangerous mission with a Special Forces officer Kerry was injured destroying a cache of Vietcong rice. In O'Neill's hands this is turned into a story about Kerry harming himself while "playing around with a grenade...in a rice field." O'Neill is a disgrace.

CAMPAIGN JOURNAL
Defense Less
by Ryan Lizza

The New Republic online
Post date: 08.26.04

Never in a campaign has a more disreputable group of people, whose accusations have been repeatedly contradicted by official records and reliable eyewitness accounts, had their claims taken so seriously. John Kerry's accounts of his military service are supported by U.S. Navy documents, his crewmates, and--in the case of the engagement for which Kerry won the Silver Star--the only other living officer who witnessed the event.

As for those disputing his record, Steve Gardner, the man trotted out as an expert on Kerry's first Purple Heart because he served on Kerry's boat, wasn't even on board the day Kerry came under fire. George Elliott, the man who recommended Kerry for the Silver Star but who now criticizes the award as fraudulent, has shifted from supporter to critic to supporter to critic in the span of months. John O'Neill, the co-author of Unfit for Command, argues that Kerry faked the report that led to his third Purple Heart and his Bronze Star. His supposed evidence: John F. Kerry's initials are on the document. But the letters actually scrawled on the page are kjw. O'Neill also claims Kerry was never in Cambodia because his own swift boat patrols never came within 50 miles of the Cambodian border. Yet, O'Neill told Richard Nixon in the Oval Office in 1971, "I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water." As for O'Neill's co-author, Jerome R. Corsi, he has left a bizarre trail of bigoted comments about "ragheads" and papal-approved "boybuggering" on FreeRepublic.com, the modern home of the loony, conspiratorial right.

It's not inconceivable that Kerry exaggerated his war record--it's just not proven. And, of course, lots of things aren't inconceivable. Back in 1999, reporters thought it plausible George W. Bush had snorted cocaine, but, when a scurrilous book by a disreputable author made that allegation, the author didn't end up on the Sunday shows. The press shunned the book, the Bush campaign threatened the author with libel, and the story went away. As for the author, he ended up disgraced and penniless and eventually killed himself.

But, as much as the press bears responsibility for the last few weeks of wall-to-wall Swiftee coverage, many Democrats, who have been tearing their hair out as they have watched this story unfold like a slow-motion car wreck, aren't just angry at the media. They are also blaming the Kerry campaign for allowing the accusations to metastasize into a clear threat to a Democratic victory.

The most frequently heard argument is that, however false the accusations are, the episode underscores a serious weakness in Kerry's case for the presidency. "All of the focus of the campaign was Vietnam, partly because nobody knew what else to talk about," says a Democrat close to the campaign. "I think it didn't have to be important, but it is because John Kerry hasn't been strong on anything else and hasn't enunciated any vision on the war. ... This is the price you pay for having the campaign so focused on the biography."

Other Democrats level a related critique: that the martial emphasis of the Democratic convention helped Kerry match Bush on national security but also left voters hungry for details about his domestic agenda, curtailing any bounce in the polls. Kerry aides argue that the convention was a unique opportunity to tell a man-bites-dog story about a Democrat who cares about national security. They say the plan was always to build up Kerry's bona fides on the war and terrorism and then pivot in August to his message on the economy and domestic issues. But the Swiftees may have set back what Kerry accomplished in Boston, and they certainly smothered his attempts to talk about other issues in August. [..]

The first instincts of the campaign were to change the subject and decry the "right-wing slime machine" rather than forcefully rebut each allegation with the facts, which have always been on their side. That eventually changed, and the campaign itself, without leaving fingerprints, was instrumental in getting facts into news stories that discredited the accusers. But by then, some Democrats complain, the damage had been done. [..]

A final postmortem critique is that the last few weeks highlighted the need to revamp Kerry's communications staff. Senior communications aides have been turf-conscious and reluctant to share authority with others. But, at the peak of the Swiftee frenzy, the campaign finally added two old Clinton pros to help out. Former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart will now serve as the traveling press secretary, while ex-Clinton adviser Joel Johnson will run the campaign's war room, a position aides say had never been clearly defined. After the toughest stretch of the campaign thus far, the news was greeted like a breath of fresh air at Kerry headquarters. "It's like the adults are coming in to babysit the kids," says one staffer. "I've been in meetings where I think, 'What the **** experience do any of us have with this stuff?' These guys are adults."

Despite all the Monday-morning quarterbacking, it's unclear how much Kerry will be hurt by the whole episode. A case can be made that neither campaign really wanted this debate but both are now stuck with it. Bush's association with the Swiftees, and his failure to condemn the ads, calls into question his character, which is the heart of his campaign, just as much as the recent allegations call into question Kerry's military biography, which is the heart of his campaign. Indeed, by midweek, the momentum of the story had shifted from a debate about Kerry to one about Bush. "It's almost as if the two campaigns have wandered into Gettysburg," says Carter Eskew, a top strategist for Al Gore in 2000. "They did not choose to have this battle in this location." But the outcome could end up deciding the war.

Ryan Lizza is a senior editor at TNR.