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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (169061)	8/15/2005 6:39:58 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

"...Bush claims that after flight training school in 1970, he "continued flying with [his] unit for the next several years." This is not true. In May 1972, Bush moved to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign, and he never flew again. In fact, in August 1972 the Texas Guard took Bush off active flight status for good because he skipped his annual medical exam.... awolbush.com ========== remember that medical exam he refused to take because he said something strange about having his own private doc? "...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.... "http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/08/bush_fell_short_on_duty_at_guard/

To: Ish who wrote (169061)	8/15/2005 6:42:28 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

The Commander in Chief is a Chicken first and a Hawk second. "...A new source has emerged with what she says is personal knowledge about why George W. Bush prematurely left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972--because nerves, fear and a possible drinking problem were affecting his ability to pilot his F-102A plane. If true, this information further confirms a growing body of evidence that Bush has not been candid about his departure from his unit. At various times the President and his spokespersons have offered shifting rationales, from the planned eventual mothballing of the F-102As, to his doctor's unavailability to give him a flight physical, to a professional opportunity in another state. However, Janet Linke of Jacksonville, Florida, says that it all came down to an inability to perform. Linke is the widow of Jan Peter Linke, who was brought into Bush's National Guard unit to replace him when Bush left the unit and the state for Alabama in May 1972. Linke says that Bush's now-deceased commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard's 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, Lieut. Col. Jerry Killian, confided in her and her husband during an encounter at a social gathering as to the reasons Mr. Linke had been brought in to replace Bush. "He said Bush was mucking up his flying very badly and he couldn't fly the plane," Linke said. "Killan told us that he was having trouble landing, and that possibly there was a drinking problem involved in that"--which Linke took to mean a particularly debilitating one, since carousing was almost the norm in such units.... In August 1972 Killian suspended the departed Bush from flying, ostensibly for his failure to take an annual physical exam. But Linke says that the physical was the result, not the cause. "He just became afraid to fly," she said. "I don't believe he was a coward. But he clearly had a problem flying one of these machines, and a problem landing." thenation.com