AWOL story legs are getting longer. picking up speed

The Defense Department has requested that President Bush's payroll records from his service in the National Guard be sent to Washington from a DOD archive in Colorado, to ascertain whether they can be released to news organizations and public interest groups that have formally requested them in recent days, according to DOD officials.  article

I don't quite understand this. I don't know why there would be a reason for the DOD to check the records first. Either they are the type of records that can be made public, or they aren't. Do you suppose if you were to ask for the records of anyone else who served in the National Guard that the DOD would have to look at them first?

The other documents that should still be available are Bush's payroll records, which would show what drills Bush was compensated for during that period. Officials said yesterday that the DOD in Washington would review the master copy of Bush's payroll records, which have been stored on microfiche for 30 years at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Denver.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday told reporters that everything was made available during the 2000 campaign. "I think that one of the things you can look at that will help address these questions is the annual retirement point summaries . . . They show that the president fulfilled his duties, and that is why he was honorably discharged," he said.

McClellan said that in 2000, the Bush campaign was informed by the Texas National Guard that "they did not have them. Obviously, if there's anything additional, we'll keep you posted."

Obviously.

I seriously don't imagine that any trace was left behind.

I think it's a wild goose chase. But perhaps the value in it is that people will become aware that those records have been "disappeard".


On the other hand, Matthew Yglesias posts this today:

ANOTHER "INTELLIGENCE FAILURE?"
An interesting story in The Wall Street Journal takes us way back to the 2002 State of the Union address:

The White House stepped back from a high-profile assertion by President Bush, in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, that U.S. forces had uncovered evidence of a potential attack against an American nuclear facility.

In the speech, Mr. Bush warned of a terrorist threat to the nation, saying that the U.S. had found "diagrams of American nuclear power plants" in Afghanistan.
. . .
Monday night, the White House defended the warnings about Islamic extremist intentions, but said the concerns highlighted by Mr. Bush were based on intelligence developed before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, and that no plant diagrams were actually found in Afghanistan. "There's no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found," a senior administration official said.

When 2003's State of the Union nuclear warnings turned out to be false, the White House at least had a forged document they could point to as the source of the "information," but now they seem to be inventing things out of whole cloth. At least I assume that's what "no additional basis" means. The New York Times also has a story on the subject today, but without the White House source. The line in question from the 2002 speech got a fair amount of press at the time, so it's pretty curious that it took two years before anyone decide to question whether or not it was accurate. According to the Times, members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been dubious about this claim ever since it was first made.

By what angle could you avoid seeing that the Bush administration has used any means to sell its war, and that Mr. Honesty and Integrity and Restoring Personal Responsibility to the White House lies almost constantly?

The only thing I can think of is to decide that the CIA and whatever other intelligence agencies shunt information to the White House are feeding faulty information.

But even that wouldn't excuse Mr. Bush. If, for instance, he is going in front of the American people saying that the U.S. has found diagrams of power plants in Afghanistan, then he is responsible for having proven to himself that those diagrams exist.

This president fails to take personal responsibility at every turn of the game, from as far back as his service in the National Guards, and I am quite sure from beyond that. The only thing he consistently accepts responsibility for is making the world a better, safer place. And he has done neither of those things.