John Kerry: radical internationalist: though John Kerry would like his early 1970s radicalism to be forgotten, he is still promoting essentially the same subversive positions as a presidential candidate.

"I'm an internationalist," Kerry told the Harvard Crimson during an ill-fated campaign for U.S. Congress in 1970. "I d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."

Explaining his 1970 statement to Tim Russert on Meet the Press on April 18 of this year, Kerry tried to dismiss that radical--even treasonous--proclamation as a moment of reckless, youthful idealism: "That's one of those stupid things that a 27-year-old kid says when you're fresh back from Vietnam and angry about it. I have never, ever. ever, in any vote, in any policy, in any speech, in any public statement advocated any such thing in all of the years I've been in elected office. In fact, I say the following and I say it very clearly, I will never cede the security of the United States to any institution and I will never cede our security to any other country. No country will have a veto over what we need to do to protect ourselves." Kerry here was echoing President George W. Bush's unilateralist rhetoric. But as is the case with President Bush, a wide gap separates Kerry's rhetoric from his actions.

Despite Kerry's protestations on Meet the Press, the Massachusetts senator has consistently supported the gradual removal of sovereignty from the United States, and the empowerment of the United Nations and its affiliated international bodies. For example, Kerry recently called for UN control over the Iraq operation, claiming that he would like to "de-Americanize the effort and begin to put it under the United Nations umbrella."

Kerry's most recent book, A Call to Service (2003), states essentially the same thing as the 1970 Crimson interview, albeit with a softer spin befitting a presidential candidate: "In contrast to the dangerous mix of isolationism and unilateralism that characterizes the Republicans, [I support] speaking from a position of strength on international issues--the multilateral cooperative tradition of democratic internationalism forged in the course of two world wars and the cold war. It acknowledges that multilateral organizations are vehicles for the promotion of our ideals and interests around the world.... America has taken a rare step in human history in arguing that its interests and the world's are one." (Emphasis added.)

Although Kerry recently complained about the UN-affiliated NAFTA treaty's provisions allowing a NAFTA tribunal to overturn American courts, he voted for the NAFTA agreement, as well as the World Trade Organization, or WTO. Moreover, he has publicly favored creation of an International Criminal Court under UN auspices. "I support U.S. participation in the International Criminal Court," Kerry proclaimed during the Democratic Party debates, despite the fact that the ICC would be empowered to arrest Americans on vague "crimes against humanity" charges and then bring them to "trial" without a jury, and without provisions to compel witnesses to testify on their behalf.

But John Kerry's political radicalism manifests itself not only in his public stances, but also in his professional associations. Perhaps no organization best links the Establishment left with the radical left more than the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which has been closely tied to the Soviet KGB and Cuban intelligence. Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate in 1985, Kerry traveled to Nicaragua to aid the Communist Sandinistas on a propaganda junket arranged by IPS activist Peter Kornbluh. The trip was scheduled on the eve of a vote for aid to the anti-Communist Nicaraguan Contras, who were trying to overturn the Communist/gangster regime of Daniel Ortega. The Soviet-backed regime had already established a well-known record for torture, religious persecution and genocide (of the Miskito Indians), but Kerry declared that his Sandinista comrades "just want peace" The Kerry-IPS efforts succeeded in influencing Congress to turn down the $14 million military aid package. Kerry eventually hired an IPS fellow, Gary Porter, to be his legislative aide.

Whether it's support for NAFTA, the WTO, the Kyoto agreement, or any other global treaty, there have been few more consistent supporters of globalism than John Kerry.

