The Times Wages War for Kerry Against Swift Boat Vets
Posted by: Clay Waters
5/30/2006 12:45:38 PM
John Kerry's own personal Vietnam, Act II: One of Sen. Kerry's Vietnam War awards contested by the Swift Boat Veterans was his Silver Star (he was also awarded the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts). This is how the Times frames the pro-Kerry argument in its Sunday pro-Kerry revisionist story from reporter Kate Zernike:
"Swift Boat Veterans for Truth said the enemy whom Mr. Kerry shot and killed in the incident for which he won the Silver Star was actually a wounded and fleeing teenager 'in a loincloth.'"
To rebut the Swift Boat Veterans, here's the Times with Kerry's side, with an accompanied photograph: "Mr. Kerry says his photographs show the body of a man fully dressed and lying face up, suggesting, he says, that the man was shot while approaching."
But blogger Tom Maguire thinks the Times misses the boat: "Does the Times really not understand how absurd this is? There were no Swift Boat Veterans for Truth at the scene of the Silver Star incident -- all they did was compare different versions of the incident as described in Kerry's medal citation and by Kerry himself, years later, to the Boston Globe."
Maguire then cites a 2003 Globe story, in which the Globe itself (the sister paper of the New York Times) declares: "Out of the bush appeared a teenager in a loin cloth, clutching a grenade launcher."
Later in the Globe’s story, there’s this: "Instead, the guerrilla got up and started running. ‘We've got to get him, make sure he doesn't get behind the hut, and then we're in trouble,’ Kerry recalled. So Kerry shot and killed the guerrilla."
In other words, according to the Globe’s interview with Kerry himself in 2003, it was a fleeing "teenager in a loincloth." Are Kerry and his sympathetic local paper also in cahoots with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?
Despite those inconsistencies, Zernike says its in fact the Swift Boat Veterans who aren’t credible: "Naval records and accounts from other sailors contradicted almost every claim they made, and some members of the group who had earlier praised Mr. Kerry's heroism contradicted themselves. Still, the charges stuck."
For more inconsistencies -- on the part of Kerry's own supporters -- Times Watch recommends Maguire's comprehensive blogging on the matter.
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