From The Sunday Herald, 9/12/04:
http://www.sundayherald.com/44773

His presidency has pushed a simple message:

America is in danger and he’s the man to keep the people safe; he’ll
take the fight against the terrorists abroad and he’s proud of the
USA’s troops.

From The Sunday Herald, 9/12/04:
http://www.sundayherald.com/44773

Unmasked:
The George W Bush the President Doesn't Want the World To See

By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor

Is President George W Bush, who weaves a narrative about himself as a
man of God, actually a charlatan?

Is he really a wolf in sheep's clothing?

Is his faith a sham?

Is he more bad boy than born again?

More playboy than penitent?

This past month has seen John Kerry, Bush's Democratic rival for the
White House, take one almighty pasting from the Republican right wing
over accusations that he exaggerated his military record in Vietnam.
Kerry, a many times decorated navy Vietnam veteran, said the smear
campaign was orchestrated by a Bush team desperate to divert attention
from the woeful state of the US economy and the running sore of Iraq.

But this week it's Bush's turn to line up for a beating.

But where Kerry has a single questionable question mark hanging over
his past, Bush's charge sheet for alleged wrongdoing has got it all --
sex, drugs, cowardice, cruelty; his alleged failings and foibles are
imperial in stature.

These are the issues being debated as a result of further revelations
into the shrouded past of the President.

His Military Record

President Bush has wrapped himself in the Stars and Stripes since the
horror of September 11.

His presidency has pushed a simple message:

America is in danger and he's the man to keep the people safe; he'll
take the fight against the terrorists abroad and he's proud of the
USA's troops.

If that is the case, why is Bush mired in a scandal about his
Vietnam-era service, or lack of, with fresh allegations that he was
able to sneak out of serving his country overseas because his daddy
was famous, powerful and rolling in cash?

Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war as a
pilot and never left the country.

He even cut short his military commitment in 1973.

In 1989, he told a local newspaper in Texas: "I regret not having gone
to Vietnam."

He went on to say that "I did my time" and "I did my duty".

Despite Bush's claims, his service in the home-based National Guard is
highly questionable. CBS Television's acclaimed 60 Minutes programme
interviewed Ben Barnes, a former speaker of the Texas House of
Representatives, who said that he pulled strings for a Bush family
friend to get George Jr into the National Guard so he could avoid
service in Vietnam.

"I was a young, ambitious politician," Barnes said, "doing what I
thought was acceptable, that was important to make friends . I would
describe it as preferential treatment.

"I was maybe determining life or death and that's not a power that I
want to have. I've thought about it an awful lot. You walk through the
Vietnam memorial and, I tell you, you'll think about it a long time."

CBS also produced documents which allegedly showed that in 1973,
Bush's superior officer complained of being pressurised to
"sugar-coat" an annual officer evaluation for Bush even though the
future President had not been at the base for the year in question.

His opponents accuse him of going awol -- absent without leave.

According to airforce records, Bush did not meet his military
commitments.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston, Texas, to
Harvard to take an MBA course, he signed a document that declared:

"It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another reserve
forces unit or mobilisation augmentation position. If I fail to do so,
I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months."

Bush didn't sign up with a National Guard unit when he moved to New
England -- but nor did he get drafted as a punishment.

In May 1968, Bush signed a "statement of understanding" that he would
"achieve satisfactory participation", including attendance at 24 days
of annual weekend duty and 15 days of annual active duty at home.

The document also said that Bush would face two years in Vietnam for
"unsatisfactory participation".

Bush performed no service for an entire six-month period in 1972 and
for a period lasting almost three months in 1973, yet Bush's unit
certified in late 1973 that his service had been "satisfactory".

His opponents say this was favouritism shown to a wilful rich boy.

Retired army colonel Gerald A Lechliter, who has studied Bush's
military records, says:

"He broke his contract with the United States government -- without
any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was
complicit in allowing this to happen. He was a pilot. It cost the
government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have
been held to an even higher standard."

The unit that Bush was assigned to was known as the Champagne Squadron
because of the number of sons of American millionaires who served in
it.

The unit included the sons of former Texas governor John Connally and
former senator Lloyd Bensten, as well as several members of the Dallas
Cowboys American football team.

