Hurricane Katrina laid bare Bush’s multiple failures as President, everything from political philosophy to inappropriate affect. But the obviousness of Bush’s failures should not distract us from the failures of America’s corporate media, without which Bush could never have become President in the first place.
The striking abandonment of duty by Bush, and every politically-appointed member of his Administration dramatically underscores the enduring significance of a major story that entire corporate media has consistently bungled since day one–Bush’s dereliction of duty in the Texas Air National Guard, and the evidence of a high-level coverup to protect him.
As will be seen in the story republished below–which has nothing to do with the discredited memos CBS used–the people who covered up for Bush’s missed service did not do a legally adequate job, and thus his ginned-up “honorable discharge” was not earned even with their help.
Why It Matters Now
To his credit, Byron Calame, the New York Times Public Editor, wrote a piece, “Covering New Orleans: The Decade Before the Storm” in which he wrote:
Given the dimensions of poverty in New Orleans and the city’s dependence on a levee system, The Times‘s news coverage of these problems over the past decade falls far short of what its readers have a right to expect of a national newspaper.
This was a refreshing admission from a corporate media leader. But it said nothing about systematic failure to tell the truth about George W. Bush, dating back well into his days as Governor of Texas.
The failure to vigorously investigate Bush’s National Guard record is particularly telling now. It was telling from the beginning, in that it went straight to the questions of character on which Bush based his 2000 campaign. It was telling on the morning of 9/11, when Bush followed a pattern similar to that he displayed with the National Guard–first, he hung back, then he abandoned the field. It was telling again, when he began sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq to die, or possibly just be scarred for life, for reasons that keep changing even to this day, reasons he dares not try to explain to the likes of Cindy Sheehan. And it was telling once again, as he and his entire administration were AWOL as Katrina bore down upon the City of New Orleans, and for a good 3-4 days afterwards, at the very least.
In the early 1970s, Bush was a low man in the hierarchy of favoritism and coverups, though his father was near the top. This arrangement meant that many others covered for him–presumeably even without being asked on most occasions. Now he’s at the top, but the shameful neo-fuedal system is in place, where the only thing that matters is loyalty to others who are in on the game. The same system that gave the AWOL son of an ex-congressman an honorable discharge cheefully hired a total incompetent to head FEMA, and America’s corporate media never blinked.
The Failed CBS Attempt Doesn’t Exonerate the Corporate Press
There will be those, of course, who will point to the ill-fated CBS investigation–“You see, they tried!” these people will say. But if the media had really been doing its job, this would have been a monster story way back in May of 2000–when it surfaced briefly as a national news item–if not before.
It was the media’s failure to give it proper consideration then, which made CBS feel the need for every last flourish it could muster. This is what you have to do, after all, if you are going to revisit something that the media as a whole has decided is “not a story,” which is what the media decided about Bush going AWOL from the National Guard, just as they later decided that the Downing Street Memo was “not a story,” because it supposedly didn’t say anything new.
The Bush AWOL Story–As It Was Known Last September
Here, then, is a republishing of a story Random Lengths News ran just under a year ago, shortly after CBS got burned by Karl Rove. It is, of course, “not a story” according to the rules of the corporate media. But see how much light it sheds on Bush’s character and the culture of coverup and irresponsibility that has always covered for him, and does so still to this day.
To emphasize the reason I’m republishing this now, I use my original working title, rather than the title it ran under, “Cover Up: Bush’s Missing Guard Duty; What CBS News Didn’t Find.”
AWOL Bush, AWOL Press
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Random Lenghts News
October 1, 2004For over 35 years, a pattern of favoritism, secrecy, and cover-ups have surrounded George W. Bush’s evasion of military duty during the Vietnam War. The latest example is the distracting controversy over forged memos used by CBS News of real memos that said precisely the same thing–that Bush was gaming the system, with help from friends in high places.
These findings in no way depend upon the apparently fraudulent memos from Lt. Colonel. Jerry B. Killian, used by CBS News recently–memos whose contents are apparently true, according to Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox. “I know that I didn’t type them,” Knox said of the memos in a broadcast interview, “However, the information in those is correct.”
Rather than depending on those memos, the analyses of Bush’s official records illustrates a pattern of disobedience and official cover-up that is perfectly consistent with Knox’s assertion.
