There are problems with President Bush’s Vietnam-era military service. That much we know for sure. There’s a Nixonian gap—from 1 May 1972 - 1 April 1973—in Bush’s Air National Guard service. That Bush missed or failed a required physical and was subsequently suspended from flight status in 1972 is not contested (a 29 September 1972 order suspended Bush from flight status for “failure to accomplish” a mandatory physical). That there was no investigation of the suspension and that Bush’s service records are incomplete is highly suspect and have led many to question whether the sitting President had avoided his obligations.
According to Bill Morlin and Karen Dorn Steele’s excellent “Bush’s partial history” in Sunday’s issue of the (Spokane, Washington) Spokesman-Review, Bush may have been grounded in accordance with an obscure military regulation known as the Human Reliability Program.
From the Spokesman-Review account:
“Human reliability regulations were used to screen military personnel for their mental, physical and emotional fitness before granting them access to nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
“Under the rules, pilots could be removed immediately from the cockpit for HRP issues, which happened in the 1974 Washington Air National Guard case. The two Washington airmen were suspended on suspicion of drug use, but eventually received honorable discharges.
“A second previously unreleased document obtained by the newspaper, a declassified Air Force Inspector General’s report on the Washington case, states that human reliability rules applied to all Air National Guard units in the 1970s. From 1968 to 1973, Bush was assigned to the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston.
“‘The Human Reliability Program, in a nutshell, applied to every U.S. Air Force and Air Guard pilot in any aircraft they would fly,’ said Marty Isham, a former Air Force briefing officer.”
Adding fuel to the speculative fires, the National Guard Bureau told the Spokesman-Review journalists “they were under orders not to answer questions” regarding Bush’s service record. To make matters even worse, the National Guard Bureau’s Freedom of Information Act officer stopped accepting requests on Bush’s military service last February, referring all requests to the Pentagon.
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