Posted on 09/10/2004 3:24:24 AM PDT by The Bandit
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Marty Heldt is a farmer. He told us, "I spent 17 years as a brakeman [for the railroad] before moving back to the farm. That job had some long layovers that gave me a lot of time to read and to educate myself." He lives in Clinton, Iowa.
Vietnam had been over for a couple of years and the U.S. was at peace when I graduated from high school. When I told my parents that I was going to go into the service my mother was a little upset. My dad, though, was very supportive with just one warning, "Once you sign, once you join up, you can't just walk away. You have to follow orders."
I thought about that a lot recently when I first heard the story of how G.W. Bush had seemingly just walked away from at least a year's service in the National Guard. He had, it now appears, deserted his post. A charge so serious that I could not believe that a presidential candidate could get away with it.
"ALMOST POSITIVE"
But a quick glance at Bush's military service tells why George felt he could walk away from his duty without fear of recriminations. G.W. Bush had been treated special since before he signed up. The rumors had circulated for years that G.W. had gotten into the Guard because of his prominent father. The senior Bush denied such rumors including a specific rumor mentioning President Bush's friend, Houston businessman Sid Adger, as the one who had wielded influence, saying he "was almost positive" (Dallas Morning News, September 28, 1999) that he had not talked with Adger about the Guard.
One who was even more positive that G.W. Bush had gotten into the Guard on his own was Colonel Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, then commander of the Texas Air National Guard. Colonel Staudt told the Los Angeles Times last July 4th that "Nobody did anything for him. There was no goddamn influence on his behalf. Neither his daddy nor anybody else got him into the Guard." (The Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1999.)
That seemed to be the line that the Junior Bush's spokesman David Beckwith took when he declared that G.W. Bush's special commission and treatment in the Guard were "routine." He said, "Our information is there was absolutely no special deal." (The Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1999.)
That somebody had influenced G.W. Bush's admission into the Guard became clear when Bush's entrance test results were released. He had scored the bare minimum 25 percent on one of the exams, and he was chosen over several hundred others who sought entrance to the Texas guard. (The Age (Australian Press) September 30, 1999.)
Then came the crushing news that the former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives had testified under oath that he had been contacted by Houston businessman "Sid Adger and asked to recommend George W. Bush for a pilot position with the Air National Guard," and that he called General James Rose and "did so." (Dallas Morning News, September 28, 1999.)
This testimony was brought about by a lawsuit alleging that the State of Texas had allowed Gtech to keep its lucrative lottery contract in exchange for former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes's silence about helping Mr. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard. Not long after Barnes gave his testimony the case was settled out of court. (The Dallas Morning News, October 30, 1999.)
So, despite all claims to the contrary, Bush had in fact received aid in getting into the Texas Guard. Young G.W. Bush was sworn in on the very day he applied, complete with a ceremony for the press. He was then sent to basic training and given a special commission instantly making him a second lieutenant.
LEAVES OF ABSENCE
That fall, while some of the heaviest fighting of the Vietnam War raged, young Bush was allowed to take a leave of absence to go work on the Florida senatorial campaign of Edward Gurney. He also took time off from the Guard in 1970 for his dad's congressional campaign and then from May to November 1972 to travel to Alabama to work on a Republican U.S. Senate campaign.
Bush was required to attend drills with the Alabama National Guard. But there is no evidence in Guard files that he even bothered to show up. General William Turnipseed and his aide Kenneth Lott both flatly deny that Bush ever appeared for duty in Alabama. (The Boston Globe, May 23, 2000.)
When Bush went back to Texas after his electioneering break he didn't bother with showing up for his Guard duties. In fact, seven months rolled 'round until Bush's two superior officers at Ellington Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, effectively declared Bush missing from duty because they could not perform his annual evaluation covering the year from May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973. They stated in their filing that ''Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report."
Within days of being reported missing, Bush showed up again in the Texas Guard records as doing duty. His friend at the time (U.S. News, November 1, 1999), Al Lloyd, now speculates that Bush's superiors noticed and that "I'll bet someone called him up and said, 'George, you're in a pickle. Get your ass down here and perform some duty.'" (The Boston Globe, May 23, 2000.) Lloyd was an administrative officer with the Texas Guard until his retirement in 1995 as personnel director of the Texas Air Guard and he is a self-professed Bush supporter.
