Link to this article came via my Silva Ultramind Newsletter.  Very good read!!

"Zen and the Art of Being a Jedi

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were great men—guardians of freedom and justice—who were in touch with nature. These men were known as Jedi, and they had a deep understanding of how the world really works. A Jedi is not a Buddha. But many of the practices and concepts that are part of their art can be found in the Buddha’s teachings. In developing Star Wars, George Lucas has drawn on many religions, myths, and cultural practices from all parts of planet Earth. As we will soon see, the roots of the Jedi can be found in Asia.

 

Clear Your Mind
In Star Wars, we often hear Jedi masters, such as Yoda and Qui-Gon, telling their pupils to clear their minds or to "let go." This is one of the most basic principles in Buddhism.

Through the act of meditation, those who want to touch the Buddha are encouraged to clear their minds of all thought and to become aware of the moment. This can be done through breathing meditation. When beginning breathing meditation, it is helpful to count from 1 to 10. This helps you clear your mind of other thoughts and pulls you into the moment. Once you are in the moment, the next thing is to be "mindful." This means that you are aware of what you are doing, of your body, of the moment.

Breathing meditation was actually seen being practiced by Qui-Gon in The Phantom Menace. Near the end of the film, during the climactic battle with Darth Maul, the two become caught in a corridor of doors that open and close, apparently on a timer. As they approach the final door, Darth Maul gets through but Qui-Gon doesn’t. Instead of yelling at or taunting Darth Maul through the force field, Qui-Gon simply kneels, closes his eyes, and breathes calmly. He is quieting his mind and collecting himself. He is truly in the moment.

 

There's No Time Like the Present
One of the problems that we all face in the modern world is that we are always dwelling on the future and the past. Our lives are so hectic that we are always being pulled in many directions at once. We get so caught up in what happened at work last Wednesday or what we are having for dinner tomorrow night when the guests come over that we forget to be aware of the moment. For us, the flow of time is very real and we are locked into a vicious cycle of birth and death, beginning and ending. We dwell so heavily on these first and last moments that we forget to live in the here-and-now.

The Buddha taught that these are only concepts, not true reality. What we believe is reality is subjective—it is what we make it. To be caught up in concepts is to be out-of-touch with the moment. If you are concerned with concepts, theories, and ideas, you can’t see the true nature of things.

Seeing the true nature of things is one of the keys to being Jedi. Abandoning preconceptions, avoiding being caught up in past and future, and focusing on the present are all things that Jedi masters teach their apprentices.

At the beginning of The Phantom Menace, when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are in the meeting room aboard the trade federation vessel, Obi-Wan begins thinking about things yet to come. Qui-Gon tells him to keep his mind focused on the here-and-now. In response, Obi-Wan says, "But master Yoda says that I should be mindful of the future." Qui-Gon replies, "Yes, but not at the expense of the present." He is teaching his student to be aware and mindful. In Buddhism, this known as Right Mindfulness.

 

The Circle of Life
Ever since the first film, Star Wars: A New Hope, it has been taught that everything in the universe is interconnected. The details of how this works have changed with the development of the series, but the basic principle has stayed the same. I titled this section "The Circle of Life," but when we speak of interconnectedness, both in Star Wars and Buddhism, we speak not only of living things but of non-living things as well.

In A New Hope, Obi-Wan taught Luke that if he let go of his thoughts he could "hear" the Force speaking to him, guiding him. He said that this is because everything is connected through the Force. Later, in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda teaches Luke of the interconnectedness of all things, that Luke and the rock are one in the same. Finally, in The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon finds himself explaining this principle to young Anakin. This is where Lucas changed the concept a bit.

In the first three films, the Force was presented as a mysterious power that simply flowed through the universe. But in The Phantom Menace it is presented as the result of a symbiotic relationship between living things and microscopic organisms called medichlorines that reside in all living cells. But regardless of this change in position on Lucas’s part, the concept remains the same. We are all part of one another. Everything in existence is interdependent on everything else. Everything contains everything else. A flower, for example, contains not only flower elements like a stem and petals, but also stardust, the earth, and the gardener. In Buddhism, this interconnectedness of all things is known as Second Dharma Seal.

