What a delightful change of pace it has been this past week listening to Secretary of State John F. Kerry accuse someone other than U.S. soldiers of committing atrocities against innocent civilians, women and children during war.
His animated recitation of chemical weapons use by Syrian strongman Bashar Assad — high dudgeon we are told by his staff that he personally penned on his iPad — brings to mind the first time the Secretary of Insufferable Wind-Baggery shed light unto the world of heinous crimes against mankind.
“Not isolated incidents,” he told a congressional committee in 1972. “But crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
He was not, of course, talking about the Assad regime. Not about Ho Chi Minh or even about what the Viet Cong was doing at that very moment to U.S. soldiers held in prisoner-of-war camps.
No, he claims he was talking about what he had heard U.S. troops were doing to innocent women, children and civilians in Vietnam. Troops he had served alongside. Troops he returned safely home from — only to betray in the most despicable way.
“They told the stories at times they 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 Genghis 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,” Mr. Kerry told the congressional committee.
Again, this was all hearsay — so, not even admissible in traffic court — but, hey, the cameras were rolling, and he was in the spotlight. You’ve got to perform when your time comes if you want to get ahead.
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