Kerry

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cdbern

Vietnam Vets Mobilize Against John Kerry
By Cliff Kincaid
February 25, 2004


Fresh from an interview where he questioned President Bush about his Vietnam War-era service in the National Guard, Tim Russert of Meet the Press thinks that the Democrats are going to continue hammering on the issue. They think Bush’s service in the guard on U.S. soil stands in stark contrast to Kerry going to Vietnam and serving in combat. But they ignore a critical issue. As claimed by Mike Benge, a former civilian Vietnam POW, “John Kerry has fought harder for the Vietnamese communists than he fought against them in Vietnam.”

This is the aspect of Kerry’s record that the major media don’t want to touch. They are apparently intimidated by the medals he won while fighting for the U.S. side against the communists. But there are two groups determined to get the media to pay attention to what Kerry did after he returned from service. They want the public to know that Kerry came back to America, accused his fellow soldiers of atrocities, marched with those seeking a communist victory in Vietnam, and then ran a Senate committee that gave up hope of rescuing American POW/MIAs that were left behind after the war.

The groups are Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and Vietnamese Americans Against John Kerry. The Vietnamese Americans are angry that Kerry promoted diplomatic relations with Hanoi while failing to promote human rights in Vietnam. They are not alone. One 30-year U.S. Army veteran wrote to us saying that he is “revolted” that the media are failing to reveal Kerry’s dark “secrets.” He calls Kerry the “War ‘Hero’ Traitor” because of how he turned against the war when his fellow soldiers were still fighting and dying on the battlefield.

POW/MIA researcher Roger Hall comments, “Now that it is fashionable for veterans to promote their military status publicly—now that it is popular to be a Vietnam Veteran—Senator Kerry touts his service and medals. But in the 1970s, when it became fashionable to protest the war, he chose that issue to begin his political career and appeared to throw his medals over the fence. Now he retrieves them to flash before our eyes to distract us from his devious ways.” Hall acknowledges that Kerry performed honorably in Vietnam. But he adds, “One brave moment does not outshine a devious and duplicitous person.”

He points to something that has been documented by the Center for Public Integrity, which is hardly a conservative group. It notes that Kerry ran a Senate committee “to investigate the possibility that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam.”

But it notes that Kerry’s participation in the committee “became controversial in December 1992 when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions.” Stuart Forbes, then the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry’s cousin. For his part, Kerry decided there were no living American POW/MIA in Vietnam and the process of restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam proceeded. Kerry later visited Hanoi to meet with its Communist rulers.
 
February 26, 2004, 8:28 a.m.
Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement got its spin from the Kremlin.

By Ion Mihai Pacepa

Part of Senator John Kerry's appeal to a certain segment of Americans is his
Vietnam-veteran status coupled with his antiwar activism during that period. On April 12,
1971, Kerry told the U.S. Congress that American soldiers claimed to him that they had,
"raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals
and turned on the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed
villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked
who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in
Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any
such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay
bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)?
To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were
sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was
to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the
fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American
war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then
flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News
organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was
amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread
them around the free world.

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very
same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in
leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our
anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S.
foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap
between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations.
Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."

The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression,
on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's
orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the
KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a
permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans
dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to
conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with
the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about
$15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the
WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had
Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working
committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic
paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from
this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations'
propaganda sheets.

The KGB campaign to assault the U.S. and Europe by means of disinformation was more
than just a few Cold War dirty tricks. The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states,
indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective
of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation
as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism.

The Stockholm conference held annual international meetings up to 1972. In its five years
of existence it created thousands of "documentary" materials printed in all the major
Western languages describing the "abominable crimes" committed by American soldiers
against civilians in Vietnam, along with counterfeited pictures. All these materials were
manufactured by the KGB's disinformation department. I would print up these materials in
hundreds of thousands of copies each.

The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) was tasked to distribute these
KGB-concocted "incriminating documents" all over Western Europe. And ordinary people
often bought it hook, line, and sinker. "Even Attila the Hun looks like an angel when
compared to these Americans," a West German businessman reprovingly told me after
reading one such report.

The Italian, Greek, and Spanish Communist parties serviced by Bucharest were much
affected by this material and their activists regularly distributed translations. They also
handed them out to the participants at anti-American demonstrations around the world.

Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were KGB-funded operations, too. I
can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause,
particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB."

In 1978, when I broke with Communism, my DIE was propagating the line that
Washington's adventure in Vietnam had wasted over $200 trillion. This waste, we warned
darkly, would soon generate European inflation, recession, and unemployment.

