JOHN 'BLACK OPS' KERRY
-- the story as told by official John Kerry
historian media spokesman apologist Douglas Brinkley in
the Telegraph, America's 'Paper of Record' for the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Quotable:
The biographer of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, said yesterday there was no basis for one of the senator's favourite Vietnam War anecdotes - that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia, a neutral nation which US leaders vowed was off limits for American forces.
John Kerry catches a baseball at Long Beach Airport
"On Christmas Eve he was near Cambodia; he was around 50 miles from the Cambodian border. There's no indictment of Kerry to be made, but he was mistaken about Christmas in Cambodia," said Douglas Brinkley, who has unique access to the candidate's wartime journals.
But Mr Brinkley rejected accusations that the senator had never been to Cambodia, insisting he was telling the truth about running undisclosed "black" missions there at the height of the war.
He said: "Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions. He had a run dropping off US Navy Seals, Green Berets and CIA guys." The missions were not armed attacks on Cambodia, said Mr Brinkley, who did not include the clandestine missions in his wartime biography of Mr Kerry, Tour of Duty.
"He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it was dangerous as hell. Kerry carries a hat he was given by one CIA operative. In a part of his journals which I didn't use he writes about discussions with CIA guys he was dropping off."
.. an anti-Kerry book published this week, Unfit for Command, .. states: "All the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command . . . indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialled had he gone" to Cambodia.
UPDATE:
Photographic evidence of John Kerry's black ops mission to Cambodia emerges. heh.
And today's Op-Ed "leader" in the Telegraph:
Kerry's military daze. The most striking image from John Kerry's campaign for the presidency is him offering a beguiling, if rather hesitant, military salute to the Democratic convention, accompanied by the message that he was "reporting for duty".
This reference to his record as a decorated war hero was a signal that he would exploit what was thought to be his strongest card in a contest with George W Bush, whose own youth was noted for a notoriously unheroic evasion of active duty in Vietnam.
Perhaps carried away by this favoured theme of personal bravery, Mr Kerry has offered up anecdotes from his military adventures that are now coming under the sort of detailed scrutiny that a closely fought political contest brings with it. His most noteworthy story involves what would have been a secret, and illegal, foray into neutral Cambodian territory during the Vietnam war on Christmas Eve of 1968.
Mr Kerry's alleged memory, laced with touching recollections of his longing for hearth and home, has now been challenged in terms so authoritative as to call into question not only his war record, but also his basic integrity.
Faced with the bald assertions of men who served with him that this incident never occurred, Mr Kerry's campaign staff have responded by subtly altering the geography of the region. "On Christmas Eve in 1968," they say, Mr Kerry was "in fact on patrol in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam".
Quite apart from the forthright statement from the gunner's mate on his own boat, that they "were not anywhere near Cambodia", this response is bizarre. There is no such territory "between" Vietnam and Cambodia. The two countries abut one another on the Mekong Delta.
As well as inventing a fictitious South-East Asian no-man's-land, the Kerry camp is attempting to smear his critics by implying that they are a politically driven arm of the Bush campaign. But whatever the motives of Mr Kerry's dissident ex-comrades may be, the hard facts of their case remain disturbing, as the frantic fiddling of national borders suggests.
There are only two possible interpretations of this paradox. Either Mr Kerry is knowingly fabricating history for crass electoral advantage (and in rather odd contrast with his own renunciation of his Vietnam war experiences in the 1970s), or else he spent a fair amount of his time at war completely unaware of where he was. Neither possibility fits well with a campaign so squarely centred on Mr Kerry's war record.
Oh, for an opposition press in America!
MORE. Drudge has this:
TOUR OF DUTY author and John Kerry historian Doug Brinkley is rushing a piece for the NEW YORKER: to set-the-record-straight on Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia tale .. Kerry has turned to author Brinkley for a "modification" after it was exposed that Kerry was not in Cambodia during Christmas of 1968, as he once claimed from the Senate floor ..
.. John O�Neil�s, author of UNFIT FOR COMMAND, comments on the �clarification:�
�John Kerry describes Christmas Eve in Cambodia as a critical turning point in his life. We now know that his story is completely false. My question is how many people do you know have invented a turning point, one that is seared in his memory? While it makes sense for John Kerry to come clean about the Cambodia story, it is one of several tales that the Kerry campaign will have to face and clarify. By claiming we were engaged in a war crime and crossing international borders, John Kerry damaged the credibility of all the commanding officers above him and insulted the sailors who served with him.�
Don't miss Captain Ed's
commentary. A taste:
Stephen Gardner served with Kerry for two months on his swift boat, until the middle of January. Gardner has been outspoken about the fact that he never went into Cambodia, not with John Kerry or anyone else. In fact, Gardner has given quite a lot of background as to how improbable a swift-boat excursion five miles into Cambodia would be, not the least of which is the less-than-stealthy nature of the boat itself. Putting John Kerry in Cambodia at the end of January allows them to cut Gardner off at the knees and avoid dealing with the one man on Kerry's boat that opposes Kerry. It's a transparent ploy to rehabilitate a transparently false story. It still doesn't address Kerry's repeated assertions that he was ordered into Cambodia on Christmas Eve, a story he has told repeatedly in order to give him credibility.
