US: For many Democrats still reeling from the attacks by Vietnam veterans on John Kerry's combat service, it is payback time writes Conor O'Clery in New York.
The damaging question of whether George Bush did not fulfil his duties in the Texas Air National Guard has suddenly erupted in the US media again.
Former Texas House speaker Mr Ben Barnes last night told CBS that he helped President Bush get into the Guard as one of a number of privileged and politically connected young men in Texas who otherwise could have been sent to Vietnam.
Mr Barnes said to interviewer Dan Rather that his conscience troubled him when he visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. "I don't think that I had any right to have the power that I had to choose who was going to Vietnam and who was not going to Vietnam," he said.
"In some instances, when I looked at those names, I was maybe determining life or death and that's not a power that I want to have." Mr Barnes said he readily "got those young men into the National Guard that were friends of mine and supporters of mine."
When Mr Barnes was Texas House speaker in 1968, George W. Bush was a 22-year-old Yale graduate from Texas and his father, future president George H. W. Bush, was a member of Congress from Houston.
Mr Bush Snr denied last week that he used any influence to get his son into the Texas Air National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam. Mr Barnes said in a deposition in 2000 that he placed a call to get young Bush a coveted slot in the Guard at the request of a Bush family friend. "Reflecting back, I'm very sorry about it," he said, "but you know, it happened and it was because of my ambition, my youth and my lack of understanding."
New evidence that Mr Bush avoided service he had signed up for was published in the Boston Globe. It claimed, based on a new investigation of military files, that Mr Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation in the National Guard during the Vietnam War.
"Twice during his Guard service - first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School - Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty," the Globe reported. "He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show."
The paper said Mr Bush's attendance at required training drills "was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974. But they did neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973 that his service had been 'satisfactory', just four months after Bush's commanding officer wrote that he had not been seen at his unit for the previous 12 months." Mr Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973, the records showed.
A White House spokesman said Mr Bush would not have been honourably discharged if he had not "met all his requirements" and that if he hadn't met his requirements "they would have called him up for active duty for up to two years".
Retired Army Col Gerald A. Lechliter, who helped analyse the records for the Globe, said: "'He broke his contract with the United States government - without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen."
Retired Lieut Col Albert Lloyd, a former Texas Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Mr Bush at the White House's request in February, agreed that the President walked away from his obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. However, the war was winding down and hundreds like him did the same thing, he said.
One of the unanswered question concerns Mr Bush's claim to have performed part of his guard service in Alabama, where he was removed from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972.
Retired Lieut Col Robert Mintz, who served in the Alabama unit, told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that he went looking for Mr Bush to "party" with him but never found him.
In a TV ad launched yesterday in battleground states by a group called Texans for Truth, Mr Mintz says he "heard George W. Bush get up there and say 'I served in the 187th Air National Guard in Montgomery, Alabama'. I said: 'Really? That was my unit. And I don't remember seeing you there'. So I called my friends and said: 'Did you know that George Bush served in our unit?' And everyone said: 'No, I never saw him there.'" New documents obtained by the Associated Press under court order showed that Mr Bush ranked below average in his Air National Guard flight class and flew 336 hours in a fighter jet before letting his pilot status lapse and missing a key readiness drill in 1972. Up to last week the White House said it knew of no other records of Mr Bush's military service.
Adding spice to the anti-Bush stories is a book by celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley to be published next week by Random House, which the White House has already dismissed as "garbage". The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty cites Mr Bush's former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, who had a bitter divorce from the President's brother Neil, as a source for allegations of Mr Bush's drug abuse.
Mr Peter Gethers, vice-president of Random House, said that Sharon Bush provided "confirmation" but was not the initial source of the allegations, which include a claim that Mr Bush took cocaine at Camp David while his father was president.
During the 2000 campaign Mr Bush repeatedly declined to address questions about possible past drug use, saying only that he had made "mistakes" when he was "young and irresponsible". He said he had not used illegal drugs since 1974 but refused to say whether he had tried them earlier.
The book will have a print run of 750,000. The author is booked on major talk shows next week, but the mainstream print media is acting with caution. Newsweek rejected an interview because of doubts about its contents, which include a claim that Mrs Laura Bush smoked pot and sold marijuana to friends at college.
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Ms Christine Iverson said: "This is the same author who falsely maligned the late president Ronald Reagan as a date rapist who paid for a girlfriend's abortion, and wrongly cast Nancy Reagan as an adulterer who had an affair with Frank Sinatra.