Another Establishment Man

Considering Kerry's pedigree, it is not surprising that in his opinion the United States has no security interests outside of the United Nations. "I have a somewhat Establishment background," Kerry told the Harvard Crimson in 1970. That's putting it mildly. John Forbes Kerry's family genealogy includes the Forbes family, which amassed a fortune in U.S.-China trade in the 19th century, and the Winthrop family, which can be traced back to the first Massachusetts Bay Colony governor. As the privileged child of moderately wealthy parents, Kerry was enrolled in the prestigious Fessenden School in West Newton, Massachusetts. Kerry's father was at that time, in 1957, the State Department's chief political officer at the U.S. embassy in Norway. The following year Kerry transferred to the exclusive St. Paul's School and its 2,000-acre campus in the woods near Concord, New Hampshire.

From St. Paul's, Kerry was admitted to Yale University. One of his roommates at Yale was the nephew of Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs William Bundy, who spent an evening discussing Vietnam with Kerry and his friends after giving an address at Yale. At Yale, Kerry expressed an early ambition for political office. "John would clearly say, 'If I could make my dream come true, it would be running for president of the United States,'" his Yale debate partner William Stanberry told the Boston Globe in 2003. "It was not a casual interest. It was a serious, stated interest. His lifetime ambition was to be in political office."

Kerry's fellow students must have noticed his ambition and family pedigree, as he was among the 15 Yale seniors tapped for membership in the prestigious and secretive "Skull and Bones" fraternity on campus. Kerry eventually cemented his Establishment credentials by joining the New York City-based Council on Foreign Relations in 1992.

Using the Military

After graduating from Yale, Kerry enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Vietnam. He received an honorable discharge, along with three purple hearts for minor injuries, a bronze star, and a silver star for valor.

Kerry returned from Vietnam with renewed political ambitions. His big opportunity arrived when he delivered a radical, anti-American statement against the Vietnam War before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971.

Kerry became National Coordinator of a group calling itself Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and testified on behalf of the group. Beside Kerry during the Senate testimony was fellow VVAW leader Al Hubbard, a man who had lied about serving in Vietnam and had ties to the leftist, revolutionary Black Panther Party. VVAW was a radical group of leftists, eventually taken over by revolutionary Communists. Notorious traitor "Hanoi Jane" Fonda was the VVAW's "Honorary National Coordinator." The politically ambitious Kerry was forced to dissociate himself from the organization in November 1971, during a meeting of VVAW in Kansas City where the assassination of U.S. senators was discussed as a possible strategy for ending the Vietnam War. The following month, the Boston Herald-Traveler (December 12, 1971) noted that VVAW rallies were "characterized by an abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government."

The medals Kerry earned from Vietnam service became props during his antiwar activism as well as during his political career. As an antiwar organizer, Kerry participated in a protest in front of the Capitol building on April 23, 1971, in which he and other veterans threw combat medals over a fence in protest against the war.

Everyone assumed that the medals Kerry threw over the fence were his. But when his medals became a centerpiece of his campaigns in the 1980s, reporters began inquiring how he could still have his medals if they had been thrown over the Capitol building fence. Kerry replied that he only threw his combat ribbons over the wall and that the medals he threw were someone else's. He explained to the Washington Post in 1985: "It's such a personal thing. They're my medals. I'll do what I want with them.... People say, 'You didn't throw your medals away.' Who said I had to? And why should I? It's my business. I did not want to throw my medals away."

Even Kerry's admirers, such as the leftwing Slate e-magazine, say Kerry applied an "extremely nuanced moral code" in pretending to throw away his medals for the benefit of publicity and then using them as a political prop.

Whose Atrocities?

Dining Kerry's Senate testimony on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the 27-year-old veteran said he had attended a January 1971 "Winter Soldier Investigation" in Detroit, where American veterans "told me stories that at times 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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan...."

Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day to day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Referring to the United States, Kerry told the committee that "we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions" (including, presumably, the Communists) and that "America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals." Referring to veterans, Kerry testified that "the country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence."

Though Kerry had accused American officers "at all levels of command" of the most unspeakable war crimes and referred to Vietnam Veterans in the aggregate as a "monster" in 1971, he flatly denied making the statement to CNN's Judy Woodruff on February, 19, 2004:

WOODRUFF: "They [Vietnam veterans] are saying, in effect, you were accusing American troops of war crimes."

