JoseCuervo
New member
This is just silly... First they are destroyed, and now 4 weeks later, they re-appear. Dubya can't evan organize a decent cover-up....
Bush's military payroll records, thought to be destroyed, surface:
WASHINGTON (AFP) Jul 24, 2004
President George W. Bush's missing payroll records from the period when he served in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War surfaced here weeks after officials said they had been accidently destroyed, US media reported.
The records however do not resolve key questions over whether Bush did -- or did not -- show up for military duty in Alabama the period between May 1972 and May 1973, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported Saturday.
No other Guard member at the time remembers seeing Bush in Alabama, and Democrats accuse him of skipping military duty at a time when thousands of drafted Americans were risking their lives in Vietnam.
The Pentagon released copies of Bush's payroll covering the first quarter of 1969 -- when Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, and the third quarter of 1972 -- when he had already transferred to the National Guard in the southern state of Alabama to work on the US senate campaign of a family friend.
The records show what Bush military records the White House released earlier had already shown: that Bush did not perform service in the third quarter of 1972, when he left his Texas Air National Guard unit to transfer to Alabama.
Various US news organizations, including the Post and the Times, sought Bush's records from the Pentagon's Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review.
In early July the Pentagon said the payroll records stored in Denver, Colorado, of numerous National Guard members were destroyed in 1996 and 1997 in a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm, and that no back-up paper copies have been found.
But Friday Pentagon officials said the early announcement was due to a mix up over boxes of old records.
"We're talking about a 30-year-old manual process for managing records," Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, told the Post. "That process has since been replaced."
The White House insists that Bush fulfilled his National Guard commitments, and note his 1973 honorable discharge from service.
Bush's service during the Vietnam war has become an election-year issue, especially among Democrats, who point out that Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry is a decorated Vietnam war veteran.