Swift Boat Liars

I know I said I was done talking about this, but there's been a flurry of new articles about it in the last 24 hours. First, read this exchange between William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg in Slate. Saletan shows that the entire SBVF"T" ad can be dispatched in a few paragraphs. Here they are:

The Swiftvets' allegations are deliberately blurred. Their ad starts with John Edwards urging people to talk to "the men who served with" Kerry. Several Swiftvets then appear on the screen, saying they "served with" Kerry. This is a semantic trick. Edwards is talking about crewmates who, at one time or another, accompanied Kerry on his six-man boat. The Swiftvets served with Kerry only in the sense that they manned other boats in Vietnam. It's a bit like saying you spent the night with Bill Clinton because you were on Martha's Vineyard, too.

Thirteen vets make 15 statements in the ad. Let's discard the unfalsifiable ones: "You could not count on John Kerry," "John Kerry is no war hero," "John Kerry has not been honest," "John Kerry cannot be trusted," "He is lying about his record," and "He lacks the capacity to lead." There's no way to fact-check these because they cite no facts.

Next, let's distinguish Kerry's statements about what he did from his statements about what others did. Most of the Swiftvets' material complaints address the latter: "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam," "John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with in Vietnam," "He dishonored his country ... he most certainly did," "He betrayed all his shipmates ... he lied before the Senate." Phrases such as "what happened in Vietnam," "dishonored his country," "lied before the Senate," and "the men and women he served with" (there were no women on Kerry's boat) give away that these claims have nothing to do with Kerry's service. They're about his allegations afterward that American forces participated in war crimes.

The war crimes debate is murky. Kerry testified not about what he had seen but about what other servicemen had told him. And some war crimes clearly occurred. So at a minimum, in both spirit and substance, he didn't lie.

That brings us to the allegations that he misrepresented his own experiences. Here, Kerry's testimony was firsthand, so his veracity is on the line. Only two statements in the ad fall into this category. One comes from Louis Letson: "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury." The other comes from Van O'Dell: "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. ... I know, I was there, I saw what happened."

Letson loses credibility right away for implying that he has firsthand knowledge about his allegation. He doesn't. The allegation has to do with the source of Kerry's injury, not its severity. According to Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, Letson told the paper that after treating Kerry, "[Letson] learned from some medical corpsmen that other crewmen had confided that there was no exchange of fire and that Kerry had accidentally wounded himself as he fired at the guerrillas. Letson said he didn't know if the crewmen giving this account were in the boat with Kerry or on other boats."

That's third-hand testimony from somebody who doesn't even know the identity or location of the firsthand source. Pretty lousy stuff. Furthermore, the Times notes, "Navy rules during the Vietnam War governing Purple Hearts did not take into account a wound's severity—and specified only that injuries had to be suffered 'in action against an enemy.' … A Times review of Navy injury reports and awards from that period in Kerry's Swift boat unit shows that many other Swift boat personnel won Purple Hearts for slight wounds of uncertain origin." Case closed.

O'Dell, on the other hand, really "was there" when Kerry earned his Bronze Star. This was the incident in which Kerry pulled Jim Rassman, a green beret, from a river. Nobody disputes that it happened or that mines had gone off. Kerry says the rescue happened under fire. O'Dell and some others who were in boats nearby say it didn't. Rassman backs up Kerry's version. So does Del Sandusky, a crewman on Kerry's boat, who told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week, "I saw the gunflashes shooting at us from the shore. I saw the rounds hitting the water." So does the Navy's official after-action report. Such reports normally included input from all Swift boat officers involved in a battle. Bottom line: Everyone agrees that there were explosions, and among the men who were on Kerry's boat or in the water next to it, the record of testimony on Kerry's account that shots were fired is 2-0 for Kerry. So much for the Swiftvets ad.

