Swift Boat Veterans for Truth announced a second anti-Kerry ad Aug. 20, using Kerry’s own words against him. It features the 27-year-old Kerry in 1971 telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stories about American troops cutting off heads and ears, razing villages “in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan” and committing “crimes … on a day-to-day basis.”

The Kerry campaign called it a smear and said his words were “edited” out of context. 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. But Kerry passed them on as true stories.

The ad characterizes Kerry as making “accusations … against the veterans who served in Vietnam.” The Kerry campaign denies that, saying Kerry was placing blame on the country’s leaders, not the veterans. But Kerry himself said earlier this year that his words were those of “an angry young man … inappropriate … a little bit excessive … a little bit over the top.”

Kerry’s critics point to a 1978 history of Vietnam that challenged some of the witnesses Kerry quoted. But other published accounts provide ample evidence that atrocities such as those Kerry described actually were committed.

The ad’s title is “Sellout,” and features Vietnam veterans saying Kerry “dishonored his country” and aided the enemy by airing allegations in 1971 of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam.

On Aug. 20, the Kerry campaign issued a statement calling the ad an a smear and a distortion, saying it “takes Kerry’s testimony out of context, editing what he said to distort the facts.”

There is some missing context. What’s missing from the ad is that Kerry was relating what he had heard at an an event in Detroit a few weeks earlier sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and was not claiming to have witnessed those atrocities personally.

Here is a more complete excerpt of what Kerry said, with the words used in the ad bold-faced so that readers can judge for themselves how much the added context might change their understanding of how Kerry was quoted in the ad:

Kerry Senate Testimony (1971): “I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

The record gives no sign that Kerry doubted the stories he was relating. In fact, he said earlier this year that he still stands by much of what he said 33 years earlier and that “a lot of them (the atrocity stories) have been documented.”

One veteran who appears in the ad says “The accusations that John Kerry made against the veterans who served in Vietnam was just devastating.” Kerry’s campaign insists his 1971 testimony as “an indictment of America’s political leadership – not fellow veterans.”

As an example, Kerry aides point to a portion of Kerry’s testimony in which he places the blame for the 1968 My Lai massacre not on the troops, but on their superiors: “I think clearly the responsibility for what has happened there lies elsewhere. I think it lies with the men who designed free fire zones. I think it lies with the men who encourage body counts.” But that statement came only in response to a direct question, long after Kerry volunteered his description of rapes and mutilations.

Earlier in 1971, during an NBC “Meet the Press” interview, Kerry explicitly spoke of “the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas” and said he considered them “war criminals.” But he did not draw such a sharp distinction between leaders and followers during the”atrocity” portion of his Senate testimony.

Kerry critics have long disputed that atrocities by U.S. forces were as prevalent as Kerry suggested. And at least some of the testimony at the “Winter Soldier” event was called into question by historian Guenter Lewy in a 1978 book, “America in Vietnam.” Lewy noted that the event had been staged with financial help from Jane Fonda. He stated that many of the Winter Soldier participants later refused to speak to investigators for the Naval Investigative Service even though they were assured that they wouldn’t be questioned about atrocities they might have committed personally. Lewy also suggested that some of the witnesses were impostors:

Guenter Lewy, “America in Vietnam” (1978): “But the most damaging finding consisted of the sworn statements of several veterans, corroborated by witnesses, that they had in fact not attended the hearing in Detroit. One of them had never been to Detroit in all his life. He did not know, he stated, who might have used his name.”

Kerry’s critics point to that as evidence that he was irresponsibly passing on false atrocity stories. However, there’s no question that events such as Kerry described did happen, as Lewy himself stated:

“Incidents similar to some of those described at the VVAW hearing undoubtedly did occur. We know that hamlets were destroyed, prisoners tortured, and corpses mutilated.”

Some atrocities by US forces have been documented beyond question. Kerry’s 1971 testimony came less than one month after Army Lt. William Calley had been convicted in a highly publicized military trial of the murder of the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai hamlet on March 16 1968, when upwards of 300 unarmed men, women and children were killed by the inexperienced soldiers.

And since Kerry testified, ample evidence of other atrocities has come to light:

• Son Thang: In 1998, for example, Marine Corps veteran Gary D. Solis published the book, “Son Thang: An American War Crime,” describing the court-martial of four U.S. Marines for the apparently unprovoked killing of 16 women and children on the night of Feb. 19, 1970, in a hamlet about 20 miles south of Danang. The four Marines testified that they were under orders by their patrol leader to shoot the villagers. A young Oliver North appeared as a character witness and helped acquit the leader of all charges, but three were convicted.

• Tiger Force: The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a series published in October 2003 reporting that atrocities were committed by an elite U.S. Army “Tiger Force” unit that the Blade said killed unarmed civilians and children during a seven-month rampage in 1967. “Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed – their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings,” the Blade reported. “Investigators concluded that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged.”

• “Hundreds” of others: In December 2003, The New York Times quoted Nicholas Turse, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who has been studying government archives, as saying the records are filled with accounts of atrocities similar to those described by the Toledo Blade series. “I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported,” Turse was quoted as saying. “I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn’t stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That’s the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds.”

• “Exact same stories:” Keith Nolan, author of 10 published books on Vietnam, says he’s heard many veterans describe atrocities just like those Kerry recounted from the Winter Soldier event. Nolan told FactCheck.org that since 1978, he’s interviewed roughly 1,000 veterans in depth for his books, and spoken to thousands of others. “I have heard the exact same stories dozens if not hundreds of times over,” he said. “Wars produce atrocities. Frustrating guerrilla wars produce a particularly horrific number of atrocities. That some individual soldiers and certain units responded with excessive brutality in Vietnam shouldn’t really surprise anyone.”

Aside from his Senate testimony, the young Kerry spoke publicly in 1971 of “war crimes,” and said in his April 18, 1971, NBC “Meet the Press” interview that he had personally engaged in “atrocities” like “thousands of others” who engaged in shootings in free-fire zones. He said then that he considered the officials who set such war policies to be “war criminals.” But 30 years later, anticipating a run for the White House, Kerry took a more conciliatory tone when confronted by NBC’s Tim Russert, again on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” program:

Kerry (May 6, 2001; Meet the Press): “I don’t stand by the genocide I think those were the words of an angry young man. We did not try to do that. But I do stand by the description – I don’t even believe there is a purpose served in the word war criminal.’ I really don’t. But I stand by the rest of what happened over there, Tim. … (We) misjudged history. We misjudged our own country. We misjudged our strategy. And we fell into a dark place. All of us. And I think we learned that over time. And I hope the contribution that some of us made as veterans was to come back and help people understand that.

“I think our soldiers served as nobly, on the whole, as in any war, and people need to understand that.”

And earlier this year, Kerry was again pressed on his 1971 antiwar views, and responded to some of the same points now being raised anew in the Swift Boat Veterans ad. He said his 1971 words were “honest” but “a little bit over the top.”

Analysis provided by FactCheck.org, a service of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. For more information, visit FactCheck.org.