MY HYPOTHESES
Before anyone goes ballistic on this past as being either irrelevant or speculative. I will admit it is speculative but not irrelevant to see the underlying mechanisms they used to convince both themselves and so many others. And on my own behalf I want to say that I early on was concerned with the ostrich like stance of the Kerry campaign because they could not fathom that their own probity could be called into question, and I think events have borne out that there was danger lurking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?hp
HOW O'NEILL AND CORSI CREATED THE LIES
1. GROUPTHINK HYSTERIA
Think back to other eras of groupthink hysteria like the girls accusing others in the Salem Witch trials. They put together things and one improbable lie was used to create and bolster other improbable lies. They really believed what they said.
These are interesting passages from the NY Times
_ About 10 veterans met in Ms. Spaeth's office in Dallas in April to share outrage and plot their campaign against Mr. Kerry, she and others said. Mr. Lonsdale, who did not attend, said the meeting had been planned as "an indoctrination session."
What might have been loose impressions about Mr. Kerry began to harden.
"That was an awakening experience," Ms. Spaeth said. "Not just for me, but for many of them who had not heard each other's stories."-
Roy Hoffman brings them together in a room. he needs to exact revenge against Kerry because Brinkley's book Tour of Duty calls him bloodthirsty. Before the book he had neutral or good things to say about Kerry.
In the room there is "indoctrination" as Merrie Spaeth admits. They put things together, with anger toward Kerry because of his anti-war activities, that really don't go together. One man's speculations becomes another man's truth to which,in historical revisionism, a third man turns himself into an actual witness of events he really didn't see. I.e. Van O'Dell says he was there when Kerry saved Rassman. He is confabulating his own and others false memories.
LEADING QUESTIONS LEAD TO QUESTIONABLE AFFADAVITS
The group decided to hire a private investigator to investigate Mr. Brinkley's account of the war - to find "some neutral way of actually questioning people involved in these incidents,'' Mr. O'Neill said.
But the investigator's questions did not seem neutral to some.
Patrick Runyon, who served on a mission with Mr. Kerry, said he initially thought the caller was from a pro-Kerry group, and happily gave a statement about the night Mr. Kerry won his first Purple Heart. The investigator said he would send it to him by e-mail for his signature. Mr. Runyon said the edited version was stripped of all references to enemy combat, making it look like just another night in the Mekong Delta.
"It made it sound like I didn't believe we got any returned fire," he said. "He made it sound like it was a normal operation. It was the scariest night of my life."
By May, the group had the money that Mr. O'Neill had collected as well as additional veterans rallied by Mr. O'Neill, Mr. Hoffmann and others. The expanded group gathered in Washington to record the veterans' stories for a television commercial.
Each veteran's statement was written down as an affidavit and sent to him to sign and have notarized. But the validity of those affidavits soon came into question.
Mr. Elliott, who recommended Mr. Kerry for the Silver Star, had signed one affidavit saying Mr. Kerry "was not forthright" in the statements that had led to the award. Two weeks ago, The Boston Globe quoted him as saying that he felt he should not have signed the affidavit. He then signed a second affidavit that reaffirmed his first, which the Swift Boat Veterans gave to reporters. Mr. Elliott has refused to speak publicly since then.
The private dick interviews people, slants the story to show Kerry in a bad light, feeds it back to these men, some of whom let it pass: others who are alarmed like Runyon. He then gives these affadAvits to O'Neill and Corsi and probably in a rolling report kind of way, they use one inaccurate affadavit to help distort other men's recColections so as to bias others memories. They then come up with more confabulated affadavits.
This is the kind of technique that haS been called into questions when wrongly used in big child abuse scandals. It has been called FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME. Remember becaus of their anger about what Kerry did after the war, they are predisposed to believe the worst.
This would explain the bizarre actions of George Elliot.
Elliott is quoted as saying that Kerry ''lied about what occurred in Vietnam . . . for example, in connection with his Silver Star, I was never informed that he had simply shot a wounded, fleeing Viet Cong in the back..
Yesterday, reached at his home, Elliott said he regretted signing the affidavit and said he still thinks Kerry deserved the Silver Star.
''I still don't think he shot the guy in the back," Elliott said. ''It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words. I'm the one in trouble here."
Elliott said he was no under personal or political pressure to sign the statement, but he did feel ''time pressure" from those involved in the book. ''That's no excuse," Elliott said. ''I knew it was wrong . . . In a hurry I signed it and faxed it back. That was a mistake."
Elliot was fed both the doctored words of the other vets about the Silver Star episode, and the private detective fed him back an affadavit that did not square with his own words or earlier defense of John Kerry. So...his initial hesitance and his first retraction about it being a "terrible mistake" is explained. After his 2nd retraction, he said he had been convinced by what the other vets had said in the O'Neill and Corsi book.