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Media Scope
"Don't Tell Rassmann About Rashomon EffectMan Kerry saved says facts not open to interpretation.By Andrea WoodHis name is Rassmann not Rashomon, and while this retired police officer has testified in enough trials to witness how truth can be subjective, he also has seen people lie.As every criminal investigator knows, the Rashomon Effect -- named for the famous Japanese movie that depicted conflicting stories told by eyewitnesses to the same crime -- sometimes makes the truth of a particular event impossible to discern. But in the case of what happened 35 years ago on the Bay Hap River in Vietnam, Jim Rassmann swears there is no doubt about what happened -- and no doubt that at least two of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are liars.Rassman is the former Army Special Forces officer whose life Lt. John Kerry saved March 13, 1969 when the Democratic presidential nominee pulled him out of the river and onto the U.S. Navy swift boat he commanded. He contacted the Kerry campaign in January -- the first time he had spoken to him since 1969 -- and was featured in an emotional television commercial that many observers said catapulted Kerry into first place in the Iowa caucuses. "I owed him," Rassmann says. "I would not be alive today if it weren't for John Kerry."It turns out that Rassmann would not be defending his integrity today if it weren't for John Kerry. Nor would the crew of Kerry's swift boat -- all of whom confirm they were under heavy enemy fire when Rassmann was pulled out of the water, the incident that earned Kerry his Bronze Star for heroism.And it turns out that swift boat veterans who weren't on Kerry's boat or in the same vicinity -- or even in Vietnam when he was -- wouldn't be accusing the candidate and his crewmates of lying about what happened 35 years ago if Kerry had not returned home from Vietnam and become a leader in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Rassmann says."Only two of Kerry's accusers were present that day," Larry Thurlow and Jack Chenoweth, "and they say Kerry's lying, I'm lying and everybody on Kerry's boat is lying. Those two people are not telling the truth," Rassmann says, "and they've laid out their motivation for everyone to see. Before they presented the ads, they said, 'John Kerry is a traitor,' because he came back from the war, spoke out against it, and talked about the atrocities that were occuring."Even the people on Thurlow's boat confirm they were all under fire when Kerry pulled him from the water, Rassmann relates. "To me, spending so much of my career in court and dealing with intense questioning, I find it interesting that in response to new testimony like that, Thurlow makes up excuses. And when it finally was revealed that his own bronze star says we were under fire, he said Kerry wrote it [the incident report] which is ridiculous," he says.Rassmann has spent nearly every day since the Democratic National Convention -- where he and the crew of Kerry's PCF-94 stood front and center with the candidate -- telling his account of what happened March 13, 1969, to veterans, reporters and talk radio announcers. His campaign itinerary brought him to VFW 3538 in Struthers Sept. 3, then to the Canfield Fair where he was interviewed by WKBN-AM's Dan Rivers, who had previously described him as the man whose life "Kerry allegedly saved." Rassmann also met with local television reporters, one of whom described him on that night's broadcast as "the man who claims Kerry saved his life."Rassmann's efforts at damage control -- no one has ever claimed that Kerry did not pull Rassmann out of the river -- brought him to the Mahoning Valley four weeks after ads claiming Kerry was lying about his war record were broadcast here, in Toledo and five other small markets in West Virginia and Wisconsin. The $550,000 campaign was paid for by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a committee funded by one of George W. Bush's biggest backers in Texas, advised by an attorney to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and put together by John O'Neill, a Vietnam veteran -- now a Texas lawyer -- recruited by the Nixon White House to debate Kerry in 1971. The broadcast bomb drop, timed for the slow-news lull between the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, was coordinated with publication of O'Neill's book, Unfit for Command. Anti-Kerry commentators quickly fell into step and recited the talking points to inflame the troops via talk radio and cable news shows."These Swift Boat guys are using the politics of misdirection, innuendo and misrepresentation to attack John Kerry," Rassmann says, "and these attacks on Kerry are also attacks on me personally. For the first time in my life, I've been called a traitor and I don't appreciate it.""