Do you agree with LAT that the 2nd SwiftVets ad takes Kerry out of context?

The Kerry campaign and its allies — obviously including the Los Angeles Times — are reacting to the second SwiftVets ad thusly (second bracketed portion in original):

The ad does not make it clear that Kerry is recounting stories that came to light during the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit earlier in 1971, in which more than 150 honorably discharged veterans talked about war crimes they had committed in Southeast Asia. He was not claiming to describe events that he had witnessed.

Contrary to [SwiftVet ad spokesman Joe] Ponder's assertion, Kerry did not say that all soldiers committed heinous acts against the enemy. In his testimony excerpted in the Swift boat ad, Kerry was describing only what the Winter Soldiers said themselves that they had done.

"In the context of that testimony, this is not a statement of every soldier, sailor and Marine in Vietnam," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, whose organization documented the widespread recognition of the group's first ad.

"You can say that by repeating it, he's legitimizing [the allegations], but it's not fair to him to make it seem that he's making the charges himself and making them about all soldiers."

The Kerry campaign argued that the new ad took Kerry's Senate testimony out of context and edited his comments in a manner that distorted the facts.

Okay then, let's see.  Let's ignore, for example, that many of those whom the LAT characterizes as "more than 150 honorably discharged veterans" were complete phonies who never served at all in Vietnam.

Here's quite a bit more of what young Kerry said under oath to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971, just to add some context that the SwiftVets short ad didn't have time for, and that the LAT certainly wants to ignore.  The full context makes it absolutely clear that Kerry was purporting to speak for many more than just the veterans then protesting in Washington, and of many more than just the veterans who'd "testified" in Detroit (boldface mine throughout):

STATEMENT OF JOHN KERRY, VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR Mr. Kerry: Thank you very much, Senator Fulbright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington, Senator Pell. I would like to say for the record, and also for the men behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1000, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony.

Here young Kerry has deliberately and explicitly begun his prepared statement by claiming not to speak only of, or for, the "Winter Soldier 150," but at a minimum for at least 1000 veterans (presumably then in Washington for the ongoing antiwar protests) — and more likely for a "they" and a "them" consisting of a "very much larger group of veterans in this country."  In terms of who Kerry's speaking for, then, everything else in his testimony was subject to his claims in this introduction.

I would simply like to speak in very general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification yesterday you would hear me and I am afraid because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

Again, Kerry claims to be "representing all those veterans" — at a minimum the "1000" and more probably the "very much larger group."  He does here make his first reference to the 150 so-called "Winter Soldiers," without identifying them yet by that name.  But he immediately and deliberately broadens the remaining scope of all his Senate testimony by making the charge that the war crimes of which the 150 Winter Soldiers "testified" were "not isolated incidents."  Rather, says young Kerry — and this is a line that wasn't included in the SwiftVets' ad, but completely undercuts any claim that Kerry's testimony is now being taken "out of context" — the war crimes of which the 150 Winter Soldiers spoke were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."  It is simply impossible to square that line with any of Sen. Kerry's or his supporters' current efforts to minimize the scope of the accusations he made in 1971 or the targets of those accusations.

Having indicted the entire US military, both in the field and at "all levels of command," young Kerry did indeed next return to a specific discussion of what the 150 Winter Soldiers had claimed:

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

With that last phrase, young Kerry goes out of his way to broaden the responsibility for the acts about which the 150 Winter Soldiers "testified" to the entire United States.  Continuing:

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

This language is in the SwiftVets' second ad.  To claim, as Kerry's campaign and supporters and the LAT does, that he was speaking only of the 150 Winter Soldiers absolutely ignores the deliberate, sweeping indictment immediately above it — "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."  And indeed, the whole point of the Winter Soldiers charade was not for them to confess individual atrocities they had committed, but to present those as being representative of normal US military practice, carried out with the full knowledge, conplicity, and responsibility of everyone up the entire chain of military command.

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation."  The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now.  We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.

The reference to "what went on in Vietnam," again, is a reference to the broad pattern that both the 150 Winter Soldiers and the 1000 antiwar protesters claimed to have seen.  The "we" in the phrase "the crimes which we are committing" can refer, at a minimum, to the 1000 protesters — since Kerry wasn't himself one of the 150 Winter Soldiers, "we" couldn't mean just them — but far more likely, the "we" was meant to refer to the entire American military.  Otherwise, the war protesters wouldn't have been going to petition Congress, but to turn themselves in to the MPs.

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

Here it is absolutely clear that the "monster" created by the claimed systematic commission of and complicity in war crimes encompasses "millions of men."

The next several paragraphs, discussing Vice President Agnew's characterization of veterans who were protesting the war, can fairly be read as Kerry speaking for, and of, a limited subset of the American military.  But then he shifts back into a broader mode, first referring to "we" war protesters, but then clearly indicting the entire American military presence in Vietnam beginning with the odd phrase "our taking umbrage" (when he probably meant "taking refuge," although umbrage can also mean "shade" in addition to meaning "a feeling of anger caused by being offended"):

We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country, the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions also, the use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.  That is what we are trying to say.  It is part and parcel of everything.

Only when he reaches this next to last sentence has young Kerry shifted back into "we" war protesters.  But even then, he deliberately broadens the scope of his accusations, painting what "we [war protesters] are trying to say" as being "part and parcel of everything."

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I could continue.  Throughout the remainder of young Kerry's prepared statement, and then through his responses to the softball questions tossed to him by fawning senators, he continues to pontificate about the entire American military and indeed, the entire American culture — arguing, for example, that the entire culture bears responsibility for war crimes like those of which Lt. William Calley was convicted.

But surely this is enough for one to ask — Who, exactly, is Sen. Kerry now trying to kid?  How stupid, exactly, do Sen. Kerry and his proxies think the American people are?

The simple fact is that the SwiftVets would have loved to add more context to their ad, I'm sure.  The closer one looks at the full context, the more powerful the conclusion becomes that John Kerry's sworn, televised testimony in the United States Senate was an indictment of the entire American presence in Vietnam — from the lowest buck private to the Commander in Chief, and indeed beyond that to the entire nation.

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Update:  Add PBS Newshour talking head Mark Shields to the list of those desperately trying to insist that the SwiftVets second ad takes Kerry's testimony out of context.  (Hat-tip: Power Line.)  Captain Ed also points to CNN's attempts to make the same claims, and adds his own excellent debunking of those claims, quoting not only from the Senate testimony but a contemporaneous Kerry appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" (rebroadcast this year) in which Kerry asserted his first-hand knowledge of, and personal involvement in, the same types of "war crimes" that he'd broadly accused the entire US military of complicity in during his Senate testimony. 

Finally, I've noted some minor variations in the transcription of Kerry's Senate testimony from the source I linked above and the .pdf scan from the Congressional Record; I've edited my blockquotes above to conform them to the Congressional Record version, and I've also interspersed throughout them more specific comments of my own, outside the blockquotes, regarding who Kerry claimed to be speaking for, and who he claimed to be speaking of, at various points in his testimony.