posted June 04, 2004 12:23 PM            

ROME (June 4) - Thousands of armed police lined the streets of Rome on Friday as anti-war demonstrators gathered to protest against visiting President Bush and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

Bush landed in the early hours of Friday for a two-day visit to celebrate the defeat of fascism in World War II, but it is the war in Iraq that has raised passions which the authorities fear could flare into violent protests.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a staunch Bush ally, has warned of violent protests. Fears of a repeat of the mayhem that marred a G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 have led Italy to massively bolster security until Bush leaves on Saturday.

Masked police snipers manned the roofs surrounding the U.S. ambassador's residence where Bush stayed the night as numerous rainbow-colored peace flags hung from balconies close-by.

As helicopters buzzed overhead, riot police with shields formed a human wall outside Rome's Termini station where bewildered tourists outnumbered protesters arriving by train.

A group of four protesters dressed in black in their early 20s had come from Milan to join the demonstration. "I think of Bush the same way as I think of Berlusconi," said a woman who identified herself as Olivia. "They both should be destroyed."

Authorities have said they will allow peaceful protests, but have deployed some 10,000 police who were out in force around rail and metro stations and in piazzas.

LIBERATION

During a three-day trip to Italy and France, Bush will seek international support for his Iraq mission and commemorate the June 1944 liberation of Rome and the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Bush, a born-again Christian, made a special adjustment to the schedule to fit in a meeting with Pope John Paul, who threw the weight of the Catholic Church against the Iraq war and spoke out against the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

A senior administration official said Bush would assure the pope of his "personal commitment" to ensuring such abuses would not happen again, while reiterating his conviction that war was justified because "there are times when force is necessary."

Bush will lay a wreath at the Ardeatine Caves, site of one of the worst World War II massacres in Italy.

Comparing the campaign in Iraq to U.S. efforts in World War II, the official said: "This is now a struggle against another kind of tyranny, one that would certainly take the Middle East back to the dark ages."

Most Italians opposed last year's invasion of Iraq and there have been many calls for Rome to withdraw its some 2,700 troops.

Italians were reminded of the dangers of their presence in Iraq on Thursday when mortar rounds landed near their embassy in Baghdad, killing one Iraqi. They are also concerned about three Italian hostages held in Iraq for nearly two months.

A video of the hostages was aired on Al Jazeera on Wednesday along with a message from the kidnappers urging the Italian people to demonstrate against Bush during his Rome visit.

Bush's biggest goal on his weekend trip -- which takes him away from a political storm in Washington after the resignation of the head of the CIA -- will be to try to overcome differences on a new U.N. resolution endorsing Iraq's caretaker government and establishing a U.S.-led multinational force.

On Saturday Bush meets French President Jacques Chirac, hoping to warm relations strained over Iraq. They will be among 17 heads of state and government due to attend Sunday's anniversary ceremonies in Normandy.

06/04/04 06:48 ET

posted June 04, 2004 12:28 PM            

CAEN, France (June 4) - France put the finishing touches on Friday to one of the biggest security operations staged on its soil to protect this weekend's ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landings.

Some 30,000 soldiers have been deployed for the event which 17 world leaders will attend, including U.S. President George W. Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the monarchs of Britain, Norway and the Netherlands.

"When you have major ceremonies with many heads of state and government, they can serve as a pretext for terrorists," said Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, inspecting security arrangements in the Normandy city of Caen.

"It is certainly one of the biggest operations, if not the biggest (staged in peacetime France)," she said. "It is purely preventive," added Alliot-Marie, accompanied on the visit by Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin.

More than one million visitors from across the world are expected to attend events in Normandy this weekend.

In front of Caen city hall, the ministers met police officers wearing masks, helmets and protection gear against nuclear, biological and chemical attacks. They are to visit army posts, fire brigades and ambulance services later in the day.

France went on nationwide red alert this week, and the army said that if ordered to do so by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, combat jets would shoot down any aircraft violating the no-fly zone imposed over the Normandy beaches.

Anti-aircraft missile batteries, warplanes and helicopters have been deployed in the Normandy area to protect a no-fly zone extending between the ports of Cherbourg and Deauville.

Demonstrations have also been banned for a week in a central Paris area that includes the Elysee palace of President Jacques Chirac, the prime minister's office and the U.S. embassy near Place de la Concorde.

Demonstrations against U.S. policy in Iraq planned for Saturday will be kept away from the zone.

Bush will meet Chirac in Paris for talks and dinner on Saturday, hoping to warm up relations strained over the U.S.-led war in Iraq, before attending Sunday's ceremonies in Normandy.

06/04/04 06:15 ET

posted June 04, 2004 01:52 PM            

By Michael Connelly
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 4, 2004

Dear Senator Kerry,

Since it has become clear that you will probably be the Democratic nominee for President, I have spent a great deal of time researching your war record and your record as a professional politician. The reason is simple, you aspire to be the Commander in Chief who would lead my sons and their fellow soldiers in time of war. I simply wanted to know if you possess the necessary qualifications to be trusted in that regard.

You see, I belong to a family of proud U.S. veterans. I was a Captain in the Army Reserve, my father was a decorated Lieutenant in World War II; and I have four sons who have either served, or are currently serving in the military.

The oldest is an Army Lieutenant still on active duty in Afghanistan, after already being honored for his service in Iraq.

The youngest is an E-4 with the military police. His National Guard unit just finished their second tour of active duty, including six months in Guantanamo Bay. My two other sons have served in the national guard and the Navy.

In looking at your record I found myself comparing it not only to that of my father and my sons, but to the people they served with. My father served with the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion in Europe. They landed on Utah Beach and fought for 317 straight days, including the Cherbourg Peninsula, Aachen, the Hurtgen Forest, and the Battle of the Bulge.

You earned a Silver Star in Vietnam for chasing down and finishing off a wounded and retreating enemy soldier. (A violation of the Geneva Convention)

My father won a Bronze Star for single handedly charging and knocking out a German machine gun nest that had his men pinned down.

You received three purple hearts for what appears to be three minor scratches. In fact, you only missed a combined total of two days of duty for these wounds.

The men of my father's unit, the 87th, had to be admonished by their commanding officer because it had been brought to his attention that some men were covering up wounds and refusing medical attention for fear of being evacuated and permanently separated from their organization...

It was also a common occurrence for seriously wounded soldiers to go AWOL from hospitals in order to rejoin their units.

You, however, used your three purple hearts to leave Vietnam early.

My oldest boy came home from Iraq with numerous commendations and then proceeded to volunteer to go to Afghanistan, and from there back to Iraq again. My sons and father have never had anything but the highest regard and respect for their fellow soldiers.

Yet, you came home to publicly charge your fellow fighting men with being war criminals and to urge their defeat by the enemy. You even wrote a book that had a cover which mocked the heroism of the U.S. Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

Our current crop of soldiers has a philosophy that no one gets left behind; and they have practiced that from Somalia to the battlefields of the Middle East.

Yet, as chairman of a Senate committee looking into allegations that many of your fellow servicemen had been left behind as prisoners in Vietnam, you chose to defend the brutal Vietnamese regime.

You even went so far as to refer to the families of the POWs and MIAs as Professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con artists, and dime-store Rambos.

As a Senator you voted against the 1991 Gulf War, and have repeatedly voted against funds to supply our troops with the best equipment, and against money to improve our intelligence capability.

I find this particularly ironic since as a Presidential candidate you are highly critical of our pre-war intelligence in Iraq. However, you did vote to authorize the President to go to war, but have since proceeded to do everything you can to undermine the efforts of our government and our troops to win. Is this what our fighting men and women can expect of you if you are their Commander in Chief? Will you gladly send them to war, only to then aid the enemy by undermining the morale of our troops and cutting off the weapons they need to win?

Our country is at war Senator, and as has been the case in every war since the American Revolution, a member of my family is serving their country during the war. Now you want me to trust you to lead my sons in this fight.

Sorry, Senator, but when I compare your record to those who have fought and died for this nation, and are currently fighting and dying, the answer is not just no, but Hell No!

Sincerely,

posted June 04, 2004 04:40 PM            

David Cline is national president of Veterans For Peace and also a long-time member and coordinator of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. During his tour of duty in Vietnam, he was wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star for bravery, the Combat Infantryman Badge and other Vietnam service medals. He is permanently disabled from his war wounds.

After his return to the United States from Vietnam, Cline joined the growing antiwar movement. While still on active duty, he marched in several protest demonstrations and helped produce the underground GI newspaper, Fatigue Press, at Ft. Hood, Texas. After his discharge, he stayed in Texas to continue organizing GIs and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1970. He also has many years of involvement in the labor movement as a rank and file activist, shop steward, and local officer in the Bakery & Confectionary Workers, American Postal Workers, and Transport Workers unions. Cline is the co-founder and presidentof the Jersey City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Committee, which dedicated a memorial in 2001 for the 64 local men who died in the war. He has lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, for over 30 years and is the father of a 28-year-old daughter, Ellen, and an 18-year-old son, Daniel.

