John Kerry 1971 Testimony

The shock and awe campaign on Baghdad was completely unneccesary. All it did was kill a lot of innocent civilians and give the Pentagon some emotional satisfaction of showing off it's nuclear-simulated bombs. It did a great job of scaring away the insurgents, huh? It's proof positive that the Pentagon is still in the WWII/Viet Nam mindset. They don't even know what type of war they are fighting.

 

Please crawl out of your cave! First of all the Pentagon never called it a "Shock and Awe" campaign. In fact they repeatedly told the media to quit using the term. Second; Those bombs effectively disrupted the entire Iraqi governments ability to command and communicate.

The military wasn't carpet bombing the city, they were using weapons that are guided by GPS. Which is a huge improvement from Desert Storm. In fact the military is developing the SDB (Small Diameter Bomb), for exactly this purpose. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/sdb.htm

I don't think you could have been any more wrong with that statement.

FYI: We have never dropped a MOAB ("nuclear-simulated bombs") bomb over a civilian population.

Being wrong is kinda your thing.

 

He also insinuated that a majority of US soldiers in Vietnam routinely committed atrocities, yet never produced a single affadavit to support these charges. Even the editor of the Toledo Blade story on Tiger Force has said otherwise:

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031020/SRTIGERFORCE/110190136

This is absolute nonsense. I'd like to see your evidence for these outlandish claims.

 

So, is this what those swift boat fucks are complaining about then? Maybe they feel betrayed that Kerry had ratted out all their dirty disgusting secrets, so now they try to slander him?

I'm no Kerry fan, but it seems to me that a man who witnessed such crimes first hand and testified that they did in fact occur (along with the fact that it was an unnessecary war) would make a better president than the madman we currently have in office. At least we know that kerry is capable of giving us the truth sometimes, even though it's not what certain baby-raping swift boat veterans wanna hear.

"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 use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart."

 

Then again, maybe they feel that he slandered them by making such sweeping accusations against them.

He actually never claimed to be a firsthand witness; he relayed the undocumented testimony of others.

No slander here, eh?

 

The U.S. govt has you well conditioned. They wish it would be that easy for everyone.

Be reasonable. Bombs that size don't need to be used to disrupt communications. There's something seriously wrong with the Pentagon if they think they need that size bomb to take out a communications facility. One can even do it with jamming techniques.

The intent of those bombs was to try to scare the insurgents away, and it didn't work. All it did was kill a lot of innocent civilians. The shear heat from those types of bombs will roast people anywhere near them. It was totally unnecessary. The govt was fighting the wrong type of war right from the start. And Bush was dumb enough early on to declared mission accomplished.

BTW, the U.S. media didn't have the guts to show the civilians that got burned by those bombs. I had to find it on news feeds outside the U.S.

 

Do you deny that it happened? How come it's common knowledge to the rest of the world (and the people of vietnam who actually had to LIVE it) but yet so many amerikans will tuck their tails between their legs and deny that amerika has ever done ANYTHING wrong? My father never served, but he has many friends who were there and most of them have told me similar stories...but I suppose they're all lying too, right? Because anyone who has anything bad to say about this country and it's wars are liberal hippy anti-government types who are just out trying to start shit.

What makes you think that any soldier that did any raping and head chopping would ever admit to it? You weren't there, and you didn't witness any of it. It's easy for patriotic types to believe bad things never happened and that all the vets who WERE there and DID fight and witnessed this sort of bullshit are just making it up. I'm not the type who thinks that simply because my almighty eyes didn't witness such things, that must mean they never happened.

Actually, now that I think about it, one of those friends of my father did admit to randomly killing women and children over there, and forcing themselves on young girls. He's in prison now for killing some dude over here. I guess he probably just made all of that up for the hell of it. And he probably didn't really kill that guy here, either.

 

And of course, Bush is riding easy on all of this because he didn't serve in Viet Nam at all. He gets the easy way out.

About the only thing we can debate about him is how many cavities he had filled by the guard dentists while he was awol.

 

That's not what the swiftboat guys would have you think though...

 

CIA and bin Laden:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/190144.asp


Saddam and Rummy:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2177


CIA and Saddam:

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html


Saddam history from one of his right hand men:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html

 

Ron Reagan was surreptitious at the DNC convention. Kerry was insinuating. We need some real arguments here.

 

I haven't denied that we commited atrocities in Vietnam, nor have I defended the war itself. I've just challenged the notion that the average US soldier there was a war criminal. See http://www.vwam.com/vets/myturn.html.

 

I didn't realize that we had such a hand in Saddam's rise to power, but I still think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that we "installed" him in Iraq. Even more so with the Khmer Rouge. I realize that we bear some responsibility for destabilizing Cambodia, but we didn't put them in power.

 

No one said the average soldier commited these crimes. If it was mentioned in the Kerry interview I guess I missed it. BUT, enough of the soldiers committed enough crimes so that it was a problem, and for those swift boat fellas are attacking kerry for saying so, then I think they're either hiding something or they're in denial. I don't recall that kerry mentioned any of those guys by name, so why should they consider it a "sweeping allegation" against them?

 

Much of what the U.S. govt does we'll never know about. We would have never known, for example, that the U.S. gave Saddam anthrax, botulism, and West Nile virus if the Senate Banking Committee hadn't accidentally come across the records while investigating an unrelated banking issue.

We also wouldn't have known about some of the arms sales from the U.S. to Saddam if there hadn't been that civil lawsuit (involving Tichener and a contractor) that forced the arms sales records to go public.

Think about all the other activities we'll never know completely about, such as Saddams stay in Jordan around 1979 (right before he took control of Iraq), which was friendly with the U.S. back at that time.

We wouldn't have known a lot about Viet Nam either if veterens hadn't come back and given their testimony.

 

Judges can be removed for illegal behavior.
House of Reps can be voted out of Office.
General public can be arrested.
Dems/Reps can be voted out of office.
President can be voted out of office or impeached.

Pentagon? No accountability.

Returning to Kerry, I encourage anyone to read the transcript of Kerry's testimony in 1971 that was originally posted. You don't have to rely on the interpretations of the corporate American media. Read the transcript for yourself.

 

I don't have much faith in the U.S. when it comes to nation building. The U.S. had a failed policy in Viet Nam. It installed a dictatorship in Iran with the Shah that failed. It then installed Saddam in Iraq to go up against the outcome of it's failed policy in Iran.

It then invaded Afghanistan because of it's failed policy of supporting fanatic groups like bin Laden and his ilk.

After that, the U.S. invaded Kuwait to stop Saddam, who was supported by the U.S. to protect Kuwait. It then invaded Iraq because of it's failed policy of supporting Saddam.

It may invade of Syria down the road due to its current failed policies in Iraq.

Why not just let the people of these countries run their own country. Bush said himself at the beginning of his term that he was against nation building.

There's always those who say, 'Don't let those people run their own country. Let the U.S. govt run it for them.'