Kerry's 1971 Remarks Return to Haunt Us, Lawmaker Says
By: Steve Sawyer | Source: CNSNews.com
June 23, 2004 12:03PM EST

By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com Morning Editor
June 23, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - A Republican lawmaker says Sen. John F. Kerry should apologize for his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Vietnamese government is now using Kerry's 1971 comments to question America's treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

In a one-minute speech on the House floor Wednesday, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Penn.) noted that the Vietnamese government has weighed in on the Iraqi prison scandal.

"But the official communist Vietnamese news agency isn't citing the Geneva Convention or the U.N.," Pitts said. "It's citing testimony given by John Kerry in 1971."

At that 1971 hearing, Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about a recent investigation in Detroit, where more than 150 Vietnam veterans "testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia -- not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...."

According to Kerry, some of the 150 veterans admitted 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 Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam..."

Vietnam News, which the Republican National Committee describes as an arm of the official Communist Vietnam News Agency, is now repeating John Kerry's 1971 comments to make the point that Americans "perpetrated well-documented atrocities in Vietnam, both at the individual and mass levels."

But, Vietnam News added, "despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely."

Rep. Pitts says there's a problem with Kerry's 1971 testimony, which Vietnam News has seized upon: "The problem is, he relied on a report prepared by a group of people who were not what they seemed," Pitts said in his speech.

"They claimed to be former soldiers. They were not. They were frauds. They were out only to discredit the military and our country. But John Kerry never repudiated or apologized for his statements," Pitts said. Instead, Pitts noted, Kerry attributed his behavior to "youth."

"And now his misleading, inaccurate, hateful words are being used by a government with an atrocious human rights record against this country," Pitts said.

"Senator Kerry should apologize once and for all to our troops and to our nation...And he should disavow these statements as false before more nations decide to rely on his erroneous testimony from 1971," Pitts concluded.

In an April 23, 2004 interview with CNN, Kerry said his 1971 comments were "mostly voice of a young, angry person who wanted to end the war" and "honest expressions of the passion that we brought to the cause."

He told CNN he regretted "any feeling that anybody had that I somehow didn't embrace the quality of the service. But I have always said how nobly I think every veteran served."

He described himself as older and wiser: "But they were the words that came out of my gut at that time, based on the anger and frustration that I felt back when it was happening," Kerry told CNN in April.

He also told CNN, "I'm not going to back down one inch on what I've fought for and what I've stood for all of these years."

Email this Article

Printer Friendly Version