Bush’s problems began in late Spring on 1972, when he first tried to transfer to a non-flying unit–a back doorway of breaking his signed service agreement approved by his Texas superiors, but rejected at the federal level. He then failed to take a mandatory flight physical and was suspended from flying, stopped attending drills for at least six months, and was not observed by his superior officers for a full year7. (He never took another physical again, and was, apparently, never disciplined for it.) A hurried spate of training unlawfully packed into a brief two-month period was then followed by his discharge from the Texas Air National Guard (TXANG), but he never fulfilled his obligation to finish his service at a unit in Massachusetts when he returned to New England to get an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Bush has unsigned pay and points records documenting training drills during part of his missing year, presumably in Alabama. However, no other documents support this evidence, which gives credit for drills outside the legally allowable time-frame, and overstates the points earned. (November 13 and 14, 1972, and January 4, 5, 8, 9, 10 were weekdays, for which only seven points total should be credited. Bush received fourteen.) A variety of such documents would normally exist for each of the drills. No one observed him at any of these drills. Other documents–such as his Chronological Listing of Service and his Military Biography–show no record of him being stationed in Alabama. There is no document authorizing his presence in Alabama after December 1972, or for the sessions he was paid for there in October and November. He missed the sessions he was assigned to those months.
Bush himself has never been seriously questioned about all these contradictions, much less given a straight answer. For years, his all-purpose response has been that he served honorably, because he got an honorable discharge. But his honorable discharge was fraudulently obtained, according to analysis by Colonel Gerald Lechliter (Retired), posted on the New York Times website, and corroborated by a similar analysis by independent researcher Paul A Lukasiak, prominently cited by Salon magazine for his role in analyzing and decoding the significance of Bush’s military record.
While their arguments go into considerable detail, a handful of documents readily reveals major contradictions in Bush’s defense. A memo released by the White House in February 2004, written by Lt. Colonel Albert Lloyd, is clearly in error in claiming that Bush fulfilled his obligations with 56 points in 1972-73 and 50 points in 1973-74–the bare minimum accepted. For the later year, a document in Bush’s file (released by the White House that same week)–“ARF Retirement Credit Summary,” dated January 30, 1974–clearly states that he earned only 40 points for 1973-74, ten points short. That alone is enough to discredit his honorable discharge.
In his analysis, Lechliter concludes that, “The pay records released by the White House this past winter prove Bush received unauthorized, i.e., fraudulent, payments for inactive duty training, even if he did show up for duty.”
Lukasiak adds that the documents “also reveal that Bush’s personnel files were tampered with to disguise what had occurred.”
Both men examined Bush’s records in light of military regulations in force at the time. Both reached similar conclusions–that Bush failed to make up for a substantial number of missed drills, but received fraudulent credit on the way to getting out of his duty. Lechliter explicitly confirms earlier research from 2000 by Martin Heldt–a self-educated researcher whose pioneering work was occasionally referenced by the corporate media, but generally ignored–and by the Boston Globe.
Surprisingly, Bush’s records were never carefully examined following a massive document dump on February 13, 2004. Lloyd’s memo, issued the same week, stated that he had examined the documents, and that “the record clearly shows that 1LT. George W. Bush has satisfactory years for both 72-73 and 73-74 which proves that he completed his military obligation in a satisfactory manner.”
But Lukasiak points out, “Unbeknownst to the press, however, Lloyd had been personally involved in ensuring that Bush received F-102 pilot training, despite Bush’s abysmal pilot aptitude test scores.”
Not only was Lloyd biased toward Bush over a period of 30 plus years, he was flat-out wrong on two additional counts, beyond overlooking the Retirement Credit Summary. First, he failed to examine whether the points even could have been properly earned. A decisive number could not. They violated policy on several different grounds, and could not have reflected actual, credited service.
Second, As Lechliter explains, “Lloyd’s most serious error obliterates the distinction between a satisfactory RR [retention/retirement] year and `satisfactory participation’ as a condition of service.”
The RR year begins when an individual’s service begins, and is of primary concern for career officers. A minimum of 50 points is required, which can include up to 15 gratuitous points in addition to points for specific drills. But points for “`satisfactory participation’ as a condition of service” are calculated by fiscal year, and typically require more than the RR minimum.
Bush needed 59 points, divided into two categories: Annual Active Duty for Training (“ANACDUTRA”) and Inactive Duty for Training (“INACDUTRA”), which in turn fell into two categories–individual and group training (known as “UTA”).
Lechliter continues, “Even a cursory review of his attendance at ANACDUTRA and INACDUTRA for the FY July 1,1972, through June 30, 1973, results in an unequivocal `no’ for that fiscal year.”
Even if all Bush’s points were legitimate, “he earned 15 ANACDUTRA points to satisfy this requirement, but only 36 INACDUTRA points, woefully short of the minimum 44 INACDUTRA points he was required to earn,” Lechliter reports.