Bush only served thirty-six days of duty after that and he was given an honorable disharge eight months early. The early release wasn't unusual and the honorable discharge was just what Bush had always known he would get. After all, he had been shown privileges and granted a wide-ranging leeway that included letting him disappear from the service for a full year. The pilot who had had expensive flight training was allowed to work as a campaign aide for three different legislative races.
There is an indication that someone higher up was trying to find out why G.W. was missing for so long. Shortly before he was given his honorable discharge a request from National Guard headquarters was placed for Bush's annual evaluation for that year. The national headquarters was told by the administrative officer at Bush's base, ''Report for this period not available for administrative reasons.'' (The Boston Globe, May 23, 2000.)
It looks as if Bush got into the Guard with a cover-up and then got out with a cover-up. In the meantime it looks like Bush got away with the one thing my father told me I couldn't do. "You can't just walk away."
This is getting more and more interesting!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1212218/posts
Seems CBS "fell in love" with the story
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The TomPaine.com Staff
Media outlets have finally started covering Governor George W. Bush's controversial military record -- at least around the fringes. In brief, the governor's privileged background not only enabled him to avoid duty in Vietnam, but also to skip out on military obligations after he learned to fly at the taxpayers' expense.
While a thorough Boston Globe investigation last spring inspired some papers to pick up the story, the New York Times and the Washington Post have only menitoned in passing the governor's one-year failure to report for duty. But in the Internet age, when the big guns of journalism fail, the man in the street can seize the battlefield.
Marty Heldt, an Iowa farmer who was so outraged by the special treatment doled out to Bush that he spent all summer pouring over the governor's military file, wrote a story for TomPaine.com, published September 27. After that, Salon.com picked up on Heldt's story in TomPaine, and later Democrats.com published a piece written by a former Air National Guard officer. Finally, the New Republic took on the governor's service record in its October 16 edition, which prompted a comment in passing on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Democrats.com alleges that "crucial evidence," such as a flight inquiry board report "that would reveal the true reason for Bush's suspension ... is missing from the records." Where did this report go? Were incriminating documents pulled from his file during his tenure as governor?
The Democrats.com story points out that in April of 1972, "all the overseas and stateside military services began subjecting a small random sample in their ranks to substance abuse testing for alcohol and drugs. The Pentagon announced its intention to do so initially on December 31, 1969. If Bush reported for his scheduled physical in August 1972, he could have been subject to selection for a random substance abuse test."
The New Republic's Notebook column takes Bush to task for hypocrisy in promising "to usher in a period of personal responsibility." (Bush: "I want each and every American to know for certain that I'm responsible for the decisions I make, and each of you are as well." Really?)
Still, with all the talk of military readiness and personal responsibility, the question remains whether Bush's record will become a campaign issue. Or will the pols continue to act like used car salesmen, trying to buy the public off with promises of tax cuts.
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http://www.populist.com/04.4.dispatches.html
FEDS BACK OFF PROTEST PROBE. Critics of the Bush regime feared that the war on terror might be expanding into a war on protesters when the FBI's Joint Terrorism Tax Force moved to subpoena records of anti-war activists. A federal judge ordered four activists to appear before a federal grand jury and ordered Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, to turn over records of National Lawyers Guild chapter that organized a Nov. 15 anti-war forum at the school, the Associated Press reported Feb. 7. Subpoena recipients included the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq in 2002. Representatives of the Lawyer's Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union said they had not heard of such a subpoena being served on any US university in decades.
Then, on Feb. 10, after national attention began focusing on the case, the US attorney said in court documents that all five subpoenas were quashed and a gag order on Drake University officials was lifted. Federal authorities said the investigation was not into potential terrorism, but was limited to actions at the Nov. 16 protest and whether plans were laid at the Drake meeting to break federal law.
US Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, expressed concern about the investigation to Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Mr. Attorney General, our country has experienced dark episodes in which the government has wrongly curtailed citizens' civil liberties in the name of fighting enemies," Harkin wrote. "I call on you to give the Iowa case your personal attention to help ensure that we do not see another such episode in Iowa or anywhere in America."
