MICHAEL BENGE
John Kerry's War Record - shades of Hanoi Jane
Thu Feb 12 02:20:07 2004
64.140.158.55

John Kerry's War Record - shades of Hanoi Jane

John Kerry's war record

As Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, considers a bid for the White House,
Americans should know a few things about him that he might prefer go unmentioned ?
and I don't mean his $75 haircuts.

When Mr. Kerry pontificated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day, a group
of veterans turned their backs on him and walked away. They remembered Mr. Kerry as the anti-war activist who testified before Congress during the war, accusing veterans of being war criminals.

The dust jacket of Mr. Kerry's pro-Hanoi book, "The New Soldier," features a photograph of his ragged band of radicals mocking the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, which depicts the flag-raising on
Iwo Jima, with an upside-down American flag.

Retired Gen. George S. Patton III charged that Mr. Kerry's actions as an anti-war activist
had "given aid and comfort to the enemy," as had the actions of Ramsey Clark and Jane
Fonda.

Also, Mr. Kerry lied when he threw what he claimed were his war medals over the
White House fence; he later admitted they weren't his. Now they are displayed on his office wall.

Long after he changed sides in congressional hearings, Mr. Kerry lobbied for renewed trade
relations with Hanoi. At the same time, his cousin C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive for
Colliers International, assisted in brokering a $905 million deal to develop a deep-sea port
at Vung Tau, Vietnam ? an odd coincidence.

As noted in the Inside Politics column of Nov. 14 (Nation), historian Douglas Brinkley is
writing Mr. Kerry's biography. Hopefully, he'll include the senator's latest ignominious
feat: preventing the Vietnam Human Rights Act (HR2833) from coming to a vote in the Senate,
claiming human rights would deteriorate as a result.

His actions sent a clear signal to Hanoi that Congress cares little about the human rights for which so many Americans fought and died.


The State Department ranked Vietnam among the 10 regimes worldwide least tolerant of religious freedom. Recently, 354 churches of the Montagnards, a Christian ethnic minority, were forcibly disbanded, and by mid-October, more than 50 Christian pastors and elders had been arrested in Dak Lak province alone.

On Oct. 29, the secret police executed three Montagnards by lethal injection simply for
protesting religious repression. The communists are conducting a pogrom against the Montagnards, forcing Christians to drink a mixture of goat's blood and alcohol and renounce Christianity. Thousands have been killed or imprisoned or have just "disappeared." The Montagnards lost one-half
of their adult male population fighting for the United States, and without them, there might be thousands more American names on that somber black granite wall at the Vietnam memorial.

As Mr. Kerry contemplates a run for the presidency, people must remember that he has fought harder for Hanoi as an anti-war activist and a senator than he did against the Vietnamese communists while serving in the Navy in Vietnam.

MICHAEL BENGE
Foreign Service officer and former Vietnam
POW (1968 to 1973)
Washington

http://www.eminutemen.com/Kerryswarrecord.htm

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Hanoi Jane: Yesterday's Fiery Communist Revolutionary
That organization was later led by Vietnam vet John Kerry, now a US senator and former co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. In 1972, Fonda took her pro-communist radicalism to North Vietnam. She visited that country's Russian built anti-aircraft emplacements and cheered the spirits of its communist gunners by wearing a gunners steel helmet and peeping through the gun sight, "looking for one of those blue eyed murderers." At a time when 50,000 US servicemen had already died on the battlefields of Vietnam, Fonda sided with the communists, making radio broadcasts from Hanoi designed to break the morale of US fighting forces while encouraging the North Vietnamese to fight harder and kill more Americans. Fonda's Hanoi radio broadcasts and propaganda films were especially painful and damaging to American servicemen held as prisoners of war by the Hanoi Reds. Communist interrogators used the Fonda recordings, along with starvation and torture in attempting to brainwash American POWs into becoming turncoats.
http://www.cyberseals.org/Communist.htm

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DONALD RUMSFELD v. JOSE PADILLA (February 11, 2004)
The U.S. Government's Reply Brief Filed With The U.S. Supreme Court
In The Case Of An American-Born Designated 'Enemy Combatant' Whom
An Appellate Court Previously Ordered Released And Permitted
To Meet With His Lawyers [PDF]
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/padilla/padrums21104grply.pdf


Be sure and vist Branton's Web page at
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/branton/

And watch for his column "Branton for The Insider" in upcoming issues of www.thehollowearthinsider.com 's Insider's Reports.