"They'll Do Anything
Why Democrats and the media think they're entitled to do whatever it takes to win this election.
by Fred Barnes
11/01/2004 12:00:00 AM

THE SCARIEST THING about this election is not the prospect of a contested outcome with no winner declared for weeks, just as in 2000. No, the most scary thing is the sense of entitlement that many Democrats and their allies have about tomorrow's election. It goes like this: Bush stole the presidency four years ago, then proceeded to act as if he had a mandate, so now we're entitled to do whatever it takes to defeat him, to say whatever we want.

You see it in the bumper stickers that call for the "re-defeat" of President Bush. You see it in the destruction of Bush yard signs and posters all across the country. You see it in the harassment, at least in blue states, of anyone wearing a Bush pin or button. You see it in the hatred of Bush by his opponents, who think they're only venting righteous indignation.

You see it in the religious bigotry against the president, a born-again Christian, and against his conservative Christian supporters. Without any evidence, Bush's opponents accuse him of believing that he has a direct line to God and that God gives him instructions, such as when to invade Iraq, and that any criticism of him is illegitimate. You see the bigotry as well in the belittling of Christians who support Bush as if their political views have no standing or worth because they may have been influenced by their religious faith.

You see it in the now exposed plans of Democrats to claim intimidation

You see that same sense of entitlement in elements of the national media--especially CBS News--who jettison the normal rules of journalism when Bush is the target. CBS not only rushed out with forged documents to torpedo the Bush campaign in September, the network intended to take another bite at Bush two days before the election by airing a dubious story about stolen explosives in Iraq. Would CBS have dared to do this against any other public figure but Bush? No.

And you see it in the victimization that is claimed for John Kerry. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Anything they say about Kerry is automatically a smear and thus doesn't have to be examined or even considered. And Kerry has no obligation to answer questions about his Vietnam experience, though he's played it up in the campaign. Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war, however, is fair game.

And you see the feeling of entitlement in comments by the Democratic candidates and their backers, who seem to feel they're free to say anything they want about Bush and Vice President Cheney. So we get the targeting of Mary Cheney as a lesbian and the criticism of Laura Bush for having worked in jobs that weren't real jobs. And when anyone accuses Democrats of debasing the campaign, the answer is always: it's Bush's fault. Bush is hardly without fault, but the shabby style and substance of this campaign is the fault of his opponents.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/859goxwi.asp

BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB - Special to the Sun
November 1, 2004

A normer officer in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve has built a case that Senator Kerry was other than honorably discharged from the Navy by 1975, The New York Sun has learned.

The "honorable discharge" on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry's record, according to Mark Sullivan, who retired as a captain in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve in 2003 after 33 years of service as a judge advocate. Mr. Sullivan served in the office of the Secretary of the Navy between 1975 and 1977.

On behalf of the Kerry campaign, Michael Meehan and others have repeatedly insisted that all of Mr. Kerry's military records are on his Web site atjohnkerry.com, except for his medical records.

"If that is the case," Mr. Sullivan said, "the true story isn't what was on the Web site. It's what's missing. There should have been an honorable discharge certificate issued to Kerry in 1975,if not earlier, three years after his transfer to the Standby Reserve-Inactive."

Another retired Navy Reserve officer, who served three tours in the Navy's Bureau of Personnel, points out that there should also have been a certified letter giving Mr. Kerry a choice of a reserve reaffiliation or separation and discharge. If Mr. Meehan is correct and all the documents are indeed on the Web site, the absence of any documents from 1972 to 1978 in the posted Kerry files is a glaring hole in the record.

The applicable U.S. Navy regulation, now found at MILPERSMAN 1920-210 "Types of Discharge for Officers," lists five examples of conditions required to receive an honorable discharge certificate, four required to receive a general discharge "not of such a nature as to require discharge under conditions other than honorable," and seven for "the lowest type of separation from the naval service. It is now officially in all respects equivalent to a dishonorable discharge."

