I watched Stolen Honor last night

[TexasBushwhacker]

Watch full version of Stolen Honor here:

http://www.buttondepress.com/BostonManifesto/stolenhonor.wmv

Watching "Stolen Honor", the first thing I thought was, "Geez, what an awful doc." Not because of the subject matter, but because it's 90% talking heads! I volunteered and worked for the film festival in Houston for a few years. I've seen well over 100 documentaries. "Stolen Honor" is not a well made (ie. effective) doc. It's just one bitter old man after another, bitching about what Kerry did over 30 years ago. Blaming him for their treatment and long stays at the Hanoi Hilton because they had to blame someone, and they couldn't bring themselves to blame the real culprit - The US Government.

I really wonder if any of them, including Carlton Sherwood, listened to or read all of Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I do not understand why anyone would think Kerry was generalizing the atrocities to every soldier that served in Vietnam. He simply said what other soldiers told him. He didn't say everyone did these things. He didn't say most did these things. He said that Vietnam was a pointless war, and that some soldiers were guilty war crimes - PERIOD. Do they honestly think that their North Vietnamese captors had no idea those war crimes happened until Kerry said something about them?

One of these ex-POW's casually mentioned the My Lai Massacre as if it was an isolated incident in 1968.

From http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/trenches/mylai.html

"As the gruesome details of the massacre reached the American public serious questions arose concerning the conduct of American soldiers in Vietnam. A military commission investigating the My Lai massacre found widespread failures of leadership, discipline, and morale among the Army's fighting units. As the war progressed, many "career" soldiers had either been rotated out or retired. Many more had died. In their place were scores of draftees whose fitness for leadership in the field of battle was questionable at best. Military officials blamed inequities in the draft policy for the often slim talent pool from which they were forced to choose leaders. Many maintained that if the educated middle class ("the Harvards," as they were called) had joined in the fight, a man of Lt. William Calley's emotional and intellectual stature would never have been issuing orders."

We found out about all this in 1969. How could Kerry's testimony, in 1971, make things worse? If anything, he was reminding the Senate FRC about what a mess we STILL had in Vietnam and asking why we were still there. As Kerry said, "...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?"

Kerry's entire testimony here:

http://www.urich.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html

There were hundreds of American soldiers who were held as POW's in Vietnam. Carlton Sherwood found a relative handful, who were willing to go on the record against Kerry. A dozen bitter old men who've lived in denial for over 30 years about who the REAL bad guy was. It's hard to be a patriot and admit your government did something wrong. John Kerry did. They can't.

Side note: For the most part, I have to look things up when it comes to details about the Vietnam War. I was only 12 in the "Summer of Love" (1969). In looking up the dates and details on My Lai, I found out that the journalist that first broke the story was none other than Sy Hersh! Also, the first sentence of Carlton Sherwood's bio on the Stolen Honor website is:

"Carlton Sherwood is a distinguished newspaper and TV investigative reporter and the recipient of journalism's highest honors in print and broadcast news, the Pulitzer Prize and George Foster Peabody Award."

I found this regarding Sherwood's Pulitzer on Disinfopedia:

"Searching http://www.pulitzer.org fails to find any individual Pulizer prizes Carlton Sherwood has won. However, a front-page April 15th, 1980 article by Peter Kihss in The New York Times mentions that he was part of the Gannett News Service team that won the public service gold medal award in 1980, together with John M Hanchette and William F Schmick (for the Pauline Fathers scandal investigation). Indeed, Gannett News Service is listed as a winner of a 1980 Pulitzer prize."

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Carlton_Sherwood

[rainy]

1. Where did you watch it?

Has it aired an Sinclair stations yet?

[TexasBushwhacker]

4. Sorry - added the link to my original post

What Sinclair aired last night was an hour long program that included parts of both "Stolen Honor" and "Going Upriver". The link is to the entire "Stolen Honor" unedited. While it's clearly anti-Kerry, in fact Carlton Sherwood says that up front, it's worth watching if only to witness the mindset of these particular POW's. Keep in mind that there were hundreds of American soldiers that were held as POW's in Vietnam. Sherwood found a dozen or so that would further his agenda.

[mcg]

2. Carlton Sherwood also thinks the Moonie cult is AOK

"Sherwood authored a book on Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, 'Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.'"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_Sherwood>

Actually, Moon is the lead of a destructive cult and proclaims himself to be the Messiah, which is blasphemy. But that ok for the right-wingers , because Moon controls the right-wing rag 'The Washington Times' and has $$$. Lots of $$$.

Sherwood is also on Bush's payroll. He was supposed to create a web site for first reponders called www.firstrespond.gov which is way overdue. Instead he produces an anti-Kerry attack ad. It seems that something illegal is going on. There are some posts on DU about this.

[JohnnyRingo]

3. Thanx for the review.....

Very good.... I seriously doubt it swayed even a quarter percentage point worth of votes.....And at a VERY high cost:

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_5541.shtml

The advance attention did not attract advertisers.

On Baltimore's WBFF, the program had only two sponsors, a local furniture store and a group dedicated to "personal responsibility and protecting consumer choice."

In Richmond, Va., a car dealer and the same group were the only advertisers, with the rest of the spots filled by promos for network shows and news programs.

[dogtag]

5. I made it through "Bitter Old Farts Telling Lies" for about

20 minutes and had to click it off. I wonder if James Stockdale knows that they used his image in the film? He absolutely denied that John Kerry had anything to do with making their conditions any worse in the Hanoi Hilton and that they had never even heard of John Kerry. By the time JK spoke at the Senate, torture of POWs was over and their treatment had greatly improved as they waited for the peace talks to conclude. Since Stockdale was the highest ranking officer and the longest serving POW he would have known. Duh?

Do people who buy a ticket for this piece of crap wonder why John McCain isn't up on the screen babbling? James Stockdale? Or don't they think at all?