Re: Dan Rather has been replaced!
George W. Bush's Military Lies: The Real Story About the Undeniable Service Gaps He Got Away With
The CBS report at the heart of a new film might have been false. But the underlying question about his service remains.
The parallel here should be underscored. Rather’s career with CBS was ended because he built his story on apparently fraudulent memos (their actual status remains undetermined) from Lt. Colonel. Jerry B. Killian. The most notable one, labeled CYA for “cover your ass,” claimed Killian was being pressured from above to give Bush undeserved better marks in his yearly evaluation. However, shortly after the original airing, Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, placed the memos’ status in an almost exact parallel to Woodward and Bernstein’s false reporting of an underlying true fact. “I didn’t type them,” Knox said in a broadcast interview, “However, the information in those is correct.”
Smith’s point here is simple:
Even if the documents could be criticized (falsely, it turns out), we can draw a close parallel with Woodward and Bernstein’s story on Haldeman: the story about Bush abandoning his service in the Air National Guard was also true.
Indeed, the gaps in Bush’s service record were undeniable. They were reported, but virtually ignored four years earlier, in the 2000 election cycle, when the media was focused on their self-fabricated narrative of Gore being the untrustworthy one who told tall tales about his past.
On May 23, 2000, Boston Globe reporter Walter V. Robinson reported finding a “one-year gap in Bush’s Guard duty,” saying that “22 months after finishing his training, and with two years left on his six-year commitment, Bush gave up flying — for good.” Beyond a momentary flurry, there wasn’t much other corporate media interest in that cycle, though Martin Heldt published a detailed analysis of Bush’s guard records at the Online Journal in September 2000. Fast forward to the morning of the “60 Minutes” report, and Robinson wrote another story “Bush fell short on duty at Guard,” with “Records show pledges unmet,” as the subhead. The framing had shifted from Bush’s attendance gap, to Bush violating his sworn duty — and getting away with it:
Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service — first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School — Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.
He didn’t meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.
The Globe’s analysis was supported by two other independent analysts. The first, retired Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, wrote a highly detailed 32-page analysis, which the New York Times put on its website, but never seriously built upon in its reporting or its editorial page. Lechliter was also interviewed by the Globe.
The second was a civilian analyst, Paul Lukasiak, whose website the AWOL Project (Sept 2004 web.archive version) had attracted considerable attention online, and was discussed at length by Eric Boehlert at Salon the day after the "60 Minutes" report. Both Lechliter and Lukasiak placed the Bush documents in the framework of contemporary military rules, regulations, policies and procedures, which were absolutely crucial for understanding what was really going on, and not being easily spun by Bush apologists. All three of these analyses reached similar conclusions, without any reliance on the “60 Minutes” memos. I summarized the broad outlines of these misadventures in a story three weeks later:
Bush’s problems began in late Spring on 1972, when he first tried to transfer to a non-flying unit — a back door way 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 year. (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.
http://www.alternet.org/george-w-bus...ps-he-got-away
Truly, in the long list of shitty Presidents, dubya was, always will be, one of the shittiest.
Re: Dan Rather has been replaced!
Here is where I have a problem with a news source. This is just like Fox. They blame THE media in the US as if it where some monolithic structure slanted against their point of view.
when the media was focused on their self-fabricated narrative of Gore being the untrustworthy on
Re: Dan Rather has been replaced!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
pgardn
This is just like Fox.
how so?
Re: Dan Rather has been replaced!
BeShit just doesn't give up.
He is the Black Knight of Monty Python.
Re: Dan Rather has been replaced!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
boutons_deux
how so?
Blaming THE MEDIA.
Who is THE MEDIA?
Read my post from your article, THE MEDIA after Gore...
