The White House has said that it is withholding all of Bush's medical records from reporters because they are personal. A drug or alcohol problem can be considered "medical," which might explain why no one has ever seen a report on Bush's grounding. In spite of White House protestations that journalists are making too much of his loss of flight status, it is not a minor matter in the military when a pilot, whose training costs taxpayers close to a million dollars, has to be yanked from the cockpit.

All the questions can still be answered. President Bush could have his staff ask the IRS for his tax and earnings statements from 1972 and 1973. Given his last name, chances are good the files are extant. His W-2 statement and rate of pay would resolve whether he fulfilled his duty. In addition, on a master microfiche at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, there is a master points document. This would show if Bush earned the minimum number of active-duty points for days served. If he did, the White House could long ago have printed this document from the microfiche and brandished it in front of reporters to make this matter disappear. But it hasn't.

The master microfiche was shipped to Gen. Danny James in Arlington, Va., who now commands the Air National Guard Bureau, and certain portions were printed and released to White House reporters -- but not all of it. That microfiche should also include a board of inquiry report on Bush's grounding, explaining what happened and why such action was taken. That report has never been released to the public. What's more, the president has said he returned to Houston and served at Ellington through the first half of 1973. That, too, could be proved with the microfiche, which ought to contain an Officer Effectiveness Rating Report for those months. No one has ever produced that document, either. It would be particularly compelling because Bush's commanders wrote Denver's Air Reserve Personnel Center in May 1973 that the young pilot had "not been observed" at his assigned base and had been transferred to Alabama a year earlier. The glaring contradiction between Bush's proclamations and the official record has never been clarified; nor has any witness ever stepped forward to say they saw Bush at the Houston base in the first half of 1973.

With the exception of IRS records, all of the information needed to determine the truth about the National Guard duty of 1st Lt. Bush is contained on the microfiche in St. Louis and at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver. If the president simply authorized its release to reporters with his signature, as John McCain did with his records in 2000, we could all stop arguing about what's missing and what it all means. But Bush had better hurry with his authorization. There's no telling when someone might begin a project to "salvage" the only remaining microfiche.

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