Great Democrats in History -- John Kerry

On this date, April 21, in 1971, John Kerry, dressed in fatigues, testified before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry testified before Congress as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He told Congress that U.S. soldiers raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable phones to human genitals and then turned on the power -and randomly shot people. He did not have a shred of evidence for any of his claims.

Kerry's charges were based on a VVAW conference called the "Winter Soldier Investigation" -- a leftist propaganda event funded primarily by Jane Fonda. None of the Winter Soldier "witnesses" Kerry cited were willing to sign affadavits, and their gruesome stories lacked the names, dates and places that would allow their claims to be tested. Few were willing to cooperate with military investigators. The Naval Investigative Service found that several of the veterans said to have given statements at Winter Soldier were in fact imposters using the name of real veterans. False testimony and exaggerations were primary characteristics of the war crimes disinformation campaign, and also of the VVAW itself. Executive Secretary Al Hubbard, for example, claimed to have been an Air Force Captain wounded in Vietnam piloting a transport plane. In fact, Hubbard had been a staff sergeant who was not a pilot and who was never assigned to Vietnam. John Kerry and the VVAW worked closely with America's wartime enemies, arranged multiple meetings with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong leadership, and consistently supported their positions. Kerry and his radical comrades also played a key role in defining the false, damaging image of Vietnam veterans as psychologically disabled alcoholics and addicts, haunted by the crimes they had been forced to commit in a "racist" war. The communist Vietnamese recognized Kerry's contribution to their war effort by displaying a photograph of Kerry being greeted by the general secretary of the communist party, Comrad Do Muoi, in a Ho Chi Minh City museum that honors Vietnam war protesters.