George Bush, This is Your Life

George W. Bush's past is finally catching up with him. Out of the morass of delays, partial truths, preemptive attacks, and doubletalk come weighty allegations from an indefatigable news service, an important public figure, advocacy organizations and a hack author – all of whom refuse to call off the search. The allegations vary in their authenticity and the depth of their political motivations, but they all add up to Bush taking heat for a past he has never had to publicly account for.

On Sept. 5, in the midst of Labor Day weekend, The Associated Press quietly filed an article alleging that: "Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973.... For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972."

Though Bush claims to have skipped the exam due to the fact that he already knew he'd be in Alabama, the record actually exposes that rationale as a lie: "Bush was required to take the physical by the end of July 1972, more than a month before he won final approval to train in Alabama."

In response to an AP Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the government claimed that it had released all records that "it can find." AP then issued this challenge to the government: "The AP identified five categories of records that should have been generated after Bush skipped his pilot's physical and missed five months of training."

And lo, three days later, still under pressure from that pesky lawsuit, new records on Bush's service were suddenly "found": "The Pentagon and Bush's campaign have claimed for months that all records detailing his fighter pilot career have been made public, but defense officials said they found two dozen new records detailing his training and flight logs...."

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan spun the newly released records with unprecended gall, saying "These documents confirm that the president served honorably in the National Guard." But the AP concluded that the records confirm just the opposite:

"The records show his last flight was in April 1972, which is consistent with pay records indicating Bush had a large lapse of duty between April and October of that year."

The Boston Globe, after its own examination of available records, was even less equivocal: "Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation." The Globe quoted a furious Army Colonel who's studied Bush's records and concluded, "He broke his contract with the United States government – without any adverse consequences.... It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."

Another interesting development has even greater symbolic bearing on the current presidential race, focusing as it does on who will make the better commander-in-chief in the prevention of, and responsiveness to, a surprise attack: "A six-month historical record of his 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, also turned over to the AP on Tuesday, shows some of the training Bush missed with his colleagues during that time... It showed the unit joined a '24-hour active alert mission to safeguard against surprise attack' in the southern United States beginning on Oct. 6, 1972, a mission for which Bush was not present, according to his pay records."

Surprise attack; Bush nowhere to be found. Sound familiar?

Wednesday's AP report ends by reiterating the challenge that even the latest Bush documents "do not include any from five categories of documents Bush's commanders had been required to keep in response to the gaps in Bush's training in 1972 and 1973."