NEW YORK - George W. Bush loves dressing up in uniform and being called commander-in-chief. You have to look to Saddam or Fidel for another head of state who spends as much media time before military backdrops.

He won't do town halls or even many press conferences, but something like a third of his statements in the previous 18 months have been delivered on military bases or to veterans' groups.

This would be bad enough, but the media is letting him get away with rank hypocrisy and worse.

He is abusing the military as movie extras, as well as car bomb-fodder in a PR campaign designed to show the American public that they need him, big tough W, to protect them from terrorists.

Peter Jennings' outrage over Michael Moore's use of the phrase "deserter" to describe a president who disappeared during his National Guard service is evidence that the charade is working.

Accomplice to a Disappearance

In his posturing, Bush seems to have the media in general as an accomplice. Not individual reporters: many of them have done great work in chipping away at the image, but editorial deference, distorted news values, and a statistically suspicious amount of missing documentation have kept the W "war" record from being properly exposed.

It was an obvious choice to use the epithet as the title for my new book, "Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Own Past."

Actually, it should not be in the least controversial. It's incontrovertible that George W. Bush used his family connections to get entry into a "Champagne Unit" in the Texas Air National Guard, and that in the middle of what Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has called "the war of his generation" and at the height of the Tet Offensive, he ticked the box on his enlistment form saying "no" to overseas military service -- that is to Vietnam.

Nor can it be seriously questioned that when Bush transferred his duties to Alabama, so that he could campaign for a pro-war Republican candidate, he disappeared off the records. It is true that some of the records seem to have disappeared as well. . . but that should also lead to more questions. The statistical correlation between disappearing National Guard Records and Bush's National Guard Service is easily as strong as that between tobacco use and cancer.

Texas Soufflé

There is not one credible witness who has come forward to say that he ever appeared at the Alabama bases where he was transferred. There were probably a lot of Alabamans who will swear to seeing Elvis in the flesh in the last year so, but no one recalls seeing Bush on a military base back in 1973. And it was not because he was self-effacing either. The ladies on the Republican campaign he joined remember him well -- as the "Texas Soufflé," full of hot air.

His commanding officers back in Texas wrote that they did not see him for a year. He was ordered to take his annual medical and Alabama, and "failed to accomplish" it thereby grounding himself as a pilot. Technically, all that was desertion -- and guardsmen in that era were ordered to Vietnam for failing to do their Guard Service.

Most distressing is to see how effective the White House has been in spinning the press, while covering their own asses. On February 13 this year, 83-year-old Helen Thomas of Hearst tried for the best part of the White House briefing to get a straight answer to the question: Was George W. Bush ever sentenced to community service in 1973? Scott McClellan implacably stonewalled and refused to answer. Indeed, he refused even to ask the president. Did this evasion make the headlines? Not at all!

You just have to look at how the administration actually leaks to the media and then uses the leak as a source, without actually putting its name to it. Just as they referred reporters to Judith Miller's fictional WMD reports, during Helen Thomas's cross examination, they pointed to, for example a Boston Globe story on how a former Texas Air National Guard officer, George Conn, was no longer backing up Lt. Col. Bill Burkett's claim that he saw the Bush records being tossed in the trash after Joe Allbaugh -- who was Governor George W. Bush's chief of staff at the time -- asked Guard commander Maj. Gen. Daniel James to gather Bush's files and "make sure there wasn't anything there that would embarrass the governor."

Burkett said he immediately told Conn about the conversation and noted it in a daily journal he kept. Conn confirmed to mainstream media in 2002 that he had spoken to Burkett about this at that time.

George Conn is now a military contractor and wants to stay in business with a vindictive and politically motivated Pentagon. Even then, his already equivocal retraction would be somewhat tempered by his statement that his friend Lt Col. Burkett who is maintaining his allegations "is an honorable man and does not lie." But most journalists have lost this nuance in the fog of media war.

Similarly, the White House referred reporters to a former Alabama Guard officer who "remembered" seeing Bush reporting for duty. The administration was too clever to put its credibility on the line, since the self confessed Republican supporting officer clearly remembered seeing Bush on bases where he had not even been transferred yet, and on days when he was not called upon to serve. But some of the media took the bait.

Listening for the Silence

The White House knows that evidence exists that could come and bite them in the backside if they made a categorical denial of these stories. But sadly, they do not have to try too hard to throw most of the media off the scent.

One of the essential skills of a journalist who wants to avoid being spun is to listen to the sound of silence. Watch for things that politicians are not saying, issues they are avoiding. There is an outline emerging from the boundaries of what the White House is evading and squirming about.

In 1973, George W. Bush was not available for the service he had wangled to avoid going to Vietnam. He was either willfully absent, or something prevented him from appearing. It has been alleged that cocaine use was involved, and there is a strong possibility that a sweetheart deal got him mandatory community service instead of a punitive sentence. The White House categorically asserts that Bush the Younger has not used drugs since 1974. What was he snorting before? The White House refused to answer, and a press corps that once hounded Clinton for not "inhaling" lets it lie.

The late James H Hatfield in his book "Fortunate Son" claimed that Bush Political advisor Karl Rove confirmed this to him. But short of a working Ouija board, Hatfield is not available to testify, and even his live testimony was compromised because of his failure to declare a murder conviction on his biography. For this the book's publisher, St. Martin Press, pulled the "Fortunate Son" from the shelves.

Normally, of course, liberals think there is always room for rehabilitation. But is this fair game for a group who have successively attacked Bill Clinton for draft-dodging, and even questioned the patriotism and war record of John Kerry with his chest of medals?

Like Senator Joe McCarthy, the people in the White House have no shame. It is the media's job to let the world know.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Own Past .

© MediaChannel.org, 2004

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