This will leave a mark. Anyone see it yet? I missed the preview the other night on Hannity and Colmes.
New Swift-Vet Ad Recounts Kerry Making 'Friends' in Paris
By Steve Roeder
Talon News
September 23, 2004
(Talon News) -- In the sixth and latest ad by The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA) is compared to Vietnam War protester "Hanoi" Jane Fonda as a man the U.S. cannot trust because he, like Fonda, betrayed the U.S. when he met with North Vietnamese communist leaders during the Vietnam War.
"Friends," the most recent television ad by the organization consisting of 254 veterans who served in the Navy at the same time as Kerry, continues their challenge of the Democratic presidential candidate's Vietnam record and activism. With a $1.3 million budget, the ad will air in the five battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, and West Virginia. It also will be shown nationally on cable television networks through the end of the month.
The five-image advertisement, which can be viewed at
www.Swiftvets.com, refers to a meeting Kerry had in early 1971 with leaders of the communist delegation that was negotiating with U.S. representatives at the Paris peace talks. The ad states:
"Even before Jane Fonda went to Hanoi to meet with the enemy and mock America, John Kerry secretly met with enemy leaders in Paris."
"Though we were still at war and Americans were being held in North Vietnamese prison camps."
"Then he returned and accused American troops of committing war crimes on a daily basis."
"Eventually Jane Fonda apologized for her activities, but John Kerry refuses to."
"In a time of war, can America trust a man who betrayed his country?"
Kerry, in a leadership role with "Vietnam Veterans Against the [Vietnam] War," testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971.
"I have been to Paris," Kerry said. "I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG)".
In 1971, Kerry called a press conference in Washington and urged President Nixon to accept the seven-point surrender plan of Madame Nguyen Thi Binh.
Kerry's campaign said earlier this year that he met with Madame Binh, then the foreign minister of the PRG, a South Vietnamese communist group with ties to the Viet Cong and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the "borderline" of what was permissible under U.S. law.
Jerome Corsi, co-author of the best-selling book "Unfit for Command," states that Kerry's 1970 meeting with North Vietnamese communists violated U.S. law. Corsi, who has studied the anti-war movement for over 30 years, indicates that U.S. code 18 U.S.C. 953 prohibits a U.S. citizen from going abroad to negotiate with a foreign government.
In "Unfit for Command," Corsi and co-author John O'Neill write, "Had Madame Binh herself been permitted to appear at the July 22, 1971 press conference instead of John Kerry, the most noticeable difference in the argument presented might have been the absence of a Boston accent."
Kerry should be grateful that President Abraham Lincoln was not in office. Said Lincoln of similar actions: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."
Kerry's campaign spokesman, Michael Meehan, claims that Kerry was in Paris on his honeymoon with his first wife, Julia Thorne. Meehan contends that Kerry, who was still a member of the naval reserves, did not go with the intention of meeting with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders.
However, historian Douglas Brinkley, who authored "Tour of Duty," a book about Kerry's military service, differs. He said Kerry's extensive fact-finding trip to Paris was done after his honeymoon.
"He was on the fringes but he was proud of it," Brinkley wrote. "[H]e wanted to make his own evaluation of the situation."
Just one year earlier, Kerry had made his own evaluation in the Harvard Crimson concerning troop deployment.
"I'm an internationalist," Kerry said. "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through [sic] the world only at the directive of the United Nations."
In an interview Tuesday, O'Neill said it would be "unprecedented" for a future commander-in-chief to have met with enemy leaders.
"It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda," said O'Neill.
Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton attempted to discredit the Swift Boat group.
"This is more trash from a group that's doing the Bush campaign's dirty work," Clanton said. "Their charges are as credible as a supermarket rag."
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2004/sept..._friends.shtml
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