Inadvertently Missing Guard Duty

A couple of weeks ago, we at 2GL noted that the Pentagon was trying to give us the old "dog-ate-Bush's-military-records" bit.  Well, in an effort to avoid the weekday news cycle, the Pentagon did a little Friday afternoon document dump of still more records from Bush's service.  Remember those records that had been "inadvertently destroyed"?

A Pentagon official said the earlier contention that the records were destroyed was an "inadvertent oversight."

Man, a lot of inadvertence going on in the Pentagon lately.  Is this really how we want those in charge of our nation's military characterizing their work?  Of course, some might agree that inadvertence is a good excuse for the Pentagon's evasive two-stepping on the Bush military records issue.  My money says they're the same folks who are faking outrage about Sandy Berger's "inadvertent" removal of copies of sensitive documents from the National Archives.  That's just a hunch. 

The Pentagon has a good reason for failing to produce these records before:

"Previous attempts to locate the missing records at the Federal Records Center had been unsuccessful due to the incorrect records accession numbers provided," the Pentagon's Office of Freedom of Information chief C.Y. Talbott said in a letter Friday to The Associated Press.

"The correct numbers were obtained ... and the records were found."

Talbott wrote that the Defense Department "regrets this inadvertent [there that word is again] oversight during the initial search and the delay it caused in your receipt of these materials."

They lost the pass code to Bush's records account?  Time to change the password, fellas.  Maybe something relevant that you won't forget.  How about CHICKENHAWK?

So what do the new records tell us?  Same thing we already knew: Bush was nowhere to be found in July, August or September of 1972, when he was supposed to be drilling with the Alabama National Guard.