4/22/1971, "Vietnam War Hearing: John Kerry Testimony - Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1971)," You tube, C-Span, Pacifica Radio archives
"Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hearing on Viet Nam war." (Pres. Lyndon Johnson approved the first US bombing of North Viet Nam on August 4, 1964).
Spokesman for Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, John Kerry, addressed the April 1971 hearing. (Kerry served in Viet Nam 1968-69).
Kerry 5:20-6:56:
"Several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans, testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. Not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day to day basis with a full awareness of officers at all levels of command. Its' impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit. The emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Viet Nam. But they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country in a sense made them do. They told the stories of times that they had
personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Viet Nam. In addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. We called this investigation the Winter Soldier investigation."...6:56
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You Tube page includes Kerry's wikipedia bio:
.........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_kerry
"John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is an American politician who
is the 68th and current United States Secretary of State. He served as a
United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1985 to 2013, and was
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry was the
presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 Presidential
Election but lost to incumbent George W. Bush.
The son of an Army
Air Corps veteran, Kerry was born in Aurora, Colorado. He attended
boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and went on to
graduate from Yale University class of 1966, where he majored in
political science and became a member of the influential Skull and Bones
secret society. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1966, and during
1968--1969 served an abbreviated four-month tour of duty in South
Vietnam as officer-in-charge (OIC) of a Swift Boat. For that service, he
was awarded combat medals that include the Silver Star, Bronze Star,
and three Purple Hearts. Securing an early return to the United States,
Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in which he served as a
nationally recognized spokesman and as an outspoken opponent of the
Vietnam War. He appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs
where he deemed United States war policy in Vietnam to be the cause of
"war crimes."
After receiving his J.D. from Boston College Law
School, Kerry worked as an Assistant District Attorney and co-founded a
private firm. He served as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts under
Michael Dukakis from 1983 to 1985, where he worked on an early
forerunner to the national Clean Air Act. He won a tight Democratic
primary in 1984 for the U.S. Senate and was sworn in the following
January. On the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he led a series of
hearings from 1987 to 1989 which were a precursor to the Iran--Contra
affair.
In 2002, Kerry voted to authorize the President "to use
force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein", but warned that the
administration should exhaust its diplomatic avenues before launching
war. Kerry based his 2004 presidential campaign on opposition to the
Iraq War. He and his running mate Senator John Edwards lost the race,
finishing 35 electoral votes behind the Republican ticket headed by
President George W. Bush (just 19 short of the 270 required for
election). Subsequently, he established the Keeping America's Promise
PAC.
Kerry became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in 2009, and in 2011 he was appointed to the Joint Select
Committee on Deficit Reduction. Having been nominated by President
Barack Obama to succeed outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton and then confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 94--3 on
January 29, 2013, Kerry assumed the office on February 1, 2013.
After
returning to the United States, Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War (VVAW). Then numbering about 20,000,[60] VVAW was
considered by some (including the administration of President Richard
Nixon) to be an effective, if controversial, component of the antiwar
movement.[61] According to Nixon Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, "I
didn't approve of what he did, but I understood the protesters quite
well", and he declined two requests from the Navy to court martial
Reserve Lieutenant Kerry over his antiwar activity.[62]
On April
22, 1971, Kerry became the first Vietnam veteran to testify before
Congress about the war, when he appeared before a Senate committee
hearing on proposals relating to ending the war. He was still a member
of the United States Navy Reserve, holding the rank of Lieutenant Junior
Grade. Wearing green fatigues and service ribbons, he spoke for nearly
two hours with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in what has been
named the Fulbright Hearings, after the Chairman of the proceedings,
Senator J. W. Fulbright. Kerry began with a prepared speech, in which he
presented the conclusions of the Winter Soldier Investigation, and then
went on to address larger policy issues."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_kerry
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