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Issues: Election 2004 : Kerry's antiwar activities
| Participating in Winter Soldier Hearing (last updated 10/24/04) | Previous | Next
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Kerry has been criticized for participating in the Winter Soldier hearings, a three-day event that occurred in early 1971 at which more than 100 participants testified about their experiences in or connected to Vietnam. Kerry used what he heard at these hearings as the basis for the section of his April 22, 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about war crimes being committed in Vietnam.
Kerry's critics have attacked procedural aspects of the Winter Soldier hearings and the credibility of some of the participants, but do not seem to have challenged Kerry on all of the substantive information given there.
It does appear that some participants in the Winter Soldier hearings were not actually veterans, despite the VVAW's efforts to ensure that participants actually were veterans, especially given similar charges just a month earlier against a book about war crimes in Vietnam, Mark Lane's Conservations with Americans. Many participants thus showed their service records to reporters, as the Detroit News reported at the time. Nevertheless, a follow-up investigation by the Naval Investigative Service found that many participants refused to cooperate and that some veterans who allegedly had participated in the hearing swore that they actually had not attended the hearing. Moreover, VVAW organizer Al Hubbard was confronted with charges that he had not been an Air Force captain in Vietnam as he had claimed.
Some have also criticized the overall politics of the hearings' organizers. For example, in a February 4, 1971 editorial, the Detroit News' editorial board dismissed the hearings as a "New Left propaganda forum organized and conducted by radical dissidents" based on a concluding statement that called for the anti-war movement to "close down America."
Such factors have done some damage to the credibility of the Winter Soldier hearings. For example, Professor Guenter Levy wrote in his 1978 book, America in Vietnam, that "[t]he VVAW's use of fake witnesses and the failure to cooperate with military authorities and to provide crucial details of the incidents further cast serious doubt on the professed desire to serve the causes of justice and humanity. It is more likely that this inquiry, like others and earlier, had primarily political motives and goals."
Nevertheless, no one has suggested that every participant at the hearings was fake and much of the actual substance of the hearings has found some support. In fact, the investigation's substance appear to have been so uncontroversial that Jerry M. Flint reported in the New York Times on February 7, 1971 that "much of what they said had been reported or televised before, even from Vietnam. What was different here was the number of veterans present."
Similarly, evidence does show that U.S. military personnel did commit crimes against the Vietnamese people in Vietnam. As Guenter Lewy reported in his book:
- Murder convictions: 95 Army personnel were convicted for the murder or manslaughter of Vietnamese between 1965 and 1973, 27 marines were convicted of murdering Vietnamese between 1965 and 1971, and 25 percent of these homicides resulted from combat not justified by military necessity.
- War-crime allegations: 241 allegations of war-crimes were made against U.S. army personnel between 1965 and 1975. Of these, 78 were found to be sufficiently substantiated to give probable cause of disciplinary action. Thirty-six cases were referred to court martial, resulting in 20 convictions for murder/manslaughter (nine convictions), rape (three convictions), mistreatment of prisoners and detainees (three convictions), and mutilation (five convictions).
- Failure to report allegations at time: Many allegations did not come to light until made by people after leaving the service, suggesting that individuals did not report war crimes at the time as required by regulations. Notably, the My Lai massacre which resulted in the deaths of roughly 175-400 Vietnamese villagers went unreported for more than a year before being reported by a serviceman who had heard about it from others, suggesting to some that other massacres had occurred but just not gone to light.
Accordingly, Lewy concluded that "incidents similar to some of those described at the VVAW hearing undoubtedly did occur. We know that hamlets were destroyed, prisoners tortured, and corpses mutilated." At the same time, Lewy disagreed with the VVAW position that such acts were condoned by superior officers. "Yet these incidents either (as in the destruction of hamlets) did not violate the law of war or took place in breach of existing regulations. In either case, they were not, as alleged, part of a 'criminal policy.'"
In any event, Kerry has stood by the basic facts recounted at the Winter Soldier investigation and summarized in his Senate testimony. Kerry did acknowledge in an April 18, 2004 appearance on Meet the Press (transcript on-line here) that some of the Winter Soldier accounts had been discredited, but said that many had also been documented and that the basic substance was supported.
| "Have some [accounts] been discredited? Sure, they have, Tim. The problem is that's not where the focus should have been. And, you know, when you're angry about something and you're young, you know, you're perfectly capable of not - I mean, if I had the kind of experience and time behind me that I have today, I'd have framed some of that differently. Needless to say, I'm proud that I stood up. I don't want anybody to think twice about it. I'm proud that I took the position that I took to oppose it. I think we saved lives, and I'm proud that I stood up at a time when it was important to stand up, but I'm not going to quibble, you know, 35 years later that I might not have phrased things more artfully at times." |
For sources, go here.
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