KERRY: "No, I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership. I said to the Senate, where is the leadership of our country? And it's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers, I never said that."

But the record from his 1971 public statements, as described in part above, clearly reveals that Kerry also accused his fellow soldiers of committing war crimes.

Had Woodruff done her homework, she could have reviewed Kerry's statement he made before NBC's Meet the Press on April 18, 1971. He said:

   There are all kinds of atrocities and I
   would have to say that, yes, yes, I
   committed the same kind of atrocities
   as thousands of other soldiers have
   committed in that I took part in shootings
   in free-fire zones. I conducted
   harassment and interdiction fire. I
   used 50-caliber machine guns which
   we were granted and ordered to use,
   which were our only weapon against
   people. I took part in search-and destroy
   missions, in the burning of villages.
   All of this is contrary to the
   Geneva Conventions and all of this
   ordered as a matter of written established
   policy by the government of
   the United States from the top down.
   And I believe that the men who designed
   these, the men who designed
   the free-fire zone, the men who ordered
   us, the men who signed off the
   air raid strike areas, I think these men,
   by the letter of the law, the same letter
   of the law that tried Lieutenant
   Calley, are war criminals. [Emphasis
   added.]

Note that Kerry said (1) he had committed atrocities, and (2) that thousands of other soldiers had committed atrocities against the Vietnamese. When Tim Russert replayed that clip for an April 18, 2004 Meet the Press reappearance, Kerry knew that the host would not just pitch up cream-puff questions like CNN's Judy Woodruff did, and then move on to the next subject. So Kerry instead defended the "war crimes" admissions he had made to Meet the Press exactly 33 years earlier.

"You committed atrocities?" Russert asked. "I don't like it when I hear it today. I don't like it," Kerry replied, adding: "I think that there were breaches of the Geneva Conventions. There were policies in place that were not acceptable according to the laws of warfare, and everybody knows that. I mean, books have chronicled that, so I'm not going to walk away from that."

When Russert pointed out that the stories he had presented to the Senate had been discredited, Kerry claimed that "a lot of them have been documented" while "some" were discredited. "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."

"Quibble" about American soldiers lopping off heads, about mutilations, raping, random shootings and torture'? Either Kerry, and "thousands of other soldiers," committed the terrible atrocities "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," as Kerry had claimed in his Senate testimony, or they didn't. Kerry characterized his 1971 statements about committing "war crimes" as "honest" to Meet the Press in 2004. So why did he tell Tim Russert that he no longer wanted to "quibble" over how he could have "phrased things more artfully at times"? If his dramatic claims were true, then they don't need to be finessed. Kerry's accusation was not just another one of those "stupid things that a 27-year-old kid says," but a conscious, despicable lie.

Kerry's claim that he had made an honest statement before the Senate is significant, even though the historical record proves that American forces did not generally commit war crimes. He placed the primary blame on the architects of America's Vietnam policy. (Interestingly, Kerry has now embraced those same architects through his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations.)

Kerry's statement that the United States was "more guilty than any other body of violations of the Geneva Conventions" in the Southeast Asian war is gross misrepresentation of the facts. Whatever sporadic abuses American soldiers committed pale by comparison to the bloody record of the Vietcong in Vietnam, who engaged in terror as a matter of policy.

According to a 1972 U.S. Senate report, The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam, the Vietcong systematically massacred countless defenseless civilians, committing the worst human rights violations imaginable. For example:

   During the Tet offensive of 1968, the
   Communists occupied a portion of
   the city of Hue for 26 days. When
   they were driven out on February 24,
   some thousands of civilians were
   missing. In 1969, a series of mass
   graves containing the bodies of missing
   civilians were discovered. Some
   of the victims had been shot, some
   had been clubbed to death, some had
   been buried alive. As more and more
   graves were discovered, the confirmed
   toll ultimately rose to 2,750.
   Counting those still missing--who
   must be presumed abducted or executed--the
   estimated civilian toll,
   according to Douglas Pike, comes to
   5,700.

