19 April 2004
UrbaneR Swags Off For Africa
The UrbaneR is on the road to Uganda making a documentary film about the work of Sister Schools' partnering with families and teachers to encourage and support academic achievement - in both Africa and the United States. Uganda's great strides in ongoing recovery from genocide a quarter century ago will also be a focus, with a view toward helping the world understand Rwanda's challenge. The Bugandan people of Kampala have a great formality and dignity - men wear a shirt and tie whenever possible, for example. Yet choruses of drums are their church bells and organs during worship services. This is going to be a great trip! After two weeks of hard work, we will conclude with a wildlife photo safari in the Masai Mara of Kenya. There are many cyber cafe's so I hope to post from Africa - but the primary job is to get video of the experience to share about Sister Schools.
01 April 2004
Air America? Wasn't that a Nick Cage Movie That Blows?
No Fox News wannabe-syndrome with this effort, no way. But hey, check 'em out, so you can proudly say "I was there at the get-go." Or you could just rent the DVD. Six 'a one, half dozen...
31 March 2004
"Shadow Parties" Join The Winter Soldier
GOP Accuses Kerry of Illegally Using Soft Money
NewsMax.com Wires
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
WASHINGTON – President Bush's campaign and the GOP on Wednesday accused Democrat John Kerry's campaign of illegally coordinating political ads and get-out-the-vote activities with independent groups.
The Bush campaign and Republican National Committee said they would file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing Kerry and pro-Kerry groups of violating a campaign law that broadly bans the use of "soft money" - corporate, union and unlimited individual donations - to influence federal elections.
The Bush campaign and GOP say that pro-Kerry groups are illegally spending soft money in the presidential race, and that Kerry's campaign is illegally coordinating that spending. The groups have contended they are operating legally.
Groups such as MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Media Fund, which work on behalf of Democrats but independently of the Kerry campaign, have been running ads this month criticizing Bush in several battleground states. Kerry, too, has been airing ads in key states, but on a much smaller scale.
The coordination complaint is the second the Bush campaign has filed against the groups.
The campaign in early March asked the FEC to investigate soft-money spending by Media Fund on anti-Bush ads. Media Fund, using large individual donations to fund its ads, argues its activities are legal.
When Media Fund and MoveOn ran ads in mid-March, the Bush campaign called them "bitter partisan groups." The two groups have helped Democrats match Bush ad for ad in key media markets.
The Republican complaints come as the commission considers placing broad new limits on soft money spending by tax-exempt political groups.
Its decision could have the greatest short-term effect on Democrats, whose party depended more heavily on soft money than the GOP did before the law banned national party committees from collecting it.
The Republican Party collects millions of dollars more than the Democratic Party in limited donations from individuals allowed under the law. Bush, meanwhile, has raised more than $170 million, more than twice as much as Kerry has.
Trying to counter those advantages, several Democrat activists set up partisan groups to spend soft money after the law banned the parties from doing so in November 2002.
Campaign finance watchdogs often call such groups "shadow parties" because they have taken on types of spending the parties used to have soft money to finance, such as get-out-the-vote drives and political ads.
Republicans have also created such groups, but so far they have not been as prolific in their efforts as Democrats have.
© 2004 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
NewsMax.com Wires
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
WASHINGTON – President Bush's campaign and the GOP on Wednesday accused Democrat John Kerry's campaign of illegally coordinating political ads and get-out-the-vote activities with independent groups.
The Bush campaign and Republican National Committee said they would file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing Kerry and pro-Kerry groups of violating a campaign law that broadly bans the use of "soft money" - corporate, union and unlimited individual donations - to influence federal elections.
The Bush campaign and GOP say that pro-Kerry groups are illegally spending soft money in the presidential race, and that Kerry's campaign is illegally coordinating that spending. The groups have contended they are operating legally.
Groups such as MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Media Fund, which work on behalf of Democrats but independently of the Kerry campaign, have been running ads this month criticizing Bush in several battleground states. Kerry, too, has been airing ads in key states, but on a much smaller scale.
The coordination complaint is the second the Bush campaign has filed against the groups.
The campaign in early March asked the FEC to investigate soft-money spending by Media Fund on anti-Bush ads. Media Fund, using large individual donations to fund its ads, argues its activities are legal.
When Media Fund and MoveOn ran ads in mid-March, the Bush campaign called them "bitter partisan groups." The two groups have helped Democrats match Bush ad for ad in key media markets.
The Republican complaints come as the commission considers placing broad new limits on soft money spending by tax-exempt political groups.
Its decision could have the greatest short-term effect on Democrats, whose party depended more heavily on soft money than the GOP did before the law banned national party committees from collecting it.
The Republican Party collects millions of dollars more than the Democratic Party in limited donations from individuals allowed under the law. Bush, meanwhile, has raised more than $170 million, more than twice as much as Kerry has.