Daniel Redwood: When did you serve in the military and what led you to join?

David Cline: I was drafted into the U.S. Army a week after I turned 20, on January 15, 1967. At the time I joined, I really didnt think too much about politics. My dad had been in World War II, and my grandfather had been in World War I, so I thought that's what you were supposed to do. I received my draft notice when I was 19, but a car had hit me when I was 18, and my leg had been broken. For my draft physical, I went in to the draft board on crutches with a full-length cast on, so I got a six-month deferment. I was drafted when that deferment ended.

D.R.: What in your military experience affected you most deeply?

D.C.: Being in the war zone. I was an infantryman with the 25th Infantry Division. I was in Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry, Manchus. I got to Vietnam at the end of July '67, and I was in operations Cu Chi and Tay Ninh, in the area they called the Iron Triangle, and then up by the Hobo Woods, and over by Nui Ba Dinh, the Black Virgin Mountain. We were in sweeps, we were on ambushes, we were on roadblocks.

You know, when I went to war, I went over there believing the United States, what they were telling us. In this country, they were telling us we were going over to Vietnam to help the people of South Vietnam fight to defend freedom and democracy from Communist aggression. I went over to Vietnam on a boat, and I remember that on our way over we used to discuss this. When I took AIT (Advanced Infantry Training), it was at Fort Polk, Louisiana, at Tigerland.

I remember buying a magazine in the PX called Ramparts, which had a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., against the war in Vietnam. I remember reading that and we discussed it among ourselves, some of us. We had our little group, you know.

So we'd always go back and forth. Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the wrong thing? We were aware of the voices of dissent. So I remember sitting on the boat going across the South Pacific and we'd have these discussions on the deck at night, because there was nothing to do on this boat but watch the flying fish off the bow. And we'd always end up saying, "Let's hope we're doing the right thing, 'cause that's where we're going."

D.R.: What happened when you arrived in Vietnam?

D.C.: When we got to Vietnam and they sent us to our unit, they sent us over in what they called "packets." Just as in Iraq right now they have these shortages of manpower; back then they had the same situation, where a lot of battalions were down to three companies because of rotations and casualties. So they were sending packets of 125 men to each battalion, to reconstitute a Delta Company. And when they sent us there, they sent us to Cu Chi and they had these indoctrination sessions. They set up baseball bleachers and they'd have these sergeants who had been in Vietnam for three tours. They're going to tell you how to stay alive, and here's the real deal, and all that good stuff. One of the first things they told us was, "Everything they told you in the United States, forget that **** . You can't trust any of these [Vietnamese] people; any one of them could be your enemy. They put ground up glass in Coca-Cola and sell it to you, they have razor blades in their vaginas. They had all these stories they would tell you. That they're not really people, they're "gooks" and "dinks."

Any sense of mission that you had was blown away by that. And then I had a 12-month tour of duty to face. I was not brought up as a guy that would rebel against the system. I was just a working class kid from Buffalo. I thought life was about chasing girls, drinking beer, and listening to rock and roll. There wasn't really that much rebellion to it. It was like, "Yeah, I'm bad," but I was just like a J.D. [juvenile delinquent], you know? The thing that changed me the most was the last battle I was in.

D.R.: Where was that?

D.C.: I was wounded three times in Vietnam. The first time was on August 30, 1967, at a battle called The Horseshoe. I took a round in my upper left back. It went through my flak jacket, hit my front ribcage, and then bounced back and exited my lower back. It caused my left lung to fill with blood and collapse, and I was actually reported dead. I had to lay in a rice paddy with morphine; I could go into a whole story on that. But 45 days after I was wounded, I was sent back to my unit, because they had developed medical techniques in Vietnam to stitch wounds inside instead of on top, so they heal quicker. So I was sent back to my unit. In fact, Bob Hope came to my hospital bed in Vung Tau Hospital, a little south of Saigon. He told me how I was doing a good job, while I'm high on morphine.

And then two weeks after that I was sent back into the bush. The second time I was wounded, I took a small piece of shrapnel in my shoulder, which was a minor wound. They just took out the shrapnel and sent e back into the field. Then the last wound I received was on December 20, 1967, at a place called Bo Tuc, which is up in what they call the Parrot's Beak, up by the Cambodian border. See, prior to the Tet Offensive, the Vietnamese used a strategy of drawing the American units out to chase the North Vietnamese units. At that time the U.S. military, [General William] Westmoreland, and [President Lyndon] Johnson, were essentially denying that there were any Viet Cong left. And even though there were intelligence reports coming in that all these Viet Cong units were amassing, they had us out in the jungles chasing the head of the North Vietnamese operation.

At about two in the morning, a mortar attack began and all of a sudden we started getting overrun by North Vietnamese coming in charging like a human wave. They overran the position next to ours. They were firing RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and in the position next to ours, they had an M-60. They took our machine gun out, and they ovrran it, and all of a sudden we saw this guy coming down from that position toward us. This was two in the morning, remember. There were three of us in the foxhole. We would dig foxholes and put sandbags on top of them for protection from mortar fire...

We saw this guy coming toward us, but we couldn't tell if he was one of our guys or one of them. So he's coming around to our hole, and I was sitting at the entrance to the hole. I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, and I had pointed my M-16 up to the entrance of the hole. All of a sudden I saw the front side of an AK-47 sticking in my hole, and all of a sudden I saw a muzzle flash. This was all within a second, you know? The guy stuck his rifle in and pulled the trigger, and I pulled my trigger. I took a bullet through my right knee, and I passed out from the round hitting me, from the impact of the bullet. I came to a second later, and we could hear them yelling in Vietnamese about 30 meters in front of us. I thought we were dead fo sure that night.

D.R.: Who saved you?

D.C.: The two guys I was with were black guys named Jamison and Walker. Walker started laying down protective fire, and Jamison pulled me out and threw me on his back, and we pulled back to the platoon CP [command post], which was further back in the perimeter. They stuck me in a foxhole there, I crawled down in the hole, and they gave me a bottle of Darvons. I lay there all night eating Darvons to kill the pain, because my knee was shattered. The Vietnamese overran the artillery and set the artillery rounds on fire, and they were blowing up all night, and they were charging holes. It was like the end of the movie, Platoon. It was hell on earth. I swear to God that was the only night in Vietnam where I thought I was dead for sure. In the morning when they pulled me out of the foxhole to medevac me out. They put me on a stretcher. They carried me over to the guy who had shot me, and he was dead. He was sitting up against this tree stump with his AK across his lap and three bullet holes across his chest. And the sergeant says to me, "Here's the gook you killed. You did a good job."

Because in our unit, they used to have a big thing about "confirmed kills." It used to be that if you had a confirmed kill, and the guy had an automatic weapon (not a semiautomatic, but an automatic weapon like an AK), they would give you a three-day in-country pass. So this was a confirmed kill. In battles, mostly we'd get hit and we'd blast away, and then we'd find bodies later, and nobody knew who killed them. We all killed them. But this one was definitely my kill. I looked at this boy who I had killed and he was about my age.

D.R.: How did you feel?

D.C.: I didn't feel any sense of pride or any sense of ***** you." What I thought was that I wondered why he was dead and I'm alive. It was just pure chance. That's what struck me the most, that it was just pure luck that I was still alive. Look, I used to be praying to Jesus and everything to save me, but I kept getting wounded so I stopped praying to Jesus. I was just trying to make it through, one day at a time. So I look at this guy dead there, and I started to wonder if he had a girlfriend. I wondered how his mother was going to find out about this. And I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was doing was refusing to give up on his humanity. Later on in therapy, I learned this.

Then I was sent to the hospital in Camp Zama in Japan. At that time, if you had asked me what my politics were, I'd have said, "Old men send young men to fight wars, and it's ******** ." You know, let Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson go kill each other. But when I was in the hospital in Japan, had a cast on my leg for almost six months because my knee had been shattered. They put it on there to try to fuse the bones back together at the knee joint. So I'd go in my wheelchair down to the library, because I've always been into reading, and I found this book in the Army library called The New Legions, by Donald Duncan.

I remember Donald Duncan. When I was at college in Buffalo in the 1960s, he was the first military man I ever heard speak out against the war in Vietnam. He was a Green Beret who had done several tours, and then he got out and said that we're fighting on the wrong side, essentially. So I read that book, and that's where I began to develop a political consciousness, because everything he said made sense to me: that the peasants don't want us, that we're supporting these corrupt generals and landlords, and what kind of foreign policy are we advocating?

At that point I decided that I had a responsibility when I came home to tell people what I had experienced and what I thought was the real deal. They tell you to go home and try to put it behind you, but no one puts it behind them. We pretend. We think we're going to go home and buy a new car and think we're going to just be the guy that was gone for a year. You know? So at that point I decided to become involved in the antiwar movement because I felt that (and this was really a personal thing for me) I knew that they were going to send my buddies over there. Back in those days, if you didn't go to college, you would get drafted about a year and a half after you got out of high school. Most of my friends were from a community where we weren't going to college; they would go get a job.