As Qui-Gon explains this to Anakin, he says that these micro-organisms speak to us and tell us the will of the Force. When Anakin says that he doesn’t really understand, Qui-Gon encourages him by saying, "When you learn to quiet your mind, you will hear them speaking to you." Again, this returns us to Right Mindfulness and being aware of and in touch with the moment.

 

Hate Leads to Suffering
If you had to sum up the goal of Buddhism in just four words it would be "the elimination of suffering." The purpose of the practices taught by the Buddha—The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path (Right View, Right Thinking, Right Mindfulness, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Diligence, Right Concentration, Right Livelihood)—is ultimately to identify, come to terms with, and eliminate suffering.

Suffering can be caused by many things. The desire for something you can’t have can cause you to suffer. A physical ailment can cause you to suffer. Exposure to things that can water the seeds of fear and hate that we all posses can cause you to suffer. In order to achieve nirvana, you must identify and eliminate all suffering. Nirvana is, in fact, the elimination of not only all suffering but also all concepts, all thought.

In The Phantom Menace, when Anakin faces the Jedi Council, Yoda questions him about his mother. "Afraid to lose her, I think," he says. Anakin responds by saying, "What does that have to do with anything?" To this Yoda replies, "Everything! Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering… I sense much fear in you."

What Yoda was telling him is that being controlled by fear makes it impossible to eliminate suffering and find happiness. The Jedi are aware of this and, because of the danger posed by the "dark side" of the Force, they identify and train Jedi soon after birth, before they have time to know fear, anger, or hate. As we already know, Anakin ultimately will allow his fear to get the best of him and lead him to the dark side.

 

Conclusion
A Jedi is not a Buddha. There are many aspects of the Jedi that are mystical and supernatural—the ability to move objects with the mind or the ability to see things before they happen, for example. These are not principles or teachings of Buddhism. It is not the aim of this article to convince you that the Jedi are space Buddhists. But many elements of Buddhism have been incorporated into the Jedi, and it is very interesting to see how this aspect of Lucas’s sci-fi epic relates to our earthly culture.

The aforementioned examples are merely a sampling of Buddhist principles that appear in Star Wars. There are many others. If you are so inclined, I invite you to learn more about Buddhism and explore its connection with Star Wars on your own. Please click here to view a list of suggested reading and continue to explore Zen and the Art of Being Jedi. May the Force be with you, always."
http://www.mindpowernews.com/ZenJedi.htm

 

From an Aussie blogger Chrenkoff which shows what happens when a nation mandates that we remain a super power on the same course .. other nations begin to fall in line to Follow the leader. 

"A bit more willing this time around? 

 

 

The Bush administration's twin pillars for going to war in Iraq were weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Critics have seized upon the lack of WMD stockpiles as a means to de-legitimize the war. Yet, in their zealousness to discredit the entire Bush effort, they've also claimed that Iraq didn't sponsor terrorism. This is a wild assertion; the reality is that there's no question whatsoever that terrorists were harbored in Iraq and operated there openly, usually with support from Saddam's regime, and did so prior to the coalition invasion in 2003, prior to September 11, and throughout the 1990s.

An extraordinary catalogue of evidence-one that liberals especially ought to view as authoritative and trustworthy-has been ignored by all sides, including both Democrats and Republicans: I'm speaking of the final report on terrorism issued by the Clinton administration. For some strange reason, amid all the heated debate, this official statement has gone completely ignored. In 2000, President Clinton's State Department, headed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, listed Iraq among the two leading sponsors of terrorism, as it had regularly in its Patterns of Global Terrorism report.

What was this report? Congress was so worried about terrorism that in 1979 it passed the Export Administration Act, which required that the State Department submit "detailed assessments of foreign countries where significant terrorist acts occurred" and a list of countries "that have repeatedly provided state support for international terrorism." This annual assessment lists the top terrorism-sponsoring states. To quote the 2000 report: "Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan continue to be the seven governments that the U.S. Secretary of State [Albright] has designated as state sponsors of international terrorism." These were the same seven nations identified in 1999 and in previous years; among them, Iraq and Iran were singled out as the worst offenders.

The 2000 report didn't rank the seven. Nonetheless, some terrorist nations received considerably more attention than others. The report devoted 78 words to Cuba, 112 to North Korea, 187 to Sudan, 199 to Syria, 390 to Iran, 537 to Libya, and 638 to Iraq. Yes, the winner was Iraq, which received literally more attention than any other country in the final terrorism report issued by the Clinton State Department.

