By Gregory Korte
Enquirer staff writer

The man who interrupted Sen. John Kerry's speech in Cincinnati Wednesday is a 48-year-old Kentucky delivery driver who ran as a Republican for Bracken County judge-executive in 2002.

"You said you committed atrocities!" shouted Michael L. Russell of Foster at the beginning of Kerry's speech.

ELECTION 2004

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That was about all he got to say before a man sitting next to him wearing a sheet metal worker T-shirt got him in a headlock. Russell, a Teamster who got an invitation through his union, tried to continue, but 600 Kerry supporters shouted, "Ker-ry! Ker-ry! Ker-ry!" to drown him out.

Cincinnati police and U.S. Secret Service agents escorted Russell from the building. Neither he nor the man who grabbed him, who declined to give his name, was arrested.

"He was a plant, obviously," said David Mann, a former Cincinnati mayor and congressman, who was sitting immediately behind Russell. "He would have kept on talking."

"I have nothing but the greatest respect for people's right to express their opinion," Kerry said after the outburst. "I might add, it's a terrific tactic of the Bush team. They love to disrupt. They love to interrupt. They don't want America to hear the truth."

In an interview afterward, Russell said he wanted to ask Kerry about his 1971comments, "There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones.... I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages."

Kerry has since said he regrets using the word "atrocity."

Russell is not, as a Kerry campaign spokesman alleged Wednesday, the same Mike Russell who is the spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an anti-Kerry group.

Outside Union Terminal, the GOP protest was a small fraction of the 2,000-plus who protested President Bush's speech there two years ago.

"He's so indecisive - I don't think he's going to be a strong leader," Bush supporter Glen Comstock of Burlington, Ky., said of Kerry.

Afterward, GOP operative Alex Triantafilou of Green Township handed out DVD copies of a Republican-produced film on Kerry's evolving position on Iraq to reporters covering the speech.

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Cindi Andrews contributed. E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com