The New York Sun reports this morning on the work of Mark Sullivan, a former captain in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve, in researching John Kerry's discharge from military service:

The "honorable discharge" on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry's record, according to Mark Sullivan, who retired as a captain in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve in 2003 after 33 years of service as a judge advocate. Mr. Sullivan served in the office of the Secretary of the Navy between 1975 and 1977...

It is hard to see why Mr. Kerry had to file an "extremely late" application since he lost the congressional race in Lowell, Mass., the first week of November 1972 and was basically doing nothing until he entered law school the following September of 1973.A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar.

The theory Sullivan presents in this story matches the analysis presented in the piece WorldNetDaily ran on Sunday, which argued that Kerry must have been hiding something based on the odd 1978 date of his honorable discharge.

Why might Kerry have received a less-than-honorable discharge? The most likely reason would be his meetings with representatives of the North Vietnamese government. Earlier this week, WorldNetDaily ran the following story providing documentary evidence showing that the antiwar activities which Kerry took part in were very much in line with the desires of the North Vietnamese:

Jerome Corsi [and co-author of Unfit for Command], a specialist on the Vietnam era, told WND the new discoveries are the "most remarkable documents I've seen in the entire history of the antiwar movement."

"We're not going to say he's an agent for Vietnamese communists, but it's the next thing to it," he said. "Whether he was consciously carrying out their direction or naively doing what they wanted, it amounted to the same thing – he advanced their cause."

Here's where you get reminded that you are reading a weblog, and not The New York Times (for better, and worse). If you were reading the Times, the above would be all you'd get. But I'll be honest with you: this is not the entire story we were expecting this morning. It makes a solid circumstancial case, but the information I received yesterday was that the story would go beyond circumstantial evidence, and have actual, on-the-record testimony from at least one senior military official with knowledge of Kerry's discharge.

That didn't happen. But if you read to the bottom of Sullivan's piece, you can see one potential reason why:

All officials with knowledge of what specifically happened in Mr. Kerry's case are muzzled by the Privacy Act of 1974.The act makes it a crime for federal employees to knowingly disclose personal information or records.

The bottom line is Kerry's military record is protected, and that protection can only be lifted by Kerry himself, if he signed a Form 180 authorizing disclosure of his records. By continually refusing to do so, Kerry ensures that this question will not be put to rest. It's bad enough that we have a Presidential candidate with this gap in his record. I can only hope that I don't wake up Wednesday morning to find that he's going to be President.

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Here's a few of the primary source documents referenced in these accounts:

Kerry's military records page at JohnKerry.com

Kerry's 1978 discharge (PDF)

The North Vietnamese documents describing their plans to use the American anti-war movement to their advantage: First Document / Second Document

18 US Code 953: "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."

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Around the Blogosphere

Beth at MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy provides a guide to Thomas Lipscomb's previous stories on Kerry.

Captain Ed: "With a day to go before the election, Kerry managed to skate by without releasing his complete service records, even admitting it on NBC before NBC decided to "sanitize" the records and remove the admission from its interview with Kerry. It follows a pattern of complicity in the mainstream media to cover up John Kerry's even while hypocritically demanding transparency on George Bush's honorable discharge, received normally and on time for his service."

Glenn Reynolds thinks "it's too late for this story to make much of a difference."

Polipundit agrees: "While it raises troubling questions, it’s not iron-clad enough to affect the presidential campaign."

Powerline: "If the mainstream media were populated with journalists of the stripe of Thomas Lipscomb, the world would be a very different place."

Spoons: "Bottom line, there's a decent circumstantical case that Kerry received an other-than-honorable discharge from the Navy, but there is hardly the smoking gun I kept hearing about. If I had to guess, I'd say Kerry did get an OTH discharge, and did lie about it..."