Enemy Combatant
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Swift Boat Incredulants For Proof
Turns out that -- when backed to the wall -- Swift Boat Nixon hitman John O'Neill does pretty good "nuance," too. From the Associated Press this morning:
During an Oval Office conversation in 1971, John O'Neill tells President Nixon he was in Cambodia in a swift boat during the war — a claim that is at odds with O'Neill's recent statements that he wasn't in the country.
"I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border," O'Neill is heard telling Nixon in a conversation that was taped by the former president's secret recording system. The tape is stored at the National Archives in College Park, Md.
In an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press, O'Neill did not dispute what he said to Nixon on June 16, 1971, but he insisted he was never actually in Cambodia.
"I think I made it very clear that I was on the border, which is exactly where I was for three months," O'Neill said of the conversation. "I was about 100 yards from Cambodia."
* * * * *
In the book [he co-authored "Unfit For Command" -- Regnery White Supremacist Press, 2004], O'Neill wrote that Kerry's accounts of having been in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968 "are complete lies."
He wrote that "Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone there."
Uh huh. And that danger of court-martial is surely why O'Neill took great pains -- in that recorded 1971 conversation, directly with his Commander-in-Chief -- to make it crystal-clear precisely where he himself had been in relation to the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. Right!
Glad we cleared that up!
