Re America Loving Its Trained Assasssins - Seal Clergyman - Bob Kerrey of 19 Fame

Yesterday's news contained an item that revealed how very high the esteem for the Navy SEAL is in America society.

Navy Seals - Local pastor made up elaborate Navy SEAL tale , Yahoo News, (The Patriot News , Jenny Kane) 5/10/11

"amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up!"

"In the wake of the dramatic Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's compound earlier this month, it was perhaps to be expected that some expansive soul would step forward to claim the prestige of a fabricated tour as a SEAL for himself. This time the exposed fabricator was a preacher--though people who monitor this brand of public lie note that members of the clergy are often tempted into such misrepresentations.

Jim Moats, the pastor at Christian Bible Fellowship Church in Newville, Penn., spun some fantastical details of his alleged time as a Navy SEAL during the Vietnam War.

Several former SEALs wrote in to the Patriot-News casting doubt on the reverend's account of his service. "We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It's amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up," said retired SEAL Don Shipley. ... Moats did serve in the Navy from 1970-74, but did not fight in Vietnam."

What kind of commentary is it on the mind of the average American

and his or her clergy if having killed poor Vietnamese in stealth and covert attack as members of Navy SEAL assassination squads shall attract more worshipers to one's congregatiion? (nominally a Christian congregation led by a minister or priest paid to promote the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.)

For a anti-war activist in the Albert Einstein tradition, Bob Kerrey is a good example of  American adulation for the Seals.

On May 1, 1901, four months before 9/11, for one agonizing hour on 60 Minutes, former N avy Seal Bob Kerrey, ashen faced trying to defend himself, even at one point depreciating his victims right to life, "They [the 18 massacred girls and one old man] were at the very least, at the very least, [Viet Cong] sympathizers!."

Kerrey had been exposed by his point man, no longer able to live with his conscience, of having ordered a massacre thirty years before. It had happened during a night raid on a hamlet in territory controlled by Vietnamese nationalist forces fighting the American invaders as they had the French and Japanese during decades before. Kerrey's assignment was to 'take out' a leader. His group initially found and murdered an old man along with two women in a hut (Kerrey referred to the hut as a hooch), Kerrey holding the man down while another Seal cut his throat.

At least one Vietnamese woman supported his point man's version of the subsequent event - "the group of girls shot at point blank range, with the baby's cry being silenced by a further shot."   Kerrey said the civilians were killed at a distance, in the dark of night, as his squad was returning enemy fire. But  historian Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the New School said, "It strains credibility to believe they fired wildly into the black night and killed everybody. Look at how the bodies were huddled together.

Kerrey's face was on the covers of Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, etc, and on the front pages of every newspaper thereafter for days if not weeks.

Yet, the following year, Kerrey was appointed member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (popularly known as the "9/11 Commission"). Was if because Kerrey was thought to be an expert on terrorists - Kerrey by then, having a reputation for being involved in terrorism himself?  Or more likely for his being a VIP for having been a candidate for the 1992 Democratic nomination for president, earlier Governor of and U.S. Senator from Nebraska, and in 2000 still considered 'presidential timber.'

Just consider, America almost had a ex-Navy Seal as president who would have had to admit to an atrocity and fraudulently accepting a medal for it within a year after his election.

And a scant six years later, the breaking news all day on a Monday in December of 2007. "Hillary Clinton has picked up the endorsement of Bob Kerrey, President of New School University, former Senator and Governor of Nebraska!" - long repeating interviews of Kerry on CNN etc.

A few of us, then election news watchers, still remembered the grueling shame of Kerrey's confession. The Village Voice (New School University is in Greewich Village) wrote, "The New School's Kerrey Crisis" - An Antiwar Institution Agonizes Over a President Who Killed Unarmed Vietnamese Civilians. In front of the New School auditorium, they gathered a thousand strong. They came to hear from a man who had recently admitted to killing Vietnamese women and children 32 years earlier, a man who was now their New School president and Congressional Medal of Honor winner."

Today, in 2011, Kerrey is still President of New School U. though he had been made infamous by the same war promoting U.S. media, which had taught Kerrey how to think about Vietnam so well that he had stated many times that he intended "to take Hanoi with a knife in my teeth,"