And I have a brother who's a year and a week younger than me. So I looked at it and realized that they're going to get my brother, they're going to get my friends. So the way I look at it, I've got a responsibility to my people. That's how I was looking at it: my people, my community.

D.R.: So you joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)?

D.C.: I joined VVAW when I became acquainted with them in 1970. But at this point I was still in the Army. I became involved in an underground paper at Ft. Hood called The Fatigue Press. I was involved in a number of activities including antiwar demonstrations and anti-riot control. They used to call it "Garden Plot." They had used troops from Ft. Hood in Chicago for the riots, the rebellions that took place after Martin Luther King was assassinated. When I went to Ft. Hood they were training us to be used to go to Chicago for the Democratic Convention of 1968. There was a GI coffeehouse called the Oleo Strut, off-base in Killeen, Texas, near Ft. Hood. The name comes from the shock absorber on a helicopter. The original concept of the coffeehouse was to be a free space, a shock absorber from the Army. Anyway, I went down there and met the people, and that's where the paper started. Actually, the first thing I did against the war when I came back from Vietnam was with my brother Bruce. He hd received his draft notice, and he asked me what I thought, and I said, "Bruce, it's all lies.'

I was on convalescent leave, in a full-length cast. Bruce refused to cooperate with the draft, and at one point they were down at the Unitarian Church taking sanctuary. I went down to join them and stayed there, and made public statements against the war. My brother, Bruce, became one of the Buffalo Nine. They were draft resisters.

D.R.: You did this while you were on active duty. There was some real personal risk to that.

D. C.: Hey, my attitude was, they used to tell you, "if you don't do this, you're going to Vietnam, if you don't do that, you're going to Vietnam." Well, I was back from Vietnam, so that had sort of lost its juice to me. Later, when I got out of the service, I stayed in Texas as part of the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse staff, and in 1970, guys from Austin came up organizing the VVAW, and that's when I joined.

D.R.: I want to fast-forward a little to ask you about Veterans for Peace, the organization of which you’re now president. When was it formed and what is its mission?

D.C.: Veterans for Peace was formed in 1986. We have a five-fold statement of purpose: to educate the public to the true costs of war; to work to restrain our government from intervening in the domestic affairs of other countries; to work for nuclear disarmament; to seek justice for veterans and victims of war; and to work for the abolition of war. It was initially started in response to the Reagan wars in Central America. Since Vietnam, every time there's been a new remilitarization of America, there's been a reaction among a certain percentage of veterans opposing it. Sort of like "the lessons of Vietnam." So it was formed in '86. I became active in the group in the late '80s, and I've been president for the past four years.

D.R.: Veterans for Peace has how many chapters?'

D.C.: There are 108 or 109 right now, and I would say about 75% of them are active. We're almost up to 4000 members now, which is not huge, but it's an organized group. I've also stayed active in Vietnam Vets Against the War, which still has an organization, and actually it's growing again.

D.R.: In what way do veterans have a special role to play in debates on issues of war and peace?

D.C.: America has been relatively safe from war since the Civil War or the Indian Wars, depending on where you want to draw the line. There has not been a war on American soil since Wounded Knee. Of course, the Civil War was really the big one. Every war after that has been a foreign war. When we go into war, we send our young men off to fight, and most people are subjected to propaganda, and they don't really see what goes on in war. This is true not just in imperial wars, but any war.

Even World War II. I used to tell my dad [a World War II veteran] that war sucks, but if I had to fight in one, I wish I had a cause to fight for. So in a certain sense, veterans bring the reality of what war really means. And oftentimes, quote "patriotism" is used as a way to silence us and keep that quiet from the people. People have to hear it. We, having experienced it, know what we are talking about. The other thing is, that I don't care what anyone says about them [Vietnam era antiwar protestors] sitting on us, that's all ******** . I was active in the peace movement at that time and I never witnessed any such thing, or anything vaguely approaching it. Nor would it ever have occurred to me, or any of the activists I knew, to even think of doing such a thing. We wanted to reach out to the military and in many cases we did just that. We understood you were our brothers. It’s all an urban myth, a postwar revisionist urban myth. There was animosity between veterans who were pro-war and protestors, no question about it. Those were turbulent times. But the idea that people were spitting on us is nonsense, man.

D.R.: It's rewriting history for current political purposes.

D.C.: I have a letter. I used to write to my parents when I was in the war. I didn't tell them about the sex or about smoking pot, but I did tell them about the killing. In one letter I told them that the best friends we have are the people who are protesting the war, because they're trying to stop us from being sacrificed for politicians' lies. I still believe that. The best friends we had were those people who were objecting to American foreign policy based on Johnson's and then Nixon's lies. But to go back to the point you asked about. Having experienced wars, veterans can bring that reality back home and take it out of the realm of video games and Rambo movies and Bush speeches. The other side of that is that the antiwar movement is constantly being blasted as being against America, unpatriotic, against the servicemen. They're always trying to make it like any dissent is un-American. Veterans who speak out provide protective cover for the peace movement in general.

D.R.: In that regard, how do you feel about the role that the presidential candidates who are Vietnam veterans, John Kerry and Wesley Clark, have played in this current presidential campaign?

D.C.: I've been very disappointed with John Kerry's position on Iraq. I think that to a certain degree, he's broken faith with the commitment he made to his brothers back in 1971. But at the same time, I intend to vote for Kerry and support Kerry. I think that bringing that issue up has some resonance among certain sections of the population, because we have an administration that's full of chickenhawks. You know, [avidly pro-war] people who avoided military service. And the pundits are even worse. Rush Limbaugh, he got out of the military because he had anal cysts. Go figure!

D.R.There's a whole long list of them.

D.C.: Like Cheney, he had "other priorities" during Vietnam. Bush was AWOL for a good period of time. To some of us, we see that as being a big contradiction. We served, they didn't. To a broader portion of the population, there' s always been a certain amount of amnesia about Vietnam. After the war ended, people didn't want to deal with it and learn from it, they wanted to forget it. That's why we went into the good-time '80s, the disco era. Like, let's forget about that ugly period where we had racial strife, and an antiwar movement, and killing students and bodies coming home. Let's sniff some coke and dance the night away.

D.R.: Has the war in Iraq brought all of this back to front and center?

D.C.: I can tell you that for a lot of veterans it's brought it front and center, and I think that for increasing numbers of the American public, it has as well. After the 1991 Gulf War, Bush Senior and others identified what they call the Vietnam Syndrome, which to them is the reluctance of the American public to support military adventures that can't be justified by legitimate national defense, protection of our nation. They have been constantly working to break that down. What we call revisionist history, that's the real purpose of it, to try to convince you that we should be the kick-ass motherfuckers on the block.

In 1991, Bush Senior said we had kicked the Vietnam Syndrome after the Gulf War, because it was a three-day war and total victory. But the reality is, the Vietnam Syndrome is deeply ingrained in our generation. You and me, we're the same generation. Really, we have been sort of the backbone of raising questions. Among the younger people, they haven't been able to get a lot of headway because of movies, video games. There's been a lot of cultural assault on young people with violence, and the idea that we're superior to other people. Not so much that we're better because we're white; that's sort of behind us. But that we're a democracy, they're no good, Saddam Hussein's a ******* , everyone's a ******* , we're all good guys, they're bad guys. You know, everything's black and white. But there's a Vietnam Syndrome alive today that is beginning to reassert itself.

D.R.: How might today's American military be more of a force for good?

D.C.: First off, most people in the military I believe to be honorable people. I don't believe most people are sadistic, murderers, or anything like that. I think most people go in for a combination of reasons. Patriotism, wanting to serve the community, and also economic reasons. Wanting to get some better education. Today we have, in fact, what I would call an "economic draft," where those who come into the military are people from rural, poor, and working class communities, people who don't really have access to college benefits. Today you've got to go to college. If you want to make yourself better, if you're a kid in the ghetto, say, and you're doing well in school, and your options are working at the Burger King, slinging cocaine on the corner, or joining the military, I would join the military.

D.R.: Makes sense.

D.C.: To a degree, the military has become an upward-mobile job program for a number of poor and working class youth. As to how the military could play a positive role in the world, here's an example: I used to work with the National Guard in Newark, New Jersey on Homeless Veterans Stand Downs. I don't know if you know it or not, but one third of the homeless males are veterans. Actually, I did know it. I read it on the Kerry for President website, where he's talking about his plans to help homeless vets. There are lots of reasons: psychological, substance abuse, bad luck. But the fact of the matter is, there's a lot of homeless veterans. So we have these Homeless Veterans Stand Downs; this is a national movement. You might want to go to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, at www.nchv.org. Stand-downs are one- to three-day gatherings where you bring homeless veterans together, provide them with some meals, some clothing, some resources, and you also bring in all the social agncies that can help them rehabilitate themselves. They go on all around the country. We used to do them in Newark. The National Guard would do the cooking at these events. They'd bring in military cooking trailers (a long semi that's a mess hall), they'd cook the food, and we'd feed these guys. Ever since September 11, the Guard pulled out because they gave them other priorities. But they were really playing a positive role in assisting their brother veterans. Beyond that, I think there's a big problem with military culture in this country. I think there's been an escalation of "militarism as a positive culture."

