Ten years after Texas Democrats began raising questions about whether George W. Bush fulfilled his responsibilities to the National Guard, reporters finally decided to go to the heart of the matter — Bush’s microfilmed personnel file.
There’s one significant new problem to finding out the whole truth: Bush’s files have been “inadvertently” destroyed.
Military records that could help establish President Bush’s whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.
It said the payroll records of “numerous service members,” including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush’s claims of service in Alabama are in question.
The disclosure appeared to catch some experts, both pro-Bush and con, by surprise. Even the retired lieutenant colonel who studied Mr. Bush’s records for the White House, Albert C. Lloyd of Austin, said it came as news to him.
This sounds like an unusually bad joke.
One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this ridiculous. The files were destroyed, according to Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, about eight years ago. Mysteriously, Bush aides never used this as an excuse before.
There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President’s military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was “AWOL” for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.
Even the White House’s soundbite svengalis couldn’t think of a realistic spin for such outrageous nonsense.
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director who has said that the released records confirmed the president’s fulfillment of his National Guard commitment, did not return two calls for a response.
Hmm, missing files from a freak microfilm incident. As Digby noted, this sounds like the kind of thing that would generate an independent prosecutor, say, one president ago.