Sunday, April 23, 2006

35 years ago: John Kerry's "Jen-jiss Khan" Senate testimony

John Kerry foisted himself upon the public consciousness thirty five years ago Saturday with his treacherous testimony in front of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the Vietnam War, as Rocco DiPippo reminds today in the Autonomist Blog.

In his pompous Brahmin accent, this is what John Kerry said to members of the US Senate on April 22, 1971:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made
them do.

They told the stories 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 (My note: Kerry pronounced it "Jen-jiss") Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage (My note: Kerry pronounced it "rah-vage") of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Historians have "rah-vaged" Kerry's testimony.

Yesterday in Boston's Faneuil Hall, where perhaps not coincidentally Nuance-boy gave his 2004 concession speech the day after the presidential election, Kerry gave another speech, this time about that '71 Senate testimony.

He makes no apologies for his scandalous conduct while a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And like many from the "Sixties Generation," John Kerry still is mired in the late-1960s and the pre-Nixon resignation 1970s.

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