As one more example of Vietcong atrocities, from the scores that could be given, consider an incident in Da Nang, a small village, as described by John Hubbell in the November 1968 Reader's Digest:

   All [of the residents] were herded
   [by the Vietcong] before the home of
   their chief [of Da Nang]. While they
   and the chief's pregnant wife and
   four children were forced to look on,
   the chief's tongue was cut out. Then
   his genital organs were sliced off and
   sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he
   died, the V.C. [Vietcong] went to
   work on his wife, slashing open her
   womb. Then, the nine-year-old son:
   a bamboo lance was rammed
   through one ear and out the other.
   Two more of the chief's children
   were murdered in the same way. The
   V.C. did not harm the five-year-old
   daughter--not physically; they
   simply left her crying, holding her
   dead mother's arm.

So, while Kerry sat before the U.S. Senate and falsely accused U.S. soldiers of committing mass numbers of heinous atrocities against the Vietnamese, the Communist Vietcong were actually carrying out such abominable activities.

But, some might say, times have changed, and Kerry has as well. Consider that the March 7, 2004 New York Times reported that had Kerry "been sitting in the Oval Office last weekend as rebel forces were threatening to enter Port-au-Prince ... he would have sent an international force to protect Haiti's widely disliked elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide." "I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period," Kerry stated.

The New York Times and Kerry failed to explain to readers why the drug-addicted, Marxist, psychopathic Aristide, whose regime Kerry described as "democratic," is so "widely disliked." One of Aristide's most barbaric ways of cowing his subjects into submission was the use of "necklacing," a horrifying torture used by Nelson Mandela's ANC against their enemies as well. A "necklace" is a gasoline-filled tire put around the gasoline-soaked victim's neck and set aflame. Regarding that use of torture, Aristide said, as caught on videotape on September 27, 1991: "A faker who pretends to be one of our supporters, just grab him; make sure he gets what he deserves with the tool you now have in your hands [referring to the "necklace"]. The burning tire--what a beautiful tool! What a beautiful instrument! It's fashionable. It smells good. And wherever you go, you want to smell it."

As for being Haiti's "elected leader," the UN's fraudulently-managed, U.S. taxpayer-subsidized elections were a sham, to say the least (see, for example, "Haiti Votes, Chaos Reigns" in THE NEW AMERICAN'S August 21, 1995 issue). Though Aristide's opposition is similarly corrupt, propping up Aristide with U.S. tax dollars and U.S. military presence will not help the hapless Haitians forced to live under such terrible conditions.

Kerry: MIA on POWs

Even more outrageous than Kerry's 1971 "war crimes" accusations against his fellow soldiers is his continued betrayal of our POW/MIAs who were left behind.

In his 1971 Senate testimony, Kerry sharply rebuked the perfidious politicians who had allowed American soldiers to die needlessly. "These are the commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war," he said. "The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude." But Kerry's record as chairman of a Senate POW/MIA investigation in the early 1990s was a betrayal precisely of the kind he described in 1971.

The Senate POW/MIA investigation was launched after a series of Defense Intelligence Agency veterans resigned claiming that the Pentagon was covering up numerous credible sightings of live POWs. "The mindset to debunk is alive and well. It is held at all levels," Col. Millard Peck concluded in his March 1991 resignation letter. Peck, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency's Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, resigned in disgust after eight months of frustration in the post. "From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was in fact abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with 'smoke and mirrors' to stall until it dies a natural death," Peck wrote. Because of Peck's and others' protestations, a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was formed in November 1991, with Kerry as chairman.

In that position, Kerry engaged in a pattern of cover-up with the same "mindset to debunk" that had plagued the DIA. Washington Times columnist Al Santoli reported on January 24, 1994 that "Sen. John Kerry had 120 boxes of potentially explosive National Security Agency files reclassified before Senate [POW/MIA] investigators could study them."

