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Joe: You have repeatedly attacked Kerry for reporting the extent of war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam. You have accused him of hypocrisy (for not seeking the conviction of his personal friends - alone among all vets), and of causing the torture or death of American POWs (for publicizing war crimes while the war was still on). I have defended Kerry in several places, but most importantly in response to those latter charges. I have been wondering what your response would be.

Regarding the possibility of endangering POWs with his reports of US atrocities, on your "From Testimony to Torture" post I questioned whether you were arguing that patriotism is a moral justification for concealing knowledge of unconscionable crimes - whether, that is, you were suggesting that a North Vietnamese citizen who knew of atrocities against Americans would be morally wrong to reveal that information, because it could result in harm to North Vietnamese citizens. I have seen no response. You cite your own post again on this page, however. I ask you again whether the fact of possible consequences to fellow-citizens, by itself, is moral justification for silence about abuses, and whether that justification holds for citizens of other countries who have knowledge about abuses of US citizens.

In your "Call for Justice" you stated that Kerry has a responsibility to lead a commission to investigate and pursue criminal charges against his WSI/VVAW compatriots (only) on the basis of his war-crimes reports. I pointed out that George Bush (like former Presidents) holds an actual legal responsibility to pursue such claims, as well as the authority to do so, and has done nothing about them, but that you offer no criticism of him. I noted as well that, if such a tribunal is required, it is no more than an election-year sham unless it is extended to cover all such crimes by any US personnel. I offered you a challenge to post a call for a universal investigation on your blog - if you are serious about investigating these charges and not just seeking to score points against Kerry - and even provided the language required. Until now, there has been no response from you. Now, however, you recycle your narrowly-focused charge against Kerry. Why do you insist on focusing an investigation only on Kerry and his fellows? I challenge you again to tell us whether you are serious about war crimes (which would require taking all such crimes equally seriously), or just engaging in partisan "gotcha" politics - and if the former, to make an open, universal call for a thoroughgoing investigation of all possible US violations.

In your posts on Kerry, you have criticized him extensively, which is legitimate, but you have also implicitly offered serious moral claims that are rather startling: that it is morally wrong to openly oppose immoral acts if your fellow citizens would be harmed, and that the investigation of war crimes should focus only on John Kerry and his fellows. I see no justification for such positions. If you are going to repeat the accusations that appear to hold such implications, I think you should clarify what you mean by them. Will you do so?

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Kevin,

…I questioned whether you were arguing that patriotism is a moral justification for concealing knowledge of unconscionable crimes –

No. “Patriotism” does not absolve a person from their moral duty to report war crimes.

…whether, that is, you were suggesting that a North Vietnamese citizen who knew of atrocities against Americans would be morally wrong to reveal that information, because it could result in harm to North Vietnamese citizens. I have seen no response.

I’m not sure how this would apply. How would a N. Vietnamese citizen, reporting atrocities to his own government harm N.V. citizens?

You cite your own post again on this page, however. I ask you again whether the fact of possible consequences to fellow-citizens, by itself, is moral justification for silence about abuses, and whether that justification holds for citizens of other countries who have knowledge about abuses of US citizens.

My criticism isn’t that Kerry reported atrocities but that he didn’t go through the proper channels. Keep in mind that he didn’t go to the DoD or the Justice Dept. with “evidence” to back up his claims. Instead, he publicly slandered Vietnam veterans in a forum that was sure to get back to the N. Vietnamese government.

In your "Call for Justice" you stated that Kerry has a responsibility to lead a commission to investigate and pursue criminal charges against his WSI/VVAW compatriots (only) on the basis of his war-crimes reports.

If he is morally responsible for reporting these “atrocities” then he is responsible for seeing to it that these charges are brought up before the proper authorities.

I pointed out that George Bush (like former Presidents) holds an actual legal responsibility to pursue such claims, as well as the authority to do so, and has done nothing about them, but that you offer no criticism of him.