Bush earned even fewer points the following fiscal year–just 25 total ANACDUTRA and INACDUTRA points–compounded by the fact that he failed to report for duty in Massachusetts when he relocated there to attend Harvard Business School, despite signing a statement saying he would do so. The White House has never disputed this.
Bush clearly failed to meet the minimum service record requirements, and thus he did not earn his honorable discharge. But a closer look shows that he didn’t even meet the RR requirements–primarily because he was credited with make-up drills that were not timely.
Missed group training could only be made up with strict guidelines– “within 15 days immediately before or 30 days immediately after the regularly scheduled UTA but before the next month’s first scheduled UTA (whichever is earlier) and within the same fiscal year”–and with the approval of a commanding officer on a specific form.
However, Lechliter notes, “In November 1972 and January 1972 [sic], supposedly while in Alabama, Bush was given credit and paid for 12 UTA periods (six days) that were outside this time envelope; in July 1973, while in his TXANG unit, Bush was given credit and paid for eight UTA periods (four days) that were outside the time limitation. Moreover, there is no evidence whatsoever that the absences were authorized: no requests and no approvals.”
Even more damningly, Lechliter continues, “These payments also explain why Bush requested a discharge on October 1, 1973, instead of any earlier date, although his counseling statement is dated July 30, 1973. Finance certainly would not have paid him for INACDUTRA after he was discharged. It clearly and convincingly demonstrates intent to defraud the government both on Bush’s part and those in the TXANG who approved the payments.”
Removing the irregular drills from Bush’s record reduces even his RR credits to 44 for 72-73, and 42 for 73-74–well below the 50 point minimum for both years.
Although this proves that Bush did not earn his honorable discharge, it only begins to scratch the surface of what’s wrong with Bush’s records.
For starters, Lloyd gave Bush 15 gratuitous points for 73-74, but because he served far less than the whole year he was only entitled to 5, as reflected on the ARF Retirement Credit Summary, mentioned above. Another 12 points Bush received in 72-73 were for drills which lacked prior written authorization. Thus, according to Bush’s existing records, he legally earned only 32 points for both his last two RR years–less than 2/3rdsof what was required.
But the problem isn’t just a lack of proper points; it’s various indications that strings were being pulled to keep Bush out of trouble. There are at best only the barest records supporting the claims that Bush performed most of these drills.
On Sept. 15, 1972, he was ordered to report to Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, deputy commander of the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery, Ala., for training on the weekends of Oct. 7-8 and Nov. 4-5, 1972.
But aside from the questionable pay records, there’s no evidence he ever showed up in Alabama. In 2000, Turnipseed told the Boston Globe he never saw Bush.
“Had he reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not, ”Turnipseed said. ”I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.”
Nor did anyone else see him in at the 187th, except for one would-be witness, John Calhoun, who claims to have seen him numerous times, beginning well before Bush was assigned there.
Rewards have been posted for anyone who can corroborate Bush’s presence with the 187th. They were first offered in 2000. The most recent offer $50,000 from Texans For Truth, was good through September 30, 2004. So far, no one has claimed a penny.
Despite a sprinkling of print media coverage, the corporate broadcast media remains utterly ignorant of how devastating Bush’s actual military records are. Instead, they are locked into a feeding frenzy focused on CBS’s embarrassment of relying on the wrong documents. But that doesn’t mean that Bush’s evasion of duty didn’t happen. One outlet that has begun to cover the story is the Air Force Times, available on the web. How far their coverage goes could have enormous influence in the weeks ahead. Depending on who is the next commander in chief, they might even get to the very bottom of the story.
Of course, they didn’t get to the bottom of the story. And now New Orleans has paid the price.
To the contrary.
There is no spectacular reporting in this piece. All I did was examine other people’s analysis that was posted on the internet, and work through it to double-check what they had done, and draw my own conclusions. Any reasonably intelligent 14-year old could have done the same.
The only thing remarkable about this is that I work at a paper that wants to publish information like this, rather than ignoring it. And that’s a terrible indictment of America’s corporate media. They have the blood of New Orleans on their hands.
As a retired Army Reserve Officer I recognize what you wrote as being accurate. It is also an excellent presentation of the information. I am less concerned with how great you are than I am with what an excellent job you have done pulling it together and presenting it.
As for the media, when the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted most newspapers were broadsides designed to get information out to the public. Today they are vehicles in which to sell advertising, and they use small amounts of mostly non-controversial but surprising news to attract eyeballs to the advertisements. “News” is no longer the purpose of newspapers or TV – if it ever was.
