A challenge to the Swifties’ veracity—unanswered, then answered

In a CNN transcript, Wolf Blitzer was interviewing John O’Neil of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, along with former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Crowe, about the disputed Bronze star incident, in which a mine exploded and Kerry pulled Jim Rassmann out of the water. The SBVTs claim, of course, that Kerry initially fled the scene in his boat before returning to pick up Rassmann. Crowe says:

If one of the boats fled, under fire and the other boats didn’t bring him into account with a senior officer, that makes no sense whatsoever, that defies reason. Fleeing under fire, of course, is a general court martial offense. The Navy has ways to do that. What were these other skippers are doing?

That seemed like a good question to me. It made O’Neil’s case look weak, and I was eager to read how O’Neil would answer. But instead Blitzer says, We have to go to a commercial, but when we come back we’ll ask John O’Neil to respond to Admiral Crowe’s question.

However, after the break, Blitzer asks O’Neil an entirely different question, leaving Crowe’s challenge unanswered, and leaving this reader frustrated at Blitzer’s sheer incompetence and sloppiness.

Here’s where the Internet comes to the rescue. In a discussion at FreeRepublic, a poster named Congressman Billybob quoted Crowe’s challenge to O’Neil (quoted above), and then continued:

Excuse me Admiral crowe, the claim was there was no enemy fire. false hypothetical. the theory is, Kerry heard the explosion and trucked out of there, dropping Rassman over the boat in the process. When he realized what went on, he returned and picked up Rassman. Meanwhile the other boats were helping get the other boat crew (the one hit by the mine) out of the water.

Of course, I say to myself. Kerry said that the mine exploded and threw the men into the water, that the Swift boats came under fire from the shore, and that he rescued Jim Rassmann while they were under fire. It’s the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who say that after the mine explosion, there was no fire from the shore, but that Kerry fled in his boat anyway thinking there was fire, that Rassmann fell off Kerry’s boat while it was fleeing, and that Kerry returned a little later to pull Rassmann out of the water.

So Crowe’s challenge to O’Neil was based on a factually false premise. Crowe was asking why they didn’t report Kerry for fleeing under fire—when the whole point of their account was that they weren’t under fire, but that Kerry fled anyway.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 12, 2004 01:48 AM | Send