Trying to counter those advantages, several Democrat activists set up partisan groups to spend soft money after the law banned the parties from doing so in November 2002.
Campaign finance watchdogs often call such groups "shadow parties" because they have taken on types of spending the parties used to have soft money to finance, such as get-out-the-vote drives and political ads.
Republicans have also created such groups, but so far they have not been as prolific in their efforts as Democrats have.
© 2004 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
29 March 2004
Slashing Attacks From the Religious Left
In what may signal desperation in attempts to reach the crumbling moral high ground of his candidacy, John Kerry yesterday questioned the religious faith of his political opponents. Meanwhile, here in Seattle, liberals cheer as virulent attacks on George Bush are made from the pulpit. Ferociously partisan attacks made by so-called "mainstream" churches out for political blood. Yet they would call Mel Gibson an extremist hate monger. Such is the state of left-wing Clerics in the Protestant "Madrasas " of "Jihadist " Seattle. Fortunately there are churches in Seattle where one may find that God is Love, rather than feel the self-loathing crack of whipped-up brimstone by Liberal Fundamentalists. Hopefully the open-and-inclusive congregations won't make themselves hard to find amid the left-wing lather. Religious "fundamentalism" is defined by lack of tolerance for, and by extension - a dearth of, diversity of viewpoints. In many left-wing Seattle churches, diversity has reached the point of intellectual famine.
21 March 2004
CIA: Take Your Checkbook To Central Asia
Al-Zawahri Says Al Qaeda Has Suitcase Nukes
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri claims the militant Islamic organization has bought briefcase nuclear bombs on the central Asian black market, according to Osama bin Laden's biographer.
Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir has told an Australian Broadcasting Corporation television program, to be aired on Monday night, that when he interviewed Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahri in 2001 he asked whether al Qaeda had nuclear weapons.
Mir said al-Zawahri laughed and said: "Mr Mir, if you have US$30 million, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available.
"They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs," Mir quoted al-Zawarhi on the ABC program "Enough Rope," recorded last Monday from Islamabad.
The Egyptian al-Zawahri, a doctor, is regarded as the brains of al Qaeda and a key figure behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Al Qaeda is suspected of having an interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, biological or chemical, but no evidence of a program was found in searches of its bases after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Security experts say it is highly unlikely that bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have got anywhere close to acquiring nuclear weapon technology, but they do not rule it out.
Experts have long said it might be easier for al Qaeda to create a dirty bomb -- a cocktail of non-fissile material and explosives capable of creating damage -- but that would spread radioactivity over only a limited area.
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir has told an Australian Broadcasting Corporation television program, to be aired on Monday night, that when he interviewed Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahri in 2001 he asked whether al Qaeda had nuclear weapons.
Mir said al-Zawahri laughed and said: "Mr Mir, if you have US$30 million, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available.
"They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs," Mir quoted al-Zawarhi on the ABC program "Enough Rope," recorded last Monday from Islamabad.
The Egyptian al-Zawahri, a doctor, is regarded as the brains of al Qaeda and a key figure behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Al Qaeda is suspected of having an interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, biological or chemical, but no evidence of a program was found in searches of its bases after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Security experts say it is highly unlikely that bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have got anywhere close to acquiring nuclear weapon technology, but they do not rule it out.
Experts have long said it might be easier for al Qaeda to create a dirty bomb -- a cocktail of non-fissile material and explosives capable of creating damage -- but that would spread radioactivity over only a limited area.
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Everything I Need To Know About WMD in Iraq
From Jay Reding is everything I need to know about Iraqi WMD, and a heartfelt reflection about what is at stake in Iraq. Read Jay's post here.
20 March 2004
Former Romanian Spy Examines Soviet Ties To VVAW
Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement got its spin from the Kremlin.
By Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online
Part of Senator John Kerry's appeal to a certain segment of Americans is his Vietnam-veteran status coupled with his antiwar activism during that period. On April 12, 1971, Kerry told the U.S. Congress that American soldiers claimed to him that they had, "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."
The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)? To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.
As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."
The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations' propaganda sheets.
The KGB campaign to assault the U.S. and Europe by means of disinformation was more than just a few Cold War dirty tricks. The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism.
The Stockholm conference held annual international meetings up to 1972. In its five years of existence it created thousands of "documentary" materials printed in all the major Western languages describing the "abominable crimes" committed by American soldiers against civilians in Vietnam, along with counterfeited pictures. All these materials were manufactured by the KGB's disinformation department. I would print up these materials in hundreds of thousands of copies each.
The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) was tasked to distribute these KGB-concocted "incriminating documents" all over Western Europe. And ordinary people often bought it hook, line, and sinker. "Even Attila the Hun looks like an angel when compared to these Americans," a West German businessman reprovingly told me after reading one such report.
