Debunking SBVFT

The 'Kerry charged troops with atrocities' Slander

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Albert Clark

"John Kerry's old nemesis - a fellow Vietnam vet picked by President Richard Nixon to discredit Kerry 30 years ago - is resurfacing today to declare him "unfit to be commander in chief."

"O'Neill says he has a letter signed by hundreds of Navy vets, including many who served with Kerry, saying he is not commander-in-chief material. O'Neill's main beef is Kerry's charge that U.S. troops committed atrocities in Vietnam."

www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/v-pfrien...

* * *

That Kerry in his congressional testimony "charged" that troops committed atrocities is an ancient calumny that is, nevertheless, repeated almost daily now in the news. This is what Kerry said:

"...several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times 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 in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is one by the applied bombing power of this country."

www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html

To anyone who bothers to read what he said it is clear he is charging no one, but is repeating statements others had made about their own behavior. We expect Republican Brown-Shirts like O'Neill to engage in vicious misrepresentations of what Kerry said, but why are he and his kind abetted by the media? Maybe if we buy CNN, et.al., some Google stock they will occasionally do the kind of (almost effortless) search it takes to find out
what Kerry really said.

Albert Clark, NY

Navy Report Supports Kerry's Account
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: August 26, 2004

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 (AP) -- A Navy report filed five days after a disputed mission in Vietnam supports Senator John Kerry's version of the incident and contradicts critics who say he never came under enemy gunfire when he won two medals.

A weekly report from the Navy task force overseeing Mr. Kerry's Swift boat squadron reported that his group of boats was fired on in the March 13, 1969, mission. Some of Mr. Kerry's critics, including several men who were on other boats that day, say there was no enemy gunfire in the incident, for which Mr. Kerry won a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart.

The March 18, 1969, report from Task Force 115, which was located by The Associated Press in a search of Navy archives, is the latest document to surface that supports Mr. Kerry's description of the event. Crew members on Mr. Kerry's boat and a Special Forces soldier Mr. Kerry pulled from the water that day insist there was enemy fire. The task force report twice mentions the incident and both times calls it "an enemy-initiated firefight" that included automatic weapons fire and underwater mines.

Task Force 115 was commanded at the time by Roy Hoffmann, the founder of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has been running advertisements challenging Mr. Kerry's account of the episode.

A member of the group, Larry Thurlow, said he stood by his assertion that there was no enemy fire that day. Mr. Thurlow, the commander of another boat who also won a Bronze Star, said task force commanders probably relied on the initial report of the incident. Mr. Thurlow says Mr. Kerry wrote that report.

The anti-Kerry group has not produced any official Navy documents supporting its claim.

It is unclear how the advertisements will affect the vote of the nation's 26.5 million veterans. Mr. Kerry had hoped his war record would help him to make significant inroads with a group that tends to vote Republican. A poll by CBS News last week showed a drop in veteran support for Mr. Kerry, but the margin of sampling error in that poll, plus or minus eight percentage points, of the small number of veterans sampled, 144, was too large to give a true picture of veterans' sentiment, other pollsters said. But interviews with veterans across the country found a hard-edged cynicism about both Mr. Kerry's using his Vietnam service to advance his candidacy and Mr. Bush for his ties to a group that has renewed some of the divisions of a long-gone war.

None of the veterans interviewed said the challenge by the anti-Kerry group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had changed their minds on the election. But a handful said the attacks were making them rethink support for Mr. Bush.

"I'm a Republican - I voted for Bush last time - but I may go to Kerry this year," said Ron Ostrander, who served in the Army from 1966 to 1969 and lives in Vancouver, Wash. "To me, it's irrelevant whether Kerry's boat went into international waters or not, or how he got his medals. The fact that he served and did his duty - don't try to take that away from him."

Ralph Bozella, a 55-year-old veteran who lives in Longmont, Colo., said the more he followed the Swift boat controversy, the more he drifted into Mr. Kerry's camp.

"I feel like what they did to attack his record is an affront to all veterans," said Mr. Bozella, who was an infantry soldier in Vietnam in 1971. "When you honor one veteran, you honor all veterans, so when you disgrace one veteran, you disgrace all veterans, especially a Vietnam veteran."

A Navy veteran and Republican who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, Mike Weiss of Portland, Me., said Mr. Bush should denounce the attack advertisements.

"It's very sad for me," said Mr. Weiss. "I'm not surprised, but I think Bush is playing a dangerous game, and I think he's turning a lot of people off, myself included."