Retired Lt Col Albert C Lloyd Jr said that by not joining a unit in
Massachusetts, Bush "took a chance that he could be called up for
active duty, but the war was winding down and he probably knew that
the airforce was not enforcing the penalty".

Lawrence J Korb, an assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan White
House, said Bush "gamed the system", adding:

"If I cheat on my income tax and don't get caught, I'm still cheating
on my income tax."

When Bush enlisted in the US equivalent of the Territorial Army, he
was given an automatic commission as a second lieutenant and underwent
flight training for 13 months.

In June 1970, he began what should have been a four-year posting with
the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron.

However, in May 1972 he moved to Alabama to work on a US senate
campaign on the condition that he trained with the National Guard in
that state.

Nobody has come forward with any memory of Bush serving in the
National Guard while in Alabama or when he returned to Texas in 1973.

In Alabama, Bush was removed from flight status as he failed to take
an annual physical test in July 1972.

His last physical test had been in May 1971.

Major General Paul A Weaver Jr, who retired in 2002 as head of the
Pentagon's Air National Guard, said:

"There is no excuse for that. Aviators just don't miss their flight
physicals."

After inspecting Bush's brief record of flying, Weaver said:

"I would not have let him near the airplane."

Weaver added:

"It appears that nobody wanted to hold him accountable."

Former friends of the Bush family have said that Bush was sent to
Alabama as he kept "getting in trouble and embarrassing the family".

In May 1973, Bush's superior officers said they could not complete his
annual performance review as he had not been seen at the base in
Houston for 12 months.

Terry McAuliffe, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that
"the President did not serve honourably".

Memos uncovered by CBS purport to show that Bush's superior officer,
Lt Col Jerry B Killian, felt he was being forced by his own commander,
Brigadier General Walter B Staudt, to go soft on Bush for his
underperformance.

The memo, dated August 1973, shows the political clout that Bush had
and an attempt, opponents say, to embellish his service record.

Bush's father was a Houston congressman at the time of the Vietnam
war.

Another Killian memo, headed "Subject: CYA" -- a military acronym for
"cover your *****" -- reads that Staudt "has obviously pressured
[Major-General Bobby W] Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble
running interference and doing my job".

The memo adds that Killian received "a message today -- regarding
Bush's [annual officer efficiency report] and Staudt is pushing to
sugar-coat it".

Killian also felt that Bush was "talking to someone upstairs" to
engineer a move to Alabama.

Robert Strong, a friend of the late Killian who ran the Texas Air
National Guard offices, said that because of Bush Killian had "found
himself between a rock and a hard place".

CBS reported that the White House did not dispute the authenticity of
these documents.

However, some questions have been raised about their provenance, with
typographical experts saying the documents were produced by computers,
not 1970s typewriters.

CBS, however, said it had the documents authenticated by its own
experts.

CBS also spoke to Killian's superior, Major-General Hodges, who said
the sentiments in the memos were the same as Killian expressed to him.

However, Marjorie Connell, Killian's widow, said she didn't believe
her husband would have used the words in the memos.

In a reversal of the sniper attacks launched on John Kerry and his
military record by the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth organisation's
adverts on TV, an outfit calling itself Texans for Truth is going to
start running television ads asking if Bush ever served with a unit in
Alabama.

The Republicans have already rubbished the planned ads as unfair and
playing dirty.

Cocaine, Booze And Abortions

Being proved to be a little yellow- bellied about fighting in Vietnam
would be mere collateral damage to the Bush campaign compared to the
all-out nuclear holocaust which would ensue if the allegations made
about Dubya's cocaine use and abortion-fixing, in biographer and
muck-raker Kitty Kelly's forthcoming book on the Bush family, stand up
to scrutiny.

Bush's stance as a strongly moral Christian who prizes family values
and Biblical ethics is just as powerful a pull on his supporters as
his patriotism and militarism.

Bush has come out as bitterly opposed to abortion.

His acceptance speech for the presidential nomination at last month's
Republican Party Convention in New York City was peppered with
sentiments about the rights of the unborn child and the wrongs of gay
marriage.

The Republican party faithful see the President as a man of moral
rectitude who will keep the liberal barbarians from the gates.