And really, I've always been in favor of a small standing army. I think you need an army; I'm not a pacifist. And I also think there have been some interventions where you could say the United States is at least trying to stop a worse thing from happening.

D.R.: What's an example? Kosovo? Haiti?

D.C.: Originally they went into Haiti with a positive mission, but it turned ugly pretty quickly. The United States turned a blind eye to Rwanda. Earlier, it turned a blind eye to Cambodia. In Somalia, we went in ostensibly on a humanitarian mission, but we ended up deciding we were going to rearrange the society. If you saw the movie Black Hawk Down, or better yet if you read

the book, you know what went down there. I think our nation would do better to stand down and try to cooperate with other people in the world rather than decide that we're the people who are God's gift to the world.

The Republican neocons work on this program called the Project for the New American Century, and the vision they hold is that we are the sole superpower, we are the source of enlightenment, so we should recast the world in our image. Now that reminds me of Vietnam. Bill Ehrhart, who's a poet from Philly, a Vietnam vet, wrote a couplet called "The Invasion of Grenada." It's a short couplet, that goessomething like, "I didn't want a bridge across the Delaware River called the Vietnam Memorial Bridge/ I didn't even want that black gash in the ground in Washington/ What I wanted was a simple recognition that the world was not black and white/ And it's not ours."

I may not be quoting it exactly, but that's the essence of it. I want to ask you about the Iraq torture scandal that's unfolding. Any thoughts you have on that, and how America can try to deal with the enormity of what we are learning? It amazes me that at the same time these right-wing people like wintersoldier.com and Veterans Against Kerry, and all of these right-wing pundits, are attacking Kerry for what was SOP [standard operating procedure] during the Vietnam War, when he testified in front of Congress in 1971. They're attacking him, saying he was besmirching the name of American fighting men, while at the same time we're seeing the beginnings of the same cycle happening again.

D.R.: And they're defending it.

D.C.: Some people say an Iraqi life is not worth an American life. I say a human being is a human being. And if you think you're a force for good, then you should uphold humanity. It has always been the practice of the U.S. military whenever any kind of abuse, torture, atrocities, or war crimes come out . . . there's an old _expression, "**** rolls downhill." So what they try to do is to turn it into "a few bad eggs" or "a few bad apples." They don't want to talk about the policies driving it, how far up the chain of command it went, or anything like that. The root cause of the situation in Iraq is Donald Rumsfeld's disdain for the Geneva Conventions, that he expressed after the invasion of Afghanistan when they started detaining people at Guantanamo and said they're not POWs. At that point they basically said, '"***** the Geneva Conventions."

There are reports about how he used to go around the Pentagon criticizing and attacking people for saying that we have to uphold te Geneva Conventions. This is the logical result of that. And it's not just in Iraq. There's a report that's been out since August 2003 about abuse in Afghanistan. This is the end result of government disdain for human rights, government disdain for the Geneva Conventions, and for this idea that we're going to straighten everything out by military force. We're not going to straighten any of this out by military force. Sometimes you've got to hit somebody, I believe that. Sometimes you have to defend yourself and sometimes you have to take people out. I live in the New York City area and I worked for the Port Authority, which ran the World Trade Center. I used to be a union officer. The head of labor relations for the Port Authority, who I used to hate, was killed in that attack. I used to hate him, but that doesn't mean I thought he should die.

On the one hand, when 911 happened, I wanted to just strike out at the people who did that. I used to have dreams, man, where I had Osama bin Laden in my rifle sights. But at the same time, there's more to this than just that. To wage a war on terrorism, you have to identify who your terrorists are and go after them. That's police work and it's sometimes military. I mean, hell, if you want to take down the Mafia, you don't bomb the hell out of Sicily and take it over. You know what I'm saying? What we've done [in Iraq] is take over Sicily.

Web Resources: _Veterans for Peace _ (http://www.veteransforpeace.org/) _Vietnam Veterans Against the War_ (http://www.vvaw.org/) _Veterans Against the Iraq War _ (http://www.vaiw.org/) Daniel Redwood, a writer for the past 25 years, practices chiropractic and acupuncture in Virginia Beach, Virginia. A collection of his writing is available at _www.drredwood.com_ (http://www.drredwood.com/) Daniel can be reached by email at drredwood2@aol.com _ (mailto:drredwood2@aol.com) Posted Monday, May 31, 2004 ©2004 by Daniel Redwood

posted June 04, 2004 04:45 PM            

For many who serve and have served America in uniform, the pious cant of GW Bush at today's Memorial Day ceremonies in Washington DC is a nauseating affront to the very veterans this presidential pretender and wartime deserter was supposedly "honoring."

In praising America's aging heroes for sacrifices made during what Bush called their country's "greatest mission," the leader of the world's sole superpower became, as usual, most animated when speaking of death and violence and war. During an earlier radio address, Bush compared America's blood soaked "mission against the present and future generations of a shattered, radioactive Iraq to the defeat of Adolf Hitler.

But during today's outdoor ceremonies, the man who last year stuffed a sock into a borrowed flight suit to replace the cojones he lacks, neglected to mention the current deceitful debacle over which he truly presides. Instead, as global climate change gathers forces for an assault beyond imagining, today's festivities celebrated last century's second calamitous world war with patriotic songs and speeches and a military fly-over, while dancers jitterbugged to 1940s swing music.

The grand occasion in Washington unveiled yet another multi-million dollar monument to mass murder and senseless destruction brought to cities like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while America remained unscathed. Instead of using the occasion to speak of past political mistakes and deceptions and the folly of endless war, Bush praised the slaughter of countless young men on the beaches of Normandy, whose supreme courage and horrific losses finally defeated a Nazi menace that threatened the world.

Those soldiers should be praised. And remembered with compassion and gratitude. So too, should it be recalled on his special day that such terrible destruction would never have happened if GW's granddad hadn't financed a failed German house painter's political comeback to absolute power. It was Prescott Bush, through his Harriman bank, who financed Adolf Hitler.

Other American industrialists - including the directors of Standard Oil who sold Hitler the essential fuel additives needed to power his Panzers and planes throughout the war, Alcoa, which supplied the Japanese with the special alloy needed for its "Zero" fighters, and IBM, whose newfangled punch-cards enabled the SS to "efficiently round up and murder millions of gypsies, gays and Jews also profited hugely by selling essential materials of slaughter to both axis and allies throughout WWII. Bush Jr. mentioned none of this today. Or the fact that granddad Bush was later convicted of war profiteering in a US court, stripped of his bank and his reputation.

Instead, in today's lapdog press coverage of Washington's latest hypocrisy, Reuters respectfully remarked on the exploits of Bush's father, who was shot down during a bombing raid on a Japanese base in the Pacific during WWII. Unfortunately omitted in this latest press paean to murder and mayhem was mention of how Bush Sr.'s supposed "heroism crashed and burned last year, after the pilot flying directly behind him in the attacking formation of medium bombers described to reporters how he watched Bush's Marauder hit by flack. The twin-engine plane, said this eyewitness, was in no immediate danger of going down. But instead of adhering to regulations and personal honor by holding the bomber steady while his crew bailed out, Bush Sr. immediately "hit the silk - saving his own skin while condemning his crew to fiery deaths in the crash of their pilotless plane.

During effusive praise of so many patriotic Americans who gave their lives dealing with a madman largely financed by Prescott Bush, his grandson also failed to mention another White House-created monster named Saddam Hussein. It was Washington and the CIA who anointed, supported and profited from this murderous thug for nearly 30 years. And it was Bush Sr. who sent Saddam the chemical and biological weapons later hurled into the faces of America's sons and daughters during Desert Storm - before betraying a nearly successful nationwide uprising that saw hundreds of thousands more Iraqis murdered in the Butcher of Baghdad's savage reprisals. More than 200,000 severely sickened Gulf War veterans and more than 20,000 of their dead comrades killed by Bush Sr.'s treason went unsung today. One million Iraqi dead - mostly children under the age of 15 - also went unmentioned.

Also omitted from today's celebrations of world-staggering duplicity, carnage and industrial profiteering was GW's own war record. The bogus "Commander In Thief" (as one Senator referred to Bush Jr.), never referred to his own cowardly desertion from the stateside Air National Guard, immediately after the introduction of mandatory drug testing for military pilots during the Vietnam War. How Americans can keep swallowing the Bush family's bloody lies and hypocrisy beggars belief. Prescott Bush's Nazi connections were detailed in US newspapers earlier this year. The report by his father's WWII squadron mate was also published here, as was Bush Jr.'s personal wartime cowardice and disgrace.

But in a nation mired in decadence and distraction, it seems that in their mindless piggish pursuits, Americans simply don't care that they are being so blatantly used by callous men (and at least one dangerously dishonest and incompetent woman) who are perverting cherished American values by extolling torture, lies, humiliation and betrayal while remaining fanatically focused on furthering their own personal, political and financial ends.

