"Leonard Caillouet" wrote in message
news:XhfXb.5046$Yj.3516@lakeread02...

"Brian Allardice" wrote in message
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In article ,
emoveunderscore says...

I disagree. I will admit that there were _incidents_ where these acts
occurred. However, Kerry tried to make it look like all the US
soldiers were behaving like this.

Ah... the classic "Just a few bad apples" defence....

Who is defending the bad apples? I don't think anyone in this forum would
do so, apart from a few nuts. On the other hand, I would be careful
judging the actions of others when you were not there.

Brian has a long history of leaping to the worst possible conclusion in
regards to anything USian. Worse, in this case, is the fact that most of
these allegations have been proven to be unfounded--Kerry's reliance upon
Winter Soldier testimony, which is the sorce of much of these kind of
claims, fails to stand up under closer scrutiny. From a Rand Corp study
completed in 2000:

"These hearings, generated in part out of the response to widening knowledge
of the events at My Lai, painted Vietnam as a catchment of continuous
atrocities and "dehumanized" behavior. It should be noted that some have
raised serious doubts about the creditability of the testimony and some of
the "testifiers" at the Winter Soldier meeting. Lewy (1980), among others,
has pointed out that there were grave problems with the Winter Soldier
testimony, some were apparently not the people they had presented themselves
as, and all refused to give military investigators the dates, sites, and
names of perpetrators of atrocities that they had reported. The tragic
reality, as Lewy pointed out, was that Herbert's book (Herbert, 1973) and
testimony were established to be a series of falsehoods and half truths."


http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/library/...18_11_ch9.html

Stories of atrocities typically turn out to be apocryphyl at best.
Investigators tried to pin down the accusations, but in each case the
accuser either recants, is proven to have had no real first-hand knowledge
of the allegation, or in the worst cases turns out to have been offering his
"testimony" in someone else's name. If Brian has any concrete evidence of
actual atrocities of the nature described in Winter Soldier, let him present
his case--otherwise, he is just blowing his usual anti-American smoke
screen.

Brooks


Leonard Caillouet