KERRY IS "NO HERO,"
SAYS FORMER POW
February 12, 2004
By Toby Westerman
Copyright 2004 International News Analysis Today
www.inatoday.com
A shocking instance of unwarranted interference in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been all but lost in the media adulation surrounding the presumed presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, John F. Kerry.
Kerry's email to Teheran, Iran, promising to "repair the damage" done to U.S. foreign policy under President George W. Bush was reported earlier this week, but little attention is being given to the dangerous precedent Kerry has set by making promises to an identified terror state during the declared "war on terror."
The email is not, however, the first instance of Kerry undermining official U.S. policy.
In an exclusive interview with International News Analysis Today, Mike Benge, a member of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, states that Kerry has a consistent record of support of Communist Vietnam at the expense of POWs and MIAs. After leaving the service - six months early - Kerry became an influential leader in the anti-war movement, while other Americans were still fighting and dying in Vietnam, Benge said.
"He betrayed the brotherhood [of fellow soldiers]," Benge stated. After the Vietnam war, Kerry also undermined the continuing search for POWs and MIAs, despite evidence that Americans may have been still alive in Vietnam, and constituting another "betrayal" of U.S. armed forces, Benge declared.
Kerry's actions during the anti-war movement and later in the Senate more than offset any valor in Vietnam, according to Benge, who remarked that Kerry "is no hero."
Benge claims to "have friends" who have supplied him with evidence indicating that during the debate on POWs/MIAs in the early 1990s, a Kerry operative told Vietnamese officials that if Hanoi could present a plausible account for the fate of U.S. POWs/MIAs, Kerry's aides would "sell it" in Washington.
Following Kerry's blunting of the POW/MIA issue, U.S. investments began to flow into Vietnam, including a $905 million contract to develop a deep-sea port at Vung Tau, won by Colliers International, a corporation whose Chief Executive is Kerry's cousin, according to Benge and other reports.
Kerry is also associated with getting firms controlled by Communist Chinese intelligence services and the Peoples Liberation Army onto American stock exchanges, several sources have revealed.
Benge's own experience as a prisoner of war of the Vietnamese Communists gives a special poignancy to his examination of Kerry and his affect on the "brotherhood of soldiers," including troops currently stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A former Marine, Benge was a vocational-agricultural teacher in what was South Vietnam. Benge was captured during the 1968 Tet Offensive, when he attempted to locate several missionaries and teachers who had wandered into a North Vietnamese military formation.
Held in so-called "tiger cages" in Cambodia and Laos, and then in one of North Vietnam's infamous "black boxes," Benge was held in solitary confinement for over two years. Benge's total period of imprisonment extended from June 1968 to March 1973 - a period which paralleled Kerry's most virulent anti-war activities and statements.
Benge's negative assessment of Kerry is shared by Duc Tran, public relations officer with Vietnamese Americans Against John Kerry. Tran spoke to International News Analysis Today about Kerry.
Like Benge, Tran has personal knowledge of the Vietnamese Communists. After the fall of South Vietnam to North Vietnamese forces in 1975, Tran's father was sent to several reeducation camps. After negotiations with the U.S., Hanoi permitted some individuals to leave Vietnam in 1990 -- Tran and his father were among this group of emigrants.
Tran supported Benge's statements, and condemned in particular Kerry's suppression of the Senate version of the Vietnam Human Rights Act. Already passed in the House, the Vietnam Human Rights Act would have tied U.S./Vietnamese trade to human rights progress by Hanoi. The measure was never voted on in the Senate, and subsequently died.
Following the defeat of the measure, Vietnam has engaged in continuing, and bloody, persecutions of all perceived enemies of the Communist state, including religious and ethnic leaders.
Tran also contrasted Kerry's war record to later actions in civilian life, and agreed with Benge that Kerry is "not a hero by any definition."
The Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and the Vietnamese Americans Against John Kerry have joined forces and will begin holding demonstrations in late February.
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