Major 'Globe' Report Appears as AP Gets New Bush Military Records

By: E&P Staff After nearly a month of focus on Senator John Kerry's war record in Vietnam, the media glare returned today to President George W. Bush's stateside service, and reputed gaps in it.

The Associated Press, after being told by the White House in February that it had released all of the President's military records, inexplicably got a new batch of documents from the Pentagon on Tuesday. Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times, who had not previously written on this subject, nailed an interview with Bob Mintz, an Air National Guard lieutenant colonel who claimed he never saw Bush report for duty in Alabama.

And the Boston Globe, which has also at times been harshly critical of Sen. Kerry, produced a major report by its Spotlight Team, concluding that Bush "fell well short of meeting his military obligation."

All this is in advance of a much-ballyhooed CBS "60 Minutes " interview scheduled for tonight with Ben Barnes, former lieutenant governor of Texas, who says he arranged for Bush's entry into the Guard in 1968.

The Globe story, written by Walter V. Robinson, the reporter who produced the first significant story on Bush and the Guard back in 2000, declares: "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."

In 1999, the Globe observes, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Now Bartlett, presently the White House communications director, concedes, ''I must have misspoke."

Bartlett, in a statement to the Globe last night, asserted that Bush would not have been honorably discharged if he had not ''met all his requirements." In a follow-up e-mail, Bartlett declared: ''And if he hadn't met his requirements you point to, they would have called him up for active duty for up to two years."

The Globe's re-examination of the records showed that Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973. In fact, the records, the Globe said, "along with interviews with military specialists who have reviewed regulations from that era, show that Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974."

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many of the documents that it was clear to him that Bush ''gamed the system."

''It appears that no one wanted to hold him accountable," Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard, told the Globe.

As for the mysterious release of Bush records to the AP, a Pentagon spokesman who requested anonymity told Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that he could not explain why the documents surfaced now. "The short answer is, I don't have an answer for you," he said.

In his New York Times column today, Kristof, after reporting that Mintz and Leonard Walls, a retired Air Force colonel, claim they never saw Bush in Alabama, concluded: "The sheer volume of missing documents, and missing recollections, strongly suggests to me that Mr. Bush blew off his Guard obligations."

Kristof also posted a 32-page analysis by a retired Army colonel on the Times' Web site.

Mintz reportedly will be featured later this week in campaign commercials sponsored by a group called Texas for Truth.