US: The credibility of a group vilifying Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in TV ads over his combat record in Vietnam has been undermined by the unearthing of statements many made earlier praising Mr Kerry as a war hero and by revelations of connections between the group and the Bush-Cheney campaign.
As the bitter controversy dominated the campaign over the weekend, Mr Kerry's aides released a video comparing the attack on him to that on Republican senator Mr John McCain by a fringe group of veterans during the 2000 Republican primaries.
Mr McCain, who has been campaigning in support of Mr Bush, said the ads attacking Mr Kerry were "dishonest and dishonourable" and called on Mr Bush to disown them, which the president has declined to do.
"Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" has been running TV ads for several days in which former crew members of Swift boats in Vietnam question Mr Kerry's account of how he earned his combat medals as a Swift boat commander in 1969.
Most of the funding for the group - $200,000 - came from Mr Bob Perry, a long-time associate of Mr Bush's political adviser, Mr Karl Rove, and a major donor to Mr Bush's campaigns in Texas.
One of the veterans in the ads, retired air force colonel Mr Ken Cordier, turned out to be a volunteer from the Bush campaign's veterans' steering committee and had to resign on Saturday when this came to light.
The ads challenge Mr Kerry's account of how he won his five medals in Vietnam and specifically that he came under fire when rescuing a comrade from the Mekong River.
The leader of the group is retired rear-admiral Mr Roy Hoffmann, who began contacting other veterans after the publication early this year of Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty, a book about Mr Kerry's time in Vietnam. In the book, the Democratic candidate recalls Mr Hoffmann acting like the hawkish colonel in Apocalypse Now who boasts how he "loved the smell of napalm in the morning".
In the ads Mr Hoffmann accuses Mr Kerry of dishonesty, but last year he wrote in the Boston Globe that Mr Kerry was a "good man" whose actions in winning a silver star "took guts and I admire that". Mr Hoffmann also now attacks Mr Kerry's tactic of turning the Swift boats into an ambush to surprise the attackers as impulsive to a fault.
However at the time he recommended Mr Kerry's initiative as a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy", according to military records cited by another Swift boat commander, a Chicago Tribune editor, who yesterday broke a 35-year silence to defend Mr Kerry's account.
Mr William Rood (61) wrote in a 1,750-word article in yesterday's Tribune: "It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there."
He said the ambush tactic worked as his and Mr Kerry's boats "roared into" the ambush, taking rocket and automatic weapon fire, and scattered the attackers. Under fire, Mr Kerry chased and killed a Vietcong and returned with the man's loaded B-40 rocket launcher, he recalled.
Mr John O'Neill, another leader of the group who was recruited by President Nixon in the 1970s to attack Mr Kerry for his anti- war protests, had described the Vietcong as a "teenager in a loincloth", but Mr Rood said he was a grown man in Vietcong clothes and one of a group of ambushers.
Other inconsistencies in the ads of the anti-Kerry group have emerged.
Veteran Mr Adrian Lonsdale says Mr Kerry "lacks the capacity to lead" but in 1996 he described him as "among the finest of those Swift boat drivers" who acted with "bravado and courage".
Veteran Mr George Elliott says Mr Kerry "has not been honest" about what happened in Vietnam, but records show that in 1996 he praised his courage in chasing an "armed enemy". In his official fitness report on Mr Kerry at the time, Mr Elliott described his decisive action in combat as "unsurpassed".
The Swift boat group's claim that Mr Kerry was not under fire when rescuing a comrade, Mr James Rassmann, from the Mekong, for which he received the Bronze Star, was contradicted yesterday by Mr Wayne Langhofer, who was manning a machine gun in the boat behind Mr Kerry's: he told the Washington Post he saw firing from both banks of a river.
The Kerry video released yesterday alleged that "George Bush is up to his old tricks". It showed Mr Bush, then Texas governor, and Senator McCain, a Vietnam veteran who was tortured while a POW, in an exchange during a televised debate in February 2000.
The Arizona senator said that when a "fringe" veteran group attacked him at a Republican function for deserting Vietnam veterans, Mr Bush stood by and didn't say a word. "That really hurt. You should be ashamed," Mr McCain told Mr Bush in the video.
Mr Kerry said on Saturday the president should "stand up and stop" the personal attacks and "have the courage to talk about it".
This week the anti-Kerry group is running a new ad criticising Mr Kerry's congressional testimony in the 1970s alleging US troops committed atrocities in Vietnam. This and his anti-war activity in the 1970s accounts for much of the bitterness in the debate over what happened more than three decades ago.
The Kerry campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, alleging the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are co-ordinating their ads with the Bush campaign. The Bush-Cheney campaign said the complaint was "frivolous" and denied any connection with the ads.
"The president has made it repeatedly clear that he wants to see an end to all" advertising from outside groups, said spokesman Mr Steve Schmidt, adding that "the president has made clear that he regards John Kerry's service as noble".
He criticised the Kerry campaign for statements by surrogates criticising Mr Bush's National Guard service.
The attack ads by the veterans' group have been seized upon by conservative commentators to savage Mr Kerry and, with the issue dominating talk radio and cable TV, they have succeeded in raising public doubts about the record of the candidate who served in Vietnam rather than that of Mr Bush who didn't.
This has had an impact on Mr Kerry's poll ratings: two weeks ago the Democrat was level with Mr Bush at 46 per cent each in support from veterans but a CBS poll on Friday showed Mr Kerry trailing the president by 55-37 per cent among veterans.