The Washington Post Jumps On Kerry's Bandwagon

I've officially decided that today needs to be "Bash the Washington Post Day" here at my little hole in the cyber-universe. The Swift Boat Vets editorial -- no, wait, Kerry Campaign ad is a better term for it -- is shameful for a major newspaper. The Post says the following, in an editorial entitled "Swift Boat Smears":

DEMOCRATIC nominee John F. Kerry has made his tour of duty in Vietnam -- a stint in which he earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star -- a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. To the extent, then, that there are legitimate questions about Mr. Kerry's behavior -- either in Vietnam or back home as a prominent antiwar activist -- those are fair game. Mr. Kerry's four-plus months in Vietnam made for an unusually short tour. He used his third Purple Heart to go home early, and his wounds were relatively superficial. Some veterans remain understandably bitter about Mr. Kerry's antiwar statements; indeed, the candidate himself has said he would rephrase some of his more cutting accusations about U.S. troops committing war crimes.

But a new assault on Mr. Kerry -- in an ad by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and in a new book -- crosses the line in branding Mr. Kerry a coward and a liar. This smear is contradicted by Mr. Kerry's crew mates, undercut by the previous statements of some of those now making the charges and tainted by the chief source of its funding: Republican activists dedicated to defeating Mr. Kerry in November.

...The most potentially damning accusation in the ad concerns the the best-known episode of Mr. Kerry's service, in which he saved the life of Jim Rassmann after the Special Forces officer was blown off Mr. Kerry's Swift boat by a mine explosion. Three people quoted in the ad, all of whom say they were present that day, March 13, 1969, assert that Mr. Kerry ordered his craft to flee the danger and turned around to rescue Mr. Rassmann only after the shooting stopped. "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star . . . I know, I was there, I saw what happened," says Van O'Dell, a retired Navy enlisted man. "His account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day," says Jack Chenoweth, who commanded a different Swift boat. "When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry," says Larry Thurlow, another Swift boat commander.

If accurate, this would demolish a central part of the picture of Mr. Kerry as Vietnam hero. But the weight of the evidence supports Mr. Kerry. Mr. Rassmann, having had no contact with Mr. Kerry for the previous 35 years, came forward during the primaries to tell the story of how Mr. Kerry, braving enemy fire and with an injured arm, pulled him back on board. "John came up to the bow, and I thought he was going to get killed because he was so exposed," Mr. Rassmann recalled. Other surviving crew mates corroborate that account. "I was there," crew mate Del Sandusky told CNN. "I saw the bullets skimming across the water. I saw the firefight gun flashes from the jungle. I know the firefight and the ambush we were in." Another crew mate, James Wasser, told ABC: "What boat were you riding on? Because you weren't there -- we were."

It's also relevant to know who's underwriting this advertising campaign. The biggest single donor so far to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth isn't a Swift boat veteran but one of the leading Republican donors in Texas. Houston builder Bob J. Perry gave the group $100,000, accounting for the bulk of the $158,000 in receipts it has reported. It's fair to ask whether truth is at the top of this group's agenda.

Okay, let's start with the fact that the Post completely ignores the fact that one claim of the Swift Boat Vets -- regarding Kerry's lie about going into Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968 -- has already been proven. Take a look at Kerry's speech, as reprinted at Just One Minute, which has the cite to the speech he gave on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986:

Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.I have that memory which is seared-seared-in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible in order to avoid that kind of conflict.

Keep in mind, Kerry was using this "searing memory" as evidence for why we should limit aid to the Contras fighting the Communist dictator in Nicaragua -- i.e., he was citing his personal experience in Vietnam as a rationale for a policy decision. We'll leave aside the issue of whether he sees memories of Vietnam every time we deploy American troops for another discussion. Also, Kerry also repeated his claim about excursions into Cambodia on at least one more occasion, as evidenced by the AP article cited by Just One Minute. What's worse, he did it in the context of hearings on POW/MIA Affairs, using his personal experience as anecdotal evidence that U.S. troops may have been left behind at war's end:

This conclusion that the government failed to account for all its soldiers, sailors and fliers did not come easily for the 48-year-old senator. Through two decades of political activism since he returned from Vietnam, first as an opponent of the war, then as a lawmaker, Kerry has remained studiously neutral on the POW-MIA question.