Kerry spokesmen have also repeatedly said that the senator has an honorable discharge. And there is indeed a cover letter to an honorable discharge dated February 16,1978,on the Kerry Web site. It is in norm and reference to regulation exactly the same as one granted Swiftboat Veterans for Truth member Robert Shirley on March 12, 1971, during a periodic "reduction in force (RIF)" by the Naval Reserve. The only significant difference between Mr. Kerry's and Mr. Shirley's is the signature innormation and the dates. In a RIF, officers who no longer have skills or are of an age group the Navy wishes to keep in reserve are involuntarily separated by the Navy and given their appropriate discharge. This is a normal and ongoing activity and there is no stigma attached to it.

Kerry spokesman David Wade did not reply when asked if Mr. Kerry was other than honorably discharged before he was honorably discharged.

"Mr. Meehan may well be right and all Mr. Kerry's military records are on his Web site," Mr. Sullivan said. "Unlike en listed members, officers do not receive other than honorable, or dishonorable, certificates of discharge. To the contrary, the rule is that no certificate will be awarded to an officer separated wherever the circumstances prompting separation are not deemed consonant with traditional naval concepts of honor. The absence of an honorable discharge certificate for a separated naval officer is, therefore, a harsh and severe sanction and is, in fact, the treatment given officers who are dismissed after a general court-martial."

With the only discharge document cited by Mr. Kerry issued in 1978, three years after the last date it should have been issued, the absence of a certificate from 1975 leaves only two possibilities. Either Mr. Kerry received an "other than honorable" certificate that has been removed in a review purging it from his records, or even worse, he received no certificate at all. In both cases there would have been a loss of all of Mr. Kerry's medals and the suspension of all benefits of service.

Certainly something was wrong as early as 1973 when Mr. Kerry was applying to law school.

Mr. Kerry has said, "I applied to Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. I was extremely late. Only BC would entertain a late application."

It is hard to see why Mr. Kerry had to file an "extremely late" application since he lost the congressional race in Lowell, Mass., the first week of November 1972 and was basically doing nothing until he entered law school the following September of 1973.A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar.

The fact that Mr. Kerry had cancelled his candidacy for a Congressional seat in 1970 in favor of Father Robert Drinan cannot have hurt Mr. Kerry's admission to Boston College. The Reverend Robert Drinan's previous position was dean of the Boston College Law School.

Given this, it is likely that a legal review took place that effectively purged Mr. Kerry's Navy files and arranged for the three-year-late honorable discharge in 1978.There were two avenues during the 1977-1978 time period. This could have been under President Carter's Executive Order 11967, under which thousands received pardons and upgrades for harsh discharges or other offenses under the Selective Service Act. Or it might have merged into efforts by the military to comply with the demands of the 1975 Church Committee. Mr. Sullivan was personally involved in the 1976 and 1977 records review answering Senator Kennedy's demands to determine the scope of any counterintelligence abuses by the military.

In the Foreign Surveillance Act of 1977, legislation introduced by Mr. Kennedy to enforce the findings of the Church Committee, there is language that literally describes the behavior of Mr. Kerry. The defined behavior that could no longer be subject to surveillance without warrants includes: "Americans having contact with foreign powers in the case of Americans who were active in the protest against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Some of them may have attended international conferences at which there were representatives of foreign powers, as defined in the bill, or may have been directly in communication with foreign governments concerning this issue."

One of Mr. Kerry's first acts of office as he entered the Senate on January 3, 1985, was making sure what was still in the Navy files. A report was returned to Mr. Kerry by a Navy JAG on January 25, 1985, and appears on the Kerry Web site. There is an enclosure listed that may have contained a list of files, according to David Myers, the JAG who prepared it, that is not on Mr. Kerry's Web site. It could have provided an index for all of Mr. Kerry's Navy files.

All officials with knowledge of what specifically happened in Mr. Kerry's case are muzzled by the Privacy Act of 1974.The act makes it a crime for federal employees to knowingly disclose personal innormation or records.