The Italian, Greek, and Spanish Communist parties serviced by Bucharest were much affected by this material and their activists regularly distributed translations. They also handed them out to the participants at anti-American demonstrations around the world.
Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were KGB-funded operations, too. I can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB."
In 1978, when I broke with Communism, my DIE was propagating the line that Washington's adventure in Vietnam had wasted over $200 trillion. This waste, we warned darkly, would soon generate European inflation, recession, and unemployment.
As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America. In 1976, Andropov gave my own Romanian DIE credit for helping his KGB do so.
Leftist intellectuals in America now look to Europe — steeped for years in anti-American propaganda from the Soviet Union — for "a sane and frank European criticism of the Bush administration's war policy." Indeed, anti-Americanism in Europe today is almost as ferocious as it was during Vietnam. France and Germany insist we are torturing the al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo Base. The Mirror, a British newspaper, is confident that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were "killing innocents in Afghanistan." The Paris daily Le Monde put Jean Baudrillard on its front page asserting that "the Judeo-Christian West, led by America, not only provoked the [September 11] terrorist attacks, it actually desired them."
In June 2002, a documentary film on "U.S. war crimes" in Afghanistan was shown in the German Bundestag by the crypto-Communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The film faithfully reincarnated the style of old Soviet-bloc "documentaries" demonizing the U.S. war in Vietnam. According to this 20-minute movie, American soldiers were involved in the torture and murder of some 3,000 Taliban prisoners in the region of Mazar-e-Sharif. One witness in the film even claimed he had seen an American soldier break the neck of one Afghan prisoner and pour acid on others.
During my last meeting with Andropov, he said, wisely, "now all we have to do is to keep the Vietnam-era anti-Americanism alive." Andropov was a shrewd judge of human nature. He understood that in the end our original involvement would be forgotten, and our insinuations would take on a life of their own. He knew well that it was just the way human nature worked.
— Ion Mihai Pacepa was acting chief of Romania's espionage service and national-security adviser to the country's president. He is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc.
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement got its spin from the Kremlin.
By Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online
Part of Senator John Kerry's appeal to a certain segment of Americans is his Vietnam-veteran status coupled with his antiwar activism during that period. On April 12, 1971, Kerry told the U.S. Congress that American soldiers claimed to him that they had, "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."
The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)? To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.
As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."
The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations' propaganda sheets.
The KGB campaign to assault the U.S. and Europe by means of disinformation was more than just a few Cold War dirty tricks. The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism.
The Stockholm conference held annual international meetings up to 1972. In its five years of existence it created thousands of "documentary" materials printed in all the major Western languages describing the "abominable crimes" committed by American soldiers against civilians in Vietnam, along with counterfeited pictures. All these materials were manufactured by the KGB's disinformation department. I would print up these materials in hundreds of thousands of copies each.
The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) was tasked to distribute these KGB-concocted "incriminating documents" all over Western Europe. And ordinary people often bought it hook, line, and sinker. "Even Attila the Hun looks like an angel when compared to these Americans," a West German businessman reprovingly told me after reading one such report.
The Italian, Greek, and Spanish Communist parties serviced by Bucharest were much affected by this material and their activists regularly distributed translations. They also handed them out to the participants at anti-American demonstrations around the world.
Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were KGB-funded operations, too. I can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB."
In 1978, when I broke with Communism, my DIE was propagating the line that Washington's adventure in Vietnam had wasted over $200 trillion. This waste, we warned darkly, would soon generate European inflation, recession, and unemployment.
As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America. In 1976, Andropov gave my own Romanian DIE credit for helping his KGB do so.
Leftist intellectuals in America now look to Europe — steeped for years in anti-American propaganda from the Soviet Union — for "a sane and frank European criticism of the Bush administration's war policy." Indeed, anti-Americanism in Europe today is almost as ferocious as it was during Vietnam. France and Germany insist we are torturing the al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo Base. The Mirror, a British newspaper, is confident that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were "killing innocents in Afghanistan." The Paris daily Le Monde put Jean Baudrillard on its front page asserting that "the Judeo-Christian West, led by America, not only provoked the [September 11] terrorist attacks, it actually desired them."
In June 2002, a documentary film on "U.S. war crimes" in Afghanistan was shown in the German Bundestag by the crypto-Communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The film faithfully reincarnated the style of old Soviet-bloc "documentaries" demonizing the U.S. war in Vietnam. According to this 20-minute movie, American soldiers were involved in the torture and murder of some 3,000 Taliban prisoners in the region of Mazar-e-Sharif. One witness in the film even claimed he had seen an American soldier break the neck of one Afghan prisoner and pour acid on others.
During my last meeting with Andropov, he said, wisely, "now all we have to do is to keep the Vietnam-era anti-Americanism alive." Andropov was a shrewd judge of human nature. He understood that in the end our original involvement would be forgotten, and our insinuations would take on a life of their own. He knew well that it was just the way human nature worked.