'SPEECH-FREE ZONE.' If you go to George W. Bush's adopted hometown, don't wear a political button, much less say a discouraging word, or you could be jailed. So said Crawford, Texas, Police Chief Donnie Tidmore Feb. 7 in a municipal court trial of five peace activists who were accused of protesting illegally within city limits last May. The activists were charged with a Class C misdemeanor, which carries a $500 fine. Tidmore testified that even nonverbal protests without a permit could violate a city ordinance that required 15 days' notice and a $25 fee for a protest or parade permit. Protesters said they didn't plan to protest in Crawford, but were merely passing through on the way to Bush's ranchette outside the city limits when they hit the police roadblock. When they got out of their cars, some with signs, the chief ordered them to disperse. Some did, but others who argued that they had a right to go through town were arrested and jailed overnight, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported. Tidmore said he could have given them a citation but he thought arresting them was the only way to stop the "demonstration." Asked by civil rights attorney Jim Harrington whether one of the defendants would have violated the ordinance by sporting political buttons, such as those that read "No Nukes" and "Peace," without the permit, Tidmore said, "It could be a sign of demonstration."
AFTER AWOL, BUSH BUSTED TO RESERVES? In his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush wrote that after he completed his Air National Guard pilot training in June 1970, "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years." Apparently not. Bush apparently blew off drills in May 1972, failed to show up for his required annual physical in July 1972 and was grounded and suspended in August, which was recorded Sept. 29, 1972. Investigators of Bush's mysterious National Guard service in 1972-73 now have found what appears to be a complete version of the "torn document" that purported to show Bush's guard activity in late 1972. Bob Fertik of democrats.com obtained the document in response to a Freedom of Information request in late 2000. According to Kevin Drum of Calpundit.com, the "ARF Statement of Points Earned" shows the first listed date is Oct. 29, 1972, when Bush was still in Alabama. ARF apparently stands for Air Reserve Force, where guard members often were sent for disciplinary reasons.
"He was apparently transferred to ARF at that time and began accumulating ARF points in October," Drum noted. ARF is a "paper unit" based in Denver that requires no drills. "For active guard members it is disciplinary because ARF members can theoretically be called up for active duty in the regular military, although this obviously never happened to George Bush," Drum wrote.
Bush never returned to his original Texas Guard unit, but instead accumulated only ARF points after October 1972, Drum reported. "In fact, it's unclear even what the points on the ARF record are for, but what is clear is that Bush's official records from Texas show no actual duty after May 1972....
"Bush's record shows three years of service, followed by a fourth year in which he accumulated only a dismal 22 days of active service, followed by no service at all in his fifth and sixth years. This is because ARF duty isn't counted as official duty by the Texas guard.
"So Bush may indeed have 'fulfilled his obligation,' as he says, but only because he had essentially been relieved of any further obligation after his transfer to ARF. It's pretty clear that no one in the Texas Air National Guard had much interest in pursuing anything more serious in the way of disciplinary action."
When Marty Heldt, who wrote "Bush's Missing Year" [11/1/00 TPP], requested information on any changes or additions to Bush's military records, he was notified that "Individual veterans, or their representatives, are required to use specific forms to request changes to their records" and "A complete review of Mr. Bush's records did not locate any requests for change." The last action documented in the record was Bush's discharge from the Air Force Reserve on Nov. 21, 1974. "It should be noted that tampering with or changing Federal records is a criminal offense ... and is punishable by fine or imprisonment," wrote Charles Pellegrini of the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.
But Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and investigative reporter for the BBC, interviewed retired Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett of the Texas Air National Guard, who said that shortly after Bush became Texas' governor in 1994, he witnessed a speakerphone call from the Texas governor's office in which Guard officers were told to "clean [Bush's] records from his files." After the call, Palast reported, 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."
On Feb. 8 Bush told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, "I served in the National Guard. I flew F-102 aircraft. I got an honorable discharge." He still claims he showed up for drills in Alabama, although nobody who was there remembers him and there is no paperwork to support his memory. And he said he was allowed to leave eight months before his term expired because "I was going to Harvard Business School and worked it out with the military."
As we went to press, Bush released his pay records, which showed he was not credited with any service for a 5-month period in 1972, from May through September. He was paid for 2 days in October, 4 days in November and none in December. The records do not indicate what Bush did or where he was.
BUSH ADJUSTS ROSY JOBS SCENARIO. Last year the White House told us Bush's tax cuts would create 1.8 million new jobs in 2003 and 3.7 million in 2004. Instead, the total addition of jobs for the second half of 2003, after the third Bush tax cut, was only 221,000. For 2003 as a whole, the US showed a net loss of 53,000 jobs. On Feb. 9 Bush predicted that the recovering economy would create 2.6 million new jobs in 2004. That number, like the ones before it, apparently was snatched from thin air for political purposes. Brad DeLong, professor of economics at UC-Berkeley, noted at j-bradford-delong.net that the White House forecast assumes a reasonable 4% GDP growth rate but stagnant productivity to achieve a net gain of jobs during Bush's first term. To admit to any less would invite "lots of negative newspaper stories saying 'Bush administration forecasts negative job growth over first term.'" DeLong wrote.
