Bush's Missing Military Records

Bush, AWOL or not? The more you look into the documents and articles the more mysteries and contradictions appear.

Let me present my own theory. It is known that while Governor, Bush had his Texas Air National Guard records scrubbed clean to remove embarrassing items. It is also known his campaign sent a friend to look at and probably clean all of his national military records. It is likely that embarrassing stuff was found and they deleted it. The national reserve and guard records could not recieve as good a scrubbing as the Texas records.

The embarrassing stuff could have been: 1 him missing one or more orders to report to duty from Texas while he was in Alabama, 2 for whatever reason not taking a required annual physical exam, and 3 for these two reasons being suspended from flight duty and six months added to his length of obligation. All of these items are either in or strongly implied in the remaining national records. However, because his campaign staff shredded his records for this time period it has created a paperwork gap of over 12 months making him appear to be AWOL for all of these months instead of just a few.

Does this make sense?

What do you say?

Lt.. Col.. Bill Burkett completed 28 years of decorated service and was medically retired from the US Army National Guard in 1998 after suffering meningoencephalitis on return from an assignment in Panama. From 1995 until his illness, Burkett served as State Plans Officer for the Texas Army National Guard and Governor George W. Bush. After refusing to follow direct orders involving falsifying readiness reports, Burkett sought "whistleblower" status for reports involving anti-Semitic activity; personnel fraud; readiness fraud and the alteration of the personal military file of Governor George W. Bush. Lt. Col. Burkett is currently the plaintiff in his appeal to the US Supreme Court in the case of Burkett v. Goodwin, Taliaferro, Meador, et al, in regard to the retaliation against him following breaking the Bush records issue. Lt. Col Burkett served as a War Plans Officer during Operation Desert Storm and functioned as a senior trainer in conducting simulations exercises for deploying troops.

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As the presidential campaign planning began in Texas, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett of the Texas Guard said he overheard orders from the Governor’s office to “scrub” Mr. Bush’s records. Burkett said he listened as Joe Allbaugh and Dan Bartlett, both of whom went to Washington with the president, told Major General Daniel James, commander of the Texas Guard, to “make sure there is nothing embarrassing in the governor’s file.” Burkett, who was chief advisor to General James, also said he was present when the records were surrendered for scrubbing.

Bush Campaign Rocked by Coverup Report

"Bush trained for two years, and then flew for two years, but then his service sort of went into neverneverland." As a Senior at Yale, explained Rogers, Bush had signed a letter of agreement that said if he were a "bad boy" in the Guard, he would have to serve "ARF" -- an abbreviation for Air Reserve Force and essentially a demotion. Bush's record stops at May 1972 and also indicates that he served ARF -- indicative of a disciplinary sanction.

Palast the Iconoclast

Palast interviews retired Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett of the Texas Air National Guard (TANG), who states on camera that shortly after George W. became Texas' governor in the 1990s, he witnessed a speakerphone call from the Texas governor's office to TANG, and overheard the caller tell Guard officers to "clean [Bush's] records from his files." Palast says that after the call, Burkett "asked the officers if they'd carried out the questionable orders, and they said 'absolutely.' They pointed, and Burkett saw in the [shredding designated] trashcan George W. Bush's ... pay [and retirement points] records."

Controversy has simmered for decades over George W.'s Vietnam era service record; critics have long charged he went AWOL from the Guard for long periods of time. The allegedly trashed documents, which had been undisclosed for years, that could have proven whether or not G.W. had been absent without leave while he was in TANG.

If Bush went AWOL, this would have been desertion during wartime. "Punishment for Air National guardsmen who missed two days of work was to be sent to Vietnam," Burkett also said, according to Palast, interviewed in Santa Monica, California, before flying to London to broadcast the expose.

Bush detractors also contend that back in 1968, his father, wealthy oilman and then-Rep. George Herbert Walker Bush, pulled strings to cut a behind-the-scenes deal ensuring Junior was not sent to Vietnam – Palast says he received a rare, coveted Texas Air National Guard spot "12 days before G.W. was to be drafted."

Palast adds he recently interviewed "an extremely well-known Texan at the center of" President Bush's alleged draft-dodging, who was a key participant in maneuvers to get him into the Air Guard. This source not only confirmed that getting G.W. into the Texas Air National Guard "was a fix," but that "it was Daddy Bush himself who made the initial call to get his son out of the war," Palast says. Although the figure would not agree to go on camera or be named, Palast said he interviewed the source in front of a high-ranking BBC producer.

Previously, says Palast, he had considered G.W.'s draft evading story unverified. However, he now believes he has confirmed it.

President Top Gun: Affirmatively Missing in Action

On camera, I spoke with Texas cattle rancher Bill Burkett, formerly a Lieutenant Colonel in the air guard. Seems that Burkett was in the office of the Guard’s Adjutant General when a call came in from then-Governor George W. Bush’s office. As is normal procedure, the call was put on the speaker box, but the request was not so normal. The Governor’s office was sending over an official biographer … and the Governor’s minions wanted to make sure the files did not contain not-so-heroic info. Burkett told me:

“I was in the General’s office, General Daniel James …. He gets a telephone call from Joe Albaugh, who was the Governor’s chief of staff, and Dan Bartlett … on the voice box … and they wanted General James to assemble all of the Governor’s files, that [Karen Hughes, Bush’s aide] was going to write a book…. But Joe told General James, ‘Make sure there’s not anything in there that’ll embarrass the Governor.’”

