Kerry has been smeared, but will Bush renounce the scumbags?
Republicans are attacking John Kerry for highlighting his role in the war as a means of demeaning the part played by US President George W Bush.
Some Republicans are contending that Kerry got three purple hearts for being wounded just so that he could get an early ticket home from Vietnam. The Democrats, on the other hand, claim that Kerry has still got shrapnel in his body to prove his service, while all Bush has to show is a couple of fillings in his teeth that he got on few occasions that he showed up for service in Alabama.
Some Democrats complain about the president’s smirk, his laziness, his verbal incoherence and his righteous confusion about whether or not the war on terrorism can be won.
They brag about his leadership during the 9/11 crisis when he raced across America, doing what he was told by the secret service.
Opponents accuse him of alienating America’s allies, exhibiting favouritism towards the oil industry and the rich, while being hostile to the environment and civil liberties.
In recent days, however, the fallout from the Vietnam era has been making most news.
The negative ads of the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ have reportedly done enormous damage to John Kerry’s campaign. In these he is denounced for having betrayed colleagues in congressional testimony.
“Several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honourably 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,” Kerry told the US Senate Foreign Relation Committee on April 22, 1971.
“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 a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Kahn, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam,” Kerry added. “The entire world already knows,” he said, “that American involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry asked the senators. “We are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalisations.”
History has proved him right. Even Robert McNamara, one of the main architects of American involvement, has since denounced it as a mistake. The Swift Boat people, who served at the same time, though not on the same boat as Kerry, quote his testimony to suggest that he “betrayed” them.
“He dishonoured his country and, a lot more important, the people he served with,” they contend in the ad. “He just sold them out.”
At the unveiling of his own official portrait in the White House earlier this year, Bill Clinton said he used to get solace from Theodore Roosevelt’s portrait. “You look at that picture and you see here’s a human being who’s scared to death and not sure it’s going to come out all right.”
That reminded me of a photograph of a terrified little girl cowering in the background and a bemused little boy in arms of a young woman adjusting her blouse moments before American soldiers murdered them on March 16, 1968.
In the foreground there is a mature woman being held around the waist by somebody whose face is hidden. All are barefoot.
US army photographer Sgt Ron Haeberle took the picture. At the time Haeberle had just a week left in his tour of duty in Vietnam, and he volunteered to go on the mission to Son My, which was listed as My Lai 4 on American military maps. Jay Roberts, a reporter, accompanied him.
They volunteered, because neither had seen much action, and they heard this mission would be “a hot one”.
AT ONE point Roberts watched as some soldiers singled out a good-looking Vietnamese girl, wearing the traditional black pyjamas. They pulled at her blouse, attempting to fondle her breasts.
“Let’s see what she’s made of,” one soldier shouted. “VC boom-boom,” said another, suggesting that she was some kind of Vietcong whore.
“I’m horny,” a third soldier said. The women and children were screaming and crying.
“An old lady began fighting with fanatical fury, trying to protect the girl,” according to Roberts. “She was fighting off two or three guys at once. She was fantastic. Usually they’re pretty passive.” One of the soldiers hit the old woman with his rifle butt, and another kicked her. “They hadn’t even gotten that chick’s blouse off when Haeberle came along,” Roberts continued.
“Hey, there’s a photographer,” Steven Grzesik shouted.
“Here’s a guy standing there with a camera that you’ve never seen before,” Grzesik thought to himself. The soldiers suddenly stepped back.
“What do we do with them?” one soldier asked. “Waste them,” was the answer.
“Guys were about to shoot these people,” photographer Ron Haeberle remembers. “I yelled, ‘hold it,’ and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M-16s open up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn’t turn to look.” “Only a small child survived,” Grzesik recalled. “Somebody then carefully shot him, too.” Roberts added: “When we turned back around, all of them and the kids with them were dead.”
Sgt Charles West complained to Haeberle afterwards: “I thought it was wrong for him to stand up and take pictures of this thing,” West explained. “Even though we had to do it, I thought, we didn’t have to take pictures of it.”
That was what the Nazis said, too: ‘We had to do it.’ But none of those who murdered the people in that picture were ever held responsible. There is no doubt about the massacre.
One of the officers, Lt William Calley, was later tried and convicted in an American military court for his part in the massacre in which more than 500 civilians were murdered, mostly women and children. Calley was sentence to a long term in prison but this was suspended within 48 hours by President Richard Nixon. Of course, all this happened over 30 years ago, but Kerry’s critics have resurrected his testimony now to damage him.
He had a duty to tell the truth before congress, and history has confirmed his testimony. Those who accuse Kerry of betraying them by telling the truth about such barbarity are moral degenerates.
If Bush is not prepared to denounce the support of these dregs of humanity, he is not only as bad as them but is condoning the worst form of terrorism. Then let us all hope he is routed in November.
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