The Greensheet it the purest form of “news” paper today. It is nothing but advertisements, the reader picks it up solely for the advertisements, and there is no silly effort to try to sweeten the ads with news.
TV, of course, is pure entertainment. It was never more than headlines and pictures anyway, which is why Natalie Holloway gets big play. Easy headlines and pretty pictures.
Any information you actually do publish is better than what the media inherently wants to publish. Especially if it is divisive and might run off readers/viewers and as a result, advertisers.
That’s why the conservatives don’t depend on advertising-driven media outlets to get their propaganda out to their followers. They subsidize things like the Weekly Standard and Washington Times to change public opinion. They have actually gone back to the original idea of the media from two centuries ago. Their money comes from government favoritism and graft.
If you can actually publish any real news through this sick system you are performing a miracle.
As I commented on another of your diaries – “It’s the propaganda, stupid.”
Tonight I was buying household items for a young couple from New Orleans who have just gotten an apartment here (and out of our convention center – hooray!) The checker at Target, when I told her why I was buying these things said, “It was so terrible. All that looting. I suppose some of those people are good people – I shouldn’t judge, I guess . . . But it was so terrible what they did . . .”
Those people.
It was all I could do not to throw a screaming fit right there in public.
The young couple? He’s an electrician. He lost his house (flooded to the eaves) and three vehicles, including his work truck. He rescued several people in his neighborhood, during the hurricane, with the winds still blowing and the waters rising using a blow up plastic boat he’d bought for his kids.
It was terrible what he did. I mean, he’s one of those people.
In the end they got out with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs – they had to leave their dogs – they even dumped everything out of their pockets onto the concrete when they were waiting in line at the NOLA convention center to get on the helicopter for fear that they would have something in them that the guy with the gun at the door to the helicopter would consider “contraband.”
That woman checking out the dish soap and the shower curtain and the lamp and the aluminum foil has only a miniscule responsibility for her perception of what happened in New Orleans. I couldn’t scream at her because those who truly are responsible are in . . . New York?
Time published a scathing expose of Brown’s padded resume a few days ago. Where the hell were they when he was appointed to the job two years ago? You know, you’d think – especially post 9/11, that it might have occurred to some of these “journalists” that FEMA is a damn important agency, and who is this guy that’s running it now? You know, it would have been nice if they’d asked that when Allbaugh was appointed. And if they had – perhaps it might have entered their pretty little heads to ask, if we have political hacks and cronies running the place, I wonder how the people who work there feel about it? How are things going at FEMA?
But no.
I’ve been thinking about this comment over and over again, trying to think of how to respond to it. It’s bad enough that Americans look at the Iraqi people, and have such a hard time seeing them as ordinary people struggling to survive in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But when they can’t even see that about their fellow Americans?
I’m still thinking about how to respond. I’m just totally flabbergasted. Yes, of course, there is no way to respond to someone like that. You have to focus on the producers, not the consumers. I know that very well. But I’m still just totally flabbergasted.
is that if I had suggested in any way that what she was saying was racist, she would have been offended and angry. She would have declared herself not to “have a racist bone in her body.” She would have thought I was some kind of “politically correct” liberal nutcase who sees lurking racism everywhere – where it doesn’t really exist.
But I know damn well that when she thinks of the World Trade Center towers falling, the faces of the victims she sees are white (even though the victims were actually very diverse), and has nothing but pity and empathy for them and their families. And when she sees the victims of Katrina, the images that fill her mind are of “looters” – and the faces of the “looters” are Black.
And who planted those images – and reinforced them over and over again until she thinks she is just “seeing the facts”?
Of course, there were looters in New Orleans and most of them were Black. But as Leonard Pitts pointed out, there are bad people in the world everywhere, and New Orleans was a majority Black city – so what would you expect the looters there to be – Native Hawaiians?
Add up all of what later turned out to be false reports of rapes and carjackings and shootings, etc. and combine them with the endless repeated footage of actual looters, and of ordinary people taking what they had to to survive being identified as “looters,” and the “face” of the Katrina victims becomes a “Black looter.” The face is not the face of the man I talked about above or his girlfriend. And who is ultimately responsible for that?
The Republicans are already starting to suggest that we really aren’t obligated to help out the Katrina survivors with the vast amount of money and resources that they will need to rebuild their city – and their lives. We “can’t afford it.” But the unspoken subtext is – you saw what they were like on your TVs. They don’t deserve it.
