Noting that both the Washington Post and the New York Times had to retract recent reports attacking the Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth for running an ad claiming that Kerry "secretly met with the enemy," the Standard explained that the confusion stems from attempts by the Kerry campaign to cover up the earlier meeting.

"Kerry did go to Paris to meet the Communists in 1971, some time during the summer, probably in August. But this was a second trip, and Kerry's advocates have done their best to veil the fact that there was more than one trip."

The Standard added that Kerry's first meeting with North Vietnamese negotiators "took place in or around May 1970, eleven months before his Foreign Relations Committee testimony" where he trashed soldiers in Vietnam as "war criminals" and "monsters."

That first meeting "appears to have been kept secret for nearly a year," the Standard said, until Kerry mentioned it during his Senate testimony - which would validate Swiftvets' claims.

The Times' misreport centered on the claim that Kerry had met with "both sides" during the Paris talks. But like the single meeting report, this is also untrue.

"In 1971 when Kerry described his first Paris meeting, he said he had talked to 'both delegations.'" But the future presidential candidate wasn't referring to the U.S. and North Vietnam, but instead to both Communist delegations.

Correcting its error the next week, the Times reported that it had "misidentified the parties with whom Mr. Kerry said he had met at the Paris peace talks. ... The parties were the two Communist delegations - North Vietnam and the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government."

The Standard notes that Kerry actually planned to meet a third time with enemy negotiators, but the trip never came off.

"FBI files reveal that Kerry planned a third such trip together with [VVAW leader Al] Hubbard for November [1971]. But, as it turned out, Hubbard went without Kerry, perhaps because the two had by then fallen out over revelations that Hubbard's repeated claims to have been an officer and a Vietnam vet were fabricated."

Editor's note: