Salon: The case of the missing Bush documents

[kskiska]

Records covering the president's crucial missing months in the Texas Air National Guard were "accidentally" destroyed. But he could still clear his name if he chose to.

(snip)

Unfortunately, key payroll records once held by DFAS are no longer available, and curiously, they happen to be from Bush's period in Alabama. Journalists' FOIA requests for the records held by DFAS are relatively recent. Perhaps they didn't bother previously because they thought they knew what the results would be -- that is, further stonewalling. (I was previously unaware that DFAS was the repository of payroll records; I had originally been informed that they were kept in state Guard offices and that the Texas Guard no longer had Bush's on file.) When DFAS responded, reporters for major newspapers received CD-ROMs and a letter from a Pentagon information officer detailing some missing information: Data for three months, July to September 1972, was not on the discs.

Although that was not a big surprise to those of us who have followed the issue for years, it is significant that the missing data covers the 90-day period when Bush was in Alabama reporting, according to White House spokesman Dan Bartlett, "many times" for Guard duty while also working on a U.S. Senate campaign. The White House has never been able to produce either a document or a credible witness that 1st Lt. Bush reported for duty in Alabama, and the DFAS pay records would have confirmed its assertions that Bush was not AWOL at the time.

When the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press opened their mail from the Pentagon, they learned that the microfilmed records had been destroyed during an attempt to restore the spools of film. The latter two publications either did not know what they were being told or simply thought the matter was not significant enough to warrant a story. When Ralph Blumenthal of the Times called me to ask about the relevance of the missing records, I told him I never expected definitive information to turn up in an official record. But I continue to be amazed at this "coincidence" that effectively hides the truth about Bush's military service.

Blumenthal wrote that DFAS said Bush's microfilmed payroll records were lost as the agency was beginning a project to restore old files. But reporters so far have not received answers on what precipitated the restoration efforts. DFAS is a minor government agency, and it is unlikely someone working there woke up one day and proposed that the aging film be unrolled and examined for salvaging. The logical conclusion is that the decision was prompted by an external consideration. It is not totally out of the question that an energetic government employee decided to show some initiative, but if so, that worker needs to be asked why the particular years 1969 through 1972 were included in the project. Moreover, did the same three months in 1972 disappear for all of the service members whose records were on film? Or just for Lt. Bush? According to the letter accompanying the CD-ROMs, the first three months from 1969 were also lost. Bush was in flight training at that time and there is no doubt about his fulfillment of that responsibility, but an explanation would be helpful in clarifying how the records were destroyed for the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/15/missing_records/index.html

[Virginian]

1. No one has followed up on this until now?

Even the "Librul" reporters haven't asked these questions?