John LeBoutillier
Thursday, August 28, 2003

Kerry - desperate to regain some momentum to the surging Howard Dean - has arranged this 'pro-military' event to contrast his Vietnam War record to George Bush's and to mock Bush's May 1 carrier landing off the coast of San Diego.

Kerry, of course, is a total political prostitute. He voted last October for the Iraq campaign; now that it has soured he is aping Howard Dean's strong anti-war stance. But Kerry was also bothered by Bush's flight-suit-wearing carrier landing. He thought that was wrong for someone who never served in the military.

Both Kerry and Bush were - and are - wrong for using U.S. Navy carriers as campaign props - especially when neither of them ever served on a carrier.

If the first President Bush or Senator John McCain - both carrier pilots - had used their old carriers in their campaigns it would be totally defensible. But this President Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam. And John Kerry piloted Navy patrol boats in Vietnam.

It is unseemly to use our fighting men and women as 'campaign props' - especially when they are dying daily in Iraq.

Both Bush and Kerry are playing politics with our soldiers. But I guess we should not be surprised. Let us examine a few facts:

Team Bush has covered up about our U.S. POWs from the Vietnam War - and we were lied to back in 1991 about Navy Pilot Scott Speicher when he was shot down in Iraq.

High-ranking members of the administration have served for up to thirty years in previous White Houses. During that time they had a hands-on role in the intelligence about living U.S. POWs held against their will in Vietnam and Laos.

In June 1992 Russian President Boris Yeltsin personally told NBC News and President George H.W. Bush that there "might" be living U.S. POWs from the Vietnam War alive "in the territory of the former Soviet Union."

What did the first Bush Administration do about this earth-shattering claim from the elected President of Russia? Did they rush teams to the former USSR to search? Did they pay Russia to help us 'find' these American heroes? No! They mocked Yeltsin! National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft backgrounded the press that Yeltsin "must be drunk."

Almost every member of the first Bush Administration's national security team is now a member of this Bush Administration including Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice and Scowcroft.

At the same time that Team Bush was ignoring Yeltsin's claim, up on Capitol Hill the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POWs was also purposefully downplaying the possibility that some American POWs were still alive in the former USSR. He was holding hearings - rigged hearings - that he used to 'close the books on the POW issue' as an impediment to normalizing relations with Hanoi.

That chairman was Senator John F. Kerry.

Now the two camps - Bush and Kerry - are vying for the pro-military audience.

And yet they have both run roughshod over thousands of pages of hard intelligence - much harder than that indicating WMD in Iraq - that has shown U.S. POWs still being held against their will in SE Asia.

Kerry's USS Yorktown escapade particularly rankles: in 1944 my uncle, John LeBoutillier (after whom I am named) was a carrier pilot on the Yorktown.

He took off one day on a bombing mission and was shot down over the tiny island of Rota. They never found him, his plane or his body. His mother - my grandmother -never got over the loss of her "baby." She waited six months after the September 1945 end of the war and when all the POWs had come home and there was no John LeBoutillier she died. The stress, worry and despair literally killed her.

To think of John LeBout's ship being used as a campaign prop by a weasel senator who helped cover-up the existence of POWs from another war is enough to make all of us sick.