"It is for Kerry and his campaign to explain, not us. He can clear it all up by signing 180 and answering some questions on the subject. If he has nothing to hide it shouldn't be a problem!"
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Kerry won't expose his records. If he had nothing to hide, and had a record that was honorable, HE WOULD HAVE PUT IT ON EVERY BILLBOARD IN AMERICA. Not so. The silence is deafening...there is something there, but we won't see it, barring a miracle.
Exactly.
The other thing to keep in mind is that there are plenty of people inside Bush/Cheney who know the truth. They will throw lots of cold water on it quickly if it is a dead end.
Karl Rove has been tracking Kerry since 1984. There isn't a thing he doesn't know about him.
I was an Army prosecutor, and I think this is way off. First of all, the repealing of 10 USC 1162 and 1163 in 1994 would obviously have no impact on anything that happened in 1972. Whatever replaced them in 1994 is totally irrelevant. What's important is whether 1162 and 1163 were in effect in 1972.
Second of all, Kerry was promoted from LTJG to full LT on Jan. 1, 1970. He asked to be released to the inactive reserve two days later. He still held a reserve commission until being discharged in 1972, and would not have come up for promotion to LCDR for at least a few years. The 1972 DD214, the smoking gun, if you will, is conspicuously absent from Kerry's website.
Third, officers are all commissioned by the President, and thus officer separations are governed by explicit USC provisions -- but these provisions are codified and fleshed out in service regulations. I'd want to see the Navy reg on officer separations before I would consider any other federal law. Nothing here is inconsistent with a 1972 OTH anyway.
Finally, involuntary separations always result in a less than honorable discharge, either a general or an OTH.
Kerry was likely asked to resign in lieu of court-martial, discharged with an OTH, then spent six years fighting with the Board of Military Corrections and Appeals to get his discharge characterization changed, accounting for the 1978 honorable discharge that was in memo format rather than on a DD214.