In article .net,
Steven P. McNicoll wrote:

"david raoul derbes" wrote in message
...

There is nothing wrong with you, Mr. Galanti or whoever opposing Kerry,
obviously, indeed it's a duty to do so if you don't like him as a
candidate. The new ads are in my opinion more of a problem for Kerry,
in that it is video of him testifying in Congress. No one disputes that
he did so. Previously, there were disputes as to whether or not there
was gunfire, and so on; here we have a videotaped record.

That said, I want to make three points.

First, the testimony of Kerry saying that atrocities were committed
has been to a small extent taken out of context. He was quoting what
_other_ people said. He did not say that he, Kerry, had witnessed
decapitations or rapes or other war crimes, but that others had, and
had told him that.


Kerry did say that he had committed atrocities himself.

"I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I
shot in free fire zones, used harassment and interdiction fire, joined in
search and destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts were
established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war
criminals."

John Kerry, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 1971

What you've posted is not completely contradictory to what I said. The sorts
of things I was writing about (rapes, decapitations) and the sort of things
you're talking about are, in my opinion, the differences between misdemeanors
and felonies. I think that Kerry's calling these things "atrocities" was
a weird way of trying not to smear his fellow soldiers, i.e., I'm just
as guilty as you are. It was dumb, and he regrets some of the language
that he used.

My guess is that many, many soldiers of the last century fired randomly
into places out of fear, anger or were ordered to do so. This is a very
different thing from rape.

David Derbes