Truth - Al Franken [29]
And for good measure, the Times tossed in some debunking of its own:
The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the “baby killer” and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men’s own statements. Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry “unfit” had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.
It was nice. But it was late. And that’s not just my opinion. That’s what a hissing Tom Oliphant said that day in our studio:
I don’t really care what The New York Times did last Friday, or the Post did the day before or Sunday. It was late.
Long before the mainstream press had debunked each and every charge made by John O’Neill and his swarm of psychotic lying vermin (the Swift Boat Veterans), those charges had been played over and over again on Fox, on talk radio, and in right-wing rags, and had burrowed their way into America’s collective brain stem to lay their eggs of pure evil. Vermin. Vermin, indeed.
Let’s just take one of those egg-laying charges and crack it open.
The Swift Boat Vets claimed in Unfit for Command and on countless right-wing talk radio shows and countable right-wing cable TV shows that, as with all his other decorations, Kerry received his Silver Star not on the basis of valor, but on the basis of scheming, treachery, and lies. And by shooting a nearly naked, wounded, and possibly unarmed child in the back.
The official naval citation for Kerry’s Silver Star says that “an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hooch, and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber” and commends Kerry for “extraordinary daring and personal courage . . . in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire.”
The Swiftees saw it differently. Even though they didn’t actually see it. Because they weren’t actually there.
Here’s how they tell the story in their awful book:
Kerry’s boat moved slightly downstream and was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in its aft cabin. A young Viet Cong in a loincloth popped out of a hole, clutching a grenade launcher which may or may not have been loaded, depending on whose account one credits. Tom Belodeau, a forward gunner, shot the Viet Cong with an M-60 machine gun in the leg as he fled. At about this time, with the boat beached, the Viet Cong who had been wounded by Belodeau fled. Kerry and Medeiros (who had many troops in their boat) took off, perhaps with others, following the young Viet Cong as he fled, and shot him in the back, behind a lean-to.
Then they editorialize about it:
Whether Kerry’s dispatching of a fleeing, wounded, armed, or unarmed teenage enemy was in accordance with the customs of war, it is very clear that many Vietnam veterans and most Swiftees do not consider this action to be the stuff of which medals of any kind are awarded; nor would it even be a good story if told in the cold details of reality. . . .
The citation statement that Kerry attacked “a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire” is simply false. There was little or no fire. . . . The lone, wounded, fleeing young Viet Cong in a loincloth was hardly a force superior to the heavily armed Swift boat and its crew and the soldiers carried aboard. . . .
Commander George Elliott, who wrote up the initial draft of Kerry’s Silver Star citation, confirms that neither he nor anyone else in the Silver Star process that he knows realized before 1996 that Kerry was facing a single, wounded young Viet Cong fleeing in a loincloth. While Commander Elliott and many other Swiftees believe that Kerry committed no crime in killing the fleeing, wounded enemy (with a loaded or empty launcher),