— Ion Mihai Pacepa was acting chief of Romania's espionage service and national-security adviser to the country's president. He is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc.
18 March 2004
Key Link For Winter Soldier Research
www.wintersoldier.com is a key link for full background on the "real" John Kerry.
Details Emerging About Kerry's Anti-War Scandal
From NewsMax.com - a major breaking scandal affecting Kerry's candidacy:
Wednesday, March 17, 2004 1:31 a.m. EST
Video Shows Kerry Conducting 'War Crimes' Interviews
A 1971 videotape shows Sen. John Kerry taking an active roll at the infamous Winter Soldier Investigation by personally grilling Vietnam vets about alleged war crimes they committed.
The tape, obtained by Vietnam war historian B.G. Burkett, apparently contradicts Kerry's claim that he was a mere observer at the Winter Soldier hearings - an event bankrolled by Jane Fonda that Kerry later cited in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
"I was looking at the tape tonight," Burkett told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg on Tuesday. "It shows that prior to putting these people on the air, Kerry is interviewing them."
According to Burkett - whose book "Stolen Valor" debunks much of the disparaging mythology perpetuated by the anti-war movement about Vietnam veterans - the tape shows Kerry rehearsing the Winter Soldier witnesses.
"They're sorting them out in terms of what each one of them is going to testify to and how they're going to testify," he told Malzberg.
Kerry wasn't the moderator at Winter Soldier - that task fell to Kerry's partner Al Hubbard, who was later exposed as an impostor who never served in Vietnam. But Burkett said the tape clearly shows Kerry "asking questions and presenting these individuals to the press."
Burkett said he obtained the video from a television producer who used it as part of an anti-war program to be shown to college students.
In a separate interview, New York Sun reporter Thomas Lipscomb shared new details about an assassination plot against pro-war U.S. congressmen hatched by Kerry's organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a few months after the Winter Soldier hearings.
Seven U.S. senators were marked for death in the plot, which the VVAW "spent a day and a half discussing seriously" before turning it down, Lipscomb told Malzberg.
"It was a remarkable moment when this peace organization turned into a terror organization," he said.
The meeting was held in a Mennonite Church in Kansas City, a location the VVAW settled on after moving the venue twice in a bid to elude possible FBI surveillance.
Witnesses differ on whether the likely Democratic presidential nominee attended the meeting, with Kerry himself claiming he resigned from the VVAW just prior to the Kansas City event.
Get Steve Malzberg's exclusive NewsMax.com column e-mailed directly to you at www.newsmax.com/malzberg
Wednesday, March 17, 2004 1:31 a.m. EST
Video Shows Kerry Conducting 'War Crimes' Interviews
A 1971 videotape shows Sen. John Kerry taking an active roll at the infamous Winter Soldier Investigation by personally grilling Vietnam vets about alleged war crimes they committed.
The tape, obtained by Vietnam war historian B.G. Burkett, apparently contradicts Kerry's claim that he was a mere observer at the Winter Soldier hearings - an event bankrolled by Jane Fonda that Kerry later cited in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
"I was looking at the tape tonight," Burkett told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg on Tuesday. "It shows that prior to putting these people on the air, Kerry is interviewing them."
According to Burkett - whose book "Stolen Valor" debunks much of the disparaging mythology perpetuated by the anti-war movement about Vietnam veterans - the tape shows Kerry rehearsing the Winter Soldier witnesses.
"They're sorting them out in terms of what each one of them is going to testify to and how they're going to testify," he told Malzberg.
Kerry wasn't the moderator at Winter Soldier - that task fell to Kerry's partner Al Hubbard, who was later exposed as an impostor who never served in Vietnam. But Burkett said the tape clearly shows Kerry "asking questions and presenting these individuals to the press."
Burkett said he obtained the video from a television producer who used it as part of an anti-war program to be shown to college students.
In a separate interview, New York Sun reporter Thomas Lipscomb shared new details about an assassination plot against pro-war U.S. congressmen hatched by Kerry's organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a few months after the Winter Soldier hearings.
Seven U.S. senators were marked for death in the plot, which the VVAW "spent a day and a half discussing seriously" before turning it down, Lipscomb told Malzberg.
"It was a remarkable moment when this peace organization turned into a terror organization," he said.
The meeting was held in a Mennonite Church in Kansas City, a location the VVAW settled on after moving the venue twice in a bid to elude possible FBI surveillance.
Witnesses differ on whether the likely Democratic presidential nominee attended the meeting, with Kerry himself claiming he resigned from the VVAW just prior to the Kansas City event.
Get Steve Malzberg's exclusive NewsMax.com column e-mailed directly to you at www.newsmax.com/malzberg
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)