Yeah, they were POWs, but presently they're bastards.

[Rex_Goodheart]

I'm talking about the 17 POWs featured in "Stolen Honor."

I'm very sorry they were captured and sometimes tortured. But in no way, shape, or form was that John Kerry's fault.

Are any of the many soldiers now coming back from Iraq who protest our occupation there in any way responsible for insurgents torturing or beheading their captives? No, they are not. The insurgents, alone, are to blame for their deeds.

Knowing that a longer war would have meant more deaths and more POWs like themselves, the bastards in this "Stolen Honor" crockumentary are forced to construct some sort of cockamamie "theory" that Kerry's and other veterans' protests PROLONGED the war. But it's an argument for pure idiots. The Vietnam War lasted precisely as long as OUR GOVERNMENT wanted it to last. The USA was not bound by any logical or rational necessity to respond to ANY Viet Cong offensive; we could have done what we ultimately WOULD do: leave the fucking place.

Even if it were true (and it's not) that Kerry's protests prolonged the war, the bastards still would fall far short of proving that Kerry did it intentionally or nefariously.

These guys should be ashamed of themselves. "Stolen Honor"? Bullshit. They SURRENDERED their honor when they allowed themselves to be a part of this smear campaign, and when they adopted the insane position that it's traitorous to protest senseless wars.

[NoPasaran]

1. If not for the Antiwar Movement

We would still be fighting that idiotic war and those guys would still be rotting in the Hanoi Hilton. And they'd have plenty more company.

[dogtag]

2. The POWs were victims.

Victims of both their captors and their government. Being captured does not endow a man with sainthood nor necessarily with honor. Some were tough and stoic and some probably were not. I wonder how many of the actors in the Stolen Honor drama would really like an in depth investigation into their every move during their term of imprisonment? Men who make up whopping lies thirty five years after the fact to smear a man can be fairly assumed to have been just as virtuous then.

We already know that at least two of them are current Bush appointees but their names have been scrubbed from the WH website. What price glory?

[Chiyo-chichi]

3. I liked what Bill Mahrer said last Friday...

re: the subtitle "Wounds that Never Heal."

Shouldn't all wounds heal? Especially after the passage of 30+ years?