Posted by SamFelder
On the brink of resolution, the George W. Bush AWOL story spiraled out of control when we learned two weeks ago that Bush’s personnel files had been “inadvertently destroyed” in a freak microfilm preservation accident.
The accident, to have taken place eight years prior, had not come up before in the ten year history of this controversy. The conspiracy theorist in all of us went wild. Was this the missing link? Would we learn that Bush had actually spent the missing month serving in a top secret special forces unit? Would this prove that our President had at least fulfilled his responsibilities to the National Guard?
Late Friday afternoon, these questions were answered when the Pentagon announced that the earlier contention that the records had been destroyed was an “inadvertent oversight.”
While all of the inadvertency sounds like a sick joke, or worse, the new records only beg more questions about George W. Bush’s military service record.
Let’s go over the story once more, just for the record. In May 1972, Bush moved from Texas to Alabama to work on the U.S. Senate campaign of a family friend. Although he was transferred to a National Guard post there, no Guard officers recalled seeing him there.
The documents released on Friday by the Pentagon show Bush was not paid during the latter part of 1972. Like all documents released thus far, they provide no indication that Bush drilled with the Alabama unit.
In defense of the President, all White House spokesman Trent Duffy could come up with is to say that the documents “show the president served in the military and completed his service, which is why he received an honorable discharge.”
After ten years of digging the administration can’t come up with anything better than to keep repeating that Bush received an honorable discharge. Not a single officer remembers seeing Bush in Alabama. Reams of documents can’t prove that he was ever there.
It’s now time for the press to accept that Bush was AWOL for three months and these records prove it.