Veterans groups and researchers of varying credibility raised allegations and published photographs suggesting that Americans might still be languishing in Southeast Asian stalags. Bereaved family members pleaded with lawmakers to rescue loved ones they were convinced were still alive. Kerry said only that there was evidence that needed to be explored."I've always said there's evidence. But I'm not going to draw any conclusions about this until we do a sound, sensible job," Kerry said in an interview. "This conclusion was drawn from documents which no one saw 10 years ago."

But for Kerry, who spent six violent months commanding a patrol boat on the Mekong River, there's always been a ring of truth to allegations of abandoned Americans. By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."We were told, `Just go up there and do your patrol. Everybody was over there (in Cambodia). Nobody thought twice about it," Kerry said.

One of the missions, which Kerry, at the time, was ordered not to discuss, involved taking CIA operatives into Cambodia to search for enemy enclaves."I can remember wondering, `If you're going to go, what happens to you,"' Kerry said.

But here today, we have the truth. Unfortunately, it takes a British paper to report it, rather than the Post or the left-wing dishrag known as the New York Times. Today's Telegraph writes:

Yesterday, however, the Kerry campaign was left in verbal knots after a new book accused the senator of inventing stories about being sent, illegally, over the border into neutral Cambodia.

The Kerry campaign responded, initially, that Mr Kerry had always said he was "near" Cambodia. Then a campaign aide said Mr Kerry had been in the Mekong Delta "between" Vietnam and next-door Cambodia - a geographical zone not found
on maps, which show the Mekong river running from Cambodia to Vietnam.

The book, Unfit for Command, is based on recollections from dozens of veterans who served in the same naval unit as Mr Kerry, including crewmen on small patrol craft under his direct command.

... In newspaper articles, interviews and at least one Senate speech, Mr Kerry has claimed that he spent Christmas 1968 inside Cambodia, at a time when even the US president was publicly denying that American forces were inside that country.

He has cited the missions as a psychological turning point, when he realised that American leaders were not telling the truth to the world about the war in south-east Asia.

Michael Meehan, a Kerry campaign adviser, told ABC Television: "The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol . . . in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was ambushed, they fired back, he was fired upon from both sides, from the Cambodian side of the border and the Vietnam side during that day in 1968."

It remains to be seen how serious an impact the row has on the Kerry campaign.

It remains to be seen if the press here in the U.S. ever reports it. Maybe they can't ignore it forever, epecially since Unfit for Command is #1 on Amazon's best-seller list right now. But let's quickly list the problems with Meehan's statement:

1. It's geographically impossible, as the Telegraph points out.

2. Kerry's own crewmates, the ones everyone cites as evidence for why the Swift Boat Vets are wrong on their other claims, state that they were not in or near Cambodia on Christmas Eve.

3. Kerry's statements say he was in Cambodia, not merely near it.

But the Post doesn't even touch the Cambodia issue. Instead it focuses on the conflict between the Swift Boat Vets account and that of the men on Kerry's boat. This is important, but it's also important to note that Kerry has his so-called "Band of Brothers" of approximately 10 men backing him. The Swift Boat Vets have far more people providing conflicting accounts of what Kerry did, both that day and other days. And the claim of these men cannot be simply dismissed by stating they were not on the same boat. As has been repeatedly stated, several boats were part of the engagement in question -- and the detailed accounts provided by others in other boats, which were less than 50 yards away, conflict with the accounts of those on Kerry's boat. They're not testifying as to what people on the boat said to one another -- they're testifying as to whether a firefight was still taking place, and whether other boats were still in the area. Presumably, they could observe these things at least as well as the people on Kerry's boat. How can the Post claim that "the weight of the evidence supports Mr. Kerry" in light of this? Is the O.J. jury writing this editorial?

Finally, let's get one thing straight -- it doesn't matter who financed the ad if the ad is true. And Kerry has not refuted its truth. God forbid the Post ever covers claims by liberal groups like Moveon.org and refutes them by mentioning the group's funding by billionaire Bush-hater George Soros.

In the end, the Post, as Instapundit put it, is working on Kerry's behalf by "spending another chunk of their diminishing credibility to help this guy. Hope they still think it was worth it in a few years." By then, they'll be the New York Times.