by
Greg Palast
Forty-eight
hours before ordering our troops into Iraq, our President told us,
"There's no certainty in war but the certainty of sacrifice."
For most
of us, yes, but not, however, if your name is 'Bush.' According to
discomforting information my BBC investigative team reported last week.
In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh
from voting to send other men's sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a
very special affirmative action program, the 'champagne' unit of the Texas
Air National Guard. There, Top Gun fighter pilot George W was
assigned the
dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.
BBC
thought it worth a look into our Commander-in-Chief's Vietnam war record
after the White House staged our President's dramatic landing by fighter
jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abe Lincoln to announce our
victory over Iraq. Hey, Churchill never did that. (And kudos
to Tom Brokaw and the
other US network performers for maintaining their patriotically solemn
expressions -- even when our President, unlike experienced flyers, kept
his
parachute clips fastened under his crotch, making him look a little less
like Tom Cruise and more like that first chimp in space.)
In 1968, to qualify for the single available pilot spot in the Air Guard,
young George took a test. He scored, out of a possible 100, only 25.
(Word
is that the chimp scored 26.) How then, did our future President -
opponent of affirmative action, who believes no one should get their post
except
through merit -- leap over thousands of other applicants and cinch the
get-out-of-'Nam post?
Here's what you won't see on US TV: Years back I got my hands on a
copy of a document languishing in Justice Department files in Austin,
Texas. In it,
a tipster fingers two political friends of Bush Senior who, the source
claimed, made the call to get young Bush out of the war and into the
cockpit
at the Air Guard. But the Feds could not act without corroboration.
Now we have it. To the BBC crew, one of those named confessed to
making the call- at Bush Senior's request - to help George W dodge the
draft. (I've posted the letter at http://www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg.
)
Look, I don't care if President Bush cowered and ran from Vietnam. I
sure as hell didn't volunteer ... but then, my daddy didn't send someone
else in
my place. And I don't march around with parachute clips around my
gonads talking about war and sacrifice.
But what the heck, Bush's supporters respond that the man did at least he
'serve his country' in the Air Guard. Or did he? Questions
have been
raised over the years about whether the younger George, having nailed the
cushy pilot seat, failed to report for duty. 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 pales
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.
By the way, the White House, where Messrs. Albaugh, Bartlett and, of
course, Mr. Bush, work, turned down BBC's offer to deny the charges of the
draft-dodge fix and the purging of Dubya's files.
That's far from the end of the story. There are only two men alive
today (outside the Bush family) who knew exactly how George Bush ducked
the draft.
Both men became high-powered Texas lobbyists. To an influence
peddler, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth it's
weight in
gold - or, more precisely, there's a value in keeping the info secret.
One of the lobbyists, former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, appears to
have made
lucrative use of his knowledge of our President's slithering out of the
draft as a lever to obtain a multi-billion dollar contract for a client.
The
happy client paid Barnes, the keeper of Governor Bush's secret, a fee of
over $23 million. Barnes, not surprisingly, denies that Bush took care of
his client in return for Barnes' silence. However, confronted with
the evidence, the former Lt. Governor now admits to helping the young
George
stay out of Vietnam.
For the full story of our president's war years and the $23 million
payment, read the title chapter of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,
nominated last
month by the California State University's for a Project Censored Award -
and excerpted in this month's Hustler Magazine. (To read the story
with
less lubricated illustrations, go to http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=233&row=1
.)
This week, on July 6, George W. Bush turned 57. William White was
born the same day in 1946. I mention this because, if you're old
enough, you'd
remember that young men were drafted for Vietnam based on a grim lottery -
if your birthday was picked out of a hat, you went. I got White's
name off
a black wall in Washington. He went to Vietnam when George W went to
the Air Guard in Houston. White never came back. Happy
birthday, Mr.
President.
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy (Penguin 2003) available at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0452283914/qid=1057790706/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-3431210-9288650?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
. Read his comments and view his reports for BBC TV at www.GregPalast.com