POW/MIA committee staffer John F. McCreary, who had been a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, charged that Kerry had engaged in a cover-up by ordering the intelligence briefing on the issue shredded--all the copies and the original. McCreary charged in a memorandum that "Sen. John Kerry ... told the Select Committee members that 'all copies' would be destroyed." McCreary and other staff members complied with the order, but issued a memorandum hotly protesting the action. Kerry's chief counsel, according to McCreary, "ridiculed the staff members for expressing their concerns; and replied, in response to questions about the potential consequences, 'Who's the injured party,' and 'How are they going to find out because it's classified.'"

After staff members reported the document shredding to Vice Chairman Robert Smith (R-N.H.), Kerry issued a statement saying that the original had been on file in the Office of Senate Security all along. But McCreary noted that the original had a time stamp, routinely made on documents when they are deposited in the office, for the very afternoon that Kerry had made his statement--six days after the document shredding was reported to Smith. Former New York Times reporter Sidney H. Schanberg summed up Kerry's role as chairman of the POW/MIA investigation for the Feb. 24, 2004 Village Voice:

   What did Kerry do in furtherance of
   the cover-up? An overview would include
   the following: He allied himself
   with those carrying it out by treating
   the Pentagon and other prisoner debunkers
   as partners in the investigation
   instead of the targets they were
   supposed to be. In short, he did their
   bidding.... Kerry never pushed or put
   up a fight to get key government documents
   unclassified; he just rolled
   over, no matter how obvious it was
   that the documents contained confirming
   data about prisoners.... He
   gave orders to his committee staff to
   shred crucial intelligence documents.
   The shredding stopped only when
   some intelligence staffers staged a
   protest. Some wrote internal memos
   calling for a criminal investigation.

Kerry had in fact assured the rulers o Communist Vietnam that they would no be embarrassed by his committee's investigations. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy noted on February 4, 1994:

   The Center has obtained a secret
   video of Sen. Kerry meeting in Hanoi
   in December 1992 with Vietnam's
   communist president and former
   minister of defense Le Duc Anh. In
   it, the Vietnam veteran and former
   anti-war activist told his host that
   "All we need to lift the trade embargo
   is to show the American people
   that there is a process" for resolving
   the POW-MIA accounting--not real
   results as President-elect Clinton
   once promised. He
   promised that, "I
   can assure you
   that we will not
   make public anything
   embarrassing
   to your government."

Why would a man who once railed against the U.S. government for betraying our soldiers in Vietnam engage in a betrayal of his own when he was in a position to do something about it (exposing our abandonment of live POWs and MIAs at the time of the U.S. pull-out and possibly helping the few who may still have been alive)? Kerry may have promised Le Duc Anh that he would not embarrass the Vietnamese regime, in part, because of his family ties, as well as his entry into the CFR in 1992.

Shortly after Kerry came out publicly for granting Vietnam most-favored-nation trading status, Vietnam announced that the Boston-based Colliers International would become the Communist state's exclusive real estate agent in the United States. The CEO of Colliers International at the time was Kerry's cousin, C. Stewart Forbes. Did the burial of the POW/MIA issue result in a financial windfall for the extended Kerry family? Did it raise Kerry's stature in the eyes of the Power Elite?

The Unvarnished Kerry

John Kerry has a long record of besmirching and betraying his fellow soldiers, both those in the field and those left behind in enemy hands. And he has committed to intertwining American security interests with those of the United Nations. Whether in his green fatigues at a pro-Vietcong antiwar rally, or as a dapper-looking, seasoned senator dressed in a suit, with red power tie, John Kerry still advocates the same subversive political agenda that he did 33 years ago.

Now, as a U.S. senator running for president, and as a member of the Establishment he had so roundly condemned, Kerry is well positioned to convert that agenda into policy. It is the same CFR political agenda that has dominated both Republican and Democrat administrations lot decades.