Only Mr. Kerry can do that. As of this writing, Mr. Kerry has failed to sign a Standard Form 180 giving the electorate and the press access to his Navy files.

http://www.nysun.com/article/4040

"John Kerry's Other Vietnam War
Why would we trust this man to be our president?

By Stephen Morris

John Kerry has fought this election campaign as a political moderate. Certainly his main foreign-policy advisers are moderate Democrats. But that campaign posture disguises his 34-year record in public life - which produced no legislative achievement, but featured a well-documented obsession with Vietnam and Cambodia that continues to the present day. Kerry made his four and a half months of service in Vietnam an electoral issue, but it's his 34 years of political activism on Vietnam and Cambodia that go to the heart of his political outlook and character.

In 1970, while still a reserve officer in the U.S. Navy, Kerry undertook his own private meetings with the Vietnamese Communist delegations in Paris. He joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a radical-Left organization viewed favorably by Hanoi, membership of which was less than one half of one percent of the 2.8 million Americans who served in Vietnam.

Kerry is remembered and reviled by many veterans for his 1971 speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he accused American soldiers of committing widespread atrocities and war crimes. He specifically asserted that U.S. soldiers were not only carrying out the cruelest tortures, with full knowledge of their commanders at the highest level, but were also "murdering" 200,000 Vietnamese each year. Many of Kerry's sources - the witnesses at the Winter Soldier Investigation paid for by Jane Fonda - were later exposed as frauds who had never served in Vietnam. Kerry's blanket libel of American troops was in stark contrast with his silence over the well-documented record of atrocities by the Communists, which were a matter of policy.

But what has been largely overlooked in Kerry's 1971 speech is that he also supported the Vietnamese Communist cause, mouthing every plank of their political platnorm as his own. He not only favored immediate unconditional withdrawal of American troops, and creation of a coalition government. He also denounced the then elected government of South Vietnam, where political opposition thrived, as the "Thieu-Ky-Khiem dictatorship." By contrast he referred to the North Vietnamese Communist dictatorship by its Orwellian official title of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and to Hanoi's southern apparatus as "the Provisional Government."

Were Kerry's extremist views merely the misadventures of a war-embittered youth? Hardly.

When Kerry joined the Senate in 1985 one of his early appointments as legislative assistant on foreign affairs was Gareth Porter - an academic with a long record of denying any evidence of major Communist atrocities in Indochina. Porter's 1976 book, Cambodia. Starvation and Revolution/I, denied that the Khmer Rouge holocaust was taking place. Of course Kerry himself had been conspicuously silent on postwar Khmer Rouge atrocities while they were happening.

Kerry continued to support some of Hanoi's foreign-policy interests in the Senate, even at the expense of his often-stated preference for the U.N. In 1990, in a rare act of post-Cold War political unity, the U.N. Security Council approved a plan to end the war in Cambodia with a U.N. Temporary Administration of Cambodia to organize elections. Yet Kerry opposed it. Instead, he wanted the Vietnamese-installed ex-Khmer Rouge Hun Sen to organize elections.

Kerry has been claiming credit for solving the problem of American POWs missing in Vietnam. This is false. Kerry had been determined for years to normalize relations with the government of Vietnam - ending trade sanctions and opening up diplomatic relations. The demands of families of Americans missing in action, that Hanoi account for the fate of their loved ones who were known to have been alive when captured, but who never returned, had for years prevented U.S. moves to normalization. So in 1992 Kerry chaired the Senate Select Committee on POWs and Missing in Action from the Vietnam War. Kerry set the bar very low: Instead of focusing on what the Communists could do to explain what had happened to their American prisoners, Kerry focused on whether there was evidence of any Americans still alive in Indochina. Lacking sufficient intelligence from U.S. intelligence services, Kerry and his committee members decided to travel to Vietnam, ostensibly to see for themselves if any Americans were being hidden in various places where live sightings were alleged. The Vietnamese Communists were asked to make sites accessible. So the American media were invited to join the intrepid senators, traveling the Vietnamese countryside looking for American prisoners. This political theater would have been comic had it not been so pathetic. Why, if the Vietnamese government were secretly holding American prisoners, would it allow them to be discovered by visiting senators? Over the years, when foreign visitors, including humanitarian organizations, inspected their political prisons, the Vietnamese Communists would always empty the cells of emaciated Vietnamese prisoners and fill them with healthy, happy prison guards in disguise. Naturally, on this occasion the Vietnamese played along. No live Americans were found. In December 1992 the Senate Committee concluded that there was no evidence of Americans still living in Indochina. The path to normalization seemed clear - until one stumbling block suddenly appeared.