Wake up America! Too many have died for corporate coffers and presidential lies. On this Memorial Day, remember who profits and who loses from your country's endless wars.

_______ After entering Reserve Officer flight training to defend his country during the Vietnam War, William Thomas resigned his US Navy commission over atrocities committed against families no different in their aspirations and love of their children than his own. Along with tens of thousands of former Americans, he currently gratefully resides in a country committed to peace and conflict resolution instead of endless war. www.willthomas.net

posted June 04, 2004 04:57 PM            

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senate Years of Service: 1952-1963
Party: Republican

BUSH, Prescott Sheldon, (father of George Herbert Walker Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush), a Senator from Connecticut; born in Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, May 15, 1895; attended the Douglas School of Columbus, Ohio, and St. George’s School, Newport, R.I., 1908-1913; graduated from Yale University in 1917; enlisted in Connecticut National Guard in 1916 and served as captain of Field Artillery in American Expeditionary Forces 1917-1919; engaged in hardware business as a warehouse clerk in St. Louis, Mo.; moved to Greenwich, Conn., in 1924; engaged in banking business in New York City 1926; moderator, Greenwich Representative Town Meeting 1935-1952; trustee, Yale University; unsuccessful Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950; elected on November 4, 1952, as a Republican to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of James O’Brien McMahon; reelected in 1956 and served from November 4, 1952, to January 2, 1963; was not a candidate for reelection in 1962; resumed his career in the banking and investment field; died in New York City, October 8, 1972; interment in Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, Conn.

Bibliography

American National Biography; Herskowitz, Mickey. Duty, Honor, Country: The Story and Legacy of Prescott Bush. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2003.

posted June 05, 2004 01:44 PM            

The president of "Veterans for Peace," the largest antiwar vets group in the U.S., David Cline is a major voice for peace. Interview by Daniel Redwood

International Socialists Review http://www.isreview.org/issues/31/cline.shtml

In fact Ozone, some of your favorite people seem to be people and groups dedicated to the destruction of the United States. How do you account for that?

From the Communist Party USA website, we find links to the following groups.
http://www.cpusa.org/
Just click on weblinks---right hand side of the page near the top and find:

posted June 05, 2004 01:49 PM            

By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 11, 2003

On February 15, many thousands of protesters will assemble within sight of the United Nations building in New York to express their opposition to a war in Iraq. Their efforts will be duplicated in some 300 additional cities throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This will be the first such protest not organized by the Workers World Party (WWP), an energetic Marxist-Leninist organization that openly supports Kim Jong Il’s brutal dictatorship in North Korea. Instead, it will be run by a group called United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ), whose co-chair Leslie Cagan is an enthusiastic, longtime supporter of yet another Communist despot, Fidel Castro.

Given the manner in which the major media report the contemporary "peace" movement’s activities, the average American would never suspect that it is in fact a movement dominated the selfsame Communists that once marched in support of Stalin, Mao, the Vietcong, the Sandinista Marxists, and the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador; the same America-loathing radicals who, because they passionately deem America the root of all evil in the world, now support Kim and Castro.

A featured speaker at last month’s massive "peace" rally in Washington, for instance, angrily denounced the "American imperialism" supposedly underlying our country’s "war against the people of Iraq, and the people of Palestine, Colombia, and the world." And he had plenty of company; there was nary a word uttered about any threat posed by Saddam Hussein – let alone the Palestinian suicide bombers or the communist guerrillas in Colombia. In the eyes of such "anti-war" orators and their enthusiastic audiences, America is always the problem, regardless of the setting or the time.

The media, however, do not mention such things. They show only the surface of the movement, flashing images of spirited marchers with their placards and pithy slogans that decry America’s "cowboy" mentality. Citing the large numbers of such demonstrators, liberal defenders of the "peace" movement contend that it is "broadening" to include many who cannot be described as "hate-America" Leftists like Ramsey Clark or Noam Chomsky.

But in order to understand the mind of any movement, we must acquaint ourselves with its leaders, those individuals whose ideas animate the masses that follow them. Consider the aforementioned Leslie Cagan. She is a socialist and longtime activist who, during the past thirty years, has mobilized millions of demonstrators in rallies denouncing our nation’s foreign policies; its military-related spending; and its purportedly virulent racism, sexism, and homophobia. She is a die-hard, pro-Communist radical who proudly aligns her politics with those of Communist Cuba.

Yet a February 4 New York Times puff piece benignly heralded Cagan as "one of the grandes dames of the country’s progressive movement," a woman whose "organizational skills are prodigious." Predictably, there was no mention that Cagan has consistently lavished praise upon Castro’s Cuba, which she considers a far better place than the United States. During her seven years as director of the Cuba Information Project, she led numerous demonstrations demanding that the US end its economic embargo of, and travel ban to, Cuba. "In the winter of 1969-70," Cagan fondly recalls, "I spent over two months with the First Venceremos Brigade in Cuba. Just ten years into their revolution, the Cubans had taken control of their history. . . . While we were in Cuba, Fred Hampton and other Chicago Black Panthers were murdered. It was a shocking reminder of the brutality and power of the US government, and there we were in Cuba, a whole nation under attack from the US. As Brigadistas we were taking a risk traveling in defiance of Washington’s travel ban, but we knew the risk was small compared to what Cubans and so many others around the world faced every day."

In short, Cagan candidly sides with Castro’s Communist regime rather than with the United States, which she deems the world’s foremost terrorist nation. The Venceremos Brigades with which she proudly associated were in fact organized by Castro’s Cuban intelligence agency, which went so far as to train some "brigadistas" in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives. Cagan’s pro-Castro rallies were supported by such socialist organizations as Casa de las Americas, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Venceremos Brigades, the Workers World Party, and the Young Socialists. Cagan herself was an original founder of the Committees of Correspondence, a splinter group rooted in the Communist Party USA. Joining the chorus of her fellow leaders in the "peace" movement, she condemns what she calls America’s "daily assaults and attacks on poor and working people, on women, people of color, lesbians/gays and other sexual minorities, the disabled and so many others, [and] such foreign policy matters as . . . military actions and economic sanctions."

In February 1996 at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), of which Cagan was a national co-chair, sponsored a public forum that featured an address by Angela Sanbrano of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which was affiliated with the Communist guerrilla movement in that country. Another guest speaker was the Cuban revolutionary José Luis Ponce, who appeared on stage with an admiring Cagan. Ponce extolled the enormous social gains that Castro’s revolution had brought to Cuba. As the socialist publication The Militant paraphrased it, Ponce lauded the revolution for its opposition to "the legacy of US domination - a legacy of unemployment, absence of health care for millions especially in the countryside, illiteracy, racism and the super-exploitation of women." He further predicted, quite happily, that "a fight for socialism" would re-emerge in Russia. To all these assertions, Cagan nodded with approval.

Not surprisingly, Cagan firmly opposes our government’s contemplated war against Iraq, which she characterizes as nothing more than a thinly veiled oil grab. "Oil is not worth war!" screams Cagan’s UFPJ Website. "How much is the Bush administration’s push for war with Iraq motivated by its desire to gain control of Iraq’s oil fields?" On February 4 in Charlotte, North Carolina, UFPJ sponsored a "No War For Oil" protest held symbolically in front of a Texaco location.

In attributing nefarious motives to US military ventures, Cagan continues a long Leftist tradition. In the 1960s, for example, it was commonplace for the Left to assert that the US was sending troops to Southeast Asia merely to secure mineral rights in South Vietnam for American corporations. As Stokely Carmichael put it at the time, our 58,000 dead soldiers were sacrificed merely "to serve the economic interests of American businessmen who are in Vietnam solely to exploit the tungsten, tin, and oil."

Following President Bush’s recent State of the Union address, Cagan said, "George Bush again tried to make his case against Iraq and he failed." "Such a war [in Iraq]," she contends, "undoubtedly threatens to unleash an escalating and uncontrollable cycle of violence, death and destruction." Of course, she does not express the barest hint of concern that Saddam’s regime, which has blatantly defied the conditions of UN Resolution 1441, poses a threat to American security. In the eyes of Cagan and her ilk, the principal enemy of world peace is the United States.

But we ought not be surprised that the very people who opposed military action against the al Qaeda-harboring Taliban should now oppose military action against a monster that has yet to strike with its full measure of ferocity. Last summer, Cagan joined such notable critics of America as Noam Chomsky, Ed Asner, Medea Benjamin, Gloria Steinem, Ossie Davis, and Michael Ratner in signing the infamous "Not In Our Name" (NION) statement denouncing America’s declared war against terror, which began in Afghanistan.

"Let it not be said," read the NION document, "that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. The signers of this statement call on the people of the US to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11 and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world."

