Frank Church's Gift From The Grave To The Kerry Campaign

Thomas Lipscomb has looked very closely at what The Fly Under the Bridge Academy has long suspected. Ted Kennedy is responsible for the belated honorable discharge that John Kerry received:

The "honorable discharge" on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry's record, according to Mark Sullivan, who retired as a captain in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve in 2003 after 33 years of service as a judge advocate. Mr. Sullivan served in the office of the Secretary of the Navy between 1975 and 1977.

....There should have been an honorable discharge certificate issued to Kerry in 1975, if not earlier, three years after his transfer to the Standby Reserve-Inactive."

....Kerry spokesman David Wade did not reply when asked if Mr. Kerry was other than honorably discharged before he was honorably discharged.

".... the rule is that no certificate will be awarded to an officer separated wherever the circumstances prompting separation are not deemed consonant with traditional naval concepts of honor. The absence of an honorable discharge certificate for a separated naval officer is, therefore, a harsh and severe sanction and is, in fact, the treatment given officers who are dismissed after a general court-martial."

With the only discharge document cited by Mr. Kerry issued in 1978, three years after the last date it should have been issued, the absence of a certificate from 1975 leaves only two possibilities. Either Mr. Kerry received an "other than honorable" certificate that has been removed in a review purging it from his records, or even worse, he received no certificate at all. In both cases there would have been a loss of all of Mr. Kerry's medals and the suspension of all benefits of service.

Certainly something was wrong as early as 1973 when Mr. Kerry was applying to law school.
Mr. Kerry has said, "I applied to Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. I was extremely late. Only BC would entertain a late application."

.....A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar.

The fact that Mr. Kerry had cancelled his candidacy for a Congressional seat in 1970 in favor of Father Robert Drinan cannot have hurt Mr. Kerry's admission to Boston College. The Reverend Robert Drinan's previous position was dean of the Boston College Law School.

Given this, it is likely that a legal review took place that effectively purged Mr. Kerry's Navy files and arranged for the three-year-late honorable discharge in 1978.

Here Lipscomb has done some real detective work, and finds that the Navy was likely complying with The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that resulted from the infamous Church Committee:

In the Foreign Surveillance Act of 1977, legislation introduced by [Senator Ted] Kennedy to enforce the findings of the Church Committee, there is language that literally describes the behavior of Mr. Kerry. The defined behavior that could no longer be subject to surveillance without warrants includes: "Americans having contact with foreign powers in the case of Americans who were active in the protest against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Some of them may have attended international conferences at which there were representatives of foreign powers, as defined in the bill, or may have been directly in communication with foreign governments concerning this issue."

Which is why Senator Kerry didn't get his honorable discharge on time. Because he was in violation of both the UCMJ prohibition against an officer of the U.S. military meeting with the enemy, and of the Constitution's definition of Treason.

Iow, Senator Kerry has the dubious distinction of being the first major party candidate for President (or Vice-President) since Aaron Burr of being in jeopardy of his life for betraying his country. And he knew it:

One of Mr. Kerry's first acts of office as he entered the Senate on January 3, 1985, was making sure what was still in the Navy files. A report was returned to Mr. Kerry by a Navy JAG on January 25, 1985, and appears on the Kerry Web site. There is an enclosure listed that may have contained a list of files, according to David Myers, the JAG who prepared it, that is not on Mr. Kerry's Web site. It could have provided an index for all of Mr. Kerry's Navy files.
All officials with knowledge of what specifically happened in Mr. Kerry's case are muzzled by the Privacy Act of 1974.The act makes it a crime for federal employees to knowingly disclose personal information or records.