Kerry now says he never said what he said

Senator John Kerry tells CNN he never accused American troops of war crimes in Vietnam. That’s new, because the record says the opposite.

Interviewer Judy Woodruff mentioned Kerry’s critics of his antiwar activism, "They are saying, in effect, you were accusing American troops of war crimes."

Kerry responded, "No, I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership. I said to the Senate, where is the leadership of our country? And it’s the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. I never said that. I’ve always fought for the soldiers."

Well, we read what he said. And among his often legitimate criticisms of the US leadership of the war, he very clearly indicted the American troops on the ground. PBS has the text of his controversial testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, given at the end of a five-day pro-Hanoi protest in Washington, of which he was one of the leaders. According to the text, Kerry told the senators:

". . . several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation" which found that American servicemen "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam,in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Kerry ignored Soviet or Chinese backing of North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese control of the Vietcong, or the Marxist-Leninist ideology that drove them. Instead, he repeated Hanoi’s propaganda line that the conflict was a civil war, a war of liberation. In his words: "We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever."

In his 1971 book, The New Soldier, Kerry wrote, "We were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and children." Last week he told CNN he didn’t regret his protests and that he stands by his record.