Veteran sues anti-Kerry filmmaker

I haven't been posting here about the Sinclair Broadcast Group's abuse of the public's airwaves. Atrios and Josh Marshall are all over this story if you need the details.

The broad outline: Sinclair owns a network of local affiliate TV stations infamous for its right-wing views. Each local station is required to run ultra-conservative editorials by a Sinclair exec. You may also remember these folks from their refusal to air the Nightline broadcast that paid tribute to the soldiers killed in Iraq.

Now Sinclair is teaming up with the Swift Boat liars and is requiring its 62 local affiliates to preempt their prime time TV schedule the week before the election to show a "documentary" attacking John Kerry for having criticized atrocities committed during the war in Vietnam.

This short film illustrates what it is that the SB liars are so angry about and why they hate, hate, hate John Kerry (and, for that matter, Bob Kerrey). Their position is that no such incidents ever occurred. There were no "free-fire zones." No civilians were targeted or killed. No villages were destroyed. The war was conducted 100 percent honorably.

The name of their short film tells you all you need to know: "Stolen Honor." In their view, any admission that the war was not 100 percent honorable taints everything and everyone involved in Vietnam. This is the desperate, frightened zeal of the fundamentalist. These men may have served and fought honorably, but in their fundamentalist view, that means nothing unless everyone else everywhere else did so too. Therefore to them, anyone who points out the existence of atrocities, of the killing of civilians in free-fire zones, of the destruction of villages, must be shouted down and destroyed lest their own honor be "stolen."

Ths same mindset explains why Abu Ghraib whistleblower Joe Darby is more reviled by some soldiers than is Abu Ghraib postergirl Lynndie England. SSDD.

The irony, of course, is that the Swifties desperation to preserve this notion of honor has caused them to behave dishonorably and dishonestly. They have spread shameful and obvious lies. They have slandered and perjured and forsworn themselves in their fearful battle with the irrefutable facts of history. Pity them.

Pity them, but don't let them get away with it. If America is to maintain or regain its honor it will be because of the heroic honesty of men like John Kerry, Joe Darby and Kenneth Campbell -- not because of the warped little liars who attack them for telling the truth.

Kenneth Campbell is the name you probably didn't recognize there. You can read some of his story in this article. Campbell, a Vietnam veteran who appeared in the 1971 documentary "Winter Soldier," is suing the makers of the anti-Kerry Sinclair film for malicious defamation.

Comments

[perianwyr]

I find it frustrating that we have an election now that is being affected by events that occurred 30 years ago against a threat largely extinct today. We have our own very different war, and our own very different threat. The relevance of Vietnam today cannot be understated.

[Ann Salisbury]

I guess everyone forgot how the Toledo Blade won last year's Pulitzer (hint: reporting on Vietnam war atrocities).

The winning series is found here:

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE

[Mnemosyne]

I've said this many times before, but I actually feel sorry for these former POWs, liars though they've proven themselves to be.

Think about it for a minute. You're a prisoner of war in Vietnam, being beaten and tortured with mind-numbing regularity. As your tormentors do their "work," they demand that you confess to crimes so horrible you know no American soldier could ever commit them: raping children, mutilating bodies, wiping out entire villages.

Then the war ends, and you're released, and you discover it was all true. All of it. The raping, the killing, the illegal bombing, the dead children.

I can understand how that knowledge might challenge your sanity and make you lash out at anyone who would suggest otherwise.

What these guys need is serious therapy. Instead, they get exploited by John O'Neill and the rest of his conscienceless cohort.

I do pity them. But they shouldn't be allowed to live in the fantasyworld they've constructed at the cost of an election.

[VKW]

Have any of these former POWs publicly considered the possibility that Richard "Not a Crook" Nixon and Henry "Holiday in Cambodia" Kissinger played some role in these events?

[Terry Karney]

I know, but don't understand, their pain. I'm an interrogator. I was in Iraq. I know some of the people who were in Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan, but that doesn't change what I did.

I suppose the only comment I can make, to explain how I feel about it is to quote (of all things, because my faith is rarely overt), "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

TK