WaTimes reminds WaPo to chase the smoking gun found by Dobbs

The Kerry camp will respond with derision, "That's just those Moonies again, yer gonna believe them?"

But Nat Hentoff's op-ed in today's Washington Times is very clever indeed, because it relies upon and quotes heavily from Michael Dobbs' August 22 article published in the WaTimes' cross-town rival, the Washington Post:

Deep in a long front-page article in The Washington Post by Michael Dobbs, "Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete," there is a smoking gun. In the Aug. 22 piece, Mr. Dobbs largely gives credit to Mr. Kerry's version of one of the controversies — whether there was enemy fire on March 13, 1969, the day Mr. Kerry rescued James Rassmann from the water. But the smoking gun appears later:

"Although Kerry campaign officials insist they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records."

On tumultuous cable talk shows, Kerry defenders repeatedly maintained that all of Mr. Kerry's Vietnam records are on his Web site. But, writes Mr. Dobbs:

"A Freedom of Information Act request by The Post for Kerry's records produced six pages of information. A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least 100 pages."

What is in these 100-plus pages? Since the centerpiece of Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign is not his 20-year Senate career, but what he did in Vietnam, including his medals, aren't voters entitled to look at the entire record? If not, why?

In the same article, Mr. Dobbs points out that while both sides in this volatile debate have a lot of information on their respective Web sites, both "the Kerry and anti-Kerry camps continue to deny or ignore requests for other relevant documents, including Kerry's personal reminiscences (shared only with biographer Brinkley)" and the boat log....

The Post story continues: "The Kerry campaign has refused to make available Kerry's journals and other writings to The Washington Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley." (In a subsequent Post story, Mr. Brinkley said those papers are in Mr. Kerry's "full control." Why not release them?) ...

A post-Vietnam fog of war does indeed hover over the Kerry candidacy. And why has most of the mainstream media not followed up on this smoking gun about Mr. Kerry's failure to release all of his Vietnam documents? 

Whatever one may think of its ownership, I'm pretty sure that the Washington Times is definitely on WaPo's radar screens.  It's got to be embarrassing to WaPo to have its upstart rival point out that WaPo's not following up on the story its own reporter broke more than two weeks ago.

As good as Dobbs' August 22 article was, it barely scratched the surface of what good investigative reporters could and should do — notwithstanding the Kerry cover-up of essential documents.  There's plenty of material out there — heck, WaPo could run at least two weeks' worth of articles that would be entirely new to the mainstream media out of my index page alone!  And each one of them could repeat what Dobbs said (too politely, and buried too deeply) on August 22, and what Hentoff's op-ed has just repeated:

Cover-up.  Stonewall.  Hidden records.  Cover-up.  If he'd only come clean!  Smoking gun.  Evasion.  Cover-up.  Won't return calls.  Stonewall.  Won't answer questions.  Cover-up.  What's he got to hide?  Cover-up.  Sing it with me brothers and sisters!  Form 180.  Stonewall.  Brinkley's seen 'em, why can't we?  Cover-up.  Right here in Potomac City!  How dare we?  Cover-up.

The only way to break Kerry's stonewall is to apply continuous, ever-building pressure, until the entire country's aware that Kerry's hiding documents and can draw the obvious inference that he's hiding them because there's something in them he needs to keep hidden.  The blogosphere snapped to this three weeks ago.  Will WaPo?

(Hat-tip, yet again, to PrestoPundit.)