"We believe," added the NION signatories, "that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers." Given the context in which it was used, that may well be the most inane sentence ever put to paper. Asserting that the US possessed no moral authority to annihilate the Taliban, it implied that that privilege rested with the same Afghan people who lived powerlessly under the Taliban’s brutal oppression. By the same token, we are apparently expected to believe that the Iraqi people have it within their power to dethrone a dictator who, during his twenty-four-year reign, has imprisoned, maimed, and murdered hundreds of thousands of actual and suspected political opponents.

Perhaps the most noxious element of the "peace" crowd’s message is its pathetic lack of viable alternatives. Cagan, for instance, boasts that "while organizing against the Gulf War in 1990/1991 . . . I coordinated the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, [whose] primary focus . . . was trying to stop the mad rush to war by the US government." The historical record shows that more than five months elapsed between Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the start of the Gulf War, during which Saddam defied repeated ultimatums to withdraw his troops as a means of averting a coalition attack. Thus it is utterly obscene to depict America’s actions as a "mad rush to war." While Cagan and her cronies self-righteously stand around bleating for peaceful resolutions to international conflicts, the armies of dictators who haven’t the slightest desire for peace can swallow up entire nations.

Cagan is never at a loss for words when presented with an opportunity to denounce America and applaud Communist regimes and their support groups. Indeed she cheered last month’s "peace" rally in Washington, sponsored by International A.N.S.W.E.R., which is closely allied with the WWP, which in turn avidly backs Kim Jong Il’s regime in North Korea. "This is A.N.S.W.E.R.’s dance, and they get to call the tune," Cagan said. "We are at a point where it is really, really critical that many, many groups come out and voice their opposition to this war. Some in the hard-core Left have taken the lead on that, and I applaud those groups for that." Stalinist Communist parties have always had their own "peace" fronts, a tradition that the WWP, Leslie Cagan, and other prime movers of the anti-war movement now continue.

Some readers may find it difficult to believe that the WWP does, in fact, support the murderous North Korean government which has not only exterminated hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, but has poured all available resources into a military buildup while some two million people died of starvation. Yet on July 9, 1994, WWP chairman Sam Marcy wrote to "Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il," extending the organization’s "deepest condolences" on the death of Kim’s father, "the great leader of the Korean people, Comrade President Kim Il Sung." Marcy eulogized the elder Kim for having "devoted his whole life to the Korean people’s struggle for national self-determination and the international working-class struggle for socialist emancipation. With his leadership, the Korean people . . . brought about the first defeat of the US imperialist military machine. . . . Comrade Kim Il Sung worked tirelessly to bring about the peaceful reunification of Korea and to forge a lasting peace on the peninsula. . . . It is Kim Il Sung’s remarkable achievement that in his own lifetime he became a symbol of national liberation and reunification for the Korean people, and a symbol of the anti-imperialist and socialist struggles of all the world’s peoples. Although US imperialism tried at every opportunity to blockade, threaten and sabotage the construction of socialism in the north, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stands strong. . . . Workers World Party [is] proud to have known Kim Il Sung as a great leader and a comrade in the international communist movement."

Obviously, it isn’t really the concept of "war" that Leslie Cagan and her fellow Communists oppose, but only war that seeks to protect the interests of the United States. As National Review Online recently reported, the WWP has in the past "supported the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Chinese government’s crackdown in Tiananmen Square," and today "devotes much of its energy to supporting the regimes in Iraq and North Korea."

posted June 05, 2004 01:53 PM            

Media Credit: Lonny Shavelson/IPhoto


Meet the leaders of the antiwar protests who sought to spread their defense of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein worldwide on Feb. 15-16, going to the streets with a style and message that seemed eerily familiar:

One urged U.S. troops to mutiny and murder their commanding officers.
One is a leader of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslavian leader on trial for war crimes.
One was made an "honorary nephew" of North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War, returned home wearing a ring made from the wreckage of an American fighter plane and later became executive director of an alleged Soviet front organization that reportedly took its marching orders from the KGB.
Several organized protests in solidarity with the FARC narcoterrorists of Colombia.
Others have been waging campaigns in support of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Many of the most influential are professional radicals with a fanatical devotion to the late North Korean communist dictator Kim Il-sung and his communist dictator son, Kim Jong-il.
None has criticized Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
In a globally coordinated campaign, these and other aging veterans of Cold War "peace" protests are running today's antiwar movement. This has other antiwar activists pulling at their hair. They argue that the affiliations and extremist positions of the current organizers risk discrediting the cause. Some even have gone public with these complaints. Writing in the Washington Post, sixties-era historian Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University, says the American left is "sharply divided" about leadership of the protests. "The organizers of the recent Washington and San Francisco marches refuse to say anything critical of Saddam Hussein," Kazin lamented.

Related material:
Who's Paying for it All?
But the critics don't have much clout with the "antiwar" leadership, as they themselves recognize, because they aren't doing the organizing or paying the expenses to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. Today's protests require huge amounts of work and are coordinated worldwide. United for Peace and Justice (UPJ), one of the two main groups that ran the Feb. 15-16 protests across the United States, claims simultaneous demonstrations were held around the world in more than 300 cities, including Baghdad.

Peace activists are torn between joining the Axis of Evil or not protesting at all. Some look the other way. Some rationalize involvement. "We can't divide the peace movement, you know," said a paid antiwar organizer at Our Lady of Mercy Church in wealthy Potomac, Md.

The demonstration planners are, in fact, professional agitators who have mass protest down to a science, having participated in or run grass-roots mobilizations since before most of today's picketers were born. Critical authorities on U.S. radicalism say the track record of the leaders reveals not a principled opposition to war but a calculated commitment to undermining U.S. security and foreign policy, regardless of their ideology, and exploiting the naïveté and idealism of whatever influential or mainstream people can be persuaded to join them. That's how a group such as the International Action Center (IAC) could support Milosevic's mass murder of Muslims on the one hand, and back Islamic terrorists and Saddam on the other.

The organizers divide into two distinct groups: the IAC and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, known as International ANSWER, lead one group, and UPJ heads the other. IAC and ANSWER are front groups of the Workers World Party (WWP), a tiny Marxist-Leninist group whose leaders display a fanatical devotion to the late North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong-il (see sidebar). According to longtime homeland-security analysts, UPJ's leaders built their political-organizing careers in the old Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

Indeed the very concept of "front groups" -- umbrella organizations set up by communists to trick liberals and innocents into supporting the party line -- has been a veritable hallmark of Marxist agitation since the 1920s.

Many are tempted to laugh off the idea that graying old extremists are running current protests, and they roll their eyes at hearing the "C"-word, even Moscow having given up communism. But many others, especially liberals in the peace movement, are not at all amused. "I think the demonstrations would have been twice as big had the organizers been from a wider range of antiwar groups and not so dominated by this tiny Marxist-Leninist faction," said Stephen Zunes, chair of the peace- and justice-studies program at the University of San Francisco.

The IAC has felt the sting. In a statement it blasted those who "dishonestly claim that ANSWER is a 'front' group in order to diminish the coalition," though it acknowledges "the presence of socialists and Marxists, in particular members of the Workers World Party." Their critics, IAC says, are racists: "Those who claim that ANSWER is a 'front' organization demonstrate their own racist and elitist perception of reality."

And ANSWER has ripped what it calls "a repugnant red-baiting campaign against the ANSWER coalition because of its role as a principal organizer of the mass grass-roots movement of opposition to war throughout the United States."

The WWP is nothing if not consistent. According to a 1974 congressional report, it split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1959 in a dispute over the Soviet invasion of Hungary three years before. The Socialist Workers opposed the invasion, while Workers World partisans supported it. "In 1968, the Workers World Party supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the communist Warsaw Pact armies," the report continued. The party, which never numbered more than a few hundred people, supported the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army against the United States during the Vietnam War, according to the congressional report. Some of its activities were coordinated with enemy military actions. An April 8, 1972, internal letter "To All Branches" of the party urged participation in "antiwar" demonstrations in support of a Viet Cong offensive in South Vietnam. The letter's author, John Catalinotto, remains in the party as managing editor of its weekly Workers World "newspaper," and occasionally represents the IAC.

Party members received revolutionary training in Cuba as members of the Venceremos Brigades in the 1960s and early 1970s, and at about that time the party oriented itself ideologically with North Korea. Deirdre Griswold Stapp, a voice of the party and currently editor of Workers World, described how the party functioned in a 1972 report to the Cuban Communist Party. Explaining its "international relationships," she told Cuban leaders about the WWP's new contacts with North Korea, via a front group called the American Servicemen's Union, according to congressional investigators. "The chairman of the American Servicemen's Union, Andy Stapp, recently visited the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and opened friendly discussions with the party there," she wrote. She later married Stapp.

In a speech to the 6th Congress of the League of Socialist Working Youth of Korea, the youth branch of North Korea's ruling party, Andy Stapp praised "Comrade Kim Il-sung, ever victorious, iron-willed, brilliant commander and outstanding leader of the international communist and working-class movements," according to a transcript published in a congressional report. "As instructed by Marshal Kim Il-sung, the outstanding leader of the international and working-class movements, the No. 1 target of all the revolutionary people in the world is U.S. imperialism. In order to avenge the many oppressed people who have died a bloody death, and in order to build a new society in America in which everyone enjoys happiness, as in Korea, I recognize the great juche idea of Marshal Kim Il-sung as the Marxism-Leninism of the present time."

