Correction: in the article 'Investigate the Winter Soldier Investigation' published today in The American Thinker, I made an error. I claimed that Al Hubbard, the executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) ended his relationship with VVAW when he was exposed as having lied about his military record. Scott Swett of WinterSoldier.com has let me know that I was in error on that. Hubbard continued as executive director of VVAW for another year.
Excerpt from: Investigate the Winter Soldier Investigation:
It's being called ‘Winter Soldier Syndrome.' The phrase refers to slanders of American soldiers and Marines made by people who also make fraudulent claims about their own military experiences. Michelle Malkin writes:
"Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits."
She is right up to a point, but it is more serious than that. It is not just the perpetrators who are causing the problem. A large and sometimes influential part of our society has been enabling and protecting these attacks on those who risk their lives to defend ours. This has been going on for almost four decades.
Winter Soldier Syndrome uses the same mechanism as racial and ethnic bigotry: tarring an entire group because of the misbehavior of a few. To understand why this is happening today, we have to understand how this came about, and why.
Continue reading at American Thinker.
7 comments:
Don't forget the 600+ page book
on "phony/fake" soldiers "Stolen Valor" - mostly about Vietnam era as I recall.
Yup! By B.G. Burkett
http://www.stolenvalor.com/foia.htm
DK
The 1971 WSI was completely fabricated, those guys never did any of those crazy things, sure... and I bet the holocaust never happened either, we should "investigate" that one too! WSI wasn't about slandering soldiers or the military, it was about exposing the truth to the American people.
They have a right to know, and we as veterans are obligated to inform them.
Clifton Hicks
1/1 Cavalry, 1st A.D.
Baghdad, Iraq '03-'04
I can't even deal with your allegations that "Winter Soldier" was faked. If you knew any of the vets who took place in that, and had to see their faces as they talked, you would know that calling all of their testimonies into question because one person said they had been pressured is just abominable.
As for IVAW, before Jesse Macbeth, DD214s were not required: it was assumed no one would lie about service like that. After him, the organization went through its rolls and required DD214s and valid military ID cards.
You and Scott Swett are telling the same lies the swiftboaters did in 2004... READ THE TRUTH below.
PeaceVet
Terry J. DuBose, Viet Nam 1967-1968
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vietnam20aug20-sg,0,7940522.storygallery
Vietnam - The War Crimes Files
A Tortured Past
By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse
Documents show troops who reported abuse in Vietnam were discredited even as the military was finding evidence of worse.
August 20, 2006
Lasting Pain, Minimal Punishment
By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse
'Americans don't do things like this,' an officer thought when he learned of three villagers' deaths. His shock grew when the soldier convicted continued to serve.
August 20, 2006
Civilian Killings Went Unpunished
By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.
August 6, 2006
Verified Civilian Slayings
By Nick Turse, Deborah Nelson and Janet Lundblad
Decades-old Pentagon records show that Army criminal investigators substantiated seven massacres of Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians by U.S. soldiers — in addition to the notorious 1968 My Lai massacre.
August 6, 2006
About this report
Deborah Nelson, who wrote these articles, is a former staff writer and Washington investigative editor for The Times. Nick Turse is a freelance journalist living in New Jersey.
August 20, 2006
You are repeating Swett's lies:
"I claimed that Al Hubbard, the executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) ended his relationship with VVAW when he was exposed as having lied about his military record. Scott Swett of WinterSoldier.com has let me know that I was in error on that. Hubbard continued as executive director of VVAW for another year."
I was on the VVAW National Steering Committee at the time and Al Hubbard was removed from the VVAW as soon as we found out Hubbard had padded his resume.
Ask Swett for documentation of any statements he makes. Swett is well known for taking half-truths out of context and spinning full blown lies of the type the swiftboating liars did in the 2004 campaign.
