McCain Says Kerry's Anti-War Protests Fair Game

Senator John McCain said Kerry's anti-war activities after he returned from Vietnam are an appropriate subject for political debate. Bloomberg reports:

McCain, 68, of Arizona, said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," that he disagreed with Kerry throwing his ribbons from his medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol when he returned from the war.

"Every American is entitled to protest," McCain said. "Whether he did that appropriately" is a legitimate subject for debate, he said.

I don't think Kerry protesting the Vietnam war by throwing away his, or someone else's, medals is going to cause Kerry any trouble. Kerry’s testimony Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, is likely to be much more of a problem. If you missed the recent broadcast on C-SPAN you can watch it via the blogosphere. Jeff Quinton, at Backcountry Conservative has provided links to the video, audio and a transcript.

The beginning of Kerry's testimony is what upsets other Vietnam veterans so much:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that 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.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape 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 country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

[from the transcript provided by C-SPAN]

Many veterans resent Kerry testimony, which they took to have been an indictment of all Americans who fought in Vietnam, and according to the Christian Science Monitor, especially troubling to POWs:

"Kerry's remarks to Fulbright's committee were devastating to everybody who served in Vietnam," says former POW Paul Galanti, who was forced to listen to "Hanoi Hannah" broadcast North Vietnamese propaganda about antiwar vets back home. "They were as demoralizing to me as solitary [confinement]. I consider Kerry's remarks to be deliberate lies and a prime reason the war dragged on."

United Press International provides example:

Jim Warner, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in the Hoa Lo prison complex -- known to U.S. servicemen as the Hanoi Hilton -- remembers Kerry. He became acquainted with him, he said, when a North Vietnamese guard and interrogator the prisoners nicknamed "Boris" took Warner to the quiz shack in the complex's punishment camp called "Skid Row" in May 1971.

During a four-hour propaganda and harassment session, Boris pulled papers from his pocket and gave them to Warner to think about, he said. Some were clippings from a leftist newspaper in the United States. The other was a typewritten transcript of Kerry's testimony before a U.S. Senate panel in which he repeated allegations of U.S. troops routinely committing atrocities, attacking the war and saying communism was not a threat in Vietnam.

[. . .]

Warner was in his Marine Corps F-4B aircraft when he was shot down over North Vietnam on Oct. 13, 1967, and was held for 1,979 days. He told UPI that in that confrontation with the North Vietnamese officer he was told "these statements (by Kerry) ... were proof I deserved to be punished. I was pretty sure they weren't going to do anything, but in the summer of '69 they had spent four months trying to get information out of me, and I still had the memory of my mistreatment -- sleep deprivation, leg irons, a cement box in the sun (and feet and ankles swollen from chains digging into the flesh).

"The memory of that was still pretty fresh in my mind, and I was extremely uneasy. Every time he mentioned (the papers), this officer said I committed crimes, that this war was illegal. I just had no idea. ... All along they told us they would execute us for our 'crimes.'"

At Outside The Beltway, James Joyner correctly observes that Kerry was repeating stories of others, Kerry was not saying that he say or did these things.

The Commons at Paulie World posts "there is going to be hell to pay."

Rusty Shackleford, at Mypetjawa suggests Kerry's testimony denigrate Kerry's status as a war hero.

Greyhawk at, The Mudville Gazette posts that you should burn Kerry's testimony on CDs and share it with friends.

Comments

[Larry Randall]

For a real solution to the war, check out www.draftwes.com

[Brew]

Sure - his protests are fair play. They're factual. He actually was a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and he did testify in front of a congressional committee regarding atrocities (alleged or otherwise) committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam.

However, this does not by any measure indicate that Sen McCain supports the sort of unsubstantiated slander SVBfT has been perpetrating. Questioning Kerry's Vietnam service because he disagreed with the policies that led thousands of young americans to their deaths in Vietnam, or because he testified about the conditions rendered by poor planning leadership decisions (can we say Abu Garhib?) is nothing more than a ploy to neutralize Kerry's perceived service advantage.