Kevin if you would have done your homework you would have found out that the claims were investigated. (I was hoping to bait someone into pointing that out but no one seems to even be aware of that fact.) Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon was so distraught by the report that he asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate these allegations. The investigation showed that the majority of the people who Kerry relied on where either not veterans or had not served in Vietnam. In essence, Kerry slandered the names of good veterans based on spurious information.

I noted as well that, if such a tribunal is required, it is no more than an election-year sham unless it is extended to cover all such crimes by any US personnel. I offered you a challenge to post a call for a universal investigation on your blog - if you are serious about investigating these charges and not just seeking to score points against Kerry - and even provided the language required. Until now, there has been no response from you.

To the best of my knowledge, all legitimate claims of war crimes were already investigated. My point was simply that the WSI was a bunch of BS.

Now, however, you recycle your narrowly-focused charge against Kerry. Why do you insist on focusing an investigation only on Kerry and his fellows? I challenge you again to tell us whether you are serious about war crimes (which would require taking all such crimes equally seriously), or just engaging in partisan "gotcha" politics - and if the former, to make an open, universal call for a thoroughgoing investigation of all possible US violations.

Show me evidence of war crimes that have gone uninvestigated and unpunished and I will be all over it.

In your posts on Kerry, you have criticized him extensively, which is legitimate, but you have also implicitly offered serious moral claims that are rather startling: that it is morally wrong to openly oppose immoral acts if your fellow citizens would be harmed, and that the investigation of war crimes should focus only on John Kerry and his fellows.

I’ve never implied any such thing. But when a Senator who is running for President claims to have had first hand knowledge of war crimes then I think he should be held responsible for seeing that justice is done. I’m sure that Kerry knows that his testimony was based on lies but I haven’t seen him publicly denounce it.

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Were you suggesting that a North Vietnamese citizen who knew of atrocities against Americans would be morally wrong to reveal that information, because it could result in harm to North Vietnamese citizens?

Joe: I’m not sure how this would apply. How would a N. Vietnamese citizen, reporting atrocities to his own government harm N.V. citizens?

In the same way it applies to Kerry: if word of it leaked out, the enemy (i.e., US troops) could retaliate against prisoners from his own side. (In my original hypothetical, I acknowledge that there is much less likelihood of an open discussion of war crimes in North Vietnam, but the question, still, is whether silence is justified in either case.) I assume you would want foreigners with evidence of war crimes by their fellow nationals, against US citizens, to speak out, and that you would not see the fact that some foreign prisoners were held by the US as justification for concealing crimes against the US. The same must be true for Kerry and others who reported US crimes.

If [Kerry] is morally responsible for reporting these “atrocities” then he is responsible for seeing to it that these charges are brought up before the proper authorities.

I think you're right.

Recall that the general premise of WSI was that the abuses in Vietnam were systematic - that they were part and parcel of the war itself, and were not only condoned by authority but flowed directly out of the general methods of conduct of the war. That, I think, explains the choice to conduct WSI as a "public hearing”, rather than just type up all the confessions and mail them to the Department of Defense. The point was not that those particular vets had committed crimes, but that such crimes were widespread. Only by making that case to the public could they have any effect on the overall course of the war.

That being said, though, they should also have sought to have individual acts investigated and punished. Why Kerry did not pursue official criminal complaints along with public testimony is not clear. It may have been an unwillingness to seek punishment of those who (he thought) had willingly revealed themselves (especially given the fact that those who concealed their own crimes generally got of scot-free). It may have been a belief that "the system" could not be trusted to pursue them fairly. It may have been a belief that, given the official acceptance of this behavior that he perceived, charging low-level troops with acts they had been goaded into by officers would be unfair. We can't know. In the end, it would have been better to have tried to force the system to take at least some responsibility for its members' misbehavior, but, then again, if someone had insisted on prosecuting, presumably no vets would have admitted their acts.

Me: George Bush . . . holds an actual legal responsibility to pursue such claims . . . and has done nothing about them . . . ."

Joe: Kevin if you would have done your homework you would have found out that the claims were investigated.

