Remember Lt. Col. Burkett? Re: Destroying Guard records in '97

[JPJones]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/12/elec04.prez.bush.texas.records/

Retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, who was then an adviser to the Texas adjutant general, who in that capacity serves as the commander of the state's National Guard, made the allegations.

He said that in 1997 he overheard Joe Allbaugh -- who was Bush's chief of staff at the time -- ask Guard commander Maj. Gen. Daniel James to gather Bush's files and "make sure there wasn't anything there that would embarrass the governor."
...
Soon afterward, he said, he saw Bush's Guard performance review in a trash can. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War era.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/campaign/09records.html

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.

[Sliverofhope]

1. Brilliant!

Great find! KICK!

[truthspeaker]

2. thanks for connecting the dots! I posted the CNN link in an LBN thread

[Stocat]

3. Brilliant! Kick! n/t

[arcane1]

4. kick ass!

:yourock:

[Pachamama]

5. I Remember...and while they can destroy/hide docs, they can't hide all

...the people trail....

sooner or later people are going to talk and the truth will come out one way or another...

[SoCalDem]

6. The thing that has always bothered me about this, is this

He said they were throwing them away.. Not shredding, burning, tearing up.. WHY did he not just wait til they left, and then recover those papers himself.. he had to know they might be important at a future date, if they were that intent on removing them from the files ..

Bush would not be president right now, if those papers had existed..

If he had kept them, they could have been "produced anonymously" during the 2000 election, and you know that someone would have run with them...

[RobertSeattle]

7. I love Josh Marshall's smart aleck remark...

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_07_...

"This guy just can't catch a break.

First, the CIA sandbags President Bush with a bunch of bogus intelligence about Iraq.

Now it turns out that the military payroll records that could have helped prove that he really did serve his Air National Guard duty in Alabama in 1972 and 1973 were "inadvertently destroyed" in a tragic microfilm accident.

The Times has more on the president's latest brush with cruel fate."

[Blue Wally]

10. Retirement Points Records

The main records for National Guardsmen and Reservist aretheir retirement points records. I don't know about the Air Force, but the Army records are "maintained" (and I use the word loosely) by an office in St Louis whih suffers from massively embedded incompetence. I once had a friend who was a reservist with 20+ years of service. His records showed him with only about a year and a half of good service. I was going to St Louis for a meeting and took an early flight armed with his power of attorney and twenty plus years of his copies of his pay records. It took me two hours to explain it all to the dimbulbs there before they produced a worksheet showing his true service. It tookk him six months of phone calls and refaxing the worksheet before he got an official computer generated form showing his true service. I have never seen an office filled with such incompetence and not caring about the job. National Guard and Reserve records are incomplete, phony, and just plain missing.

[izzie]

8. Yar and pigs fly-------------

I would need to be in the "right' Church to believe that about his records.

[cap]

9. I just wonder if the CIA has any way of getting those records

or a reconstruction of those records. The CIA isn't going down without a fight. They aren't going to take the blame for a poor defense on terrorism.

[dumpster_baby]

11. Yep. Much of the CIA is trying to take down Bush

....for the Plame incident. Very few at DU seem to realize this. THe CIA revolt is likely Bush's biggest obstacle to reelection.

[NashVegas]

12. Calpundit's Rebuttal to Attacks on Burkett's Credibility

http://www.calpundit.com/archives/003261.html