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Next week the American people may do something they have never done before:
they may elect as president of the United States of America a man who has committed treason against the United States of America.
The Constitution of the United States of America defines treason as follows:
''Section 3. 1. Treason against
the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in
open court.''
U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3.
Let's look at some facts.
1.
The Cover Up of Military Records.
It has been widely reported for months,
and not contradicted by John Kerry, that he has never signed the Form 180 required to fully release his military service file
for public scrutiny. Various news stories from multiple sources over the last few months report that somewhere between
31 and more than 100 pages of his records have not been released. See ''Navy Contradicts Kerry on Release of Military
Records,'' Marc Morano, CNSNews.com, September 16, 2004. See http://www.cnsnews.com/.
The Big
Media, openly and completely complicit in the Kerry campaign, have never demanded that he do so, although the same Big Media
have spent the last year parsing every word of President Bush's service records (George Bush signed Form 180 and fully released
his service records years ago, while running for governor in Texas).
The
obvious question is: Why does John Kerry not want to release the rest of his service records? What is in there that
he does not want me, or you, or anyone else, to see?
John Kerry will obviously
do anything he can to win this election. If his concealed records would help him, you can bet the farm he would publish
them.
Since he keeps them covered up, so to speak, you can bet the farm
that they would hurt him, and that he knows it. It's a pretty simple deduction that he knows releasing them would hurt
him even worse than taking the heat for not releasing them. If releasing the records would help his campaign, he would.
If releasing the records would help his campaign, he would have done so a year ago.
What, exactly, is in them? I don't know. I haven't seen them either. But whatever it is, it can't be good
for his election chances.
2. Kerry's 1971 Direct Ties to North Vietnam
According to two new articles published in World Net Daily on October 26, 2004, ''Discovered Papers: Hanoi Directed Kerry,''
and on October 28, 2004, ''Another Document Ties Kerry to Hanoi,'' authenticated documents recently found in the Texas Tech
University's Vietnam Archive in Lubbock, Texas, confirm that Kerry made two, and possibly three, direct contacts with Madame
Nguyen Thi Binh and the North Vietnamese Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks in Paris, in he summer of 1971, where she is
reported to have instructed him on how he and the Vietnam Veterans Against The War could ''serve as Hanoi's surrogates in
the United States.''
See www.WorldNetDaily.com articles numbered 41106 and 41142.
John Kerry returned to the United States and on July 22, 1971, held a press conference publicly calling on President Nixon
to accept the North Vietnamese's 7-point ''Peace Plan''--essentially calling for the surrender of the United States to North
Vietnam.
The seven points John Kerry and the North Vietnamese advocated
were:
1. The U.S. must agree to a date certain for total withdrawal of all U.S. and allied
forces from South Vietnam. If the date was set in 1971, North Vietnam would agree to a safe withdrawal of U.S. forces
and a release of all POWs.
2. The U.S. must no longer interfere in the internal affairs of
South Vietnam.
3. The North and South Vietnamese will ''settle the question of Vietnamese armed
forces in South Viet Nam in a spirit of national concord.''
4. The reunification of North and
South Vietnam.
5. That South Vietnam would pursue a ''foreign policy of peace and neutrality.''
6.
The U.S. would pay reparations for all the losses and destruction it had caused to the Vietnamese people (North and South).
7.
The parties, the United States and North Vietnam, would ''find agreement on the forms of respect for and international guarantee
of the accords that will be concluded.''
[I have summarized these points for the sake of brevity. Source:
Liberation Press Agency, July 1, 1971, translation by Robert K. Brigham and Le Phuong Anh.]
I.e., the United States would unconditionally withdraw from South Vietnam, and would not interfere with the completely predictable
takeover of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese communists.
In this
press conference, John Kerry advocated that the United States surrender to North Vietnam on the terms and conditions proposed
by North Vietnam, at a time when John Kerry was a reserve officer in the United States Navy, the United States was at war
with North Vietnam, and American POWs were being held and tortured by North Vietnam. This followed just three months
after Kerry's famous congressional testimony in April 1971, when he falsely claimed that American troops in Vietnam, including
himself, had committed war crimes and atrocities on a daily basis, with official sanction.
Men who were POWs at the time, including Senator John McCain, have since reported that John Kerry's congressional testimony
and other anti-war activism was used as propaganda against them by their torturers. See ''Stolen Honor.''
This conduct by John Kerry, which appears to be thoroughly documented and undisputed, clearly appears to give ''aid and comfort''
to an enemy of the United States, in a time of war, and to be prosecutable as treason.
3. The
Crime of Private Diplomacy
John Kerry's meetings with Madame Binh
and the North Vietnamese Delegation appear to violate 18 US Code 953, which provides:
''Any citizen of the United States,
wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence
or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct
of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United
States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three
years, or both.''
I.e., Congress by 18 USC 953 has declared it a crime
for a private citizen to conduct private diplomacy adverse to the public policy and interests of the United States, without
the prior authority of the U.S. Government.
And this is exactly what John
Kerry appears to have done--he met with the North Vietnamese Delegation and attempted, in collaboration with an enemy of the
United States, to effect the surrender of the United States to North Vietnam.
His office has denied this, and claimed that he just happened to be taking a honeymoon in Paris when he just happened to drop
in on Madam Nguyen Thi Binh and the North Vietnamese Delegation for a spot of tea and strumpets, sorry, I mean crumpets, or
croissants, perhaps, and a couple of weeks later he just happens to give a highly publicized anti-war press conference
in America calling on President Nixon to accept all seven points of the North Vietnamese surrender demands forthwith - this
explanation doesn't even pass the straight-face test!
