Why was he abruptly grounded from flying? Why did he leave the Texas Guard two years early? A key report answering those questions is still missing from George W. Bush's records.
The story keeps changing. And regardless of what the White House says about George W. Bush and his time in the Texas Air National Guard, journalists tend to accept the explanation. I can't. The president of the United States is lying to hide his behavior while he was a young pilot during the Vietnam War, and he has almost taken away reporters' ability to get the whole story. Unfortunately, the national media have other distractions, and they apparently don't think the Guard story is important enough to warrant additional effort. I think they are wrong.
The president's behavior while under oath to serve in the military is an important matter. By George W. Bush's own admission, there were at least eight months in 1972 when he was not performing assigned Guard duty. What if today's Guard members behaved as irresponsibly as Bush did during his hitch? Where would our war on terrorism be if they all acted as capriciously as he did and they took off to go do something else while they were still under oath to serve? That's what the records prove George W. Bush did. Aren't there young Americans in Iraq, who have been called to active duty in a war zone, who would rather be in Alabama?
The president and his staff are doing a very good job of convincing the public he has released all of his National Guard records and that they prove he was responsible during his time in Alabama and Texas. But the critical documents have still not been seen. The mandatory written report about Bush's grounding is mysteriously not in the released file, nor is any other disciplinary evidence. A document showing a "roll-up," or the accumulation of his total retirement points, is also absent, and so are his actual pay stubs. If the president truly wanted to end the conjecture about his time in the Guard, he would allow an examination of his pay stubs and any IRS W-2 forms from his Guard years. These can be pieced together to determine when he was paid and whether he earned enough to have met his sworn obligations.
The narrative trail of the president's time in the Guard isn't easy to follow, and I have been pursuing it since Bush ran for governor of Texas in 1994. When he began planning his race for the presidency, a few journalists filed Freedom of Information requests for Bush's retained records at the Texas National Guard Headquarters at Camp Mabry in Austin. The file they received contained 160 pages. Dan Bartlett, now the White House communications director, who was working for the campaign at that time, said that represented the entirety of the record. However, when the Bush administration provided White House reporters with the "complete" file in the dead-news zone of a Friday night in early February, there were about 400 pages. Two hundred forty pages, unavailable to us during the presidential campaign, had suddenly been discovered. Nonetheless, the most important documents were still missing. Reporters just didn't know what was absent.
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/27/bush_guard/index.html
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