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There is a story, told by a very liberal Pulitizer Prize winning journalist, Sydney Schanberg, who works for the Village Voice, no less, trust me he is no Bush lover, that Kerry had his staffers shredding classified material when he was the Chairman of the Committee on MIA/POW affairs, his only leadership role in his whole career as a Senator by the way, and in fact some CIA agents caught them but nothing was done to punish anyone there either.....stunned me that this was rarely brought up if at all even by conservative media, even by the Swift Boat vets, during the elections...especially given Kerry's band of brothers routine

the theory as espoused by the author and many of the families of POWS and MIAs was that Kerry and others suppressed evidence of sightings of POWS and MIAS in Vietnam in order to hurry up normalization of relations with Vietnam, the author concludes either Kerry was part of the coverup or rush to conclude the investigation or he was very inept as Chairman, take your pick but given his background as a lawyer?

from the article

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo—from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst—reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies—but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0408,schanberg,51276,1.html

The families of the POWS and MIA's go on further to allege that the reason Kerry was in a rush to normalize relations with his buddies the Viet Cong was his cousin already had signed on to do 900 million dollars worth of reconstruction contracts in Vietnam and he couldn't get started until normalization was declared

gee it seems shredding isn't just a Republican pastime (see Oliver North and Watergate) and in fact could we say the Democrats are worse, shredding documents that are from or belong in the National Archives, isn't that worse than shredding your own personal correspondence etc......