sharky said:
toleloblade.com/tigerforce
And where are you getting this notion that Kerry said this happened at all levels? Where is the documentation for that? I could find nothing in his statement before congress in which he said that. Please verify that what you are saying is true.
As for Kerry telling the truth, why are you attacking his credibility? Because of the Swift Boat veterans, most of which have been discredited. Hell, John O'Neill was a lap dog for Nixon. Sorry, but I'm going to believe a man who spoke out against the horrors he saw both here and abroad any day over a shill for a crook and the only man who ever had to resign the presidency.
And why do people make it out to be John Kerry going against American troops? He spoke out to get our guys home from an unjust war. I hate the fact that conservatives today act as though speaking out against the war is anti-American. If we are sending our men and women out to fight and unjust war, it is our job as Americans to speak out against the government that sent them over in our name. We should never have dropped napalm on our own soldiers and we should never have sent troops into combat with their parents at home raising money to buy them kevlar vests. Different era, same issues.
Just some of the BS John Kerry presented to congress, direct quotes from his testimony.
"not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day to day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command"
"They relived the absolute horror of what this country has, in a sense, made them do."
"razed villiages in a fashion reminicient of Genghis Khan"
"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold are silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds and not redcoats, but the crimes which we are committing threaten it, that we have to seak out."
"The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the forms of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped."
"In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos, by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocricy, and it is the kind of hypocricy which we feel has torn this country apart."
"we are probably angriest about all we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism."
"We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say non-third world people theater,"
"the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as a justification for the continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions"
"But all they have done and all they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war,"
"So what I am saying is yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United Sates of America,"
"Yes sir. I think we have a very definite obligation to make extensive reparations to the people of Indochina."
"It is my opinion that the United States is still reacting in very much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided up between the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles which was responsible for the creation of the SEATO treaty, which was, in fact, a direct reaction to this so called Communist monolith. And I think we are reacting under Cold War precepts which are no longer applicable."
"Why do we have to, therefore, consider and keep considering threats?"
"but right now, we are reacting with paronoia to this question of peace and the people taking over the world."
"I think it is bogus, totally artificial. THERE IS NO THREAT. The Communist are not about to take over our McDonald hamburger stands."
" A lot of Guys, 60%, 80% stay stoned 24 hours a day just to get through the Vietnam"