Terrible Swift Truths haunt Kerry and NY Times

Thomas Lipscomb:

Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.

But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.

Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.

Zernike appears to have made no effort to look at any record besides listing Kerry's latest assertions with obligatory quotes from the usual Swiftie suspects to provide "balance." She doesn't appear to be aware of the hilarious inconsistency of the Kerry hat story she recites dutifully as if this was the very first time the hat had appeared in print. As the clips should have shown her, Kerry first pulled the famous hat out of a "secret compartment" for Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld's feature story in 2003. "My good luck hat," Kerry told Blumenfeld, "given to me by a CIA guy." Now he tells Zernike a "special operations team" member gave it to him on a secret "mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals" in February.

Once again Zernike cites a Kerry claim as fact, this time directly conflicting with the Washington Post account on the record. But the facts on this are already on the record and no matter what Kerry "researchers" may come up with they should be addressed by any reporter attempting a review of the dispute. Admiral Roy Hoffman may have been head of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but he was also in command of all the Swift Boat operations in Vietnam, directly under the commander of all sea operations in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.

Any tasking for insertions of special operations troops across borders by sea, whether Seals, CIA, Army Special Forces or Vietnamese troops like CIDG had to come through his command. Hoffman stated he was never asked to handle missions for the CIA. "They had their own teams for that. And none of my Coastal Commands ever inserted any troops of this kind into Cambodia. We had some operations we ran north that I am not at liberty to discuss."

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There is much more in this devastating takedown of the Kerry Swift boat meme. The Times should have run this story.