Petition for John F. Kerry's Resignation

Published on May 14, 2004 By HoustonTech In Republican

The link below will open a window to a petition I wrote around May 12 calling on John F. Kerry to resign from the senate, and from his run for the presidency. I wrote the petition after seeing Kerry's petition blasting Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and calling for his removal form his possition. Your signature would be appreciated.

Comments (Page 2)

kingbee

on May 15, 2004

Kerry probably should step down in the wake of how traumatized Americans are with the Abu Ghraib scandal, because after all he has admitted to doing and witnessing far worse things, he told the senate that he or other soldiers “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 Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.

let me get this straight...the above is your statement. where exactly in that complete quote does kerry say he engaged in any of those activities?

Anthony R

on May 15, 2004

He said it happened with full awareness of officers at all levels of command, shouldn’t he have reported them if he knew about them? These are crimes. Why then the double standard on the left. The Abu Ghraib guards have committed an unspeakable outrage, but John Kerry and his men get a pass.

Kerry’s statement goes on when he said,

“We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.”

“the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.”

kingbee

on May 15, 2004

its an infinitely long distance between reporting the statements of others and testifying to having done or witnessed any of those things himself as you indicated. theres nothing in his testimony that validates or justifies your original characterization. the issue here isnt the content of his testimony except to determine the accuracy of your synopsis. whether its an accidental error or not, you have a responsibility to retract it.

Anthony R

on May 15, 2004

You should probably go and re-read what I wrote.

kingbee

on May 15, 2004

ive reread it several times and im still unable to locate the part where kerry says that he witnessed or did any of those things. its pretty simple but then so am i at times. please just quote the portion of his testimony where he incriminates himself in the way you describe and ill have no alternative to admit im mistaken.

Anthony R

on May 15, 2004

he told the senate that he or other soldiers

kingbee

on May 15, 2004

please post any portion of that statement in which he says i saw or i did one of those things.

Anthony R

on May 15, 2004

I already have.

Here is the whole thing.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations April 23, 1971

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that 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 Ghengis 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. We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.... In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American. We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals. We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others. Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war." We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything. An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end. We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.... We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

heyhey

on May 15, 2004

Anthony R, there are good courses on logic these days, maybe you should consider doing one it will help you avoid you making the same mistake you make here, i.e. the 'Rover is black, all cats are black therefore Rover is a cat' type argument.
a basic course should go a long way to help you.

Gene Nash

on May 15, 2004

I'm sorry but Ying and hey hey are just spouting unsupportable bigotry. I actually don't support Bush. I didn't vote for him the first time. I haven't voted for a Republican for President for 16 years. But the Democrates have fallen off their rocker. They didn't really put up anybody that could win, in my opinion. Kerry is out of touch with America. You don't have to be a Republican to sign that petition; an extremly frustrated and concerned Democrat will do just as well.

Anthony R

on May 15, 2004

Reply #24 By: heyhey - 5/15/2004 8:16:04 AM
Anthony R, there are good courses on logic these days

It's a clearcut case of selective outrage, Kerrys Atrocities are acceptable but the Abu Ghraib incident is deplorable.

jeblackstar

on May 15, 2004

Umm, the only time in your "case" where Kerry could be taking any responsibility is when he uses the group "we". This was of course meant to mean the whole of the American people. Believe it or not, the United States authorized free fire zones where anything that moved was shot or bombed. That violates the Geneva Convention by the way. And any American who didn't know about those zones wasn't paying attention.

Cheers

messybuu

on May 15, 2004

If the U.S. authorized the torture of Iraqi POWs, does that mean that those who were responsible for it should not face any consequences for their actions, since John Kerry supposedly doesn't have to face any for following the illegal orders of the U.S.?

illusivedreamer

on May 15, 2004

It does become a matter of this petition even making any difference in the life of a politician. Great idea and I widh it all the luck there is, but, how many petitions have you signed in your life that fell on deaf ears and blind eyes. I wouldn't have a problem signing it and I just may, but again, will it change the outcome of what is going to happen in November.

I am going to do a very shameless (head down in shame) plug. Check out my article titled, "I Nominate". Good for a laugh if nothing else..

Saint Ying

on May 15, 2004

There needs to be a web site dedicated to all the online petitions that have failed, so people can see exactly how futile they are. I've only signed one or two of those things, and then only to petition a company to release a certain DVD.

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