Stapp committed himself and his organization to armed violence and to promoting mutiny within the U.S. military. According to the transcript of his speech broadcast over Radio Pyongyang, Stapp stated, "The American Servicemen's Union will study as documents, that must be read, the works of genius of Marshal Kim Il-sung. ... With the juche idea as the guiding compass of struggle, we will consolidate the branches of the American Servicemen's Union in order to rally more soldiers around the organization. In this way the American GIs will fight against their real enemies, against the policy of aggression and war enforced on them by the U.S. ruling circles and the fascist military officers."

He added that his goal was "to build a powerful American Servicemen's Union that will turn the guns against their fascist officers. ... If the American Servicemen's Union cuts the windpipe of U.S. imperialism inside the army while at the same time it is mutilated in all parts of the world, U.S. imperialism will surely perish forever."

Today, the WWP and its fronts claim to be nonviolent, but they remain as enthusiastic as ever about North Korea. Visiting Pyongyang to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung in April 2002, Griswold Stapp signed a statement denouncing President George W. Bush's "notorious antiterrorism war" and demanding that "the Korean peninsula be reunified without fail under the wise leadership of the respected leader Kim Jong-il following the banner of the Three Charters for the national reunification set forth by the great President Kim Il-sung." Filing an article from the North Korean capital for the July 23, 2002, issue of Workers World, Griswold Stapp called Pyongyang "truly one of the most beautiful cities in the world."

Brian Becker, a WWP secretariat member and a director of ANSWER and the IAC, visited North Korea in March 2002 to denounce the United States, discredit the presence of U.S. troops in South Korea and reaffirm a commitment to reunify the divided peninsula along the lines of the plan set by Kim Jong-il. Becker serves as a spokesman for the IAC and its antiwar campaign.

The second major coordinating faction of the present-day antiwar movement, headed by UPJ under Leslie Cagan's leadership, has its roots in the old Soviet "active-measures" agitprop networks, say homeland-security experts.

Insight has traced Cagan's career to Cuba, where in the early 1970s as a member of the Venceremos Brigades she received revolutionary training and indoctrination. In the last years of the Cold War, Cagan organized mass protests from an office called Mobilization for Survival, according to former congressional investigators. She coordinated with Soviet international front organizations and the CPUSA as the vanguard element of broader-based demonstrations around the world against U.S. resistance to Soviet expansion. This magazine has obtained Mobilization for Survival documents from the 1980s that show the group's support for Marxist-Leninist insurgencies and terrorist groups in the Third World, Middle Eastern terrorists (including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Soviet-backed dictatorships in Africa and Latin America, and Soviet-inspired campaigns for the unilateral disarmament of the United States.

In 1990-91, when the United States led an international coalition to free Kuwait from the Iraqi military, Cagan coordinated the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East to organize grass-roots opposition to the liberation. Also in 1991, when the CPUSA broke into two factions, Cagan cofounded the splinter group, called the Committees of Correspondence. Now she runs the UPJ, coordinating opposition to the war on terrorism in general and the effort to destroy Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, longtime Cagan associate Michael Meyerson is helping to run protests in New York, according to the Associated Press. Formerly a member of the national council or "Politburo" of the CPUSA, Meyerson has been involved in protests since at least 1960. It was Meyerson who, in a 1965 visit to Hanoi, was made an "honorary nephew" of North Vietnamese Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh. He returned home to attend "antiwar" protests sporting a Viet Cong cap and the ring he famously said was made from the wreckage of an American fighter plane. He ran the U.S. Peace Council, the New York-based branch of the World Peace Council, a Soviet international front organization that, according to 1982 CIA and FBI testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, received covert funding and direction from the KGB.

posted June 05, 2004 01:57 PM            

By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2004

With Matt Drudge’s recent revelation that John Kerry is as faithful to his second wife as he was to his old Vietnam “brothers,” the senator’s presidential campaign may depend more than ever on the actions of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. While the mainstream media has thus far overlooked the alleged infidelity, media outlets have also overlooked a far more important story: The former Mrs. John Heinz is also in bed – financially – with the radical Left.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has financed the secretive Tides Foundation to the tune of more than $4 million over the years. The Tides Foundation, a “charity” established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open borders advocates.

During the years 1995-2001, the Howard Heinz Endowment, which Heinz Kerry chairs, gave Tides more than $4.3 million. The combined Heinz Endowments (composed of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Vira I. Heinz Endowment) donated $1.6 million to establish the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh office of the San Francisco-based Tides Center. Since that time, the local branch has tirelessly pushed an anti-business agenda in the name of “preserving the environment.” However, it is the Tides Foundation’s national organization whose connections are most disconcerting.

The Tides Foundation is a major source of revenue for some of the most extreme groups on the Left. Tides allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a host of causes; the donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. Tides does so. The Tides Center will even manage a left-wing project, for a nominal fee. Drummond Pike told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.” That becomes understandable when one views the list of Tides grant recipients. And who are the beneficiaries of this money?

The Antiwar Movement

Senator John F. Kerry has gone far with his nuanced view of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He voted for the war resolution but specified a litany of conditions the Bush administration must meet before he would support combat, then proceeded to vote against funding troops already in harm’s way – then claimed he had always supported the president when Saddam Hussein was captured. The grant recipients of the Tides Foundation, to which Kerry’s wife has steered millions of dollars in “charitable” funds, understand no such nuance.

Tides established the Iraq Peace Fund and the Peace Strategies Fund to fund the antiwar movement. These projects fueled such hysterical protest organizations as MoveOn.org, the website that recently featured two separate commercials portraying George W. Bush as Adolf Hitler. (Howard Dean, not Kerry, won MoveOn.org’s “virtual primary.”)

The antiwar movement often boasted that MoveOn.org and the radical website Indymedia provided them “alternate media coverage.” Indymedia, an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for radical activists often with violent agendas to coordinate their protests. Indymedia received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.

The Institute for Global Communications is another leftist communications facilitator that received Tides grant money. IGC, which during the 1990s was the leading provider of web technology to the radical Left, links to “recommended sites” such as the War Resisters League (a group whose purpose is enabling peaceniks to refuse to pay taxes) and the leftist American Friends Service Committee. Most disturbing is the link to Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, which has supported Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il. The IAC is the force behind International ANSWER, which sponsored the major antiwar (and anti-Bush) rallies before the invasion of Iraq. When ANSWER was outed as a Communist organization, United for Peace and Justice, headed by longtime Communist Party member Leslie Cagan was created as a "moderate" alternative. UFPJ is also a Tides grant recipient.The Tides-funded “A Better Way Project,” which opposed war in Iraq, also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition. The celebrity-laden Win Without War Coalition, along with the Bill Moyers-funded Florence and John Schumann Foundation, ran full-page ads in the New York Times opposing the War on Terrorism. This will not be the last overlapping of far-Left causes.

The Islamist Front

Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. Part of the half-million dollars in grants the 9/11 Fund dispersed went to the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project to protect the rights of homosexual Arabs. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Currency speculator and pro-drug advocate Soros is, like Teresa Heinz Kerry, a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.) The Democratic Justice Fund seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as “terrorist nations.”

Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations. Ostensibly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations within the Wahhabi Lobby, with links to Hamas. CAIR regularly opposes and demonizes American efforts to fight terrorism, claiming, for instance, that Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in “hate crimes.”

CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s anti-terrorism measures: all too many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorism. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad openly stated in 1994, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi has been arrested for visa and bank fraud. Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning jihad. CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration. Every few months some CAIR campus official is arrested for aiding and abetting terrorism.

The Legal Matrix

The Tides Foundation has funded a number of the pillars of the radical legal establishment. Chief among these is the National Lawyers Guild, which began as a Commnist front organization and is proud of its lineage. At its recent convention last October, the concluding speaker was Lynne Stewart, an indicted terrorist NLG lawyer arrested for helping her client – convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – communicate with his terrorist cells in Egypt. In her speech, Stewart said she and her NLG comrades were carrying on a proud tradition of their forebears, past and present:

And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.

More recently, the NLG has endorsed the March 20 call to End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine & Everywhere” organized by International ANSWER, and has posted a petition for “Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Tides’ Peace Strategies Fund has funneled money to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The CCR was stablished by Sixties radical William Kunstler, defender of the Chicago 8, and Arthur Kinoy. The two also had plans to establish a new Communist Party. Executive Director Ron Daniels has been honored by the Communist Party USA for his work. Daniels also has a long and cordial relationship with racist, anti-Semitic “poet laureate” Amiri Baraka. Since 9/11, CCR has channeled its efforts into fighting every effective Homeland Security measure. They have opposed increasing the government’s ability to wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and moaned the sequestering of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay was an unexcusable form of “racial profiling.” CCR President Michael Ratner has portrayed American soldiers as the offenders, guilty of 9/11 by their Middle East policy and guilty of keeping Islamist killers “shackled, hooded and sedated during the 25 hour flight from Afghanistan.” CCR has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s Islamic Jihad.

