As normal, the truth invariably is somewhere other than where those who have something to gain from non-truth so it is. Does this surprise any rational person?
"There is some missing context. What's missing from the ad is that Kerry was relating what he had heard at an an event in Detroit a few weeks earlier sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and was not claiming to have witnessed those atrocities personally."
Most of those who "testified" in Detroit were found to have never served in Vietnam, or served stateside or in Germany and several were never even in the Military! Their "testimonies" were nothing more than lies and Kerry repeated them "under oath"!
whether the investment of trust is right or wrong. That someone would repeat statements by people who lied to them is no surprise, it happens at some point to all of us, and we often take significant actions based upon those lies.
Kerry and other Vietnam Veterans Against the War members "were very careful to double-check" the accuracy of soldiers' accounts at the Detroit event, because prominent war opponents such as author Mark Lane had been heavily criticized for relying on spurious evidence of atrocities, said University of Waterloo history professor Andrew Hunt. "Kerry was involved in that. They really did their work."
...
The Nixon White House quickly launched an effort to undermine the testimony (of the Winter Soldiers).
"The men that participated in the pseudo-atrocity hearings in Detroit will be checked out to ascertain if they are genuine Viet Nam combat veterans," White House counsel Charles Colson wrote in a memo.
But in the end, authorities offered no public challenge to the veracity of the allegations.
It was not until seven years later that the testimony was challenged, in conservative writer Guenter Lewy's 1978 book "America in Vietnam."
Lewy wrote that he had examined a Naval Investigative Service file that seriously discredited several of the Detroit veterans. Some were revealed by Navy investigators to have falsified their identities and weren't even in Vietnam, Lewy wrote.
Government officials today cannot verify that Naval Investigative Service report's existence.
"We have not been able to confirm the existence of this report, but it's also possible that such records could have been destroyed or misplaced," said Naval Criminal Investigative Service public affairs specialist Paul O'Donnell.
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