As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America. In
1976, Andropov gave my own Romanian DIE credit for helping his KGB do so.

Leftist intellectuals in America now look to Europe — steeped for years in anti-American
propaganda from the Soviet Union — for "a sane and frank European criticism of the
Bush administration's war policy." Indeed, anti-Americanism in Europe today is almost as
ferocious as it was during Vietnam. France and Germany insist we are torturing the al
Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo Base. The Mirror, a British newspaper, is confident
that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were "killing innocents in
Afghanistan." The Paris daily Le Monde put Jean Baudrillard on its front page asserting
that "the Judeo-Christian West, led by America, not only provoked the [September 11]
terrorist attacks, it actually desired them."

In June 2002, a documentary film on "U.S. war crimes" in Afghanistan was shown in the
German Bundestag by the crypto-Communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The
film faithfully reincarnated the style of old Soviet-bloc "documentaries" demonizing the
U.S. war in Vietnam. According to this 20-minute movie, American soldiers were
involved in the torture and murder of some 3,000 Taliban prisoners in the region of
Mazar-e-Sharif. One witness in the film even claimed he had seen an American soldier
break the neck of one Afghan prisoner and pour acid on others.

During my last meeting with Andropov, he said, wisely, "now all we have to do is to keep
the Vietnam-era anti-Americanism alive." Andropov was a shrewd judge of human nature.
He understood that in the end our original involvement would be forgotten, and our
insinuations would take on a life of their own. He knew well that it was just the way
human nature worked.

— Ion Mihai Pacepa was acting chief of Romania's espionage service and national-security
adviser to the country's president. He is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to
have defected from the former Soviet bloc.
 
The ideological spin wars continue.

Yesterday on Hannity's radio show I heard someone spinning that all dictatorships are born of socialism because the state becomes more important than the people. The reasoning was that under a dictatorship the dictator is more concerned for his own power (the state) than the rights of the people. So the conclusion is socialism. So now Saddam was not a dictator, he was a socialist.

So their logic follows this path:

All dictators are socialists.

Kerry is a socialist.

Kerry if elected would be a dictator.

You can spin just about anything with unchallenged fallacy if you want to.
 
Quote from ARogueTrader:


Kerry is a socialist.
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I do agree Kerry is a socialist. Whether dictatorships are born of socialism I haven't considered before.

Kerry won't be elected but even if he were, I don't think he'd be a dictator. Hopefully Congress would prevent that as well they should prevent any president getting to big for his/our own good.

As for his war record, that article provides some info that the media conveniently overlooks. But its worth looking into. I had a fair amount of respect for him until the truth started coming out.

As for his anti war speech. I think he's a traitor. Speak against the war, that's okay, but what he said resulted in thousands of our boys coming home and getting spit on, and worse. That was wrong. They didn't volunteer for the job, they just did what they were told. Because of the treatment they received, thousands headed for the mountains in Washington and Idaho, feeling betrayed and vowing never to have anything to do with the government or "the people" again.
 
You are entitled to your opinon.

You see him as a traitor, some as a hero.

There were (and still are) many who think his support of the anti war movement was heroic and very patriotic.

Holding Kerry in any way responsible for the behavior of those who treated Veterans with a lack of respect is a stretch at best.

How has the Bush administration treated Veterans by the way?

http://www.independent-media.tv/ite...fcategory_desc=Veterans and Military Personel

http://www.independent-media.tv/ite...fcategory_desc=Veterans and Military Personel


Quote from cdbern:

I do agree Kerry is a socialist. Whether dictatorships are born of socialism I haven't considered before.

Kerry won't be elected but even if he were, I don't think he'd be a dictator. Hopefully Congress would prevent that as well they should prevent any president getting to big for his/our own good.

As for his war record, that article provides some info that the media conveniently overlooks. But its worth looking into. I had a fair amount of respect for him until the truth started coming out.

As for his anti war speech. I think he's a traitor. Speak against the war, that's okay, but what he said resulted in thousands of our boys coming home and getting spit on, and worse. That was wrong. They didn't volunteer for the job, they just did what they were told. Because of the treatment they received, thousands headed for the mountains in Washington and Idaho, feeling betrayed and vowing never to have anything to do with the government or "the people" again.
More...
 
Quote from ARogueTrader:

You are entitled to your opinon.

You see him as a traitor, some as a hero.

There were (and still are) many who think his support of the anti war movement was heroic and very patriotic.

Holding Kerry in any way responsible for the behavior of those who treated Veterans with a lack of respect is a stretch at best.

How has the Bush administration treated Veterans by the way?

http://www.independent-media.tv/ite...fcategory_desc=Veterans and Military Personel
More...

