By Kathleen Kern

Listening to George W. Bush and John Kerry debate who would kill terrorists with more alacrity made me sympathize with those who do not vote for reasons of conscience.

But even if I am not enthusiastic about Kerry, I am concerned by the media coverage of his 1971 testimony before Congress. I am disturbed that the mainstream media have by and large not challenged the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who claim Kerry lied when he testified that U.S. soldiers had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . randomly shot at civilians, razed villages . . . and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

I understand why a POW tortured by his Vietnamese captors into confessing atrocities he did not commit might feel bitterness toward Kerry. And certainly, most soldiers did not commit atrocities. But I don’t understand why most media let the comments about Kerry’s “lying” pass without comment. One can easily find documentation of all the crimes Kerry described on the Internet or a trip to the library.

The media silence is ironic, considering that the month before the Swift Boat Veterans launched their organization at a news conference last spring, the Toledo Blade received the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering atrocities committed in Vietnam by the Tiger Force, an elite U.S. military platoon, in 1967.

The Blade’s series, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” includes examples of almost all the war crimes Kerry listed in his testimony:

— Sgt. Dennis Stout — an army journalist who vowed to remain alive so that he could report on the war crimes of the Tiger Force and other units in the 101st Airborne Division — watched 22 paratroopers rape and execute a Vietnamese woman. Another soldier reported that his unit raped a 13-year-old girl before slashing her throat.

— Former platoon medic Larry Cottingham told army investigators: “There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears” cut from victims they killed and strung on shoelaces.

— Another medic, Harold Fischer, told the Blade that he witnessed Pvt. Sam Ybarra leaving a hut with a bloody necklace on his wrist. Fischer looked inside and found a decapitated baby.

— Fischer, in describing the murder of civilians said, “We would go into villages and just shoot everybody. We didn’t need an excuse. If they were there, they were dead.” He also told the Blade that a Pvt. Colligan tested a new 38-caliber handgun by killing an elderly man near the village of Chu Lai.

— In the Son Ve valley, the Tiger Force spent two months burning down villages in order to get the inhabitants to leave. William Doyle — a soldier whom Army investigators urged not to report war crimes — told the Blade: “If you wanted to burn a village down, you burned it down. . . . Who’s going to say anything to you?”

Kerry told NBC’s Meet the Press in a 1971 interview that he himself had burned villages. He then described how that destruction and other actions committed by him and his unit violated the Geneva Conventions and other international laws.

I wish I could have voted for the 1971 Kerry instead of the 2004 Kerry. As it is, I take some consolation from the fact that my primary citizenship is in the kingdom of God, where I don’t need to vote for the One who will govern me. In that kingdom, truth is more important than political power, repentant sinners will always find a home, and atrocities never happen.

(The Toledo Blade series on the Tiger Force is posted here.)