Whether the candidates saw combat or not, few veterans interviewed said it made much difference.

Question here....

Has anybody other than myself on this forum ever fired a military rifle?

What I mean is, that if a person's entire exposure to firearms has been pistols, he could easily get the idea that nobody ever hit anything with any sort of a firearm from more than about forty yards.

Rifles aren't like that at all. Marines view two hundred yards as point blank range for American service rifles, meaning they'd figure to hit a tennis ball ten times out of ten at that range with a normal 223 caliber M16 with just iron sights.

Even a total piece of **** communist rifle like an AK or SKS isn't going to miss something like a swiftboat on a river, even if the shooter was blind. I mean, I haven't heard anybody say this river in question was 1000 yards wide where this sordid story took place. Those boats were sitting there like the world's biggest targets in the middle of some river while supposedly commies lined up all up and down the riverbank were shooting at them with rifles which had 30-round detachable magazines.

Those boats should have looked like sieves when they got back and everybody on them should have had gunfire wounds. And yet we hear that the boats only had one or two bullet holes in them which had been there the previous day.

What's wrong with the picture????

What the dems are doing here is equivalent to trying to elect P.T. Barnum as president of the United States; they deserve what the American people are going to do to them in November.

Thanks, ehBeth.

Quote:

Navy Report Supports Kerry's Account
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: August 26, 2004

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 (AP) -- A Navy report filed five days after a disputed mission in Vietnam supports Senator John Kerry's version of the incident and contradicts critics who say he never came under enemy gunfire when he won two medals.

A weekly report from the Navy task force overseeing Mr. Kerry's Swift boat squadron reported that his group of boats was fired on in the March 13, 1969, mission. Some of Mr. Kerry's critics, including several men who were on other boats that day, say there was no enemy gunfire in the incident, for which Mr. Kerry won a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart.

The March 18, 1969, report from Task Force 115, which was located by The Associated Press in a search of Navy archives, is the latest document to surface that supports Mr. Kerry's description of the event. Crew members on Mr. Kerry's boat and a Special Forces soldier Mr. Kerry pulled from the water that day insist there was enemy fire. The task force report twice mentions the incident and both times calls it "an enemy-initiated firefight" that included automatic weapons fire and underwater mines.

Task Force 115 was commanded at the time by Roy Hoffmann, the founder of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has been running advertisements challenging Mr. Kerry's account of the episode.

A member of the group, Larry Thurlow, said he stood by his assertion that there was no enemy fire that day. Mr. Thurlow, the commander of another boat who also won a Bronze Star, said task force commanders probably relied on the initial report of the incident. Mr. Thurlow says Mr. Kerry wrote that report.

The anti-Kerry group has not produced any official Navy documents supporting its claim.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/politics/campaign/26record.html

Question here....

Has anybody other than myself on this forum ever fired a military rifle?

What I mean is, that if a person's entire exposure to firearms has been pistols, he could easily get the idea that nobody ever hit anything with any sort of a firearm from more than about forty yards.

Rifles aren't like that at all. Marines view two hundred yards as point blank range for American service rifles, meaning they'd figure to hit a tennis ball ten times out of ten at that range with a normal 223 caliber M16 with just iron sights.

Even a total piece of **** communist rifle like an AK or SKS isn't going to miss something like a swiftboat on a river, even if the shooter was blind. I mean, I haven't heard anybody say this river in question was 1000 yards wide where this sordid story took place. Those boats were sitting there like the world's biggest targets in the middle of some river while supposedly commies lined up all up and down the riverbank were shooting at them with rifles which had 30-round detachable magazines.

Those boats should have looked like sieves when they got back and everybody on them should have had gunfire wounds. And yet we hear that the boats only had one or two bullet holes in them which had been there the previous day.

What's wrong with the picture????

What the dems are doing here is equivalent to trying to elect P.T. Barnum as president of the United States; they deserve what the American people are going to do to them in November.

I have fired an M16 and I know for a fact that a 300 meter target looks about as big a an eraser when viewed through iron sites. I also know that I can hit one about 3 out of 4 times. To be exact I did my M16 qualifaction this weekend and shot very well, I was in the top 5 in my unit and we don't even shoot that often, maybe once a year. The point is that if there were being shot at like they claim they were then there should have been more then 3 bullet holes in the boats. Rassaman claims that he could see the bullets hitting the warter around him and feel the splash then when the boat pulled up to get him it should have been sprayed like crazy, because of the size of the boat.