In the winter of 1992-93, while a fellow at Harvard University, I was researching the history of the Vietnam War in recently opened Soviet Communist Party archives in Moscow. By chance I discovered a secret Soviet military-intelligence document concerning American POWs once held in North Vietnam. The Russian-language document asserted that in September 1972 hundreds more American POWs than Hanoi had admitted to holding were being secretly held in North Vietnam. If true, this meant that hundreds of living American prisoners were never released at war's end. In February 1993 I contacted the Clinton administration, and met Deputy NSC Adviser Sandy Berger in Washington about this. In April I provided the document to the New York Times. The front-page Times story created enormous media and public interest. Senator Kerry appeared on ABC's Nightline with me to discuss the issue. But he was skeptical then and showed no further interest - until his public disparagement of the document's contents caused me to criticize him in the Boston media. Then Kerry suddenly took an interest, and phoned me, asking me to meet him in his Boston office on the weekend. There I told him, as I had told Sandy Berger in February, that this document was the tip of an iceberg. The ultimate fate of those missing Americans could be determined not from this document, but from other secret documents in other parts of the Russian archives to which I had not been given access. President Boris Yeltsin, eager for American assistance at the time, could give the U.S. access. I offered Kerry, as I had Berger, to help them in any way. Kerry said he would pursue the matter. But I never heard from him on this matter again. Kerry, it seems, only wanted to silence the source of a politically inconvenient controversy, which was impeding his political priority of normalization - not determine conclusively the fate of hundreds of missing American heroes.

Ties with Vietnam were eventually normalized. And Kerry's support for the dictatorial regime - his apparent indifference to human rights in Indochina - continues to this day. Ever since the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in 2001 for Vietnam human-rights efforts, Kerry has bottled up this bill in his Senate committee, preventing it from reaching the floor for a vote.

He has treated Cambodia with the same disdain. The non-Communists, whom the U.S. government had been aiding during the 1980s (in the face of Kerry's rabid opposition), won the 1993 U.N.-sponsored elections. But the Vietnamese-installed Communist ruler, Hun Sen, whose forces the U.N. had failed to disarm, refused to accept the result, and demanded a share of power. The Clinton administration and the U.N. caved in to his threats. Still not satisfied, in 1997 Hun Sen launched a bloody coup d'état to seize total power. Democratic opponents of the Communists were tortured to death in the most grisly manner. Yet Kerry still embraced the normer Khmer Rouge commissar as Cambodia's legitimate ruler. Kerry's staff even blocked Sam Rainsy, the leader of Cambodia's terrorized democratic opposition, from testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Is this the kind of person that the American people would want to have making judgments about the direction of U.S. foreign policy? How could he be relied upon to make wise judgments about dealing with North Korea - a nation in the process of acquiring a nuclear arsenal? North Korea is a totalitarian state that is related to the kinds of regimes with which John Kerry has shown such affinity over the years. North Korea's nuclear arsenal poses an immediate threat to Japan and South Korea, and it will soon have missile delivery systems capable of striking Los Angeles and San Francisco. And should the erratic tyrant Kim Jong-Il choose to proliferate nuclear weapons the way he has proliferated missiles, he could provide al Qaeda with the ability to devastate major American cities.