Getting us out of Nam was essential, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. But my God man, the protests were outrageous. Sure, under pressure we finally pulled out, but John Q. Public was sooooo convinced that every solder was a baby killer (thanks to Kerry and Fonda), that these men were treated like dirt. Bit of a stretch, I think not. Besides, he wasn't there to do his duty, he wanted to mimic Kennedy.

I've never said I agree with everything Bush has done or has proposed. However the Democratic party has been taken over by Socialists. There are damn few who don't hold that banner close to their breast. I'll fight that agenda to the end.
 
Trickle Down Outsourcing - A Brave New World
By: Todd Smyth
Independent Media TV Date: 02/25/2004


Trickle-Down economics just isn't what it used to be. That $ trillion Bush pumped into the economy last year is trickling overseas. With cheap foreign labor, a new US tax code, trade policies and modern technology all encouraging US companies to expand overseas, why would US companies create jobs in the US? The trick to Trickle-Down economics is the jobs need to be created in the same country the tax cuts come from. Ooops!
The premise of Trickle-Down or Supply-Side economics is to stimulate the economy with large tax cuts for the wealthy. That money hopefully is invested in a way that creates economic growth. That translates into increased productivity, profits and jobs. It sounds good and to some extent, it use to really work. However, something got terribly misunderestimated this time.

The technology boom that occurred during the Clinton administration namely mobile computing, Internet, satellite and broad-band communications, laid the foundation that has made it possible to ship so many jobs overseas, where labor is cheap. Our declining public education system and lack of graduating engineers and scientists hasn’t helped. A new fifteen thousand page tax code with loopholes galore hasn’t helped. Weak trade policies that are casually enforced are no great help either.

All this adds up to a great short term gain for the wealthiest US corporations. It drives down costs and drives up profits, while destroying labor unions and competing small and medium size businesses. It also permanently damages our middle class. With every job lost overseas a consumer is lost in this country. We are by far the largest market place in the world. We have every right and responsibility to protect that at some level.

The wholesale give away of our middle-class job market is not a good thing and job retraining is not much of a solution. Dr. Catherine Mann, the architect and most quoted advocate of globalization has no more of a remedy than job retraining. Retrain us for what? It doesn’t take much training for the French fry cooking, car parking and butler serving jobs transforming our new “service industry growth.”

Is it possible too many of us are confusing the word “serfdom” with “surfing” and think it sounds like fun?

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director has said [Supply-Side tax cuts] "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top [tax] rate" … "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down," … "So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory." (Atlantic Monthly August 1981)

Hmmm.....?

While George Bush tells us to be patient, job growth is just around the corner, the trickle-down effect has already come and gone. We should still see some job creation by November, probably around a million new jobs. They will be mostly low paying service sector jobs that will bring down the median income while the rich get richer. Meanwhile, I’m sure we’ll hear plenty of empty rhetoric about how job growth will continue to accelerate as long as we re-elect Bush and make the tax cuts permanent.

In addition to the 3 million jobs lost in the last three years, 2.6 million additional good paying, median income jobs have already been replaced by part time and minimum wage jobs. The typical American now works 184 hours longer than in 1970, an additional 4.5 weeks on the job for only nine percent more pay.

I think it’s time for a change. I personally have never liked being trickled on and prefer investment in middle-class tax cuts to put the money directly into our own US marketplace. Investing in public education, small and medium size businesses, public works and infrastructure to create good paying jobs and stimulate our internal market upward.

So how do we make such a change? You’re not going to like this. Register to vote; inform yourself on the issues and vote. Volunteer to help other people vote. Encourage everyone you know to do the same. It’s that simple. That’s the way it really works. There is no short cut and we can only hope it’s not too late.
 
ART we've had this discussion before I think. People can blame any President they want, except the President isn't the only problem. You can never eliminate a lizard by cutting off the tail. Democrats are noted for two things: 1) raising taxes and 2) trying to redistribute wealth. Thanks but no thanks. All I have to do is look at the pay stub and see how much goes to taxes.

By the way, your "Independent Media" is kinda slanted.
 
From a "right" wing point of view, it is slanted.

I saw an editorial slamming Gore at that web site.

http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=5862&fcategory_desc=Under Reported

Quote from cdbern:

ART we've had this discussion before I think. People can blame any President they want, except the President isn't the only problem. You can never eliminate a lizard by cutting off the tail. Democrats are noted for two things: 1) raising taxes and 2) trying to redistribute wealth. Thanks but no thanks. All I have to do is look at the pay stub and see how much goes to taxes.

By the way, your "Independent Media" is kinda slanted.
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