Bush's Supposed Air National Guard serviceFollow

This courtesy of a former military pilot turned commercial pilot turned psychiatrist specializing in helping those with aero-anxiety:

In regard to Bush's supposed service in the Texas Guard, you may already know he
had pilot apptitude test scores in the thirtieth percentile, and applicants for
slots with the Texas ANG were passed over who had scores in the high nineties.
Though Bush's White House staff claim he did not gain his slot through political
influence, there is no other explanation for an applicant with grossly
unsatisfactory pilot apptitude scores gaining a slot at all. Even with an
unlimited amount of slots, an applicant with such low scores would not have been
considered without outside influence.

To leave flying status voluntarily is considered by military pilots to be the
greatest disgrace a person could bestow upon himself. For a pilot to
voluntarily leave flight status was inthinkable. Pilots who left flight status
voluntarily became social lepers.

I would like to draw your attention to the following:

An editorial in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/opinion/08kristof.html?hp

A study of Bush's service at:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/lechliter.pdf

An article in todays Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2004/09/08/bush_fell
_short_on_duty_at_guard/

Records show pledges unmet

September 8, 2004

This article was reported by the Globe Spotlight Team -- reporters Stephen
Kurkjian, Francie Latour, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes, and editor
Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Robinson.

In February, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President
Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the
records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air
National Guard during the Vietnam War.

But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe
reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service -- first when
he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in
mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush signed documents pledging to
meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.

He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The
1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has
received scant notice.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge, Bush signed
a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to
another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to
do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months. . .
" Under Guard regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan
Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at
a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now
concedes. ''I must have misspoke," Bartlett, who is now the White House
communications director, said in a recent interview.

And early in his Guard service, on May 27, 1968, Bush signed a ''statement of
understanding" pledging to achieve ''satisfactory participation" that included
attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty -- usually involving two weekend
days each month -- and 15 days of annual active duty. ''I understand that I may
be ordered to active duty for a period not to exceed 24 months for
unsatisfactory participation," the statement reads.

Yet Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month
period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973, the
records show.

The reexamination of Bush's records by the Globe, along with interviews with
military specialists who have reviewed regulations from that era, show that
Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his
superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972,
1973, or 1974. But they did neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973
that his service had been ''satisfactory" -- just four months after Bush's
commanding officer wrote that Bush had not been seen at his unit for the
previous 12 months.

Bartlett, in a statement to the Globe last night, sidestepped questions about
Bush's record. In the statement, Bartlett asserted again that Bush would not
have been honorably discharged if he had not ''met all his requirements." In a
follow-up e-mail, Bartlett declared: ''And if he hadn't met his requirements you
point to, they would have called him up for active duty for up to two years."

That assertion by the White House spokesman infuriates retired Army Colonel
Gerald A. Lechliter, one of a number of retired military officers who have
studied Bush's records and old National Guard regulations, and reached different
conclusions.

''He broke his contract with the United States government -- without any adverse
consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to
happen," Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the
government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to
an even higher standard."

Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas Air National
Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White House's request in
February, agreed that Bush walked away from his obligation to join a reserve
unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. By not
joining a unit in Massachusetts, Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush
''took a chance that he could be called up for active duty. But the war was
winding down, and he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the
penalty."

But Lloyd said that singling out Bush for criticism is unfair. ''There were
hundreds of guys like him who did the same thing," he said.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve
affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many of the documents
that it is clear to him that Bush ''gamed the system." And he agreed with Lloyd
that Bush was not alone in doing so. ''If I cheat on my income tax and don't get
caught, I'm still cheating on my income tax," Korb said.

After his own review, Korb said Bush could have been ordered to active duty for
missing more than 10 percent of his required drills in any given year. Bush,
according to the records, fell shy of that obligation in two successive fiscal
years.