But if, as alleged by Kelly, Bush used class A drugs and arranged for
doctors to "kill" his own baby -- as many in the party would regard an
abortion -- that would hole Bush below the waterline and scupper his
chances of re-election.

Kelly -- the ***** of biographers who has already assassinated the
characters of such luminaries as the Reagans, Frank Sinatra, Jackie
Onassis and the Windsors -- says she spoke to the President's
sister-in-law Sharon Bush, who divorced the President's brother, Neil.

Sharon Bush apparently told Kelly:

"The President did coke at Camp David when his father was President
[1989-93] and not just once either."

Camp David is the US presidential retreat.

Sharon Bush, however, is now denying that she made the cocaine claim
to Kelly.

Proof of coke use in the late 1980s and early 1990s would mean that
Bush used the drug after his reported conversion to Christianity.

If that was proved to be the case then the one thing that protects
Bush from his hard- partying past -- his born-again status and his
repentance for past sins -- would fall to bits.

The cocaine claim is therefore political dynamite.

Bush has pursued America's so-called war on drugs with a vengeance. US
jails, which now have the highest population figure ever, are filled
with drug users.

Even more damaging is the allegation aired by Kelly in her book, The
Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, that she has gathered "a
great deal of circumstantial evidence" that the President helped
arrange for a girlfriend to have an abortion in the 1970s.

Kelly says four friends of the woman who had the abortion provided
affidavits to the authoritative US current affairs magazines Time and
Newsweek about the abortion but the magazines did not run with the
story.

Kelly also brings up allegations of George Bush Sr's affair with his
English secretary Jennifer Fitzgerald, which apparently devastated
Barbara Bush, his wife.

The book further delves into the sexually transmitted diseases which
have afflicted one of Bush's brothers following his habitual use of
Asian prostitutes.

Sharon Bush told Kelly:

"The Bushes don't practise what they preach."

Bush has always been evasive about drugs.

During his first presidential campaign, he said:

"The current FBI form asks the question, 'Did somebody use drugs
within the last seven years?' I will be glad to answer that question
and the answer is no."

Kelly quotes a former lieutenant, who refers to Bush not taking his
medical during his Air National Guard days, saying:

"There is circumstantial evidence pointing to substance abuse by Bush
during this period."

The book claims that Bush first used coke at university in the
mid-1960s.

Kelly quotes two sources, one of whom says Bush sold him the class A
drug.

Another acquaintance of Bush says that after work, Bush, in his
mid-20s, "liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the
bathroom for a line of cocaine".

There are even claims that First Lady Laura Bush was a drug dealer in
her youth.

She is the darling of the US right, adored for her schoolmarm
demeanour and whiter-than-white aura, and one of the biggest assets in
Bush's attempt to appeal to middle America.

But Kelly says she was the "go-to-girl for dime bags" of grass at the
Southern Methodist University.

Kelly quotes a PR executive, Robert Nash, who says:

"She not only smoked dope but she sold dope."

Laura was also involved in a car smash that killed a friend when she
was 17.

The accident happened when she ran through a stop sign in her
Chevrolet sedan on a clear night in November 1963, drove into an
intersection and struck the Corvair sedan of 17-year-old Michael
Douglas.

No charges were ever filed.

Laura is also supposed to have had to flee her marital home on a
number of occasions because of Bush's apparently abusive behaviour.

However, the police were said to have never been involved.

A friend of Bush, Tobery Macdonald, says:

"Poor Georgie. He couldn't relate to women unless he was loaded."

Another "friend" added:

"He went out of his way to act crude. It's quite amazing that someone
you held in such low esteem became President."

A third says Bush wasn't interested in anything except "booze and
sports".

In 1976, Bush was found drunk driving down his parents' street in
Washington.

When his father challenged him, Bush apparently offered to fight his
dad, saying:

"You wanna go mano a mano right here?"

His consumption of alcohol -- primarily beer and whisky -- turned him
into a belligerent boor.

At one society party in Houston, he asked an older woman:

"So, what's sex like after 50, anyway?"

Bush allegedly confronted his alcoholism in 1986 -- a decision he says
set him off on the road to being born again.

He dried out, joined an evangelical group and found the Lord.