John Kerry's sympathy for totalitarian states in the past has resulted in the slander of millions of American Vietnam veterans, not to mention the betrayal of hundreds of missing American POWs. If he is elected president, in dealing with more powerful and dangerous totalitarian enemies like North Korea, his flawed judgment and values could have devastating consequences for all the people of America, and the world.

- Stephen J. Morris is a fellow at John Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/morris200410311242.asp

Bomb-gate
The scandal the Times ought to be investigating.

The United Nations is already embroiled in the largest economic scam in world history: the multibillion dollar Oil-for-Food scandal. Now there is reason to ask whether a senior U.N., official also has attempted to influence an American election by spreading misleading innormation. 

To understand why this scenario is plausible, let's connect some dots.

The headline of the New York Times front-page story on Monday read: " Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished from Site in Iraq." According to the Times, powerful HMX and RDX explosives - used to "make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons" - were stolen from Al Qaqaa, an Iraqi installation that "was supposed to be under American military control."

The source for this politically explosive charge? The Times quoted unnamed White House and Pentagon officials acknowledging that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year. But named White House and Pentagon officials have said the opposite. And a senior government official told me flatly: "The stuff in Iraq was missing as of April 10, 2003 - the day after Baghdad fell."

The Times also quoted experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) saying they assumed Saddam Hussein had moved the explosives - before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But, those experts speculated, perhaps the explosives were only moved to nearby fields where, the Times suggests, they would be "ripe for looting."

But how? The Times neglects the fairly obvious fact that looters could not have stuffed 380 tons of explosives into shopping bags. To transport that much material would have required about 38 large trucks - 10 tons per truck. Before the U.S. invasion, such truck convoys moved about Iraq freely. Once the U.S. was in occupation, that kind of effort could hardly have gone unnoticed.

On Tuesday, the Times ran another page one headline: " Iraq Explosives Become Issue In Campaign." Yes, that's true - thanks to the Times.

As for the holes in Monday's story, the Times tried to fill them this morning with a page A17 story: " Commander Says Brigade Didn t Inspect Explosives Site," quoting Col. Joseph Anderson of the 101st Airborne Division, saying that when his troops arrived at Al Qaqaa, they didn't look for the HMX and RDX. But what does that imply? That tons of HMX and RDX were still there? Or that the explosives were no longer there? The Times doesn't know and doesn't appear to care.

What's more, Belmont Club argues today, persuasively I think, that the Times "interviewed the wrong unit commander" because it was the Third Infantry Division that first searched Al Qaqaa "with the intent of discovering dangerous materials," almost a week before the 101st arrived.

If the 3ID had found tons of HMX and RMX, we'd have heard about it. On April 5, the Washington Post reported on their discoveries at "Al QaQa," including "vials of white powder, packed three to a box," and stocks of "atropine and pralidoxime, also known as 2-PAM chloride, which can be used to treat exposure to nerve agents...."

If the 3ID got so close and personal that they were counting the vials in boxes, how likely is it that they would have missed 380 tons of HMX and RMX?

At this point, Times editors ought to be asking who got their story rolling and to what end?

Here's one theory: It was Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Why would he do that? "The U.S. is trying to deny ElBaradei a second term," a high U.S. government official told me. "We have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program."

ElBaradei also opposed the liberation of Iraq. And he would like nothing better than to see President Bush be defeated next week.

If all this is true it would amount to a major scandal: It would mean that a senior U.N. official may be changing the outcome of an American election by spreading false innormation. And major U.S. media outlets are allowing themselves to be manipulated in pursuit of that goal.

The Times and other news organizations also have ignored this pertinent question: Why did Saddam Hussein have the kinds of explosives favored by terrorists - and why was he permitted to keep them? Such explosives, according to the Times, also "are used in standard nuclear weapons design," and were acquired by Saddam when he "embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980s."

Writing in The Corner, normer federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy pointed out that U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, which imposed the terms of 1991 Gulf War ceasefire, required Iraq to "unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of . . . [a]ll ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities[.]"

Yet the IAEA made no attempt to force Saddam to comply with his obligations to destroy these "related major parts" of its ballistic missiles.

