Kerrey War Crimes

From 1966 through early 1969, Kerrey was a gung-ho Navy SEALs officer. In February of his final year, Kerrey’s unit slaughtered 21 innocent women and children in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. This horrific incident is commemorated in a display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The display includes several photos, a drain pipe, and a placard that includes the following historical crime-scene background:

“From 8PM to 9PM February 25th, 1969, a group of Seal Rangers [sic] (one of the most selective rangers of U.S. Army): led by Lieutenant Bob Kerry [sic] reached for Hamlet 5, Thanh Phong Village, Thanh Phu District, Ben Tre Province. They cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh’s necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disembowelledone. Then, these rangers moved to dug-outs of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowelled a girl…It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public.”

It was a CIA operation, part of the Agency’s notorious Phoenix Program. Kerrey, historian John Mariciano notes, hardly just fell into a chaotic situation that led inadvertently to unpredictable civilian deaths. As Marciano explains:

“he was on a CIA mission and participated in an ‘illegal, premeditated mass murder.’ According to an investigative report in The New York Times, one thing is certain: Around midnight on February 25, 1969, Kerrey’s unit killed at least 13 innocent civilians….no guerrillas were killed in action and the official report was a lie…Attacks such as these…were part of the Phoenix Program and run by the CIA. Kerrey and his team were part of a larger campaign to murder and terrorize Vietnamese civilians. The object of this program was to target not only individual members of the [revolutionary Vietnamese] National Liberation Front’s political infrastructure, but also their families, friends and neighbors. These war crimes were a central part of the CIA’s actions during the war.”

According to witnesses from his unit and the village, Kerrey helped kill the elderly Bui Van Vat and gave the order to shoot women and children. A “baby was the last one alive,” unit member Gerhard Klann recalled. “There were blood and guts splattered everywhere.”

Kerrey was awarded the Bronze Star for commanding this “heroic” action, falsely reported by Kerrey and the U.S. military as having “killed 21 Viet Cong guerillas.”

“Imagine,” Vietnam-based educational consultant Mark Ashwill wrote last July, “what would happen if a foreign university in the United States appointed an individual who had killed US civilians…to serve as chair of its board of trustees? Or…‘If the post-war West German government had selected a former German army officer who had killed (or ordered the killing of) unarmed French civilians to head the Goethe Institute in Paris [historian David Marr]…’”

“The Destruction Was Mutual”

Kerrey admitted that he’d killed noncombatant Vietnamese women and children after 16 years in higher political office, after one initially promising but failed presidential bid (1991-92), and just two months after he was installed atop the New School. The compelling force behind his long- overdue confession was not a sudden surge of moral guilt and courage on his part but rather his knowledge that the New York Times and CBS News were about to expose his war crime. The confession came with the nauseating excuse that “both sides did a lot of damage in the Vietnam War” – a preposterous suggestion of moral equivalence for the colossal calamities resulting from a prolonged assault on a poor peasant nation by the most potent military killing machine in history.