NEW YORK, September 15, 2004 -- Henry Kissinger once joked off a comparison between accusations against him and Clinton by saying that the problem with Bill Clinton was "that he didn't have the strength of character to be a war criminal."

One could almost make the same complaint about John Kerry -- he is just out of his depth when it comes to rolling in the mud of a dirty campaign.

When MoveOn ran an entirely truthful ad on Bush's military record, he initially condemned it, implicitly putting it on a par with the proven lies of the Swift Boat crowd.

Letting the Facts Fall into Place

Let us reiterate what is irrefutably proven. Bush, with an incredibly low pilot aptitude test, jumped to the head of a long line to join the Texas Air National Guard.

He was given an immediate commission despite a complete lack of experience of qualifications.

He missed his flight medical in 1972 and was grounded. He has never explained why.

He was absent from active duty for twelve months from May 1972 to May 1973, and has never explained why.

The White House has never answered Helen Thomas's question about whether or not he was sentenced serve mandatory community service in this period.

Trashing the Messenger

Faced with unpalatable facts, the Bush campaign has been consistent. Trash the source: or better yet, get someone else to do so. It is interesting that the White House itself has not denied the authenticity of the documents that CBS obtained from Lt Col Jerry Killian's files, but has relied on other people to do so on its behalf.

They almost certainly suspect that the documents are genuine and in the words of the Jerry Killian memo, are covering their ass. Indeed, there are likely to be more such documents out there. Watch CBS and USA Today over the next few weeks.

We have Ben Barnes' daughter joining in a chorus to say that Barnes is a partisan democrat -- despite a long record of bipartisan contributions and back-scratching fairly typical of Texas state politics.

But John Sununu, definitely no Democrat, accused Barnes of getting Lloyd Bentsen's son a slot in the same unit. When Barnes gave exactly the same testimony in an affidavit in Texas as he did last week for "Sixty Minutes," George W. Bush sent him a thank you letter!

Indeed, if it were not for fear of a perjury rap, one suspects that he would have been even more forthcoming.

And this week, Harvard Professor Yoshi Tsurumi told the New York Daily News that Bush boasted to him that "My dad had a good friend who put me at the head of the waiting list."

Smirking in the West Wing

When tasked with dodging a war that he supported, he "just smirked." And well he might, since if much of the media had their way, he would get away with it still.

In a similar way, the White House has been careful never to endorse the testimony of retired Lt. Col. John "Bill" Calhoun, who is the only person who claims he saw Bush performing drills in Alabama in 1972.

There is a reason for that reticence. Calhoun "remembers" seeing Bush in the summer, before he was ordered to turn up at the Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Alabama that Calhoun was at -- and Bush's pay records as released by the White House, prove that he did not attend when Calhoun says he did.

That did not stop three major networks citing his testimony. Calhoun has not tried to claim the $3,500 reward put forward by a group of local veterans for anyone who can prove they saw Bush on an Alabama base.

But even if the Killian documents were forgeries, which is far from proven, since the IBM Selectric's had been around for over ten years by then, the facts of the case are clear. George W. Bush failed to turn up for his flight medical in 1972, and there is no record of any explanation from him or discipline. Since then, the White House has claimed that he did not need to, because his plane, the F102 was obsolescent.

Honorable Discretion?

In fact his Texas Unit continued to fly it for another two years, and the Alabama unit that he was ordered to report to, but never did, had begun using more modern planes -- so he could have begun to refine his skills.

In fact, the Texas Air Guard was activated and the "forged" documents hint at that, the need to use the slot taken up by the young wastrel by pilots with more experience -- who would be present as well, presumably.

What this means is that the White House has been caught in an outright lie. And the Blogosphere remains silent.

In any case, the notion that a junior officer like Bush could decide which orders made sense, and which he could disobey would be a refreshing idea for people like Sergeant Camilo Meija who refused to go back to Iraq this year because it made no sense.

He is military prison, and would doubtless welcome the Commander-in-Chief's testimony on the discretion to disobey orders that appear stupid.

In fact, the Killian documents are consistent with what we know from other sources. For some reason, Bush tried to use campaigning in Alabama as an excuse for not taking his flight medical.

It appears that after conversations with Killian, the latter arranged for him to take them earlier, in May, instead of July, and in Texas. Bush did not turn up. Nor did he turn up in July in Alabama for the examination due within one month of his birthday. Killian had to ground him.

On the public record, we have Killian in documents released by the White House, dated, May 1973 refusing to appraise Bush's performance, because he had not seen him for a year.

So why all these memos and notes to the file? As in any bureaucracy, it appears that Killian was getting pressure from above, as the disputed memos said, to "sugar coat" the Bush record.

But he did not want to be the fall guy if anything went wrong, so he left a paper trail that he could refer to in case there was any comeback, in case the Air Force nationally noticed a missing pilot.

The White House repeats continually, and is echoed by much of the media, that Bush got an honorable discharge. And so did the Washington Sniper, after court martials for hitting an officer, stealing a gun and letting off a grenade in a tent.

This, as the White House knows, is a content free fact. It takes a lot of work to get anything but an honorable discharge, not least when you have so many friends in high places.

Death By Blog

The way in which the Bush fans are trying to blog this story to death suggests that it is true, and that it will hurt him. The way in which the rest of the media is happily pounding at CBS may owe more to professional pique than partisan fever (although some elements of that cannot be discounted. But for whatever reason, they have succeeded in making the provenance of the Killian documents and Dan Rather's integrity the story.

In the end though, it is almost as sad that most of the media, including CBS, have let the real story -- Bush's lack of service in the Guard -- lie dormant for so long. The basic information has been there all along, well researched by local magazines and newspapers.

Even if it is likely that someone would use a modern word processor to elaborately forge thirty year old documents instead of using an old typewriter, the fact remains: George W. Bush used his family influence to dodge a war which he supported and was happy to send 58,000 poorer and less well connected contemporaries to their death.

He then dodged the obligations that he had signed up for, and was again protected by his family connections.

All the rest is commentary, and sadly most of that commentary seems specifically designed to obscure those irrefutable facts. It is not necessary to invent new details to add verisimilitude to what is an already clear and convincing narrative.

-- Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Own Past.

© MediaChannel.org, 2004. All rights reserved.

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