The Iraq section of the report began categorically: "Iraq planned and sponsored international terrorism in 2000." It then listed where and how "the regime continued to support various terrorist groups." These included activities in London, Prague, Berlin, and other Western cities, as well as various activities in northern Iraq and even in neighboring Iran. The mode of attack ranged from shootings to car bombs.

The report detailed Iraqi attacks on U.N. workers-i.e., assaults not unique to today's post-war Iraq: "Baghdad continued to denounce and de-legitimize UN personnel working in Iraq, particularly UN de-mining teams, in the wake of the killing in 1999 of an expatriate UN de-mining worker in northern Iraq under circumstances suggesting regime involvement. An Iraqi who opened fire at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) office in Baghdad, killing two persons and wounding six, was permitted to hold a heavily publicized press conference at which he contended that his action had been motivated by the harshness of UN sanctions, which the regime regularly excoriates."

Most remarkable, the Clinton State Department reported: "The Iraqi regime rebuffed a request from Riyadh for the extradition of two Saudis who had hijacked a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Baghdad.. Disregarding its obligations under international law, the regime granted political asylum to the hijackers and gave them ample opportunity to ventilate in the Iraqi Government-controlled and international media their criticisms of alleged abuses by the Saudi Arabian Government, echoing an Iraqi propaganda theme. While the origins of the FAO attack and the hijacking were unclear, the Iraqi regime readily exploited these terrorist acts to further its policy objectives."

This is an utterly fascinating finding, reported one year before the September 11 hijackings, which were orchestrated by radical Saudi citizens expelled from Saudi Arabia. The report is very short on details and provides no names. Nonetheless, the statement is extremely intriguing. How has it escaped our notice over the last few years?

Likewise significant, the 2000 assessment listed the various thugs that found safe haven under Saddam's Baathist-fascist regime: "Several expatriate terrorist groups continued to maintain offices in Baghdad, including the Arab Liberation Front, the inactive 15 May Organization, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the Abu Nidal organization (ANO). PLF leader Abu Abbas appeared on state-controlled television in the fall to praise Iraq's leadership in rallying Arab opposition to Israeli violence against Palestinians. The ANO threatened to attack Austrian interests unless several million dollars in a frozen ANO account in a Vienna bank were turned over to the group."

The report said more, but still only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. There was no mention of Mr. Al-Zarqawi, of the April 1993 assassination attempt on an American president traveling to Kuwait, or of the chilling clandestine facility south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, a terrorist training camp which drew attention after September 11 when it was reported that terrorists there-of Saudi and Egyptian origin-had conducted training missions on an actual 707 fuselage, where they practiced the art of hijacking an aircraft without guns, using only knives and utensils, all before September 11. Also, the report didn't note that Saddam had publicly offered payment of $10,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew themselves up in the service of killing Israel's Jews, a total that he upped to $25,000 in April 2002. The report could not have known of the thousands of suicide-bomber vests that American and British troops would find in Iraq in April 2003.

The facts are painfully obvious: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was one of the world's leading terrorist states. If it didn't top the list, it was second. That was literally the conclusion of the final report on terrorism by the Clinton-Albright State Department.

To borrow from the language applied to George W. Bush by Madeleine Albright and Al Gore, was the 2000 report just a bunch of lies? Of course, not. It was the awful truth. And yet, liberal Democrats now say there was no pre- or post-9/11 terror threat coming from Iraq. How can they so willingly disregard this lengthy record of Iraqi crimes, denying the undeniable? And how can journalists join them in lock-step after dutifully reporting many of these facts for a decade? Can they all put aside Bush hatred for a moment and consider this crucial 2000 report produced by their very own? Please?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=15695

"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

of minority voters even if no intimidation actually occurs. You see it in the voter registration efforts by Democrats that have made the number of people on the voting rolls in some jurisdictions larger than the voting age population. You see it in the plans of Democratic lawyers to file lawsuits all over the country, challenging the outcome unless Bush is defeated.

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

 

 

"Kerry's Discharge Is Questioned by an Ex-JAG Officer

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

 

 

Kerry's Legacy:

PAUL GALANTI GUEST COLUMNIST

Oct 31, 2004