Hi Peace Vet,
You wrote:
“I was on the VVAW National Steering Committee at the time and Al Hubbard was removed from the VVAW as soon as we found out Hubbard had padded his resume…Ask Swett for documentation of any statements he makes. Swett is well known for taking half-truths out of context and spinning full blown lies of the type the swiftboating liars did in the 2004 campaign.”
Mind if I ask you to document your claim that Hubbard was removed from VVAW when his lying about his record was discovered? You say immediately, but David Cline, who was there in 1971 with the VVAW, says otherwise.
From a 2004 column by Marc Morano:
“VVAW member David Cline said Hubbard has been ‘missing in action. He dropped out of the scene a long time ago and hasn't resurfaced.’
‘The last time I seen him was in the 70s,’ Cline added.
Cline recalled that the VVAW did not disassociate itself from Hubbard as a result of his admitted lies.
‘At the time that it came out, there was some people (in VVAW) who called for his expulsion, but in the end the people felt that the embarrassment of the thing was enough -- that was his punishment,’ Cline said.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/Politics/Archive/200403/POL20040303a.html
And Peace Vet, in the spinning full blown lies department, the VVAW’s own site has this in their FAQ section:
Did one of VVAW's leaders lie about his military service in 1971?
Al Hubbard was an important leader in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Hubbard had been an Air Force enlisted man who actually served. He felt that as a black man, with racism what it is in this country, he had to portray himself as an officer in order to get any respect (Overend, 589; Stacewicz, 293). This was wrong on his part, but he was a good man, and he worked hard for VVAW. VVAW forgave him for lying, but he shouldn't have done it. This one fact doesn't detract from the tens of thousands in VVAW who did not lie about their service and experiences. Hubbard's exposure (June 1971) came very shortly after Dewey Canyon III and shows how aggressively the Nixon administration scrutinized every member of VVAW. In the end, the Nixon's plumbers exposed only one guy whose records show that he actually served, more than any Chickenhawk in the current administration.
http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=407
First, the VVAW says the group forgave Hubbard, which dovetails with what Morano got from Cline, and is at odds with your claim. Nothing about his being removed. Second, they claim the Nixon WH exposed Hubbard in June of 1971 and tries to pin that exposure on Nixon’s plumbers. Problem is that it was NBC and CBS News that exposed Hubbard in April, at virtually the same time (April 22-23) that Kerry was appearing before Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
From the article "Who Is Al Hubbard?" which the VVAW itself cites as a source, written by William Overend in June 1971. Overend was a liberal and anti-war, and wrote:
...That was April 21. On April 22, the story began to change. According to Frank Jordan, the Washington Bureau Chief of NBC News, NBC got a tip that Al Hubbard hadn't been an Air Force captain, but instead an Air Force sergeant. NBC reached Hubbard at a Washington hotel that night, asked Hubbard about the tip, and got a confession that, indeed, he had been lying about his rank. NBC broadcast that on its 11 P.M. news that night and also interviewed Hubbard on the Today Show the next morning. As NBC's Jordan remembers it, Hubbard explained he made up the business about having been an officer: "He was convinced no one would listen to a black man who was also an enlisted man."
The Pentagon had answered all my questions except the ones touching on Al Hubbard's medical records.
Al Hubbard had the opportunity to defend himself. Instead he chose to make no comment, and I was left to draw my own conclusions.
So what to do? First, of course, report it for my employer, CBS News. But the story required a longer telling than broadcast time permits. As a liberal, it had occurred to me that raising questions about Al Hubbard might hurt the antiwar movement, but as a journalist, it didn't seem that that should be a factor. I was wrong. No one would touch the story. Not David Sanford of the New Republic; not any other editor of any liberal publication, I contacted.
The NY Times records that Kerry resigned from the VVAW in November of 1971, in a dispute with, among others –. Al Hubbard! But if Hubbard was removed seven months earlier when his lying was exposed….how could that be?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE2DA1630F930A15750C0A9629C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Seems you have a credibility problem, Peace Vet, since you claim to have been there and remember this.
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