MORE.
Mona Charen examines the biographical lies of John Kerry and other members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We've got a common pattern here folks. Anyone for some armchair psychology?
MORE. The "Kerry in Cambodia" story makes it into Investor's Business Daily.
MORE. Pat Buchanan takes on the "Kerry in Cambodia" story.
MORE. Another expert witness with evidence against the idea that John Kerry and his Swift Boat were in Cambodian waters, on a 'black ops' mission which saw combat with the Khmer Rouge. This time it's Andrew Antippas. Quotable:
"I served as a Foreign Service officer in the American embassy in Saigon from March 1968 to February 1970 and subsequently at the American embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, from 1970 to 1972 ..
There were established U.S. forces "rules of engagement" that governed the activities of American forces near the Cambodian border. There was, for example, a "no-fly zone" along the Cambodian border, where U.S. forces ground units, aircraft and boats were prohibited from routinely approaching or entering Cambodia ..
The Cambodians patrolled the crossing border points on the Bassac and Mekong Rivers and had fortifications above the frontier. In mid-1968, just before Adm. Zumwalt took over, a U.S. Army LCM landing craft sailing north on the Mekong River � loaded with lubricants, gas, rations, beer and a forklift, as well as a number of U.S. soldiers � missed the turn from the Mekong River to the Bassac River (the two main north-south rivers that flow through the Mekong Delta) in order to reach its destination on the southern portion of the Bassac. Apparently the troops were somewhat bemused from the heat and the beer consumed and sailed right up into Cambodia, where they were halted by a Cambodian patrol craft and taken to the frontier base and then up to Phnom Penh. Gen. Creighton Abrams, newly in command, was furious, and Adm. Zumwalt's predecessor was nonplussed, blurting out that it wasn't one of his boats. Gen. Abrams snarled, "Yeah, it was one of mine and why did they do it?" We got the crew and LCM back eventually, but that was the only river incident involving the Cambodian border or Navy actions inside Cambodia to my recollection. There were continuing firefights along the Vinh Te [sic] Canal, which is a kilometer inside the Vietnamese border and stretches straight as a shot from the Gulf of Siam to the Bassac River. The canal fronted the southern Communist base areas inside Cambodia and the Navy patrol craft frequently interdicted Communist infiltrators.
The big question. Was Kerry and his Swift Boat on the Vinh Te Canal? Were Swift Boats even in operation on the Vinh Te Canal?
UPDATE: Answer -- there were. Quotable:
On October 14 1968, shortly after Admiral Zumwalt conceived of SEALORDS, Swift Boat OinC Mike Bernique was informed by local Vietnamese at Ha Tien that the VC had set up a tax collection site a few miles up the Giang Thanh River from Ha Tien.
Even though it was strictly forbidden by the Rules of Engagement for Swift Boats to operate that far up the rivers, Mike proceeded to follow up on this lead and investigated. He discovered the tax collection site and a fire fight ensued. This resulted in five enemy KIA's and the collection of weapons, ammunition, supplies and documents left behind by the fleeing communists.
Mike was called to Saigon to explain his unauthorized conduct and to answer a diplomatic protest by Cambodian Prince Sihanouk that he had fired across the border into that supposed neutral country. Facing possible disiplinary actions, he answered Admiral Zumwalt's questions with an emphatic "Tell Sihanouk he's a lying SOB."
The Admiral declared that Bernique was exactly the kind of aggressive skipper he was looking for and awarded him a Silver Star instead of a general court marshal.
From that point forward, the Giang Thanh became known as "Bernique's Creek"
Eventually, patrols were augmented throughout the length of the Giang Thanh River and extended from its northeastern head along the Vinh Te Canal to the east all the way to the western bank of the Bassac river. Interdiction operations included not only Swift Boats, but also PBRs (Patrol Boat River) and units of the Navy's Mobile Riverine Force.
MORE: Additional commentary
here and
here from QandO.
MORE:
Just One Minute has this:
ABC's August 12 NOTE intrigues us with this comment about the subtlest of flaws in the Kerry campaign:
"E. . Let's face it: there is something squirrelly and unsettling and not quite right about the way Michael Meehan answers the media's Vietnam-era questions � something that makes nearly every member of the Gang of 500 think there is still something there."
And there is a reason for that - like the rest of us, this campaign is on a voyage of discovery into John Kerry's past. And like the rest of us, they are repeatedly learning that their candidate's memory of his Vietnam era is conveniently unreliable.
MORE. Another
Kerry deception?
MORE. Other reactions here, here, HERE, and here.
MORE. Observations from Ed Driscoll.
Posted by Greg Ransom
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