Kerry in the Viet Nam News

An excerpt from Viet Nam News - June 11, 2004. Do we want John F. Kerry to be the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in history and representing us ?
---Larry Everett
(snipped for length)
(emphasis is mine)

Invoking Viet Nam to cover up Iraq abuses

The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal calls forth questions over the American War in Viet Nam: "How were captured US troops treated?" and "How did the Americans treat the Vietnamese?"

Diem Quynh

The Voice of America has attempted to deflect criticism of American soldiers’ treatment of Iraqi prisoners by claiming recently that captured US troops were treated worse in Viet Nam.

Besides begging the fundamental question "what were the Americans doing in Viet Nam in the first place?" the claim is also patently false.

In fact, like in any of the dozens of countries they invaded, it was the Americans who perpetrated well-documented atrocities in Viet Nam, both at the individual and mass levels.
American POWs treat themselves to a refreshing game of volleyball.

My Lai is a byword for callous mass murder while the Bach Mai hospital and Kham Thien street bombings, though less well-known outside Viet Nam, were no less brutal for their manner of execution. As if to show they were not merely capable of ‘impersonal’ atrocities (by dropping bombs), the Americans helped run the notorious Con Dao prison with its ‘tiger cages’. In each of these 3m by 1.5m cages, they held five Vietnamese prisoners.

Conditions at the prison prompted a visiting US legislator, William R Anderson, to write to then-president Richard Nixon slamming the human rights violations and asking him to reconsider American involvement in the south of Viet Nam.

Candidate in this year’s American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US’ Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia "were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

But despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely.
[snipped]

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