FOX News Channel managing editor and chief Washington correspondent Brit Hume and National Review Washington editor Kate O'Beirne gave credence to false claims made in the anti-Kerry film Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal. Appearing on FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Hume declared that the “most compelling parts” of Stolen Honor are the claims by the prisoners of war (POWs) featured in the film that “their treatment was worsened” and “their captivity was prolonged” because John Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate foreign relations committee was used against them. O'Beirne made a similar claim about Stolen Honor on the October 16 edition of CNN's Capital Gang: "[F]inally, 33 years later, these POWs are having their say. They couldn't talk then because they were rotting in jails in North Vietnam, being tortured to confess to the war crimes that John Kerry was busy accusing them of."

From the October 17 edition of FOX Broadcasting Company's FOX News Sunday:

HUME: The most compelling parts of the documentary, it seems to me, if that's what it is, is the word of these former POWs who say they had Kerry's name thrown in their face, and what he said in their face, when they were still captives. And they believe devoutly that their treatment was worsened by it, that they were being tortured to say the things that Kerry himself was saying, and that their captivity was prolonged because of it.

But as MSNBC correspondent David Shuster noted in his “Hardblogger” coverage of the presidential election for MSNBC, the claims by the POWs featured in Stolen Honor contain “prominent factual errors.” While the featured POWs claim that Kerry's anti-war activities lengthened their captivity (for example, former POW Jack H. Fellowes said, “we stayed two more years because of him [Kerry]”), Shuster noted, “the fact is, the war stopped in 1973 when the Nixon administration negotiated an end. History shows it was the lack of a settlement before then, not the protests [by Kerry and others], that kept the North Vietnamese fighting.”

As for the film's assertion that Kerry's actions “worsened” the POWs' treatment when under interrogation (text on the Stolen Honor website reads, “Their horrifying days of darkness, starvation and torture were made worse by the actions of a young American Officer named John Kerry”), remarks by two of the film's featured POWs contradict that claim. As Washington Dispatch managing editor Shane Cory noted in an October 15 editorial, Stolen Honor interviewee and former POW Jim Warner wrote in a July 2004 editorial for the military magazine Soldier of Fortune that “the last torture that we knew of had taken place in September of 1969.” That was two years before Kerry's 1971 testimony. Also, in the same editorial, Warner recounted an instance in which Kerry's name was used for interrogation purposes against him, but then noted that the interrogation occurred “without torture.”

Cory also documented that another POW featured in Stolen Honor, Leo K. Thorsness -- who claimed POWs were “tortured to say the same thing that he [Kerry] is saying” -- had actually admitted in a published bio that the use of torture had decreased by the time Kerry testified. Thorsness conveyed to the Missouri nonprofit group the POW Network on March 3, 1997, that the amount of torture he was subjected to had declined dramatically by the time Kerry returned from Vietnam to protest the war: “He [Thorsness] was held six years [1967-1973]. Three years were brutal and the second three years were 'boring' as torture eased because of pressure in the U.S. from family members.” As the Detroit Free Press noted on July 19, 2003, the POW Network is “a nonprofit in Skidmore, Mo., [which] has compiled about 5,000 pages of information from public records and published news accounts on missing military personnel and posted them on the Internet.”

Shuster also reported in his MSNBC coverage that he found no evidence Kerry's name was used in the interrogation of all American POWs in Vietnam: "[T]he film only features POWs who say John Kerry's name was invoked by north Vietnamese prison guards. But we've spoken to dozens of POWs who spent years in Vietnamese prison camps and say they never heard John Kerry's name mentioned once."

O'Beirne's claim, which the film made as well -- that Kerry “accus[ed]” the POWs of “war crimes” -- is also false. In his 1971 Senate testimony, Kerry was simply relating the personal experiences of other Vietnam veterans who had come forward and told their stories. Media Matters for America has previously noted this and numerous other false allegations in Stolen Honor.