Anyway, to meet Bush's forecast the US needs to add 320,000 jobs per month. In January we gained 112,000, mainly in retail trade, but lost 11,000 manufacturing jobs, which generally pay higher wages. Max Sawicky notes at maxspeak.org/mt, "The change in average hourly earnings was all of two cents for January. Pro-rate that out to a year and you almost have 25 cents growth in your hourly pay. Then you could buy a Washington Post and learn how great the economy is. If you compound the two cents over a year, the overall increase is 1.5% -&endash; no more than you need to keep with inflation. Hey you could always work more hours, but you can't necessarily count on getting overtime pay." Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute (epinet.org) reported Feb. 5 that inflation-adjusted hourly wages fell for middle- and low-wage workers, making 2003 the worst year for wage growth over the 1998-2003 period. Despite the acceleration of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in late 2003, the wage growth of non-supervisory production workers (over 80% of the workforce) actually slowed in this period.
To be fair, Bush's tax cuts may have created millions of new jobs -- in China and other low-wage nations that have lured multinational corporations, whose increased profits have kept the Dow Jones industrial average humming.
GOP HACKED DEM COMPUTER FILES. A Republican Senate staffer stole thousands of confidential documents by hacking into a Democratic computer server, Roll Call reported Feb. 9. The unnamed staffer was allowed to quit his job and left the committee. An aide to Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Manuel Miranda, who read some of the stolen memos, also quit his job but said he would speak out on how Democrats worked with liberal groups to block judicial nominations. Miranda filed a complaint with the Ethics Committee charging Judiciary Democrats with "public corruption." Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle is investigating possible criminal and ethical violations in the unauthorized access of the Democratic memos. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he intends to demand that Pickle examine the flow of where the memos went and whether top White House officials had access to them. "It will reach beyond the committee," Durbin predicted. "There are many questions that need to be asked."
E-VOTE PROBLEMS IN N.C., FLORIDA. Six electronic voting machines used in two North Carolina counties lost 436 absentee ballot votes in the 2002 general election because of a software problem, raising more doubts about the accuracy and integrity of voting equipment in a presidential election year, Kim Zetter reported on Wired.com Feb. 9. Election Systems & Software said problems with its iVotronic touch-screen machines, used in a trial run, lost ballots in two North Carolina precincts during the state's early voting in 2002. ES&S, the largest US maker of election equipment, is also the focus of probes into lost votes last month in Florida during a special election when 134 votes went uncounted in a Broward County race to elect a state representative. The voting machines left no paper trail to determine whether the machines lost the votes. ES&S, Diebold Election Systems and other electronic voting-machine makers are coming under increasing scrutiny about the accuracy of their devices. Manufacturers claim their machines don't need auditing mechanisms -- such as printers that would give voters receipts confirming their choices. But anecdotal evidence of discrepancies and anomalies are piling up. "All of this just underscores the need for voting machines to have a paper trail," said Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, who runs Verified Voting (verifiedvoting.org), a group that is pushing election officials and legislators to mandate voter-verified paper ballots that provide a way to audit, such as the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (HR 2239) sponsored by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., introduced a companion bill (S 1980) in the Senate.
AUSSIE TRADE DEAL GUTS RANCHERS. A new trade deal between the US and Australia threatens the livelihoods of family farmers and ranchers, the Western Organization of Resource Councils (worc.org) said Feb. 9. The agreement ends or phases out tariffs for many agricultural products including beef, lamb, sheep, wool, wheat and dairy products. WORC spoksman Gilles Stockton, a rancher from Grass Range, Mont., said the trade agreement gives even more economic power to multinational corporations. He said the process that led to it "is blatantly undemocratic." For example, he said, the agreement would phase in more beef imports from Australia over the next 18 years. "We've yet to see the impact of more imports from trade agreements with countries in South and Central America," he said. "These agreements will spur a stampede of beef imports that will overrun the American cattle industry," but US trade negotiators never consulted with American cattle producers, he said.