That is true. So what is it you are demanding that Kerry do? Since the charges were investigated (and dismissed) over 30 years ago, there seems to be no point in demanding that Kerry investigate them now. Or was that just your "bait" to raise the fact that the WSI testimony was not reliable? There are still plenty of other reports and memoirs regarding abuses in Vietnam. The revelations about WSI do not undermine his main point about the war, but they do seem to make further investigations of those particular claims unnecessary. It seems now as if your call for an investigation by Kerry is not only strangely narrowly-focused, but has no point at all.

Regarding WSI as one particular incident, however, it has to be admitted that the investigation by the Navy revealed a disaster scenario. As you note, much of the testimony turned out to be unsubstantiated or fraudulent, and some of the "veterans" were impostors; most refused to cooperate even when offered legal immunity. When the dust settled, the WSI testimony had turned into a farce. (As an intriguing side note, exactly what took place is hard to say; apparently no one can find the Navy investigative report.)

As for what this all means, though, I think it is limited in significance. The collapse of the WSI charges is certainly an embarrassment for those who conveyed them to the public at large (and the acts of those who actually committed the frauds or knowingly connived at them are shameful). But I don't think that impinges upon the original intention of WSI or the way it was conducted. To all appearances, Kerry and others believed what they had heard in the (in the context of the times, plausible) testimony at WSI, and on that basis were justified in reporting it. Their choice of a public venue, rather than narrow-focus criminal complaints, was an attempt to bring public opinion to bear on the entire war, not just particular acts. I think that also makes sense.

The worst parts of the story are the fraudulent conduct of the "witnesses" and the refusal of those who told the truth to cooperate with official investigators (if they did so - obviously most of the non-cooperators were also the frauds). In the end, though, even though WSI was (in large part, at least) a disgrace, at least some of those who participated seem to have done so sincerely and without knowledge of falsehoods. They may have been mistaken about the particular charges that arose from WSI, but they were not mistaken in the larger implications they drew from this about the war generally (see more below on this point), and in any case appear to have been defrauded by the WSI impostors as much as the public was.

This brings us back to the question what should be done about those charges now. If your call for Kerry to lead an investigation is sincere, it applies with much more force to Bush. If it was only intended as a sly reference to the fact that WSI was discredited, that appears to reinforce my original supposition that it was really only intended to score points against Kerry.

Me: I offered you a challenge to post a call for a universal investigation

Joe: To the best of my knowledge, all legitimate claims of war crimes were already investigated. My point was simply that the WSI was a bunch of BS.

This says again that you were not serious in wanting an investigation of Kerry's charges.

Regarding "all legitimate claims of war crimes", however, there were something like 280 convictions for war crimes charges through the main years of the war, but punishments were generally ridiculously lenient or often waived – some convicted criminals were allowed to re-enlist. (Even Calley served only house arrest; his sentence was reduced twice and then he was pardoned after only three years.) That hardly scratches the surface of the allegations that were made. You may be familiar with the recent Toledo Blade story on long-standing reports of mass killings by the 101st Airborne that were swept under the rug at the end of the war; the Army, after first refusing, is now re-investigating, but suppressed the evidence the first time around. Newsweek, amazingly, ran a story in 1972 detailing “Operation Speedy Express” – the complete destruction of an entire valley, with an officially reported “VC” death toll of 11,000, who, remarkably enough, possessed barely 700 weapons between them. Neil Sheehan (author of A Bright Shining Lie) has reported an incident not in his book, in which the US almost completely destroyed 5 fishing villages and killed at least 600 civilians; he noted that “it did not occur to me that I was witnessing a war crime.” (The linked article also discusses the Bob Kerrey incident, and the remarkable blindness of Vietnam war reporters to atrocities until after the My Lai incident, when several then came forward with events they had also witnessed.) And these are only a few representative accounts by mainstream press and scholars. The accounts in personal memoirs and oral histories are legion.

