On Friday, December 21, Barack Obama announced his second choice to replace the soon-to-be disgraced Hillary Rodham Clinton as Secretary of State. After unceremoniously tossing his U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice, under the Benghazi cover-up bus, he announced his intention to appoint Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the party’s unsuccessful candidate for president in 2004.
In making the announcement, Obama said, “As we turn the page on a decade of war, he (Kerry) understands that we’ve got to harness all elements of American power and ensure that they’re working together. John has earned the respect and confidence of leaders around the world.” Then, in what can only be interpreted as a back-handed reference to his own lack of experience, Obama concluded by saying, “He is not going to need a lot of on-the-job training.”
Well, that depends. The last time we had a chance to evaluate Kerry’s fitness for high public office was in November 2006 when he let it be known that he felt he deserved a second chance at the presidency in 2008. Oddly enough, I agreed. Not because I thought he’d make a halfway decent president, but because it would have provided us with yet another opportunity to see the last 100 pages of his military records – the military records that he has buried every bit as deeply as Obama has buried every conceivable record of his life prior to 2008.
So what do we actually know about Kerry’s military service? We know that he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve on February 18, 1966 for a six year commitment, ending on February 17, 1972; that he was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Navy on December 16, 1966; and that he left the Navy sometime in either 1971 or 1972. However, records released during his 2004 campaign for the White House provide little or no information regarding his release from active duty. Instead, documents displayed on his official website indicated that he received an honorable discharge on February 16, 1978, six years after his commitment ended.
The cover letter transmitting his February 1978 discharge papers, signed by Navy Secretary, W. Graham Claytor, indicated that the honorable discharge was granted at the “direction of the president,” and upon “the approved recommendations of a board of officers convened… to examine the official records of officers of the Naval Reserve on inactive duty…”
The “approved recommendations of a board of officers?” Why was it necessary for a “board of officers” to study Kerry’s fitness for an honorable discharge, six years after his enlistment was over? According to an October 13, 2004 story by Thomas Lipscomb in the New York Sun, the referenced sections of the U.S. Code authorizing such an evaluation refer to “the grounds for involuntary separation” from military service (emphasis added).
Had Kerry received an honorable discharge when his six-year enlistment was completed, would there have been the need for a recommendation by a “board of officers” six years later? Is it not reasonable to assume that the action taken by a board of officers in 1978 was to upgrade Kerry’s 1972 discharge, whatever it was, from something less than honorable to an honorable discharge?
What makes this matter even more intriguing is to place it in political context. Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on January 20, 1977. His first official act was to sign a general amnesty, Executive Order 4483, covering all Vietnam era draft dodgers and war resisters. Those with long memories will recall that Carter was so anxious to sign the executive order that his staff had it waiting for him on a desk inside the Capitol rotunda. He took the Oath of Office, delivered his inaugural address, walked inside the Capitol building, and signed the order. (Note: Another beneficiary of Carter’s Executive Order was the then-unknown Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, who was pardoned for having ignored an order to report for active duty in July 1969.)
In other words, Kerry did not receive an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy until thirteen months after Carter signed EO 4483. According to the Lipscomb story, “By the time it became a directive from the Defense Department in March 1977 (two months later), EO 4483 had been expanded to include other offenders who may have had general, bad conduct, or dishonorable discharges…” (emphasis added).
What gives even greater credence to the suspicion that Kerry may have received a dishonorable discharge is the mystery of his missing medals. It should be noted here that, in the event of a dishonorable discharge, military regulations require that all pay, benefits, and allowances are forfeited, along with all medals and decorations. Kerry has claimed that he lost or misplaced all of his medal certificates. However, after receiving an honorable discharge in February 1978, and five months after being sworn into office as a member of the United States Senate in January 1985, all of his medals were restored to him on a single day: June 4, 1985.
So the question remains, what type of discharge did Kerry receive when he left the Navy in 1971 or 1972? And if he was dishonorably discharged, what grounds existed?
As a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and while still an officer in the Naval Reserves, Kerry met with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong negotiators in Paris in May 1970. He obtained a copy of the Communist peace proposal and in July 1971, seven months before the completion of his six-year Navy commitment, he gave aid and comfort to the enemy by leading a demonstration in Washington demanding that the Nixon Administration accept the seven-point peace plan, word-for-word, as proposed by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.
Although the evidence is largely circumstantial, it is sufficient to raise suspicions that Kerry was given a “less than honorable” discharge in either 1971 or 1972. Beginning in 2004, he promised repeatedly that he would sign Standard Form 180, releasing all of his military records for public inspection. Maybe he has, but has he been carrying the release around in his briefcase for eight years, unable to find a mailbox? The Washington Post has reported that the Navy continues to withhold some 100 pages of Kerry’s military documents.
Should we learn one day that Secretary of State John Kerry was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Navy, what then? In recent times we have had a Democratic president who lied under oath in a court of law and who was subsequently impeached and disbarred. Can the American people handle another scandal in which an illegally elected Democratic president appoints a Secretary of State who was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Navy?
If anyone knows the truth of the matter… other than John Kerry… it would be the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, formerly known as the KGB.
The July 3, 2012 edition of Pravda contains the following report: “On April 27, 2011, President Barack Obama walked into the White House press room with a Cheshire cat-like grin and a ‘Long Form Birth Certificate’ from the State of Hawaii in hand. From the podium in the press room, Mr. Obama said, ‘We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.’ Quite the barb from a man holding a forged document.
“That’s right, forged. The president himself created the scene; one filled (with) laughter from an adoring press corps, a scene of unprecedented fanfare while holding a forged document which was later posted on the White House website.”
It is widely known that Barack Obama has promised Russian President Vladimir Putin that, after his reelection, he would have far more flexibility in making concessions in nuclear disarmament talks. We’ve all seen the videotape. So if the Russians are aware that Obama is ineligible to be president… his presence in the Oval Office supported by nothing more than forged documents… and if their FSB agents are able to reach deep into the Pentagon archives to learn that the man sent by Obama to negotiate with them once received a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Navy, what sort of outcome could we expect from a new round of nuclear disarmament talks?
More importantly, what if the Russians shared their information with the Iranians, who’ve sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth? With that information held over their heads, Obama and Kerry would almost certainly choose personal political survival over the survival of the Jewish state and the Israelis would be left totally at the mercy of their most dangerous enemies. What this means is that the vaunted Israeli lobby in Washington had better get busy convincing Jewish members of the U.S. Senate… Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CN), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Al Franken (D-MN), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Carl Levin (D-MI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Charles Schumer (D-NY), and Ron Wyden (D-OR)… to demand that Obama and Kerry produce convincing evidence, if it exists, that Kerry was not at one time dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Navy.
Kerry must clear up this mystery before the Senate is required to vote on his confirmation as Secretary of State. Just as the mainstream media has refused to demand that Obama prove who he is, we cannot expect them to press Kerry for answers about his military record. Once again, it is left to those of us in the alternative media to press the issue.
If Diogenes were alive today, and if he were asked to find just one “clean” Democrat suitable for high public office, he would be a very frustrated man.