A former officer in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve has built a case that Senator Kerry was other than honorably discharged from the Navy by 1975, The New York Sun has learned.

Being a prisoner of war in Vietnam had some high points but many more low ones. The worst days physically were behind us in 1970, 1971, and 1972. After Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, the routine torturing of POWs for propaganda purposes pretty much stopped. Our captors panicked in November, 1970, following the daring raid on a closed POW camp at Son Tai 20 miles west of Hanoi - and moved all of us into the huge Hoa Lo prison in central Hanoi. We finally were permitted a semblance of societal life after years in solitary and/or stuffed into tiny windowless cells with two or three other POWs.

Mr. Leonard Downie, Executive Editor
Mr. Michael Getler, Ombudsman
The Washington Post

On October 27, 2004 Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. penned an op-ed entitled, “A Strict Separation”. Therein Mr. Downie, the self-described “ultimate gatekeeper” (Post, “Live Online” 10/6/04) for everything printed in the newspaper, reassures readers that there is what amounts to a Chinese wall between the editorial and news reporting departments at the Post.

The nation's most highly decorated living veteran told a hometown audience in Sioux City, Iowa, Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry "will go down in history as the Benedict Arnold of 1971."

The communist regime in Hanoi monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group's spokesman and a member of its executive committee, two captured Viet Cong documents suggest.

In the long run, it probably won't make much difference that the Sinclair Broadcast Group didn't show the documentary film about John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism as a primetime news show.

JOHN KERRY SAYS HE IS "PROUD" of his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War. Why, then, have he and his spokesmen consistently misrepresented them? Indeed the Kerry camp has been so effective in obscuring this history that both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to run corrections on the subject recently because their reporters relied on misinformation that the Kerry camp had succeeded in putting into wide circulation.

In a race appropriately dominated by questions of presidential leadership, the war on terror, Iraq and the economy, Vietnam nonetheless continues to haunt Democrat John Kerry. For this, Kerry has only himself to blame.

It is Kerry who quite deliberately made his brief four months on Navy Swift Boats in Vietnam in 1968-69 his signature credential to be commander in chief 35 years later. It is Kerry and his surrogates who repeat constantly the mantra that he "defended this country as a young man." It was Kerry who presented his "band of brothers" – the seven (out of eight) members of his Swift Boat crew who support him for president – as a backdrop at the Democratic National Convention.

Honor to the Soldier, and Sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country's cause. Honor also to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause - honor to him, only less than to him, who braves, for the common good, the storms of heaven and the storms of battle.

-- President Abraham Lincoln, December 2, 1863

In 1971, a Vietnam veteran wrote a speech defending the honor of the servicemen and women who served in that war and its surrounding theaters of operation. He hoped to present it before Congress, but was prevented from doing so, while the Senate testimony of anti-war Vietnam vet John Kerry was splashed all over the media. John O'Neill's eloquent defense of the Vietnam veteran lay sleeping in old files for more than 33 years, but it retains its original power and deserves to be heard at this point in America's history.