Sorry for the long post....
.... but with a dirtbag like Kerry, there is a lot of material to cover.
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From
various NewsMax.com articles and other articles (links provided below), I constructed the following timeline:
- Labor Day weekend, 1970: Fonda & Kerry are the two primary featured speakers at an antiwar protest rally at Valley Forge, PA. The protest started with a march from Morristown to Valley Forge. Kerry was National Coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Fonda was named Honorary National Coordinator of that same group, and they had a personal meeting at the event (according to David Brinkley). The VVAW not only protested the war, but also encouraged American soldiers to munity and desert.
- Winter, 1970: Fonda & Kerry solicited fraudulent testimony about US atrocities supposed committed in Vietnam from some real and some phony veterans. This was called the Winter Soldier antiwar campaign. Fonda & Kerry had a meeting at the Detroit Howard Johnson's Comfort Center, where the event was being held (according to David Brinkley).
- Spring, 1971: In April, Kerry gives his fraudulent testimony in front of the US Congress about supposed war atrocities. Today, those who served with Kerry refute his claims. 'Hanoi Hilton' prison guards taunted American POWs with Kerry's claims of 'American atrocities committed upon innocent Vietnamese civilians'. Kerry also threw his medals on the steps of the Capitol in an antiwar protest with a large sign proclaiming them as "trash", in a guesture of public repudiation of his military honors. The only problem is, it turns out he still has his medals today. He just pretended he was throwing his own medals, but that was BS.
- 1971: After the trial of Lt. William Calley over events that occured at the 'Mei Lai massacre', John Kerry said this at a protest on Wall Street: "Guilty as Lieutenant Calley may have been of the actual act of murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal ... the United States of America..." A few weeks later, on a Meet the Press interview, he said: "I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others, in that I shot in free-fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions and burned villages." {maybe he should be turned over to the ICC and tried for war crimes, hmmm ? } NBC now refuses to release tape of that interview. And while Kerry protested the 'monied interests' and the 'military-industrial complex' at the Wall Street protest, he had been secretly raising campaign money from some of the Wall Street elite for his Senate campaigns for at least a year previously. This was from donors who had supported the Vietnam war. (
LINK )
- Spring, 1972: Jane Fonda travels to North Vietnam, visits American POW at the 'Hanoi Hilton' prison camp, giving them an antiwar lecture about the evils of American participation in the Vietnam war. She poses for the infamous picture or her sitting at an NVA antiaircraft gun wearing an enemy helmet, pretending to shoot down American planes.
- Fall, 1972: Sept. 18, 1972, the evening before the primary election during his second attempt for Congress, Kerry's brother Cameron and one Thomas Vallely, both part of his current campaign team, were arrested by Lowell police at 1:40 a.m. and charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny. The two were apprehended in the basement of a building whose door had been forced open, police said. It housed the headquarters of candidate DiFruscia. The Watergate scandal was making headlines at this time, and it was called the 'Lowell Watergate'. (
LINK )
- Spring, 1973: Released American POW John McCain wrote in the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report that Kerry's testimony in front of the Congress about 'American atrocities' was "the most effective propaganda [my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us." Recently, Sen. John McCain defended Kerry against charges by Ted Sampley on his POW/MIA website that Kerry had not properly investigated the MIA situation in Vietnam, as well as criticizing him for his antiwar record during the Vietnam war.
- 1985: Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military commander-in-chief during the Vietnam war, publishes his memoirs. In that book, he says that if it werer not for groups like Kerry's VVAW, the North Vietnamese would have surrendered.
- 1992: Kerry visits Vietnam as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. He praises the government of Vietnam for being "open" about American POWs, and he reports that there are no more American POWs in Vietnam. He also called on President Bush, Sr. to "reward the Vietnamese" for their total cooperation in the POW investigation.A few weeks after the Senate panel’s hearings had concluded, according to Center for Public Integrity, Kerry’s participation in the committee became “controversial†when Hanoi announced that it had awarded a fat contract to Boston real estate firm Colliers International, then headed by the senator’s cousin Stuart Forbes. On 9 April 1992, Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry ordered all copies of the POW intel briefing destroyed. This fact came out, and damage control ensued. Today, Kerry's campaign website says: “When John Kerry returned home from Vietnam, he joined his fellow veterans in vowing never to abandon future veterans of America’s wars. Kerry’s commitment to veterans has never wavered and stands strong to this day.â€
- 11 February 2004: Jane Fonda publicly defends John Kerry after a photo of the two of them attending the 1970 Valley Forge protest rally surfaces. Fonda says, in a CNN interview: "Any attempt to link Kerry to me and make him look bad with that connection is completely false." She says, "I don't even think we shook hands." Kerry says through his spokesman: "John Kerry and Jane Fonda were just acquaintances."
- 15 February 2004: In an interview with WABC Radio host Steve Malzberg, David Brinkley says Kerry and Fonda had a personal meetings at the 1970 Valley Forge and 1971 Winter Soldier events. Oops! Fonda & Kerry are busted as liars!
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Note: Copyright laws.... fair use.... blah, blah, blah....
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations
April 23, 1971
I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....
In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
