A Strong, Clear Voice (The Hidden Herbert)

Bob Herbert ruminates on John Kerry's 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the midst of the Vietnam War and noting Kerry's speech this weekend in Boston marking the occasion (35 Years Later fully available to Times Select subscribers):

I've felt all along that Democratic politicians, including Senator Kerry, have hurt themselves with their muddled messages on Iraq. Most elected Democrats have been petrified almost to the point of paralysis by their fear of being seen as soft on national security. So they've acquiesced to one degree or another in a war that in their heads and in their hearts they knew was wrong.

In his speech on Saturday, Senator Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had found a voice he'd been seeking through trial and error for a long time, perhaps since that springtime day in Richard Nixon's Washington in 1971.

"I believed then," he said, "just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and disserves our people and our principles."

He repeated his call for a complete withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year, and offered an uncompromising defense of the right of all Americans — including retired generals — to engage in "untrammeled debate and open dissent" on the war.

"I come here today," he said, "to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation."

[...]

In an interview after the speech, I asked Mr. Kerry about the secret prisons being run by the C.I.A. and the practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are abducted by the U.S. and sent off to regimes skilled in the art of torture.

He said he believed these policies were violations of the Geneva Conventions, then added: "But the more important thing is that they are violations of our values, violations of our principles. Who are we to run around the world saying protect the Falun Gong or somebody else's right to speak out, and then we're willing to take people without knowledge of [guilt or] innocence and throw them into torture situations. I think that's reprehensible."

Speaking of Kerry (and his 2004 running mate, John Edwards), Salon's War Room has a few tidbits from the Senator (and the former Senator) regarding the case of the firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy, who leaked information to the Washington Post about secret black ops prisons in Europe holding War on Terror suspects:

There is, as more than a few Democrats have noted, something of a double standard at work here. Scott McClellan once vowed that the president would fire anyone in his administration who leaked classified information. But Karl Rove and Scooter Libby leaked Valerie Plame's name with no repercussions, or at least none that came from the White House. While Libby was indicted -- and Rove still might be -- in the Plame case, Libby's indictment (and subsequent resignation) came on charges of lying, not leaking. As John Kerry put it over the weekend: In the case of fired CIA analyst Mary McCarthy, "you have somebody being fired from the CIA for allegedly telling the truth." In the case of Libby and Rove and who knows who else, "you have no one fired from the White House for revealing a CIA agent in order to support a lie."

As Raw Story notes, Kerry's 2004 running mate has proposed a logical if unlikely fix: Give Patrick Fitzgerald the power to investigate it all. In a petition posted on his One America Web site, Edwards says that the special prosecutor should be empowered to investigate whether the president himself ordered "selective leaking of classified intelligence" from the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in order to bolster his case for war.