STATEMENT:
The “AGREEMENT” that I have recently published on my website is important for two reasons:
1) It demonstrates that the White House withheld at least one key document concerning Bush’s military commitments from his personnel files, despite its claims that it released all of the relevant documents in February
2) It demonstrates that Bush had signed a “contract” stating that in exchange for the expenditure of considerable sums of public monies on his pilot training, he would serve his country for five years after that training was completed.
The key phrase here is “I will serve with my parent ANG unit, as directed by the unit commander, unless sooner relieved by competent military authority.”
Bush was never “relieved” of his obligation to train with the Texas Air National Guard when he went to Alabama. He was never actually transferred to any unit in Alabama, and without the necessary paperwork actually discharging Bush from TXANG and orders issued reassigning Bush to a different unit, he remained a member of TXANG.
The issue of “competent” military authority is also key here. Bush’s commanders did not have the authority to tell him it would be okay to miss statutorily required Unit Training Assemblies for five straight months without performing “substitute duty.” The discretion of the “unit commanders” was limited by provisions in the Code of Federal Regulations which allowed commanders to make “exceptions”(in essence, ignore the fact that Bush was not participating in required training) for only 4 of 48 mandatory drill periods each fiscal year.
Nor did his commanders have the authority to permit Bush to indefinitely lose his flight status because of his failure to accomplish a required physical while allowing Bush to maintain the job title of “F-102 pilot.” The discretion of the commanders in this instance was limited to three options, either order Bush to get the physical, reassign him to a position that did not require flight status, or take punitive action against Bush for failing to maintain the qualifications for his position.
But, in addition to the “news” that this document provides, there is a much larger story. That is the complete and absolute failure of the mainstream media to subject the records released by the White House to any serious scrutiny whatsoever. The “Agreement” I have released is mentioned in those documents, and pilot from that era have been asking the question “where is his five year pilot agreement” ever since the files were released in February. This is a question that the news media should have been asking all along---and if they had asked it, I would not be releasing this document right now.
My website, The AWOL Project, is the result of six months of research by one person*, who made the effort to answer the questions raised by the documents that were released by the White House in February when it became glaringly obvious that the news media would not be doing its job. The first question that had to be answered was “what were the actual standards, policies and procedures of the Air Force to which Bush was subject at that time?” A few simple internet searches made it clear that under current laws and regulation, Bush had not “fulfilled his duty.” That of course “proved” nothing, but it should have been sufficient for the mainstream media to find out what “fulfilled his duty” meant from 1972-1974.
Far more attention has been given in the last eight days to the provenance of the memos released by CBS than was given to the questions that were raised by the “document dump” in the six months after February 13. Certainly, if one tenth of the scrutiny given to the “Killian memos” had been given to the “Lloyd memo” which was the basis for the White House claims that Bush had “fulfilled his duty”, Lloyd would currently be established as a fraudster, and a not terribly competent one at that.
Instead, the press corps relied upon someone who had been hired by the Bush campaign to clear Bush of accusations concerning his time in the US Armed Forces. But Lloyd was not just a partisan operative, he was also an active participant in Bush’s military career (a fact that was not disclosed by Lloyd in his memo), and had personal reasons to want to avoid any real scrutiny of Bush’s military records. (One of the documents in the Bush files has Lloyd’s signature as the authorizing official approving Bush’s F-102 pilot training, despite Bush’s abominable scores on pilot, navigational, and quantitative aptitute tests.)
The discrepancies were so obvious as to be laughable. He misstated the dates covered by a key document (claiming it covered the entire retention/retirement year of May 27, 1973 through May 26, 1974, when the document itself is dated January 30, 1974), misstated the number of “gratuitous” points that had been awarded (5, not 15), and (falsely) based his claim on Bush receiving 50 point toward retirement, when the document shows that the Air Force had disallowed two of the 40 total points awarded toward a good year for retirement, and without those two disallowed points Bush couldn’t even get to 50 points. The guy couldn’t even add, coming up with 56 when he added 19, 16 and 15.
(It was the discrepancies in this document that got me started doing the research to begin with. They were obvious, and were commented on throughout the “progressive” blogosphere in early February. Contrast this with the feeding frenzy involving questions of the authenticity of the Killian memos, which was based on some right-wing blogger retyping the memos on his computer, and declaring the memos to be forgeries.)
The media didn’t do its job in February, and with a few notable exception (Walter Robinson at the Boston Globe, US News and World Report---not even CBS has reported that it has investigated Bush’s service record in the context of contemporaneous laws and policies, and found them lacking) still hasn’t begun to do its job. It is thus to be expected that someone who did what the media should have been doing would come up with the “Agreement” that I have just released.
Paul Lukasiak
September 15, 2004
ADDED 9/16/04
For those of you who would now like find to figure out what Bush’s training requirements actually were, I have posted all the relevant statutes and CFRs, as well as the relevant chapters of the Air Reserve Forces Personnel Manual (as well as excerpts from a few other manuals) from that period. Links can be found at http://www.glcq.com/source_documents.htm
* of course, dozens upon dozens of other people proved invaluable to my understanding of the documents, laws, regulations, policies and procedures, as well as providing me with the fruits of their own research.