Handwriting experts hired by many media organizations as well as other critics contend the document, and possibly all four, are forgeries. However, Killian’s order is confirmed by two documents that were not part of the CBS papers. The first is a White House-released letter from the commander of the 147th Fighter Group, Col. Bobby W. Hodges, to its Texas higher command dated Sept. 5, 1972, with a subject line of “Suspension From Flying Status.”
The letter documents the missed flight physical and the suspension, “effective 1 Aug 1972.” A Sept. 29 order from the National Guard Bureau further confirms the missed physical and the suspension.
[...]
Two months earlier, on June 30, Bush signed a statement promising that if he left his Texas Ready Reserve unit, “it is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve Forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months.”
There is no record of Bush ever having signed on with a Massachusetts Reserve unit. In 1999, Dan Bartlett, working for the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post that Bush had completed his six-year commitment with a Boston unit. That didn’t happen, Bartlett recently told The Boston Globe. “I must have misspoke,” he said.
[...]
Killian’s former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, 86, of Houston, has said she believed the memos were fake but their content accurately reflected Killian’s opinions.
“I know that I didn’t type them,” she said in an interview with CBS. “However, the information in those is correct.”
This is not new. But considering the source — the Air Force of which he is nominal Commander-in-Chief — this is quite damning to George W Bush. The questions of his suitability as CiC still stand.
...NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
Why is it you can find more context for this sort of story on The Daily Show than you can on CNN? Why aren't the editorial directors at the mainstream network news organizations bothered by the fact that Jon Stewart's credibility eclipses theirs?
We're proud to be part of the listing for the solid-blue state of Illinois, home of two of the nation's greatest senators: Dick Durbin and Barack Obama.
Oddly enough, just like other multibillion dollar CEO criminals Ken "Kenny Boy" and Linda "Jus' Stuff" Lay of Enron fame, Sanjay and Sylvia Kumar are contributors to the campaign of a certain George W Bush.
White collar crime somehow escaped the Republican mania for mandatory sentences. Why would that be? I guess multibillion dollar fraudsters are sort of a not-so-secret club that happens to include the GOP.
Eighty-two of the country's largest profitable corporations paid no federal income tax for at least one year of the Bush administration's first three years, a study found.
The study by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, and the affiliated Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, examined 275 Fortune 500 corporations with total cumulative profits of $1.1 trillion in 2001, 2002 and 2003. One-third paid no federal income taxes in at least one of those years, and many received refunds of taxes paid in prior years.
The think tank's 1988 survey of large corporations found the overall effective tax rate was 26.5%; a survey of companies in 1996-98 found the rate dropped to 21.7%. The latest survey showed the effective rate fell to 17.2% in 2001-03.
Under President Bush, several corporate-tax breaks have been expanded temporarily. That, with sagging profits and improper tax shelters, has driven down corporate-tax receipts as a share of the economy, to 1.2% in 2003, the second-lowest rate recorded in the post-World War II era.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has sought to exploit the issue. An economic adviser, Jason Furman, said the study shows Mr. Bush is "utterly hypocritical" when he talks about advancing a tax overhaul in a second term. The administration has failed to back many needed loophole closers, Mr. Furman said, while it pushed through the expansions of corporate-tax breaks in 2002 and 2003 that are a focus of the study's criticism.
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General Electric Co. topped the list of companies with the largest total tax breaks, at $9.5 billion duringthe three-year period. It was followed by SBC Communications Inc. with $9 billion, Citigroup Inc., $4.6 billion, and International Business Machines Corp., $4.6 billion.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has launched another flurry of television advertisements attacking Democrat John Kerry, and Houston homebuilder Bob Perry is providing most of the money.
In a report available to the public on Monday, the organization disclosed that it spent $326,210 on ads aired earlier this month in New Mexico and Nevada — states considered key to winning the White House this year.
Of that amount, $250,000 was donated by Perry, a longtime support of President Bush and other Republican candidates.
Perry, 71, earlier this year gave the Swift Boat Veterans $100,000 in start-up money at the urging of Houston attorney John O'Neill, co-author of a book critical of Kerry's military record.
According to the group's most recent report to the Federal Election Commission, seven other Houston residents chipped in smaller donations totaling $8,500 to the 527 political organization, so-called because of its designation under the federal tax code.
The $250,000 donated by Perry on Sept. 13 is the latest in a string of large donations from major Texas businessmen. Texas oilmen and longtime Bush family supporters Boone Pickens and Albert Huddleston previously gave $500,000 and $100,000, respectively, to the "Swifties."
There are an awful lot of rich Bush family supporters in that list. And there's no coordination between the Swifties and the Bush campaign, right?
Q: Let's segue into the issue you raised of political stability. A: Bush is taking the country in a direction that is very different than it had been going in for the last 50 years. The notion of pre-emptive wars and the pre-emptive war that we have in Iraq is a failed strategy. If [Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz were a money manager, and he made the forecast about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqis greeting the American forces with flowers, and then declared "mission accomplished," when in fact we were totally unprepared for the uprising we face there, he would have been fired for incompetence. No one responsible for these decisions has been fired. If you had a big money-management company with bad research and bad portfolio managers making bad judgments, that would be the end of that company.
Q: Yes, and I believe there's been a few examples of that. A: These people are delusional. They are deluded by the apparent military power of the United States. There are three levels of military power, and we have a great advantage in one: the middle level. The top level is the ability to produce atomic weapons and missiles. Now the Chinese can do it. The Russians can do it. The Israelis can do it. The Indians can do it. The Pakistanis can do it. The British can do it. Nobody has an advantage, and these weapons cannot be used without blowing the world to smithereens. In that sense, they are useless. The middle level is about projecting force, and that's what we're good at. We have airplanes. We have aircraft carriers. We have guided missiles. We have electronics. We have all that in profusion. There we have an advantage. However, at the third level, we have no advantage at all, and that's in guerrilla warfare and in controlling territory. That's the problem in Iraq. We needed a multiple of the number of troops that we have there to control that country. Unlike the Russians and the Chinese and many of the European countries, we don't have a conscript army.
Q: Are you suggesting we'll reinstate the draft? A: If Bush gets elected for a second term, and he's faced with an army that is overextended, there's going to be a draft. That will divide this country further. That's where the political crisis comes in. Because of the military overextension, you have some terrible decisions that have to be made. The draft is one. The second involves the budget. The war costs are much greater than they should have been.
Q: Bring this back to your point that our power in the world is diminishing? A: The power diminishes because of this huge growth over the next 10-to-20 years of Asia. Also, our unilateral policies are angering the world, and it isn't unreasonable to consider Western Europe joining with the Russians and creating a huge power bloc against us.
Other capitalists who disapprove of Bush policies, explicitly or implicitly, include Seth Glickenhaus and Warren Buffett.
