During every interrogation session, said Warner, his Vietnamese jailers echoed Kerry's charges that he was a war criminal. "The memory of that was still pretty fresh in my mind, and I was extremely uneasy. ... This officer said I committed crimes, that this war was illegal. ... All along they told us they would execute us for our 'crimes.'"

His captors even waved a four-page transcript of Kerry's Senate speech, Warner said, where the Democratic nominee had accused his brother soldiers of raping, torturing and mutilating innocent Vietnamese civilians.

The ex-POW said also that audio from Kerry's speech was regularly played on Radio Hanoi and piped into the prison camp.

But what particularly incensed him was efforts by Kerry and Jane Fonda to use his parents for propaganda purposes - by persuading them to appear at the Fonda-sponsored Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971.

"His sisters had told him that Fonda and Kerry were involved in getting his parents to appear," UPI said.

"The [North Vietnamese guards] were always talking about that [anti-war demonstrations], and they picked right up on Kerry's throw-away line, 'Don't be the last man to die in a lost cause,'" ex-POW Kenneth Cordier told UPI. Cordier, an Air Force pilot who spent 2,284 days as a prisoner, said his jailers "repeated [Kerry's quote] incessantly."

He also remembers his captors using photographs of the protest march where Kerry famously threw his war medals over the White House fence.

"They kept talking about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War [Kerry's group]," recalls a third ex-POW.

Navy pilot Paul Galanti told UPI that his Hanoi Hilton jailers would cite Kerry as a shining example of someone who had seen the light and had "crossed over to the people's" side.

Editor's note: