The Associated Press sued the Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access to all records of George W. Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War.
Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy of Bush’s microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.
The White House says the government has already released all the records of Bush’s military service.
Yeah, that’s the White House’s story, and they’re sticking to it, but it’s not true.
Bush has consistently moved the goal posts while dissembling over his military record (or, in this case, the lack thereof). In February, Bush said he had released his entire service file in 2000. That’s demonstrably false.
A week after promising to release all of the records, the White House gave reporters hundreds of documents, including reports that Bush aides had claimed not to have a day earlier. Despite the document dump, the reports still showed several gaps in Bush’s alleged service and failed to provide any support to bolster Bush’s claim that he showed up for duty, as required, in Alabama in 1972.
At that point, the story more or less died. There were plenty of unanswered questions, but the White House said they didn’t have any more documents to share, the press got bored, and the story faded away.
As it turns out, the AP realizes the record is incomplete and that there should be documentation to prove if Bush did what he says he did. So they’re going to court to find out.
There are questions as to whether the file provided to the news media earlier this year is complete, says the lawsuit, adding that these questions could possibly be answered by reviewing a copy of the microfilm of Bush’s personnel file in the Texas archives.
The Air National Guard of the United States, a federal entity, has control of the microfilm, which should be disclosed in its entirety under the Freedom of Information Act, the lawsuit says.
The White House has yet to respond to a request by the AP in April asking the president to sign a written waiver of his right to keep records of his military service confidential. Bush gave an oral waiver in a TV appearance that preceded the White House’s release this year of materials concerning his National Guard service.
The government “did not expedite their response … they did not produce the file within the time required by law, and they will not now estimate when the file might be produced or even confirm that an effort has been initiated to retrieve a copy from the microfilm at the Texas archives,” the lawsuit says.
Lawsuits are slow and there’s little hope that this will be resolved by the fall. Still, this completely-justified case will bring attention back to the story that the White House really doesn’t want to talk about.
(If you’re looking for details about the kind of documents the AP is seeking, Phil Carter has a helpful list from earlier this year.)
So, how long should we say this lawsuit took? Some might argue that the press should have insisted on Bush’s full military record in February, when the AWOL story was at it’s most intense. Others will note that reporters should have bothered to listen to Dems and consider the seriousness of this story back in 2000, when Bush’s critics were jumping up and down over the story but couldn’t buy media attention.
But I’m going to say that this lawsuit is actually 10 years in the making — Bush ran for governor in 1994 when Dems first noted that he apparently did not fulfill his responsibilities to the National Guard. Reporters ignored the story then and kept ignoring it until this year, a full decade after they should have taken note.