Anti-Kerry Documentary, 'Stolen Honor', Riddled With Errors

The documentary that Sinclair Broadcast Group has instructed 40 of its television stations to feature in a broadcast on Friday night makes some of the most serious accusations against Senator John Kerry of the campaign. The accusations include that he single-handedly prolonged the Vietnam War, worsened the torture of prisoners of war and ultimately caused countless, needless deaths with his antiwar activism 30 years ago.

The film is rife with out-of-context and incomplete quotations from Mr. Kerry and other antiwar veterans. Several historians said many accusations in it were not provable or stretched far beyond reality.

Throughout, the film shows wrenching images of torture as ex-prisoners of war recount the deep sense of betrayal they felt after hearing about Mr. Kerry's Senate testimony in 1971 in which he recounted atrocities by American troops.

Mr. Kerry's backers acknowledge many veterans' frustration over Mr. Kerry's antiwar statements then. The supporters have not actively challenged assertions from former prisoners of war who are anti-Kerry that their Vietcong captors referred to his testimony during torture.

Historians not connected to the Kerry campaign dispute the central assertion of the film, that Mr. Kerry was responsible for prolonging the war and the prisoners' torture. In the film, several veterans estimate that the war dragged out for an extra two years because of Mr. Kerry's statements in 1971.

Some historians say that gives Mr. Kerry, and probably the antiwar movement, too much credit. Although the North Vietnamese were well aware of antiwar sentiment in the United States and took heart from it, the movement was in full steam by the time Mr. Kerry joined.

''The rise of the antiwar movement had been a factor in North Vietnamese decision making six or seven years before Kerry joined it,'' said William J. Duiker, a former professor of East Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University who has written extensively about the wartime strategy of Hanoi, where he was stationed in the mid-1960's while in the foreign service. The only factor that changed the way prisoners of war were treated, Professor Duiker and others said, was the peace treaty that President Richard M. Nixon signed with the North Vietnamese in 1973 that paved the way to release the prisoners.

The film opens with the film's producer, Carlton A. Sherwood, a former investigative reporter and a Vietnam veteran, saying although he has undertaken many journalistic endeavors, the history of Mr. Kerry's antiwar activism is ''a lot more personal.'' He recalls listening to Mr. Kerry's testimony in 1971, saying, ''I felt an inner hurt no surgeon's scalpel could remove.''

Other veterans appear, saying Mr. Kerry wrongly accused them of war crimes. The film says Mr. Kerry never saw the atrocities he reported. It has a snippet of his testimony on soldiers' cutting off ears and raping women. The snippet is edited to a sentence where Mr. Kerry says he did not witness those scenes, that he was reporting testimony from the Winter Soldier hearings that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War used in 1971 to show that war crimes like the My Lai massacre were not isolated.

Mr. Kerry made clear in his testimony and on ''Meet the Press'' that year that he was not blaming the veterans but rather the leadership that had come up with ''free fire'' zones, encouraged body counts and authorized areas for airstrikes.

Kenneth Cordier, a former war prisoner and former volunteer veterans' adviser to President Bush's campaign, says in the film, ''I was outraged, and still am, that he willingly said things which were untrue.''

Several historians said yesterday that Mr. Kerry's testimony could be legitimately criticized for greatly exaggerating the frequency of atrocities but that atrocities did occur.