Saletan gets right to the heart of the motivation for the SBVF"T" campaign, though he doesn't dwell on it too much; namely, the whole thing is revenge for Kerry's Senate testimony. It was that testimony that led to the creation of John O'Neill by Charles Colson and the Nixon dirty tricks apparatus, and for which O'Neill has been pursuing a vendetta against Kerry for the last 33 years. And, as it turns out, Kerry's Senate testimony was essentially true. Not only did the US Army commit and then try to cover-up atrocities in the commonplace sense of the word, but through official policy like free-fire zones, carpet-bombings, use of napalm and agent orange, razing of villages, etc., the government certainly did contravene international law concerning the conduct of war. That was what Kerry testified to, and he was correct. Saletan's case would have been even stronger, as Josh Marshall notes, had he seen this article from the Washington Post. Josh summarizes:

Larry Thurlow is one of Kerry's most vocal critics. He's a member of the Swift Boat group; he's in the group that put out the ads, etc. Thurlow's claim to fame is his contention that Kerry's boat wasn't actually under fire in a 1969 incident for which Kerry was awarded a Bronze Star.

The Post asked Thurlow to release his records. He refused because "he was unwilling to authorize release of his military records because he feared attempts by the Kerry campaign to discredit him and other anti-Kerry veterans." It seems he had some reason for concern. The Post got the records from a Freedom of Information Act request; and they back up Kerry's version of events [specifically, that both Thurlow and Kerry acted under fire during the incident in question].

Well, that should just about do it for Thurlow. We've already noted on this website that Thurlow himself received a bronze star for the mission in question. I think, now, Thurlow's foray into amateur plumber-ism is over. It didn't last a moment too long. John O'Neill clearly deserves a public libel suit. Unlike Kenneth Baer, who recommended that Kerry himself sue O'Neill, I think the wisest course of action would be for Rassman, Kerry's crewmates, and some of the other veterans about whom O'Neill has written and published scurrilous lies, to be the ones taking O'Neill to court.

In his half of the Slate article, Weisberg concerns himself with the damage the SBVF"T" can do to Kerry, and the concordant benefits to Bush. Weisberg quite rightly notes that the moveon.org response ad isn't even remotely in the same moral category as the SBVF"T" ad. It says two things that are perfectly true of Mr. Bush, 1) that he used family connections to get a very safe post in the National Guard, and 2) that he is condoning a campaign of libel against Mr. Kerry; as well as one thing that is somewhat exaggerated but basically true in spirit, namely that there are no records that Mr. Bush ever showed up for service in the Alabama National Guard. What should Kerry do to fight these lies? As Weisberg notes, Kerry cannot actually respond to the substance of the charges against him; to do so would be a kind of political harakiri in which the media act as the fatal weapon. These suggestions are pretty good:

Kerry could ask his friend John McCain to stop campaigning for Bush until the Swiftvets ads stop. If Bush doesn't respond, Kerry should loose his own attack dogs and make a bigger issue out of Bush avoiding the draft.

Bush's tacit approval of the SBVF"T" ad (he changes the subject whenever asked about it, which is tacit approval) amounts to a rejection of any sort of decorum or restraint in this campaign, and if Kerry doesn't do likewise---always indirectly, always through surrogates---he might get Dukakis'd. It's going to be incumbent upon left-wing independent groups to begin an all-out advertising blitz against Mr. Bush, and their efforts should be as negative as possible without claiming anything that isn't true. What else? Kerry and his campaign, and the DNC, should simply flood every media outlet with statements like this paragraph from Weisberg:

The [Swiftvet] ad is a carefully crafted lie. [It] is beyond vile...Suffice it to say that the spot packs an impressive amount of deceit into 60 seconds. Without entering into every detail of the "controversy," it pretends, as you note, that people who weren't present when Kerry sustained injuries were eyewitnesses. It implies that Kerry wouldn't deserve his Purple Hearts if his injuries had been caused by friendly fire, when in fact he would still qualify. It implies he has said things about his experience that he hasn't. It blurs the distinction between friendly fire and "self-inflicted wounds," implying that Kerry intentionally harmed himself to receive medals and escape Vietnam. It makes criticism of his activities after returning home sound like criticism of his activities in Vietnam.

The gloves are off now, bitches.

UPDATE: The remnant of the Stalinist left is calling John Kerry a war criminal. For whatever it's worth (not much).