AWOL: Is HRP the key?

While the Washington press corps evidently has bought into the White House's "nothing to see here, move along" storyline regarding George W. Bush's spotty military record, there are, thank goodness, still a few working journalists out there who can see through the fog and spot the gaping holes in the story.

One of these, as it happens, is my good friend Bill Morlin, the veteran reporter at the Spokane Spokesman-Review whose work played such a big role for me in writing In God's Country (we covered a number of far-right events together, including the Freemen standoff in Montana; Bill has been covering Aryan Congresses since 1983). Bill teamed up with Karen Dorn Steele, another veteran investigative reporter, to examine Bush's military record thoroughly (Spokane is home to a large contingent of both Air Force and Air Guard forces).

The resulting report is an important advance in the AWOL story, since it not only brings into focus the possible reasons for Bush's previously unexplained (and frankly inexplicable) behavior regarding his missed flight physical, it also raises the key question that speaks to the story's immediate relevance: Have Bush's records been tampered with or altered?

Bush's partial history: Stringent military screening program may explain gaps on president's record

What Morlin and Steele appear to have ascertained is that Bush was subject to the Human Reliability Program, a set of stringent regulations designed to prevent nuclear weapons from being handled by people who were unreliable:

The White House documents do show that Bush's military job description, called an Air Force Specialty Code, or AFSC, was listed as "1125D, pilot, fighter interceptor."

Bush's pilot code was among those covered by Air Force Regulation 35-99, a previously undisclosed document recently obtained by The Spokesman-Review. Regulation 35-99 contains an extensive explanation of the Human Reliability Program.

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.

While Bush's defenders expend a great deal of energy downplaying the HRP rules and their role in the Air Guard, the reality is that they were in fact a point of emphasis during the time period in question:

Thousands of pilots and other military personnel have lost their job assignments under the human reliability regulations, which were established in the 1960s, according to academic researchers.

The regulations were made stricter in the 1970s when the military started screening for drug abuse, said Dr. Herbert Abrams in a 1991 research paper.
... "The military takes this very, very seriously," said Lloyd Dumas, professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Lethal Arrogance, a 1999 study of human foibles and dangerous technology.

"People of a lesser rank can even remove their superiors (under HRP). It's one of the few areas where rank doesn't matter," Dumas said.

Bush's suspension, his spotty final year of military service and his failure to take his flight physical are puzzling, Dumas said.

"If Bush was under the Human Reliability Program, there should be a paper trail. And if there's not, that's very, very unusual," the University of Texas professor said.

There already are indications -- just from the gaps in the record and what we know should be there -- that Bush's records have been manipulated (which is a federal offense). Recall, if you will, Walter Robinson's major piece on these gaps for the Boston Globe, in which he reported:

The order required Bush to acknowledge the suspension in writing and also said: "The local commander who has authority to convene a Flying Evaluation Board will direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination." After that, the commander had two options -- to convene the Evaluation Board to review Bush's suspension or forward a detailed report on his case up the chain of command.

Either way, officials said yesterday, there should have been a record of the investigation.

As noted earlier, there were no such records in the supposedly "complete" release given by the White House.

So now the question is: Will anyone in the Washington press corps pick up on this development? Will any of them ask Scott McClellan or Dan Bartlett whether Bush in fact was under the HRP rules? And if so, where are the accompanying documents?

UPDATE: Eric Boehlert at Salon tosses in his two bits' worth, noting that the Morlin/Steele piece "goes a long way in explaining what's always been the biggest mystery surrounding Bush's questionable Guard service: Why did he stop flying?"