The official Communist Vietnamese news agency is citing presidential candidate John Kerry’s 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as proof the U.S. committed war crimes in its conduct of the Vietnam war.
A report in the Vietnam News begins: “The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal calls forth questions over the American War in Vietnam: “How were captured U.S. troops treated?” and “How did the Americans treat the Vietnamese?”
The report goes on to charge, “like in any of the dozens of countries they invaded, it was the Americans who perpetrated well-documented atrocities in Vietnam, both at the individual and mass levels.”
While the report shows America POWs enjoying “a refreshing game of volleyball” while imprisoned during the war, it contrasts that photo with reference to the My Lai massacre.
“Candidate in this year’s American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism,” the report continues. “In a statement to the U.S.’ Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by U.S. 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.'”
The report insists that despite such abuses, “the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured U.S. troops humanely.”