While WSI seems to have been badly, stupidly tainted, the larger point about the extent of war crimes remains. The vast majority were never reported, and many that are well-known, or were even officially reported, have been deliberately minimized or covered up. One common theme in reports of such crimes is – as Sheehan notes – that they were so commonplace that troops did not even recognize they were committing crimes, or believed their actions were officially approved. This is exactly what Kerry was saying in the wake of WSI. It is ironic and embarrassing that the particular charges he relayed were largely false, because reliable reports then and since make it clear that the general substance of his claims was correct.

Again, if this means anything at all, it is that the general issue of atrocities in Vietnam should be revisited. It is not a question of Kerry alone, or even whether his particular charges related to WSI are, in the end, substantiated. The larger question about the war itself is the point Kerry was making, and that point is still valid; if we are going to reopen the questions he raised, they must be addressed across the board, not just in respect of a certain number of people from one particular gathering. As for “apologizing” for his statements to Congress, he could do so simply by re-reading his entire speech again, changing the references to WSI to references to other Vietnam veterans, and prefacing the speech with the words “In 1971, I received false reports of atrocities which I mistakenly believed. Since then, the general thrust of those reports has been confirmed all too often, reminding us that . . .”. (OK – he’d have to put in some past tense, as well.) The particular charges made by particular people in WSI have (in many cases) been disproven, but there are many others to choose from. WSI was stupid and embarrassing, but I still don’t see it puts Kerry in an especially bad light, or undermines his overall argument.

[W]hen a Senator who is running for President claims to have had first hand knowledge of war crimes then I think he should be held responsible for seeing that justice is done. I’m sure that Kerry knows that his testimony was based on lies but I haven’t seen him publicly denounce it.

Not to be nit-picky - I think this is important: Kerry never said in his Congressional testimony that he had "first-hand" knowledge of war crimes. He described the emotional testimony of what he referred to as "highly decorated veterans" (many of whom, it now appears, were anything but) at the WSI hearing, and gave a synopsis of what they said they themselves had done. Technically, that's second-hand, but the real point is that Kerry never said he himself had seen these things, he said that he had been told of them by people who had (they claimed) actually done them, and (implicitly) that he believed them.

As for reporting the crimes, Mark Hatfield's call for an investigation - coincident with Kerry's Congressional testimony - had that effect. As you point out, an investigation was conducted (to rather embarrassing effect). I don't know what more you expect Kerry to do or have done, now or then. You can't be claiming that he was attempting to cover up the (supposed) actions of the WSI members - he participated in public hearings about them, wrote about them in a book, and testified at a nationally publicized hearing before the US Congress! His choice of venue, as I've said, was in keeping with his main goal of bringing the general conduct of the war to the public's attention, rather than of pursuing limited criminal charges against a few line soldiers (and thereby contributing to the myth that such acts were isolated aberrations). But as for reporting the crimes, he reported them to anyone who would listen! As for today, there is hardly any need for him to "report" them again, especially since - as we now know, but Kerry apparently did not know in early 1971 - those specific charges were mostly groundless. His larger point remains true, the details have been dealt with, and Kerry did as much as anyone could to get the charges heard at the time. I don't know what you're accusing him of.

As for "denouncing" his testimony, I think in the main it is still valid. The specific reports he made about WSI members are clearly (mostly) false, but they also seem to me (mostly) water under the bridge. It would, of course, serve the interests of accuracy for him to publicly revise errors in his testimony of 30 years ago, but it also seems like a small matter. WSI was never the issue; the war was the issue. WSI was just evidence to support his general claims about the war. That evidence turned out to be false, which would be important except for the vast amount of similar evidence available from other sources. As it is, the facts about WSI are an historical footnote. Kerry has made it clear that he stands by his general claims about the war. If one wants to disagree with him on that issue, that is reasonable and it is an issue on which he has clarified his own stance. I agree that the WSI business - especially as it looms so large in the path of Kerry's public career - should be cleared up, but I don't see it as a big deal.