PBS PRESSURED TO CANCEL MOYERS' 'NOW.' MediaChannel's Danny Schecter (newsdissector.org) writes from the Digital Independence Conference in San Francisco that Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy (democraticmedia.org) reports PBS is under extreme pressure to cancel the Bill Moyers program NOW. "Unless we wake up to this and rally behind the program, NOW will soon become THEN." George W. Bush has named two major Republican donors to the nine-member board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including Cheryl Halpern, who supports giving CPB board members the authority to intervene in program content, and Gay Hart Gaines, an ardent supporter of Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who as House speaker in 1994 proposed cutting all federal assistance to public TV. Contact your local PBS station to express support for Bill Moyers' NOW.
BUSH'S KAHN JOB. The Bush administration expressed shock at the disclosures that Pakistan, our ally in the war on terror, has been running a nuclear secrets bazaar. If Bush did not know of these facts, investigative reporter Greg Palast says, it's because, shortly after his inauguration, Bush's National Security Agency stymied the probe of Kahn Research Laboratories in Pakistan. Palast reported that on Nov. 7, 2001, on BBC TV and the London Guardian. Dr. A.Q. Kahn recently confessed selling atomic secrets to Libya, North Korea and Iran. But CIA and other agents could not investigate the spread of Islamic bombs through Pakistan because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia. According to sources and documents obtained by the BBC, the Bush administration spiked the probe of Kahn's lab as part of a policy of protecting key Saudi Arabians, including the Bin Laden Family. Palast and associate David Pallister received a Project Censored Award for this expose based on the story broadcast on BBC Television Newsnight. Of course, the story was ignored in the US mass media. See an excerpt from the 2003 edition of Palast's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, at www.GregPalast.comwww.
WHITEWASH CHAIRMAN. Bob Harris writes at thismodernworld.com: "I hear George W. Bush's hand-picked whitewashing of the Iraq intel failures will be co-chaired by Laurence Silberman. Described simply as a retired federal judge by most news reports, Silberman was until recently one of the three judges of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which oversees sensitive domestic surveillance issues and approves of wiretaps of suspected terrorists. After 9/11, this became the judicial body which would uphold John Ashcroft's agenda in the PATRIOT Act and (in the words of the ACLU ...) "rubber-stamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants." In other words, Silberman hardly seems disinterested, and more like a full-fledged member of Team Death Star. Silberman is also one of the two judges who threw out Oliver North's Iran-Contra conviction. Later, he served as a 'mentor' to American Spectator writer David Brock during the years of constant character assassination against Bill Clinton.
PENTAGON CLIPS ONLY GOOD NEWS. Senior Pentagon managers have repeatedly ordered the department's widely read clipping service to exclude articles critical of the military and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Howard Kurtz reported in the Feb. 9 Washington Post. Staffers at the Early Bird, whose service is devoured by Pentagon brass, lawmakers, journalists and military personnel around the world, were told to eliminate all newsmagazine articles last October -- four days after the publication of a Newsweek cover story on Iraq that included "Rummy's New Headaches" and a Time piece titled "Is Rumsfeld Losing His Mojo?" But the Pentagon press office has waived the magazine ban for some articles that senior managers deem positive -- such as the Time package on the American soldier as Person of the Year (which included a Rumsfeld interview) and two recent US News & World Report pieces -- one on civilian efforts in Iraq and an officer's column defending the ban on coverage of deceased soldiers arriving at Dover Air Force Base. Early Bird was ordered to exclude an unflattering Oct. 22 Washington Post profile of a deputy undersecretary who manages Iraq policy.
CHENEY'S STAFF FOCUS OF PROBE. Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year, Richard Sale reported in Insight Magazine for Feb. 17. Sources told Insight John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees.
It appears to be 10 pitch courier font, a ball commonly found on military Selectrics in the 1970s. Beyond that, I don't now.
Documented Service Records of John Kerry and George Bush
Maybe be useful.
Also there is an organization in Clinton Iowa, Marty Heldt's hometown:
Independent Citizens for Responsible Journalism
5101 2nd Avenue South
Clinton, Iowa 52732
Let's call this the IOWA WORKSHOP.....
I think this Marty Heldt is a real good candidate for the fabrication job.....
Google Marty Heldt of Clinton Iowa.
Hmmm....could that be the infamous Marty Heldt??
Very likely!
Someone mentioned this earlier (may have been you) and I wondered what "kearning" is. What is kearning?
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