“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” –George Washington

Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution notes: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

It’s no surprise that John Kerry has devoted so much time and energy questioning George W. Bush’s record as commander-in-chief. Nor is it any surprise that he recently launched a campaign calling on Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld to resign after a handful of military personnel humiliated al-Qa'ida terrorists in Abu Ghraib prison while attempting to obtain actionable intelligence about their plans to kill more of our troops.

These political attacks are just the latest round on Kerry’s long list of black-bag antics designed to undermine America’s military strength and resolve.

Kerry, who fancies himself a war hero, has spent much of his political career denigrating American military personnel and the nation they defend. But his anti-American actions preceded his first campaign for Congress – indeed, they were the platform from which he launched his political career.

Like his comrade “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and so many other Leftist protagonists from the Age of Aquarius, Kerry was a child of wealth and privilege. Today, he is the wealthiest member of Congress (the “F” stands for “Forbes,” after all) but don’t expect that to be a central theme of his “man of the people” campaign. (In fact, the top five wealthiest Senators are all Democrats.)

Kerry grew up hobnobbing with the Massachusetts Cape glitterati, a life of leisure including all the accoutrements – the best schools, the best vacation homes, the best yachts, etc. He socialized with the rich and famous, especially the Kennedy clan elites, where he was taken under the wing of his future patron saint, Teddy. He attempted to emulate John Kennedy’s PT-109 heroics by joining the Navy and using his connections to obtain an assignment for a short tour on a swiftboat in Vietnam. Kerry then went on to collect three Purple Hearts in just two months – all of dubious merit, but requisite for a ticket home to pursue his political aspirations.

Unlike John F. Kennedy, however, when John F. Kerry got home, there was no hero’s welcome. The nation was in turmoil over our continued role in Vietnam, the result of limited but well-publicized Leftist protests against the war. So Kerry, ever the opportunist, endeavored to become the Left’s most “useful idiot” (Western apologists for socialist political and economic agendas), collaborating with Fonda, et al., and leading protests accusing his “brethren” in Vietnam of all manner of atrocities.

Kerry was (and remains) an effective spokesperson for his Leftist cadre. His anti-war protest period culminated with his 1971 congressional testimony, after which he told the press, “There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions….”

Regarding the substance – and source – of Kerry’s claims, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, says “KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. … As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, ‘our most significant success’.”

As for the success of Kerry’s anti-democracy protests and his leadership of the VVAW and association with Fonda’s Winter Soldier Investigation, Hanoi could not have been more please.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, supreme leader of the North Vietnamese Army, told CBS in a 1989 interview: “We paid a high price [during the Tet offensive] but so did you [Americans] … not only in lives and materiel. Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. … The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory…. The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion. ”

More to the point, in a 1995 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a communist contemporary of Giap and Ho Chi Minh, who was serving as an NVA colonel assigned to the general staff at the time Saigon fell, had this to say about the Leftmedia and Soviet puppets like “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and John Kerry: “[They were] essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.”

Bui stated further, “Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.”

Most notably, Bui observed, that the 1968 Tet Offensive was “to weaken American resolve during a presidential-election year. We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.”

But the consequences of Kerry’s actions extend far beyond the fall of Saigon.

Kerry, by his own account, violated the UCMJ, the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Code while serving as a Navy officer, and he further stands in violation of Article three, Section three of the U.S. Constitution.

Upon entering the Navy in 1966, John Kerry signed a six-year contract (plus a six-month extension during wartime) and an Officer Candidate contract for five years of active duty and active Naval Reserve. This indicates that Kerry was clearly a commissioned officer at the time of his 1970 meeting with NVA Communists in Paris – in direct violation of the UCMJ’s Article 104 part 904, and U.S. Code 18 U.S.C. 953. That meeting, and Kerry’s subsequent coddling of Communists while leading mass protests against our military in the year that followed, also place him in direct violation of our Constitution’s Article three, Section three, which defines treason as “giving aid and comfort” to the enemy in time of warfare.

Thus, we refer our readers to the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3, which states, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President … having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, [who has] engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

It is for this reason – for his record of giving aid and comfort to the enemy while a member of the U.S. Armed Forces in violation of his oath – that we insist John Kerry resign his seat in the U.S. Senate. He has dishonored his family, dishonored his state and dishonored our nation. He is not fit for command or public office at any level of government, much less, the highest office in the land.

More than 200,000 signatures have been logged for the Petition to Investigate and Indict John F. Kerry for acts of treason. While it is clear that no action will be taken on the petitioners’ request while Kerry is a sitting senator, John Kerry should resign.