In addition, McCarthy noted, Iraq was required "not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components[,]" and, to the extent it had such items, present them for "urgent on-site inspection and the destruction, removal or rendering harmless as appropriate of all items specified above."

It shouldn't require a rocket scientist to understand that a detonator is a key component of a nuclear bomb. But according to the Times, Saddam persuaded ElBaradei that he wanted to hold on to the explosives in case they were needed "for eventual use in mining and civilian construction" - and ElBaradai agreed.

It gets worse: The U.N. weapons inspectors led by Rolf Ekéus asked the IAEA to dispose of these explosives back in 1995. The IAEA did not do so - and between 1998, when Saddam forced the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq, and late 2002 when U.S. pressure caused him to allow inspectors to return, 35 tons of HMX went missing. Saddam claimed he used it in Iraq's cement industry. Evidently, ElBaradei saw no reason to doubt Saddam who - as noted - was working hand-in-globe with the U.N. on the Food for Oil program, an enterprise which, we now know, stole billions of dollars from the Iraqi people.

So when all the dots are connected what we see revealed is Bomb-gate - a controversy that should be about foreign interests that may be improperly influencing the U.S. media to affect the outcome of an American election.

But that story will be written after the elections. For now, the question is who voters will believe.

If they are persuaded that the dangerous weapons went missing because of Bush's incompetence, he is likely to lose (and ElBaradei will be breaking out the cigars and bongos this time next week). On the other hand, if voters come to believe that this is another instance of Kerry shooting from the hip, basing charges on flawed innormation, saying anything in order to win, they will almost certainly abandon him.

- Clifford D. May, a normer New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

http://www.nationalreview.com/may/may200410271536.asp

"Hanoi Approved of Role Played By Anti-War Vets

BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB - Special to the Sun
October 26, 2004

The communist regime in Hanoi monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group's spokesman and a member of its executive committee, two captured Viet Cong documents suggest.

The documents - one dubbed a "circular" and the other a "directive" - were captured in 1971 and are part of a trove of material from the war currently stored at the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Originally organized by Douglas Pike, a major scholar who is now deceased, the archive contains more than 20 million documents. Many are available online at the Virtual Vietnam Archive and, as the election has heated up, have been the focus of a scramble for insights into Mr. Kerry's anti-war activities. The Circular and the Directive are listed as items numbered 2150901039b and 2150901041 respectively. Their authenticity was confirmed by Stephen Maxner, archivist at the Vietnam Archive.

The two documents provide a glimpse of the favorable way the Viet Cong viewed the activities in which Mr. Kerry was involved. They are from many documents of a kind that were ordinarily sent to a unit called the Captured Document Exploitation Center at the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, which was headquartered in Saigon. Documents like these that were sent to the center were immediately translated into English and processed for battlefield intelligence for targeting or operations as required, or filed.

The CDEC cover sheet of the "Directive" indicates it was "acquired" on May 12, 1971. The cover sheet itself is dated June 30, 1971, and is entitled "VC Efforts to Back Antiwar Demonstrations in the United States." It shows a detailed knowledge of such VVAW activities as the Dewey Canyon demonstration on the Mall in Washington in April 1971, mentioning the "return of their medals." And the Saigon American military intelligence cover sheet dates the innormation in that document as being assembled in Vietnam only a week after the Washington VVAW demonstration had taken place.

The CDEC Viet Cong document titled "Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US" notes, "The spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly (VC/NVN) delegations at the Paris Peace Talks." It also notes that "The seven-point peace proposal (of the SVN Provisional Revolutionary Government) [the Viet Cong proposal advanced by one of its envoys, Madame Binh, operating out of Paris] not only solved problems concerning the release of US prisoners but also motivated the people of all walks of life and even relatives of US pilots detained in NVN to participate in the antiwar movement."

The significance of the documents lies in the way they dovetail with activities of the young Mr. Kerry as he led the VVAW anti-war movement in the spring of 1971.