Tides also funds the Alliance for Justice, a group dedicated to stopping Bush judicial appointees (a cause John Kerry can agree wholeheartedly endorse). Other Tides grants have gone to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the Asian Law Caucus.

Environmental Extremism

The Tides Foundation has funded the Ruckus Society, a group of anarchist Greens who rioted and looted Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots. The Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania, established in Pittsburgh with Heinz Family funds, advocates for environmentalist measures that have helped put holes in the Rust Belt’s economy.

Tides money has also squashed free speech. Thanks to complaints generated by the Tides-funded Environmental Working Group, ABC cancelled a John Stossel piece exposing the misleading nature of environmental advocacy in public elementary schools.

Greenpeace is a well-known Tides grant recipient. Greenpeace is best known for its illegal actions, endangering humans in order to make a point about the environment. Tides gave Greenpeace a quarter of a million dollars over ten years.

Lest one think only Tides’ money is going to radicals, not funds directly controlled by Teresa Heinz Kerry, remember that Heinz money has repeatedly found its way to the Earth Island Institute. On September 14, 2001, the Institute’s website bore the headline “U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance.”

Heinz family philanthropic funds have also had some dubious effects on the presidential race. The League of Conservation Voters has recently endorsed John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The Heinz Family Foundation gave LCV at least $20,000 and donated almost $250,000 to a member of the LCV board.

Perhaps this circular rotation of cash and endorsements should not surprise anyone. The grant-making institutions of the Left and their feverish recipients ultimately form an amorphous, leftist entity. One never needs to search very far to find connections between a leftist foundation and extreme advocacy groups. Teresa Heinz Kerry, George Soros, Bill Moyers and the Ford Foundation fund the Tides Foundation/Center; Tides funds the National Lawyers Guild, CAIR, MoveOn.org and United for Peace and Justice; those organizations then unite in fluid coalitions to protest against their common political enemies (Republicans). Ultimately, their representatives end up on Bill Moyers' PBS programs or active within the Democratic campaigns of their fundraisers. Between now and the election, these organizations will run constant interference for the Democratic presidential nominee (presumably Kerry himself): they will march en masse against the Bush administration again and again; they will file more lawsuits against the administration's Homeland Security measures, decry any effective response to terrorism, claim the United States is guilty of slaughtering Iraqi civilians and petition leftist judges to open America's borders to Islamist terrorists. After they help his election, President Kerry will be indebted to them. And then they will insist he begin implementing their political agenda.

Moreover, they will have a close ally in the East Wing of the White House, an ally more intimately tied to them than she is to her (second) husband. (She only adopted his last name and political party registration less than 18 months ago. “Politically, it's going to be Heinz Kerry,” she recently said. “But I don't give a sh-t, you know?”) Teresa Heinz Kerry will play a potent role in saving her second husband’s presidential campaign now – as Hillary Clinton did in 1992, and again during her husband’s impeachment. Like Hillary, in return for her service, Heinz may demand a place at the table for her pet causes. Caveat emptor.

posted June 05, 2004 02:00 PM            

Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry (V.V.A.J.K) has formed a national coalition with Vietnamese Americans for Human Rights in Vietnam. V
"We represent hundreds of thousand of American veterans who do not want to see John Kerry any where near the Oval Office," said Ted Sampley, founder of V.V.A.J.K, and a U.S. Army Green Beret and veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam.

Said Sampley, "I have personally dealt with John Kerry on the issue of US POWs left behind in Vietnam. Kerry is not truthful and is not worthy of the support of US veterans. Many Vietnam vets have been duped into thinking Kerry is their friend. He is not. To us, he is 'Hanoi John'"

Dan Tran, a NASA engineer and president of the Vietnam Human Rights Project, said, "John Kerry aided and abetted the communist government in Hanoi and has hindered any human rights progress in Vietnam."

Mike Benge, former civilian Viet Nam POW says, "John Kerry has fought harder for the Vietnamese communists than he fought against them in Vietnam.

"In the Senate, Kerry almost single handedly prevented a Vietnam Human Rights (and religious freedom) Bill from coming to a vote. Mean while the Vietnamese communists continue to wage a war of repression against our former South Vietnamese allies and a war of genocide against the Montagnard ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam."

Chau Nguyen, President of the Vietnamese Community in NY said, Pastors, Priests, and Buddhist Monks are being held against their will and many are beaten close to death on a regular basis"

When Kerry returned from military service in Vietnam he became a national leader and spokesperson of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In this role, Hanoi John campaigned against the efforts of the United States to contain the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members marched in demonstrations under the flags of the Viet Cong enemy and displayed pictures of Ho Chi Minh. They mocked the uniform of
United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues, many marked with pro-communist graffiti.

In congressional testimony Hanoi John called the U.S. involvement in Vietnam "a genocide against the Vietnamese people" and referred to his former comrades as "war criminals." The false image and social stigma portraying Vietnam vets as "drug-addicted baby killers and mindless drones" can be traced directly to John Kerry and his VVAW.

"It's one thing," said New York Vietnam veteran Jerry Kiley, "to oppose a war for moral reasons, but it's dishonorable to take that extra step and support the enemy. That's what John Kerry did."

Dan Tran, speaking as a member of Vietnamese Americans Against John Kerry said, "On behalf of tens of thousands of Vietnamese-Americans, we are determined to demonstrate against Senator Kerry all across this nation"

posted June 05, 2004 02:05 PM            

juniperb

posted June 05, 2004 04:02 PM            

You'll have to be the judge.

May 04, 2004, 4:26 p.m.
Kerry Purple Heart Doc Speaks Out
The medical description of his first wound.

By Byron York

Some critics of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry have questioned the circumstances surrounding the first of three Purple Hearts Kerry won in Vietnam. Those critics, among them some of Kerry's fellow veterans, have suggested that a wound suffered by Kerry in December 1968 may have made him technically eligible for a Purple Heart but was not severe enough to warrant serious consideration, even for a decoration that was handed out by the thousands. Whatever the case, Kerry was awarded the Purple Heart, and, along with two others he won later, it allowed him to request to leave Vietnam before his tour of duty was finished.

Kerry was treated for the wound at a medical facility in Cam Ranh Bay. The doctor who treated Kerry, Louis Letson, is today a retired general practitioner in Alabama. Letson says he remembers his brief encounter with Kerry 35 years ago because "some of his crewmen related that Lt. Kerry had told them that he would be the next JFK from Massachusetts." Letson says that last year, as the Democratic campaign began to heat up, he told friends that he remembered treating one of the candidates many years ago. In response to their questions, Letson says, he wrote down his recollections of the time. (Letson says he has had no contacts with anyone from the Bush campaign or the Republican party.) What follows is Letson's memory, as he wrote it.

"I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay.
John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2, he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.

The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was any reported damage to the boat." http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200405041626.asp

Wednesday, April 14, 2004 10:31 a.m. EDT
Kerry's War Wound Called 'Fingernail Scrape'

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry insisted on being awarded his first Purple Heart in Vietnam even though his injury amounted to no more than a "fingernail scrape," his commanding officer at the time now says.

Retired Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard tells the Boston Globe that he can still recall Kerry's wound, and that "it resembled a scrape from a fingernail," the paper said.

"I've had thorns from a rose that were worse," Hibbard insists.

Still, the former Navy man remembered that Kerry insisted on receiving a Purple Heart for the wound he said was incurred during a Dec. 3, 1968 skirmish with Viet Cong near Cam Ranh Bay.

"He had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel," Hibbard told the Globe. "People in the office were saying, 'I don't think we got any fire,' and there is a guy holding a little piece of shrapnel in his palm."

Much to Hibbard's chagrin, Kerry persisted in his quest for a war decoration for the scratch.

"I finally said, 'OK, if that's what happened ... do whatever you want,'" Hibbard said. "After that, I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got it, I don't know how."

Kerry's campaign refused to say whether he remains certain that his skimmer boat had come under fire or whether he recalls his superior officer raising doubts about whether he was entitled to the Purple Heart.

While a Kerry aide provided a copy of a medical report showing treatment for the wound in question, The Naval Historical Center "could not locate a copy of the original card for the incident," the Globe said.

Kerry was awarded two additional Purple Hearts for subsequent wounds that have also been described as minor. He then invoked a little-used regulation that entitled a triple Purple Heart winner to return to the United States.

Former Sen. Max Cleland, a Kerry supporter who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was never awarded a Purple Heart.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/4/14/103222.shtml

posted June 06, 2004 07:35 AM            

Looks like Ozone has at least one Kerry voter in MI... them purple hearts seem to be swaying some of the thirty somethings. Amazes me that a vote would be based on that but ...........

juniperb

posted June 09, 2004 07:12 AM              

God bless outer Mongolia