It's a bit long but full of good wholesome factual evidence:

In response to that eloquent letter addressed to “John” where good ole Ollie first needs to mention all those things that aren't really "the problem." Oliver North is on a personal crusade against Kerry (whom he doesn't even have enough respect to refer to him as Senator Kerry! I bet you'd never hear him refer to President Bush as 'George').

As it would be inappropriate to make an unsubstantiated accusation, I'll back up my theory with information compiled in a 2003 article in the Boston Globe (I know the Globe is left-leaning and therefore inaccurate, right?)

The following are excerpts from the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON -- On a summer day in 1986, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gathered behind closed doors off the chamber floor to hear the sales pitch of a brash freshman, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

Now, at age 42, Kerry was a senator himself, the US was embroiled in another anti-communist crusade in a distant land, and Kerry was determined to prevent a repeat of Vietnam.

He had spent the spring conducting an…investigation into reports that the Reagan administration was illegally providing aid to the rebel Nicaraguan Contra armies, which were attempting to overthrow the left-wing government of that Central American nation. At this closed session, he planned to urge the committee to launch an official probe.

On this and related issues, Kerry's relentless drive "came largely from Vietnam veteran syndrome," said former aide and investigator Jack Blum, describing the disillusionment that returning soldiers often felt as a result of that divisive war. "You come home and discover that people who are running the war are just interested in covering their ass; meanwhile, real people are dying real deaths. ... This was a very searing business."

In the course of their investigation, Kerry and his staff had found evidence that some contras had ties to drug smuggling. The committee reached a consensus: It would investigate the contras and the contra-drug connection.

John Kerry and Oliver North were just three months apart in age. Both served in Vietnam. Both were renowned for their daring, and both won Silver and Bronze Stars. Kerry had three Purple Hearts; North had two.

But while Kerry returned from the war speaking against needless deaths and government lies, North believed that Vietnam was an honorable stand against communist tyranny. North blamed antiwar protesters for forcing the United States to prematurely bring its troops home. The Iran-contra probe would pit these two determined figures against each other.

The Cold War was reaching its final stages when Kerry entered the Senate in 1985. Reagan had been re-elected in a thunderous landslide in November of 1984 and was using his administration to help the contra armies destabilize the Sandinista government of Nicaragua as part of a global strategy to give the tottering communist empire a final shove.

Reagan had carried Massachusetts that fall, but the contra cause was unpopular in the state. House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill Jr., a Democrat from Cambridge, feared the United States would be drawn into another Vietnam in the jungles of Central America, and he worked with Congressman Edward Boland, an old Democratic pal from Springfield, to attach a series of "Boland amendments" to appropriation bills, banning or limiting US aid to the contras

During this time, North had secretly begun to organize a complex scheme to raise money from wealthy conservatives, foreign nations, and eventually from the proceeds of secret arms sales to circumvent the Boland amendments and keep the contras in the field.

Kerry worried that a repeat of Vietnam -- with a White House misleading the public -- was in the making. "A central part of my campaign had been the notion that I would bring to the Senate the experience of the Vietnam period, which cautioned me against the kind of illegal activities we were hearing about, and the things that were going on," Kerry recalls. "Literally, I did do an ad hoc investigation."

In late 1985, an intriguing report came to Kerry's staff from John Mattes, a public defender in Miami. Mattes had a client who claimed to know all about the contras' secret supply network. Kerry's staff interviewed Mattes and his client and traveled to Costa Rica to quiz other young men who allegedly had been working in a US-sanctioned contra supply network.

"It was like a detective story at that point," recalls Jonathan Winer, who was Kerry's counsel. The clues pointed to "violations of US law by the Reagan administration, including this guy Ollie North, who I didn't know anything about."

On hearing some of the wilder allegations brought to him by his staff -- tales of mercenaries and smugglers and assassination plots -- Kerry recalls that he would grimace and complain: "This is cockamamie. It cannot be true."

Kerry enjoyed the trust of Senator Richard Lugar, the respected Republican who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"He understood that I was ambitious and serious about the work that we were doing, an enormous agenda, and in fairness, he regularly participated," Lugar says. "He was not one of the dissident types. I did not see in him someone who was out there going after President Reagan, out after a Republican president."

