On August 27, both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times gave discredited co-founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (and co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry) John E. O'Neill a forum for more false attacks on Senator John Kerry and for misleading claims about O'Neill's own military and political records. While the Journal published an op-ed by O'Neill, the Times ran a profile piece on Kerry's chief critic.

O'Neill denied personal, organizational connections to GOP in Journal; the claim was backed up by The Washington Times

In his op-ed for the Journal, titled "We're Not GOP Shills," O'Neill claimed that the Swift Boat Vets “do not take direction from the White House or the president's re-election committee” and that "[t]he Swift boat veterans who joined our group come in all political flavors." Media Matters for America has documented the numerous connections between Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the GOP, as well as the long-standing Republican ties of O'Neill himself.

Of Swift Boat Vets' funding, O'Neill stated, “To date, we have received $2 million from 30,000 Americans who have donated an average amount of around $64.” What O'Neill neglected to mention, but MMFA has noted, is that $200,000 of the group's funding comes from one man -- prominent Texas Republican and Bush-Cheney '04 campaign contributor Bob Perry.

In his profile of O'Neill, the Times' Jerry Seper simply repeated O'Neill's claims that “he is not a partisan and he actually voted against Mr. Bush in 2000, supporting Al Gore, and Ross Perot in 1996,” without noting any of O'Neill's ties to Republicans going back to the Nixon administration or his history of contributions to Republican candidates.

Times neglected to mention O'Neill's lie about Cambodia

In addition to ignoring O'Neill's slanted political record, The Washington Times also neglected to mention a lie by O'Neill about his military record. The Times reported that O'Neill “said his [swift] boat patrolled an area about 100 yards outside the Cambodian border for nearly three months.” While O'Neill now denies ever having been in Cambodia -- and claims to know Kerry was never there because, he says, no U.S. crewman went into Cambodia during the war -- a newly released audiotape of O'Neill meeting with former President Richard Nixon in 1971 reveals that O'Neill told Nixon that he was in fact in Cambodia on a swift boat during Vietnam.

Journal gave forum for O'Neill to distort Kerry testimony, Times distorted testimony by itself

The Journal editorial also allowed O'Neill to unleash another false attack against Kerry; O'Neill claimed that Kerry “disgraced all legitimate Vietnam War heroes when he falsely testified to Congress that we were war criminals.” As MMFA has documented, Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was an indictment of the leaders of the time and did not blame the soldiers who reported having committed atrocities in Vietnam.

The Washington Times bolstered the false claim that Kerry accused Vietnam veterans of atrocities in his testimony by reporting: “Mr. Kerry told the committee that U.S. soldiers and sailors in Vietnam 'personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies...'” The Times left off key first words of this quote from Kerry's testimony: “They told the stories at times they had personally raped...” and did not mention that Kerry actually was relating the stories of other Vietnam veterans who came home and testified to their personal experiences in what was known as the Winter Soldier Investigation, which Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had commissioned a few months earlier in Detroit, Michigan. The Times even falsely claimed that only after being challenged by O'Neill about the incidents on The Dick Cavett Show, “Mr. Kerry then said the incidents had been relayed to him by other veterans.” The Times' selective editing of Kerry's 1971 testimony replicated that of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's second ad. As FactCheck.org has noted, “The ad does indeed fail to mention that Kerry was quoting stories he had heard from others at an anti-war event in Detroit, and not claiming first-hand knowledge.”