Kelly's book quotes a family friend saying of Bush:

"George has no humility whatsover about being President. He really
thinks he deserves the office; that it's his by merit, not default.
With each political job he's had, he's gotten worse, more arrogant.
Now he's unbearable."

Kelly's book concludes that Bush's faith makes him invulnerable to
self-doubt -- just like his political friend and fellow Christian Tony
Blair.

A Caring Christian, A Compassionate Conservative?

America may not have the same sensibilities about the death penalty as
"old" Europe, but there can't be many US citizens who embrace the
killing of their fellow man as gleefully as the President.

Perhaps the most disturbing example of Bush's zeal for the Death House
was shown in 1998 when he was governor of the state of Texas.

Karla Faye Tucker was then facing execution by lethal injection.

The former teen prostitute had committed murder after a three-day drug
binge and later underwent a religious conversion in jail.

As a born-again Christian -- just like Bush -- many religious leaders
wanted her life spared.

Tucker even appeared on Larry King's TV show to discuss her case.

Bush was caught out by a reporter mocking the condemned woman.

Sneering at her, he put on a whiney voice, pouted his lips and
whimpered:

"Please, don't kill me."

Significantly, Tucker had never even asked for mercy while on King's
show.

Bush later claimed in his biography, A Charge To Keep, that he had a
"restless night" before Tucker's execution and "felt like a huge piece
of concrete was crushing me" as he waited for her to die.

Bush said reading her postmortem was "one of the hardest things I have
ever done", adding that the whole experience left him "heavy of
heart".

Bush said he denied her a clemency appeal -- which was based on the
fact that her conversion had rehabilitated her -- saying:

"I have concluded judgments about the heart and soul of an individual
on death row are best left to a higher authority."

When governor of Texas between 1995 and 2000, Bush presided over more
than 120 executions -- that accounts for about a third of the
executions in the entire USA during the same period.

Bush objected to a bill to stop the state executing people with mental
problems.

He also vetoed a unanimous bill by the Texas legislature requiring the
appointment of a lawyer to an accused within 20 days.

Most states require a lawyer be appointed within 72 hours.

In Texas, judges appoint lawyers for defendants.

The bill which Bush vetoed would have allowed an independent body to
appoint lawyers.

There were concerns that the appointment of lawyers was being
influenced by the fact that lawyers were making campaign contributions
to judges.

A survey by the State Bar of Texas found that half of all judges
believed campaign contributions from attorneys were a factor in judges
considering which lawyer to assign to which case.

Dodgy Deals And Insider Trading Allegations

Since his days in Yale, Bush has been strongly anti-intellectual and
rampantly pro-business.

Until the age of 30, he didn't really do very much of anything, but by
1977 he started to use his family's powerful connections to raise
money for an oil business.

He describes his attitude to business as a "bulldog on the pantleg of
opportunity".

However, in all Bush lost some $2 million of other people's money in
failed business ventures while still managing to walk away in 1990
with $840,000.

One of his ventures was called Arbusto, which the President thought
meant "bush" in Spanish -- it actually translates as "shrub".

Shrub has now stuck as the nickname for him by his Texan detractors.

The most questionable business venture of Bush's oil career came while
he was with the Harken Energy Corporation.

Harken made investments in the Middle East in the run-up to the
invasion of Kuwait by Saddam .

At the time, Bush Sr was the 41st President of the USA and Bush Jr was
on the board of Harken.

Harken took a pasting on the stockmarket. In June 1990, Harken
consultants said only "drastic action" could save the company.

Bush sold his entire stock in Harken before information about the dire
state of the company was known publicly -- despite a legal requirement
on him to notify the Securities Exchange Commission immediately.

Bush didn't report his sale for eight months.

Bush -- who now stakes his fiscal reputation on the fact that he loves
to slash taxes and not spend public money unwisely -- took a hefty
slice of taxpayers' cash when he later bought the Texas Rangers
baseball team.

He persuaded the city of Arlington to finance a new stadium for his
team using public taxes.

Arlington contributed $191 million in public subsidies.

Bush's stake in the Rangers was later valued at rising from $640,000
to $15.4 million.

+--+
|Rathergate explosive: Yep, Killian Documents are genuine:
|

| http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/politics/campaign/11guard.html
|Hezbollah endorses George W. Bush: http://www.hezbollah.ws/
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