But North, who declined repeated requests for an interview, did see Kerry as a threat to Reagan. His notebooks, later obtained by Congress, were peppered with notations of concern about Kerry, his staff, and their freelance investigation. On April 18, 1986, North wrote: "Sen. Kerry trying to get evidence linking RR [Ronald Reagan] to La Penca," the location of an attempted assassination attempt against a contra leader by hardliners in the movement.

`In early 1986, people like North were deathly afraid of what Kerry was after," says Tom Blanton, the executive director of the National Security Archive, a research organization in Washington.

Before long, Kerry encountered resistance. Congressional investigators would later detail how the government intimidated Kerry's witnesses, including a mysterious figure named Jack Terrell, who claimed to have been a contra adviser operating under the nom de guerre "Colonel Flaco."

Terrell told Kerry and a handful of investigative reporters that North's supply network had been used to smuggle arms and drugs.

In a memo to Reagan, later obtained by the Iran-contra committee, North warned that "Terrell's accusations are at the center of Senator Kerry's investigation." North labeled Terrell a possible Nicaraguan spy, potential presidential assassin, and a "terrorist threat."

The Secret Service was alerted, and the FBI placed Terrell under surveillance. Agents tailed him, combed his telephone records, searched his garbage, and pressured him into taking a polygraph test. They ultimately determined he was no threat to the president, but his eagerness waned and he never testified.

Elsewhere, Republican staffers on the Foreign Relations committee leaked details of Kerry's probe to the administration. The Washington Times, a paper known for its conservative ties, published stories containing allegations that Kerry's office was inducing witnesses to commit perjury. At North's insistence, the FBI began to compile information on the Kerry investigation.

Then, in early November 1986, a Lebanese newspaper broke the news of US arms sales to Iran. A few weeks later, the White House disclosed that funds from the sale had been diverted to supply the contras.

Democratic leadership gave Kerry chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations and a charter to dig into the contra-drug connection. The subcommittee published a report in 1989 that concluded the CIA and other US agencies had turned a blind eye to drug trafficking occurring on the fringes of the contra network. In many cases, traffickers were using the same airplanes, airfields, and other resources that the contras were using.

Ultimately, the subcommittee's findings on the scope of the contra-drug connection were validated by two subsequent federal investigations. Inspectors General at the CIA and the Justice Department found that these agencies had done little or nothing in response to hundreds of allegations that elements of the contras and their supply networks were involved with drugs.

"Kerry's proven conclusion was that the government, especially the CIA, looked the other way," says Blanton. "The Kerry committee findings hold up."

In an off-shoot of the contra-drug investigation, Kerry examined reports that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was involved in drug trafficking. The probe led to information that Noriega was shipping money out of Panama.

Kerry was on his way to a second term, where Vietnam -- a war that he questioned, then fought for, and then opposed -- would continue to define his senatorial career, just as it had in the 1980s.

"Vietnam is a lesson," Kerry says. "It is history to me. It can guide me, but it doesn't run me. You have to move on and I moved on long ago. But the lessons are valuable."

-end of Boston Globe article

I gotta say, it sounds to me like Ollie is using the campaign to settle an old score. But that is speculation. Let’s delve a bit deeper into the main point of his letter. Ollie suffers from the same inability to remember all of the words from a quote. Republicans have this uncanny knack for taking quotes from their opponents out of context and spinning them into negative points. Now before you groan and think about clicking that delete button up there, just bear with me a moment.

In his letter Ollie states: “On April 22, 1971, under oath, you told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that you had knowledge that American troops "had 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, 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."

Of course if he actually read the full transcript of Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he would realize he left out a few key words like: "...veterans testified to war crimes…” and “They told the stories…” When you return these nine words to their rightful place, the quote reads a bit differently:

“…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....”

“They told the stories at times they had 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, 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 countryside 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.”

He goes on to state: “...In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom…is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart....”

…and continues: “At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the security and freedom I will be one of the first people to pick up a gun and defend it, but right now we are reacting with paranoia t this question of peace and the people taking over the world.”

Ollie must of have missed this part of the testimony as well:

“I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read. …the response to it within two and a half weeks from Vietnam was 1,200 members. I think they are expressing, some of these troops, solidarity with us, right now by wearing black arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the War buttons. They want to come out and I think they are looking at the people who want to try to get them out as a help.”

“However, I do recognize there are some men who are in the military for life. The job in the military is to fight wars. When they have a war to fight, they are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these men feel they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I think to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the hollowness, the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home.”

