Bush Geo

wanted to reply to the messages that have been posted here and to the personal e-mails I have received on this subject.

We stand by our story. Our conclusions are based on the evidence. In light of the responses we have received from readers, three points deserve some added emphasis.

1. George W. Bush's officer evaluation report for 1972-73 is unreliable. As we and others have pointed out, Lieutenant Colonel William Harris, Bush's squadron leader, was wrong when he wrote on May 2, 1973 that Bush had "been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status" in Alabama since leaving Texas almost a year earlier. It is therefore dangerous to assume that Harris was right when he stated that "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit" for the preceding year. To put it simply, if Bush fell off his superiors' radar screens after the spring of 1972 to such an extent that they didn't know where he was, which is clearly the case, then it makes no sense to use their evaluation of Bush to determine his whereabouts. Because it is erroneous, Bush's evaluation by itself neither demonstrates nor disproves the idea that he showed up for scattered dates of inactive duty between the time he stopped flying and May, 1973.

2. The ARF Statement of Points Earned by Bush in 1972-73 comes from his own military records. Torn and undated though it may be, we obtained copies of this document from multiple sources. One of them was a set of Bush's military records released under the Freedom of Information Act. It was the 99th page in that set, and it filled a gap between statements of points Bush earned in previous years and the points he earned in 1973-74. Purely for purposes of legibility, we posted a copy that did not come from that set and that had some handwriting on it on our Web site. But the handwritten notes do not alter the substance of the page: that Bush accumulated 41 points of service over the span recorded, which, when added to his 15 "gratuitous" points, was enough to keep him in good standing with the Guard.

This document should be available to anyone who files a FOIA request for Bush's records. For example, writer Marty Heldt has a copy, according to David Case, a researcher at TomPaine.com, though Mr. Heldt has not mentioned it his work so far.

2. Multiple documents indicate Bush served in the spring of 1973. As we noted, Bush was ordered to report for six days of annual active duty training on April 23, 1973, in a document we posted on our site. The dates for this training (May 1 through May 3 and May 8 through May 10) correspond to the visible parts of dates on Bush's 1972-73 Statement of Points Earned.

On May 1, Bush was ordered to report for nine additional days of active duty training. We did not post this document, but it is available elsewhere -- for example, at http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/
Heldt090300/Docs-4/docs-4.html#Document17, where Mr. Heldt included it in his September 3 report for the Online Journal. The first date for this training (May 22 through May 24) corresponds to the visible part of the last date on Bush's 1972-73 Statement of Points Earned. The second and third dates (May 29 through May 31 and June 5 through June 7) correspond to the first two dates on Bush's 1973-74 Statement of Points Earned.

In short, there are two orders to attend training that contain dates that correspond in an overlapping fashion to two documents listing points of service that Bush earned. Unfortunately, however, other chronologies have not offered a full account of this fact.

In his Online Journal piece, for example, Mr. Heldt included a link to the May 1, 1973 document ordering Bush to attend active duty training. He also included a link to Bush's 1973-74 Statement of Points Earned, writing: "These points are marked down as three days in May, three days in June and 29 days in July." But Mr. Heldt didn't mention that the three days in May and the three days in June match the days Bush was ordered to show up-quite an omission. Further, Mr. Heldt did not discuss the 1972-73 points earned by Bush, nor the 15 "gratuitious" points that the Guard granted its members each year. (Indeed, he made no mention at all that Guardsmen needed to accumulate 50 points a year to maintain their standing.) For these reasons, Mr. Heldt's statement in the Online Journal that there "are not enough points to make up for both the missing year and the last year of Bush's active service" is incorrect.

Mr. Heldt's piece in TomPaine.com contains even less information on this score. There, Mr. Heldt included a link to the May 1, 1973 document ordering Bush to attend active duty training, but he did not provide a link to Bush's 1973-74 Statement of Points Earned. Instead, he wrote that Bush "began serving irregularly with his unit" in May, 1973. That's true, but it's also true-and highly relevant-that Bush's Statements of Points Earned show him serving on the days he was ordered to attend active duty training. Mr. Heldt further writes that "Nothing indicates in the records that he ever made up the time he missed." (Emphasis added.) Again, the 1972-73 and 1973-74 Statements of Points Earned, in conjunction with the April 23, 1973 and May 1, 1973 orders, show that is wrong.

We appreciate the time and energy that our readers have invested in responding to this piece. And we look forward to using this interactive medium to keep the story going if and when new evidence about George W. Bush's military record turns up.

Karthik Thyagarajan responds:

As late as the summer of 1999, George W. Bush told a reporter from Texas Monthly that he knew the press would hear a whole lot of things about his years in the Air National Guard but that there would never be evidence to prove that he crashed a military jet or was yanked from the cockpit of an aircraft or did drugs of any kind. What inspires that confidence? Some critics of Bush have gone so far as saying it's conspiratorial manipulation of the available documentation by his one-time CIA-director father. But our reporting strongly suggests it's due to the knowledge that there exists no evidence of wrongdoing. (Former Base Commander Bobby Hodges insisted: "There is no dirt.")

While reporting our story in Texas, I repeatedly received "no comment" replies from people who could describe what Bush was doing in 1972 and '73. People like Madgelean Bush, director of the Martin Luther King Jr., Community Center in Houston's Third Ward, Lt. Col. Daniel P. Harkness, whose name appears on the documentation noting Bush's missing OER, and even the widow of Bush's roommate that year who was director of the P.U.L.L. project in Houston.

Meanwhile several off-the-record sources implied repeatedly that Bush had problems that affected his service in the Air National Guard; but none are willing to go on record to discuss Bush's whereabouts or behavior during '72 and '73.

I stand by our story. Bush was privileged, pampered and protected by his officers and the Texas Air National Guard but nothing worse than that seems to have happened.

Given Bush's spotty service record, one can question his preparedness as a Commander in Chief, but facts as we know them say he was a good pilot who served at home and left service early because he could. Please do not accuse me of poor journalistic practices or right-wing manipulation; I pursued the truth without bias. Our story is what we learned.



From the Forum

Ex-Navy wrote:
"I know if I hadn't reported as ordered for a period of months, as a regular or reserve, I sure as hell would not have received an honorable discharge. The governor owes the families of the 58,000 Amricans whose names are on the wall in Washington an explanation of exactly what it was he was doing during the Vietnam War. It sure as hell wasn't upholding his oath as an officer and a soldier."

Elaine Supkis wrote:
"Where did you get this document? The torn page one. The one that 'proves' Bush 'served'? Who gave it to you? Why didn't Martin Heldt get it? Why the mystery around this? There are questions inside of questions. Even if the document were something useful or legal, how in all hell do you still pass Bush on his original tall tale that it was normal for our fighting men in war to drop everything, remove their uniforms and go off to the wild blue yonder to get fellow cowards into office?"

Wendell Kekumu wrote:
"It is not up to an Air National Guard pilot to decide whether or not to take his mandatory annual physical exam. If he fails to take his physical, he is automatically suspended from flying. It is a very serious action because it takes a fully trained pilot out of commission, and harms the nation's military readiness, the exact charge that Bush has leveled repeatedly against the Clinton-Gore administration. The suspension of a pilot is routinely followed by the appointment of a Flight Inquiry Board to review the reason for the suspension and to determine the appropriate punishment because of the seriousness of the suspension. Was there a Flight Inquiry Board hearing?"

See all the posts and respond

Click here for more information