Just how many honeymooning
couples in Paris that spring just happened to drop in to see Madam Nguyen Thi Binh of the North Vietnamese Delegation to the
Paris Peace Conference, do you think?
See ''Kerry's Meeting With Communists
Violated U.S. Law,'' CNS News, May 20, 2004.
4. The Discharge Mysteries
In the New York Sun, October 13, 2004, in an article entitled ''Mystery Surrounds Kerry's Navy Discharge,'' Thomas Lipscomb
describes how unusual circumstances surrounding John Kerry's discharge from the Navy and the reissue--the reissue--of his
medals after Kerry joined the Senate on June 4, 1985, suggest that he received something other than an honorable discharge.
For brevity, I shall simply refer you to the article at www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=3107.
5. The First Amendment Breach
In the last few months and weeks, John Kerry and the Kerry Campaign have at least twice violated, or attempted to violate,
the First Amendment rights of American citizens, the right of free political speech.
In August, 2004, Kerry's lawyers threatened to sue the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and any television station that carried
their ads, when the Swiftboat Veterans, men who had served alongside John Kerry in Vietnam, began running te;evosopm ads expressing
their opinion that John Kerry was ''Unfit for Command.''
In October, 2004,
Kerry's lawyers again threatened Sinclair Broadcasting Group, Inc., with lawsuits and retaliation if it ran the documentary,
''Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,'' which highlights the testimony of former POWs who describe how their imprisonment
was lengthened, their torture was intensified, and their physical and emotional pain was aggravated, by the aid and comfort
John Kerry's anti-war activism gave to the enemy in the early 1970s.
The
freedom of speech is the very second right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, following
only the freedom of religion. Indeed, modern liberalism kicked itself off with the ''Free Speech Movement'' at Sproul
Plaza at UC Berkeley in the 1960s with loud and often profane demands that nobody interfere with its First Amendment right
to speak freely and say anything!
It has come full circle, and the Free
Speechers of yesterday are now doing all they can to suppress the free speech of anyone who disagrees with them today.
John Kerry's efforts to suppress the freedom of his political opponents to speak freely and publicly, while not precisely
an act of ''treason,'' is clearly an act in violation of the United States Constitution, in violation of the First Amendment,
and in violation of John Kerry's Senatorial oath to ''protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.''
This is, in my opinion, a wholly despicable act, an act beneath contempt, an act that betrays John Kerry's utter and complete
disregard of the Constitution which John Kerry has twice sworn to protect and defend, an act that betrays John Kerry's utter
and complete disregard of the Constitution he will again swear to protect and defend if he is elected president, an illegal
act by John Kerry, a presidential aspirant, a senator, and a lawyer, who of all people should know better.
America cannot afford a president who holds the First Amendment of the Constitution in such deep contempt that he will violate
it at will to get elected. If he does not respect the First Amendment while campaigning for office, I fear the disregard
in which he and his administration may hold it, and any other amendment, if, or while, he holds office.
John Kerry has not been tried for treason. He has not been convicted. He may never be tried, and if he were tried,
he might not be convicted. I cannot predict the future. But he hasn't even been elected, and these circumstances
are already the beginning of the first great scandal of a Kerry presidency: Kerrygate.
The Democratic Party cannot afford to elect a Democrat as President who has committed treason, or who has given aid and comfort
to an enemy of the United States, or who has acted with open disregard of the First Amendment in the conduct of his presidential
campaign; a man who may be subject to removal from the presidency after he takes office, without impeachment, but simply by
a judicial determination that he is disqualified from the presidency by the U.S. Constitution, Article III Section 3, and
by the U.S. Constitution, Amendment 14 Section 3.
The Democratic Party
cannot afford to elect this man, not if the Democratic Party wants to remain a credible, respected, and cohesive force in
American life and politics. Not if it wants to survive this election, or a Kerry presidency.
The euphoria of the election will quickly fade in the litigious aftermath of the voting discrepancies, real and imaginary,
and then the lawsuits contesting John Kerry's eligibility to be president at all will come. This will begin one of the
most heated and contentious legal and political battles in American history. And the blood will be on the hands of the
Democratic Party which has nominated and elected a man who appears to have committed treason, to have given aid and comfort
to any enemy of the United States in a time of war, to the presidency.
And
if Kerry is removed from office, then the Presidency will fall on the shoulders of John Edwards, a one-term senator from South
Carolina who would not be re-elected to the Senate if he ran again, a trial lawyer who has made himself rich by suing doctors,
a man with no military experience, no international diplomatic experience, no national political experience before this election,
a man whom even John Kerry has called unqualified to be president!
And what
if this legal challenge to the legitimacy of a Kerry presidency occurs at a time of great danger to the United States?
In the midst of a war on terrorism? If it disrupts the ability of the administration to conduct that war? What
if the election of such a candidate is, itself, an act of giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States?
These are serious questions, and serious issues, about which I see no public discussion, certainly not in the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, or on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, or even Fox News.
We are on the verge of an election. John Kerry is still covering
up some of his own service records, and whatever is in them, and the American people deserve to know what he doesn't want
us to know. Where is the ''Peoples' Right to Know'' now? We need to know, before we vote. We don't like
cover-ups. We have called them Watergate. Iran-Contragate. Whitewatergate. Monicagate. They
have brought down some presidents, and humbled others. We may call the next one Kerrygate.
And John Kerry and the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.
About the Writer: Raymond
Kraft is a lawyer and writer living and working in Northern California. Raymond receives e-mail at
rskraft@vfr.net
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