A widely circulated report yesterday implicating Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry in Vietnam war crimes turns out to be wrong, New York Daily News "Lowdown" columnist Lloyd Grove insists today.
But while the report in question did confuse John Kerry with former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, the Massachusetts Democrat did in fact once confess to committing war crimes - at least as he defined them - during his Vietnam War protest days.
Blaming "the vast right-wing conspiracy" for spreading the misinformation, "Lowdown" notes that the Web site intellectualconservative.com had slammed Kerry for opposing the Vietnam war, even though he helped kill "21 innocent Vietnamese" civilians as a Navy SEAL.
Unfortunately for the column's author, Brian Wise, he confused the two Vietnam veterans. "He got it wrong - and badly," said Grove.
However, the thrust of Wise's report may not be so far off the mark - according to Kerry's own comments as quoted by the Boston Globe.
Last May the Globe recounted Sen. John Kerry's televised confession in 1971, delivered on the old "Dick Cavett Show," where the ambitious anti-war Democrat admitted to taking part in military action that was "contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions."
The top Democrat said his wartime conduct would have rendered him "guilty" of violating the Nuremberg Principles.
Kerry's full statement went as follows:
"I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground.
"And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty."
In reality, there's no reason to believe that any Vietnam veteran who engaged in the actions described by Sen. Kerry is a war criminal.
But the fact that the Democratic Party's current presidential front-runner couldn't see the greater good in what he and his colleagues were asked to do to in the name of America's long twilight struggle against murderous Communism is more than a little instructive.
Editor's note:
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