Another Aidan Delgado/John Kerry SimilarityWelcome Polipundit readers! Please look around and if you like what you see, consider bookmarking
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Happened across this superb
post by Neo-neocon while reading at
Roger L. Simon's blog. Neo-neo makes a great point about Kerry never living up to his promise on the Dick Cavett Show to produce depositions from the soldiers quoted in the Winter Soldier Investigation. Which of course means that his promise to sign the Form 180 is a comparatively recent pledge on national TV that he's failed to fulfill.
But the thing that caught my eye was this:
Kerry: But what we're saying is – and the reason that some of these men have not signed depositions is very, very simple, and it's up to each individual. One reason is that specifically they are not looking to implicate other people.Aidan Delgado
in an interview a few months ago:
I'm not really interested in naming names or getting culprits caught; I'm just interested in letting people know that what happened in Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly. It was virtually standard operating procedure.What are both Kerry and Delgado saying? They're not interested in naming names. They don't want the people who committed these supposed war crimes to be blamed "specifically". They want the military blamed in general. They want supposed specific incidents inflated into thousands of similar or worse incidents everywhere. Which of course smears all their fellow soldiers.
Update: Delgado returns in
Herbert's column today with a direct statement which confirms this objective:
His goal, he said, is to convince his listeners that the abuse of innocent Iraqis by the American military is not limited to "a few bad apples," as the military would like the public to believe. "At what point," he asked, "does a series of 'isolated incidents' become a pattern of intolerable behavior?"As I said a long time ago, most people don't see
where John Kerry really smeared the military. It was not when he said, "They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape 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 Genghis Khan...."
It was this, much less often quoted passage from his testimony to the Senate:
"...many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
