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By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan
John Kerry's military service record has become a major topic of debate in recent weeks, and both sides are trying to spin it to their advantage. Many Democrats have attempted to make it appear that their presidential candidate knowingly volunteered for especially risky duty in Vietnam, but in fact Kerry volunteered for swift boat duty before it became so dangerous. Meanwhile, an anti-Kerry ad from Swiftboat Veterans for Truth makes charges that it can't back up. (Read the entire column in the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
By Bryan Keefer
A new ad by an independent group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks John Kerry's service in Vietnam. Some of the evidence presented by the group, however, fails to back up allegations presented in the ad. And some reporters and pundits are already spinning the facts about members of the group.
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The group's ad repeatedly accuses Kerry of lying - an inflammatory charge that the ad presents no evidence to support. On its website the group provides supporting materials, but the charges often boil down to disputed accounts to which there is no definitive resolution.
For example, the commercial features one veteran, Louis Letson, who states that "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury." In backup documentation on the website, Letson, a former military doctor, describes the treatment he gave Kerry: removing a small piece of shrapnel from his arm and applying a bandage. (Letson, however, did not sign the medical treatment report of Kerry's injury.) While the group suggests that the injury was minor, the extent of the injury does not matter according to the Navy's criteria for Purple Heart eligibility, only that it was received by enemy fire.
Letson speculates that the wound could have been caused by shrapnel from a mortar fired by Kerry himself, which may have exploded close enough to the boat to cause such an injury. Letson, however, was not present during the firefight, and bases his accusation on the contested accounts of others. This is extremely thin evidence upon which to directly accuse Kerry of lying.
A second example is the dispute surrounding Kerry's Silver Star. In the ad, Kerry's former commanding officer George Elliott, who recommended Kerry for the medal, states that "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam." In an affidavit, Elliott states, "Had I known the facts, I would not have recommended Kerry for the Silver Star for simply pursuing and dispatching a single, wounded, fleeing Viet Cong."
However, as FactCheck.org pointed out, Elliott himself admits that his contention is not based on first-hand knowledge, but rather upon his own reading of other versions of events, including Kerry's own account in a biography by Douglas Brinkley. Moreover, Elliott's claim in his affidavit mischaracterizes the official citation, which awarded Kerry the medal for two ambushes - not just the specific killing of a member of the Viet Cong. (Last week Elliott appeared to retract his criticisms in a Boston Globe article, but later issued a statement reaffirming it.)
In short, the evidence upon which the group has based its claims of lying falls short, for the moment, of definitively proving these charges.
Unsurprisingly, however, the group's allegations are already being distorted. While none of the veterans filmed in the ad served in either of the swift boats Kerry commanded in the war, the group's technically true claim that the men "served with" John Kerry is already leading some pundits and journalists to exaggerate their relationship to the Massachusetts senator.
Fox News Channel has seen several instances of such distortion. As the liberal group Media Matters pointed out, Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity and Pat Halpin both claimed that the men were "some of his crewmates" on August 4, and Catherine Herridge introduced the ad as " featuring some of John Kerry's Vietnam crewmates" on August 6. Such exaggerations take the technically true claim that the veterans served with Kerry and spin it into a misleading talking point.
Perhaps the release of the book Unfit for Command will provide more definitive evidence. But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad and website do not prove several of the group's charges.
Update 8/12 11:33 AM EST: A version of this post was included in our Philadelphia Inquirer column today.
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By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan
During the 2000 presidential campaign, then-Governor Bush liked to tell the story of a hypothetical waitress who would benefit from his tax cut plan. "Under current tax law," he said, "a single waitress supporting two children on an income of $22,000 faces a higher marginal tax rate than a lawyer making $220,000," adding, "Under my plan, she will pay no income tax at all."
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This wasn't much of a feat. What Bush failed to mention was that his hypothetical waitress probably already paid no federal income tax.
In August 2001, President Bush announced a new policy on the use of stem cells in federally funded medical research. "More than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist," he told the nation in a televised address, concluding, "We should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines."
Researchers eager to obtain access to these "existing" lines were quickly disappointed, however, when Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, admitted that only 24 or 25 lines were actually "fully developed." Although 60 lines did exist, it was uncertain whether many of them would ever become available to researchers.
In late 2001, Bush began pointing back to a statement he claimed to have made during the 2000 campaign. As he put it in May 2002, "when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta."
It was a good story, but there's no evidence that the President ever made such a statement in Chicago or elsewhere. In fact, Vice President Al Gore was the candidate who had listed the exceptions in 1998 (though Bush advisor Lawrence Lindsey said at the time that they would apply to the Texas governor as well). Was this an innocent mistake? The answer is almost certainly no—Bush continued to repeat the "trifecta" story for months after it had been debunked.
Then, in a televised address to the nation in October 2002, Bush declared, "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy—the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America."
Each of these statements was true, but Bush's words were carefully constructed to leave a false impression. Without ever stating that there was a direct connection between Iraq, al Qaeda, and September 11, the President artfully linked them together with a series of carefully chosen phrases. After the war, Bush told an interviewer from Polish television that "We found the weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. But he was not reporting the discovery of drums of chemical weapons or artillery shells filled with anthrax. Rather, Bush was referring to a pair of trailers that some analysts thought might have been used to produce biological weapons. While experts debated the purpose of the trailers, the President of the United States was falsely claiming that WMD had been found.
These examples might not be so troubling if the press had consistently called attention to them. But on most issues, with the possible exception of stem cells and the aftermath of the war in Iraq, he got away with little more than a slap on the wrist. Journalists deserve much of the blame for this, but one of the chief reasons these examples received so little attention is that many were based on a partial truth about a complex policy issue; after all, the waitress did end up with no federal income tax, there were 60 "existing" stem cell lines, and Iraq had some fragmentary connections to Al Qaeda . . . sort of.
Bush's record raises a number of questions. Just how often did the President deceive us? How did he do it? And why didn't anyone put a stop to it? (Read the whole introduction at MediaBistro.com and then buy the book at Amazon.com today!)
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