Yes, Iraqis are not just ordinary people struggling to survive. They are not “us.” And our fellow Americans – if they happen to be Black, are “them” too.
Back to your “Teachable Moment” diary.
Not surprisingly, I don’t see us having that teachable moment in an actual moment, certainly not on tv. Oh, we had lots of mini-moments, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to put down anyone who did some good. But the networks as a whole went into damage control fairly quickly.
And here in the blogosphere? Well, over at My Left Wing, I had a long, drawn out battle over whether people should be called “racist” for harboring the effects of growing up and living in a structurally racist society. All the while, what I’d rather be discussing is “how do reach people like that woman?”
What I see on one side of this coin is the same old same old. The society continues with powerfully engraved racial hierarchy, sustained by people devoid of conscious racist intent–just like that woman. And instead of a broad, wide-ranging discussion of race, we have a hot-house brawl on the left.
But on the other side of the coin, I see a watershed moment. And it’s the nature of such moments that the differences are very minor, at first. The drop of rain that will end up in New Orleans falls only inches away from the drop that will end up rolling out to the Pacific past Portland, Oregon.
It’s natural to feel all sorts of frustration, confusion, and numbstruck astonishment in the immediate aftermath. But what counts is what we do in the period ahead, as days and weeks turn into months and years. Momements that matter can take place in the twinkling of an eye, but what fixes them in their importance may take years.
I followed your discussion over at MLW – that was actually what I was referring to in my first paragraph in the comment above. Somewhat obliquely, I guess.
What I see on one side of this coin is the same old same old. The society continues with powerfully engraved racial hierarchy, sustained by people devoid of conscious racist intent–just like that woman. And instead of a broad, wide-ranging discussion of race, we have a hot-house brawl on the left.
I found this diary very disturbing. Not because of the subject matter of the diary itself, although the continued existence of the blatantly racist hatred that she quoted is of course, appalling and scary. What was disturbing to me was the comment thread.
It’s too easy for people “devoid of conscious racist intent” to read such things and see only how awful “they” are. In this case, the “them” are the “White Pride World Wide” cretins posting on Stormfront.org. Not us. We are not like that therefore racism has nothing to do with us. It is too easy to revel in condemning their vileness and ignorance and move along. That’s what I was trying to say, somewhat gingerly, in my comment on your “Teachable Moment” diary.
But what songbh had to say is the crux of the matter. It is very difficult for well-meaning white people to confront what is in their own hearts and minds and take a painful look at how they contribute to sustaining the racial hierarchy in our country. They are well-meaning and good-hearted people. They really do want equality and justice for all. So how could they be contributing to the perpetuation of the pervasive racism in our society?
God only knows what the Republican manipulators of public opinion and the media moguls are doing consciously, for political gain. But I’m sure that most of the reporters and anchors and pundits that contributed to most Americans’ warped impression of what kind of people the Katrina survivors are, are themselves “well-meaning white people” who are convinced tha they don’t “have a racist bone in their body.”
As one who grew up in East Texas (culturally essentially the same as Northern Louisiana) in the 50’s, the world I grew up in was openly segregated, Jim Crow, and racist. Because it was so blatant, I was forced by the confluence of the the rising Civil Rights Movement and adolescent idealism to face the openly racist world around me. Which then forced me to confront how much of it I had absorbed – in spite of growing up in a home where I had been taught from my early years that the racism in my world was morally wrong. But there was a world past our front door which had infected me, as dismayed as I was to acknowledge that.
I sometimes feel like aliens implanted a “racist chip” in my brain that I can’t quite ever – totally – disable, no matter how hard I try. I think almost all Americans have them. Even African-Americans – not in the sense of “reverse racism” but in the sense of how difficult it is to see their own self-worth given the subtle racism that pervades our world.
I wish I could share your optimism that in the coming months and years that well-meaning white people will become more aware that racism is not just what the White Power nutcases are spewing and see how they too contribute to the continuing racial divide in this country. But I’m not hopeful at the moment.
I have a little more hope when I look at the bright, hard-working African-American young people in my classes taking advantage of opportunities that their grandparents could only dream of and the uncomplicated friendships between black and white that I see in my daughter’s generation (she’s 25). But that is such a slow process. I remember back in the 60’s discussing how it would take generations for true equality to be a reality. For African-Americans to take for granted and never question their worthiness, for the white people with their subtle racism that they are blind to to die off and be replaced by their “non-infected” descendants. But that process is so damn slow. And as we saw in New Orleans, waiting for that bright future is literally killing people today.