All this point/counter-point having been addressed, however, I want to briefly take stock of the entire debate. It has been hard for me to write this post, because I realize that there is truth to some of what you have been saying, particularly about the WSI members and their fraudulent claims. When you raised this topic, I knew a bit about VVAW, but almost nothing about WSI specifically, and did not know that those particular charges had been discredited. On learning that, I have had to rethink my position in the debate over Kerry's actions. In the end, my position has not changed very much. I like to think this is not mere rationalization (but I am at least aware of the tempation to indulge myself in that way).

Where I come down is that the importance of Kerry's anti-war activities, and his famous Congressional testimony, was in the indictment that they constituted of the war itself, and of how it was fought, in broad perspective. That indictment consisted largely in his claims that atrocities and undisciplined behavior were widespread and semi-officially condoned. His cited evidence was the personal testimony of "vets" from WSI - evidence that is now known largely to be false. But his general claims are widely regarded as true, and the kinds of evidence he cited are available from many other better-confirmed sources. (And, as far as that goes, I don't think Kerry "stumbled into the truth" - I think he was right in saying that the charges he made were familiar to many who had seen combat in Vietnam. He believed the impostors because they sounded just like many others whom he - and many other combat vets - knew were not impostors.) From this perspective, WSI by itself is a minor incident. It is embarrassing and shameful, but the falsity of statements made there has no significance for the truth of similar statements made by many others elsewhere. As to Kerry's personal involvement, it should be embarrassing to him that he gave credence - so publicly - to falsehoods, but there is nothing to suggest he did so knowingly. So, for me, in the end, there seems little significance in WSI for Kerry as regards his position on the Vietnam war, or in respect of questions about his behavior at the time.

He believed people who lied. He made statements about the war on the basis of their lies that were wrong in individual detail, but right in general implication. He brought public attention to these statements in an effort to affect the war. And both the public statements and the claims he made about the war generally are substantiated by other known facts that come from more reliable sources. None of that seems blameworthy to me, even if some of it is embarrassing or ironic.

Still, it has taken me some time to work through the significance of the falsity of WSI. Your raising of the WSI frauds is reasonable, even if I am not persuaded it means very much in the end. And, with that, the question why the WSI evidence was not pursued through official channels is also relevant. That, too, I think can be explained, but it is a reasonable question. The result of these considerations is that, although I think Kerry's behavior in 1971 was generally reasonable, I agree you have a point that he tended to act in pursuit of public opinion rather than official action - to act through unofficial, rather than official channels - and may have been gullible or naive in doing so. He also has not been eager to acknowledge as much and clarify the historical record on those points. I don't think all that is very bad, but there are things he could have done that he didn't do, there are times when he was insufficiently cautious about whom he trusted or associated with, and he seems to hope that it will all be overlooked if he ignores it as much as possible. That kind of behavior counts for something, though I think not for as much as you seem to think.

Let me close by pointing out that your position, Joe, has also shifted somewhat. You began by accusing Kerry of near-treason for publicizing war crimes charges when US POWs were at risk of retaliation. You now are focused mostly on the fact that his particular evidence was false, apparently unbeknownst to him at the time, and you now say you agree it would be right for anyone with knowledge of such crimes to speak out. You previously asked why Kerry does not lead an investigation of his former charges, but you now say that was intended only as a joke or a sly dig. This all leaves you with only one charge against Kerry: that his claims were reckless because his corroborating evidence was false. This is a far cry from your opening claim that he should not have made such charges at all. Not only that, but it is clear that he sincerely believed that his evidence was true, and that belief was not unreasonable in the context of the times; furthermore, it was backed up by well-known evidence of other atrocities at that time, and by further evidence since then. That makes his charges not only reasonable in light of what he believed, but true in (broad) fact as well - offering an effective counter to the one remaining charge that you now put forward.

I think you have weakened your own attack over the course of this debate, and that the attack you are now making does not amount to much. As for my position, I agree that you have raised valid questions about Kerry's handling of the information he was given; I do not think his conduct was reprehensible at any point, but it could have been better at some points, and you have forced me to recognize this.