WinterSoldier.com has a bunch of stuff about Kerry and his anti-war activity. It's bookmarked on the left column now. It's worth surfing through. I found some funny stuff about Doonesbury making fun of Kerry in 1971 and contrasting that with Trudeau’s praise of the same man today. This particular article, explains how much of the supposed atrocities were pure theatre.
Kerry described the Winter Soldier event in Detroit as “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.” The veterans, said Kerry, “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.”
But strangely, all those horrific accounts of rape, torture, arson and slaughter that the VVAW had recorded in Detroit seemed to evaporate once the real investigation demanded by Senator Hatfield began. As recounted in Guenter Lewy's 1978 book “America in Vietnam,” few witnesses agreed to talk with military investigators, even after being assured that they would not be asked about their own crimes. Many of those who did permit interviews turned out never to have been in combat. Some of the most gruesome claims came from men who were imposters using the names of real Vietnam veterans. One Marine who had been in combat eventually told investigators that a member of the Nation of Islam had helped prepare his statement, and admitted that he had never witnessed any of the atrocities he had testified to in Detroit. In the end, the Navy was unable to verify any of the hundreds of war crimes alleged by the Winter Soldier Investigation. Neither has anyone else during the 33 years since, including journalists, historians, and military and Congressional investigators.
We'll spend a week talking about Bush's attendance record in the National Guard, but who is out there asking Kerry to verify the atrocities he claimed in 1971? It's pretty much assumed that Kerry saw none of this, but was reading from a script.
This could be a really fun dirty campaign on both sides if the media would just take turns playing up the discrepancies.
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