AP quick to point on Drudge: O'Niell Lied!!

[bfp]

I have been following the AP closely, and it seems to me that the ONLY STORIES they will publish are attacks on the swiftboat vets. But they get it wrong. O'Niel didn't lie. I can't believe the AP is only reporting one side of the issue. Everytime there is something against the swiftboats, they pounce, but if it's against Kerry, they don't report. Notice how they talk about O'Neil lying, but the AP NEVER EVER mentioned that Kerry lied, which he did. There is proof. Back to the story.



AP: Swift boat veteran lied about being in Cambodia:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ts_1&printer=1



On instapundit.com though, they clearly set things straight. Read below:

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CAMBODIA UPDATE: John Cole notes that John O'Neill says he was in Cambodia on a Swift Boat. He says this hurts O'Neill's credibility.

Does this suggest that Kerry might have been there? Maybe it would, if the Kerry campaign hadn't already admitted that he wasn't.

But it's worth noting that O'Neill was in Vietnam longer than Kerry:


After a year on the Woodpecker, O'Neill transferred to the Swift boats in the spring of 1969, serving on them until the summer of 1970. His boat was fired on many times as it patrolled the Cambodian border, as well as the Uminh and Namcan forests in southern Vietnam. In the Swifts, says O'Neill, the average length of service was twelve months; John Kerry was in for four.


Why does that matter? Because he was serving (as Kerry was not) during the Cambodia incursion of 1970, which began on April 29 and lasted two months. (Nixon didn't deny that operation; it was official, and large, and well-publicized, and presumably pre-existing barriers at the border would have been removed.) But Kerry was long gone by then.

As I say, I don't see how O'Neill's presence in Cambodia at some later date -- and it had to be later because O'Neill wasn't in the area yet at Christmastime of 1968 -- can possibly make a difference regarding Kerry's Christmas claims, which are reproduced below for convenience. (And go here to see Kerry's "five miles inside Cambodia" claim.) Especially given that the Kerry campaign has already retreated from the claim that Kerry was in Cambodia in Christmas of 1968. But maybe I'm missing something. And O'Neill, of course, should explain what's going on.

By the way, has anyone looked to see if President Nixon (who of course wasn't President until January 20, 1969) ever denied that we had U.S. forces in Cambodia during the time that Kerry was serving in Vietnam?


UPDATE: Okay, O'Neill has responded. (I'd know that if I weren't boycotting Fox because of it's right-wing smear campaign against InstaPundit!) Here's the key bit from CNN suggesting an inconsistency on O'Neill's part:


O'Neill said no one could cross the border by river and he claimed in an audio tape that his publicist played to CNN that he, himself, had never been to Cambodia either. But in 1971, O'Neill said precisely the opposite to then President Richard Nixon.

O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.


So that would undercut the "nobody could cross" bit, right? Now here's what O'Neill said on Hannity & Colmes:


O'NEILL: Alan, yes, they are, Alan. It's two different places, Alan. One place is along the Mekong River, right in the heart of the delta. The second place is on the west coast of Cambodia at a place called Ha Tien, where the boundary is right along that border.

Where Kerry was in Christmas of 1968 was on this river, the Mekong River. We got about 40 or 50 miles from the border. That's as close as we ran.

Later, Kerry went, and I went, to a place called Bernique's Creek — that was our nickname for it — at Ha Tien. That was a canal system that ran close to the border, but that wasn't at Christmas for Kerry. That was later for him.

So it's two separate places, Alan, and the story is correct.


Unless there's more to this story, I don't think it undercuts O'Neill's credibility -- and it certainly doesn't support Kerry's Christmastime claims at all.

In fact, the whole thing seems to bear out Ann Althouse's prediction that the Kerry Campaign's strategy would be to try to create a "swirly mass of confusion" to deflect these charges. It's unfortunate that Big Media folks are falling for it. Er, or helping it along.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Manyen emails: "How about we all agree we shouldn't vote for ANYONE that falsely claims to have been in Cambodia between 1968 and 1972?"