The last thing I’ll say about Ollie’s letter is in response to this little tidbit:

“…instead of standing by your sworn testimony, you confessed that your words "were a bit over the top." Does that mean you lied under oath?”

Well Ollie, let’s not go there. After all who was convicted of obstructing justice by lying before Congress, again? Oh, yeah.

But wait, there's more! This is in regard to Kerry’s voting record on defense since we know how this subject keeps coming up again and again. This information was compiled by “War Stories” journalist Frank Kaplan.

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie On Sen. John Kerry’s Defense And Intelligence Record: “What he’s not proud of, apparently, is his votes in the United States Senate when it comes to national security policy: votes against the Apache helicopter, votes against the Stealth bomber … He voted against the first Gulf War in 1991.”

While he was single-handedly dismantling our armed forces there were other things happening on Capital Hill... like this:

“After completing 20 planes for which we have begun procurement, we will shut down further production of the B-2 bomber. We will cancel the small ICBM program. We will cease production of new warheads for our sea-based ballistic missiles. We will stop all new production of the Peacekeeper [MX] missile. And we will not purchase any more advanced cruise missiles. … The reductions I have approved will save us an additional $50 billion over the next five years. By 1997 we will have cut defense by 30 percent since I took office.”

The speaker was President George H.W. Bush in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 1992.

Oh and I especially like this one:

“Overall, since I've been Secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That's the peace dividend. … And now we're adding to that another $50 billion … of so-called peace dividend. Congress has let me cancel a few programs. But you've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements. … You've directed me to buy more M-1s, F-14s, and F-16s—all great systems … but we have enough of them.”

This came out of the mouth of Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney just 3 days later.

Even Colin Powell jumped on the defense-cuts wagon while serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the same hearings, he testified about plans to cut Army divisions by one-third, Navy aircraft carriers by one-fifth, and active armed forces by half a million men and women, to say noting of "major reductions" in fighter wings and strategic bombers.

I want to clarify Kerry’s voting record. The claim about these votes was made in the Republican National Committee "Research Briefing" of Feb. 22 and bandied about by almost every conservative since. The report lists 13 weapons systems that Kerry voted to cut—the M-1 tank and the F-14, F-15, and F-16 fighter planes, as well as Patriot air-defense missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and AH64 Apache helicopters, among others. But Kerry didn't really vote to cut them.

Most of these weapons systems were included as footnotes in Senate bill S. 3189 (CQ Vote No. 273) on Oct. 15, 1990. S. 3189 was the Fiscal Year 1991 Defense Appropriations Act, and CQ Vote No. 273 was a vote on the entire bill. There was no vote on those weapons systems specifically.

On a couple of these weapons the RNC report cites H.R. 5803 and H.R. 2126. They are votes on the House-Senate conference committee reports for the defense appropriations bills in October 1990 (the same year as S. 3189) and September 1995.

In other words, Kerry was one of 16 senators (including five Republicans) to vote against a single defense appropriations bill 14 years ago. He was also one of an unspecified number of senators to vote against a conference report on a defense bill nine years ago.

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie went on to claim at a news conference that in 1995, Kerry voted to cut $1.5 billion from the intelligence budget. Here is the real clarification for this cut: The Air Force's National Reconnaissance Office had appropriated that money to operate a spy satellite that was never launched. So the Senate passed an amendment rescinding the money.

From 1989-92, he supported amendments to halt production of the B-2 stealth bomber. In 1992, George H.W. Bush halted it himself.

“Kerry also voted for amendments to restrict the deployment of the MX missile (Reagan changed its deployment plan several times, and Bush finally stopped the program altogether) and to ban the production of nerve-gas weapons.”

BUT…what they didn’t mention:

“At the same time, in 1991, Kerry opposed an amendment to impose an arbitrary 2 percent cut in the military budget. In 1992, he opposed an amendment to cut Pentagon intelligence programs by $1 billion. In 1994, he voted against a motion to cut $30.5 billion from the defense budget over the next five years and to redistribute the money to programs for education and the disabled. That same year, he opposed an amendment to postpone construction of a new aircraft carrier. In 1996, he opposed a motion to cut six F-18 jet fighters from the budget. In 1999, he voted against a motion to terminate the Trident II missile. (Interestingly, the F-18 and Trident II are among the weapons systems that the RNC claims Kerry opposed.)”

Again more examples of the RNC taking bits and pieces of the story for the purpose of spinning them into talking points that continue ringing in everyone’s ears.