And there wouldn’t be. Burkett asked if the general’s staff really intended to purge the files; and sure enough, as evidence of the affirmative reply, he was shown the piles of pay and pension records in the garbage pails destined for the shredders. Colonel Burkett did not run off with those files so we can only conclude this: the only evidence that Bush showed up for duty during the war is now missing. Military pay records are public records – and now they are conveniently unavailable.

Bush military records

"Burkett said Bush aides had visited the National Guard headquarters at Camp Mabry 'on numerous occasions' to make sure that records available to the public about his military service would tally with his autobiography's version of his time as a reserve pilot during the Vietnam war."

“From May to November 1972, Bush was in Alabama working in a US Senate campaign, and was required to attend drills at an Air National Guard unit in Montgomery. But there is no evidence in his record that he did so. And William Turnipseed, the retired general who commanded the Alabama unit back then, said in an interview last week that Bush never appeared for duty there.”

In Fall 1973, as an automatic disciplinary action, Bush was reassigned to the Obligated Reserve Section in Denver, because he disobeyed orders to show up for a mandatory flight physical and therefore was unable to fulfill the last two years of his six-year obligation as an Air National Guard jet fighter pilot.


Hackers Disable Web Links to Bush Documents

News writers do not break national TV stories that could damage a candidate on the day before an election, because there is no time for the candidate to defuse a damaging story. Blocking the web site from TV reporters on Friday provided a critical delay, preventing TV pundits from tying two "failure to disclose" stories together.

Final Summary of Bush's military records.

For the Guard, for the ranking officers involved and for Lieutenant Bush the easiest and quietest thing to do was adding time onto his commitment and placing that time in the inactive reserves.

Among these old documents there is a single clue as to how Bush finally fulfilled his obligations and made up for those missed drill days. In my first request for information I received a small three-page document containing the "Military Biography Of George Walker Bush." This was sent from the Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel Center (ARPC) in Denver Colorado.

In this official summary of Bush's military service, I found something that was not mentioned in Bush's records from the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia. When Bush enlisted his commitment ran until May 26, 1974. This was the separation date shown on all documents as late as October 1973, when Bush was transferred to the inactive reserves at Denver, Colorado. But the date of final separation shown on the official summary from Denver, is November 21, 1974. The ARPC had tacked an extra six months on to Bush's commitment.

Documents.

More On Military Record (Google Cache)

The Air Reserve Personnel Center serves as the processing center for calling up the Reserves to active duty & general personnel management for the Air Force. Thus, if you are assigned to the ARPC/Obligated Reserve Section (ORS), this in actuality, means you are assigned to this office-not for service on the Base in Denver, but for processing of the paperwork for the ORS.

The ARPC explained exactly what being assigned to ORS means. ORS means that you are placed higher up on the list of those to be called into active duty, but that does not mean that you will be called to duty. The other criteria for calling up an enlistee is also based upon the "AFSIC"- or as they clarified, your specialty training. This was a near-guarantee that Bush would not be called to active duty, as the planes he was trained to fly had been phased out.

Bush Watch

Bush finished his active duty and his military servie by serving in Denver, Colorado, between 2 Oct. '73 and 21 Nov. '74. Bush attended Harvard Business School full-time between the Fall of '73 and the Spring of '75, and nothing has ever been said or written about Bush taking trips to Denver during this period. Heldt concludes that, based on the relevant documents, "it would appear that the way Bush fulfilled his duty was not by attending the obligated number of drills, but by having his name added to the roster of a paper unit at the ARPC (ORS) Denver Colorado for an extra six months."

AWOL BUSH

The Errors in the George Magazine Piece - Altered Documents and Lies

This "torn and undated" document is the only new evidence discovered by George Magazine, and is the cornerstone of their story. It therefore warrants close scrutiny.

On the face of it, there is nothing to connect this document with George W. Bush, because his name appears nowhere, and the place where his name should be is torn.

Secondly, there is nothing to suggest that this is an official document of any kind, because it is unsigned and undated, unlike any other document in the record.

Finally, the original record has been modified with handwritten notations, without indication of the author or the date of the alteration.

A document similar to this was received by Marty Heldt with his FOIA request. However, the document that was sent had NO handwritten notations. Thus, the version exhibited by George - and the cornerstone of its story - must have been altered.

This "document" therefore raises more questions than it answers - in particular, WHO altered it, and WHY?

Article Aurthor Responds

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.

However

Another document, the Chronological Listing of Service, shows the location and the number of days he served every year, with the exception of 1972-1973. In fact, nowhere except on the torn document is there evidence that he served during that year.

Another question: considering the military's obsession with audits, chains of command and official reports, what weight does this torn document carry? After all, it is unsigned, undated and partially obliterated.

Who really broke the story?

The article's setting "the record straight" depends almost entirely on the word of someone who claimed to have dated George W. Bush while he was stationed in Alabama, and a torn and undated piece of paper. Wow.