Bush's flight from the Guard - the long version made short for you!

In Light of the recent attacks on Kerry, this article in Salon is a fun read. i've trimmed it down for you

Bush in the Guard -- or how i learned to avoid telling the full story.

We got part of this. Bush goes to serve in the guard in Alabama. no one sees him show up, including the Comanding Officer. this is all on the record. Bush can find NO ONE that even recalls seeing him on duty (the best he's got is an old girlfriend that says he told her he had guard duty, but she never saw him go). Everyone under the sun asks for his records and he refuses. you know, this would put it all to rest.

Its a no-brainer. release the records and we see just where he was, right?

well, no. See, somehow his records didn't show his duty being done there. it shows him going to the dentist once, but that's far from the big questions:

Why was he abruptly grounded from flying?
How could he leave the Texas Guard 18 months early?
Where was he?

When asked about this, his default answer is always to point at his Honorable Discharge and state that if he'd done something wrong, he wouldn't have gotten one of those. the problem is, that doesn't answer the question "were you able to skip out on your guard duty in a time of war?"

from the Salon.com article:

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. (you can bet he'll be dead before you see that).

Unlike lawyers, journalists pay little attention to concepts like chain of custody for evidence. In the case of the president's Guard records, whoever possessed them and had the motive and opportunity to clean them up is a critical question. When Bush left the Guard about a half year early to attend Harvard Business School, his hard-copy record was retained in a military personnel records jacket at the Austin offices of the Texas Guard. Eventually, those documents were committed to microfiche. A copy of the microfiche was then sent to the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Those records are considered private, and they cannot be released to anyone without the signature of the serviceman or woman. The White House has never indicated that Bush has signed the authorization form. And this is what prompts unending suspicion.

The documents given to Washington reporters were printed from one of those two microfiches. According to two separate sources within the Guard who saw the printout and spoke with me, the microfiche was shipped to the office of Maj. Gen. Danny James, commander of the Air National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va. James' staff printed out all of the documents on the film and then, according to those same sources, James vetted the material. Subsequent to being scrutinized by James (who commanded the Texas Guard and was promoted to Washington by Bush,) the records were then sent to the White House for further scrutiny prior to release to the news media.

This is a considerably different process from what was practiced by Sen. John McCain during the 2000 presidential campaign ... McCain signed a release form, and his entire record, a stack of papers more than a foot tall, was made available to reporters without being vetted by the campaign.

when the most common records in his millitary file are missing AFTER the President and a (soon promoted) surrogate sift through them, it doesn't take much of a nose to tell something stinks.