Korb said Bush also made a commitment to complete his six-year obligation when
he moved to Cambridge, a transfer the Guard often allowed to accommodate
Guardsmen who had to move elsewhere. ''He had a responsibility to find a unit in
Boston and attend drills," said Korb, who is now affiliated with a liberal
Washington think tank. ''I see no evidence or indication in the documents that
he was given permission to forgo training before the end of his obligation. If
he signed that document, he should have fulfilled his obligation."

The documents Bush signed only add to evidence that the future president -- then
the son of Houston's congressman -- received favorable treatment when he joined
the Guard after graduating from Yale in 1968. Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the
Texas House of Representatives in 1968, said in a deposition in 2000 that he
placed a call to get young Bush a coveted slot in the Guard at the request of a
Bush family friend.

Bush was given an automatic commission as a second lieutenant, and dispatched to
flight school in Georgia for 13 months. In June 1970, after five additional
months of specialized training in F-102 fighter-interceptor, Bush began what
should have been a four-year assignment with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor
Squadron.

In May 1972, Bush was given permission to move to Alabama temporarily to work on
a US Senate campaign, with the provision that he do equivalent training with a
unit in Montgomery. But Bush's service records do not show him logging any
service in Alabama until October of that year.

And even that service is in doubt. Since the Globe first reported Bush's spotty
attendance record in May 2000, no one has come forward with any credible
recollection of having witnessed Bush performing guard service in Alabama or
after he returned to Houston in 1973. While Bush was in Alabama, he was removed
from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972.
On May 1, 1973, Bush's superior officers wrote that they could not complete his
annual performance review because he had not been observed at the Houston base
during the prior 12 months.

Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some of them
suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a weekend in April
and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June, and July. But Lechliter,
the retired colonel, concluded after reviewing National Guard regulations that
Bush should not have received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either.
The regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled drills
that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30 days after the
date of the drill.

Lechliter said the records push him to conclude that Bush had little interest in
fulfilling his obligation, and his superiors preferred to look the other way.
Others agree. ''It appears that no one wanted to hold him accountable," said
retired Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's
director of the Air National Guard.

Same people who want the attacks on Kerry's war record to stop?

So good it posted twice

DDP

Edited, Wed Sep 8 16:10:37 2004 by Nobby

<ahem>

How bout them medical records kerry....anyone willing to bet kerry won't release them?

Varus

This has all been hashed out in the Kerry threads, if you really want to see the truth look for them in those threads about a month or so ago. I believe that most of the accusations against Bush where proven to be bull sh[i][/i]it and published by people that don't understand the Reserve/Guard Systems of accountability.

Have a Great Day :)

If Bush had based his whole campaign on his service in the Air Guard then this would mean more than a flying rats ***...


If Kerry HADN'T based his whole campaign on his service in Vietnam then we would say "swift boats for who?"


Bush got in the guard with political pull.
Kerry got out of Vietnam with political pull.

Big Fucking deal.


Which one has the most political pull to get U.S. out of the current mess we are in?

I vote for Bugs Bunny.

Yup. Just a reprint of old accusations that have long since been disproven.


New documents on 60 minutes tonight, no response from the Bush camp. No response to the new Globe allegations.


It's the reserves folks.


No, folks, it's the National Guard. Not the same thing, but hey, what do you know about it.

I'm shocked you guys don't Bush to answer for this. Shocked I say. I mean I know you all have a deep concern about any questions raised about the military records of them men who want to command the ocuntries military for the nexy four years.

Wait, is it because these are factually based, backed up by hard docmentation and brought to light by trusted journalists?

That must be it. I guess we'll have to wait untill we see a group of TANG-vets against cokeheads start running ads based on ******** lies before you'd be intrested.

Hahahah.

Classic timing by the DNC machine sitting on this untill after Labor Day. Priceless. Let the GOP get the entire country worked up about what happened in Vietnam in an attempt to attack Kerry then when the media attention is at it's peak, right after Labor Day, counter punch with this.

The GOP's been so hopelessly outmanuvered on this one it's stunnong.