George W. Bush Military Service Controversy - Release of Military Records

Release of Military Records

During the 2000 presidential campaign, various military records of Bush were made public by the Bush campaign.

On February 13, 2004, during Bush's re-election campaign, more than 700 additional pages of documents on Bush's service were released, including those from the National Personnel Records Center, under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. This release was claimed by some to contradict the statement that Bush made on February 8, 2004 to Meet the Press interviewer Tim Russert, that "We did in 2000, by the way." In response, Bush contended that he was referring only to documents already in his possession, as opposed to the newly released documents from military sources.

On June 22, 2004, The Associated Press sued the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force, seeking access to all of Bush's records during his military service.

On July 8, 2004, the Pentagon reported that the microfilmed payroll records of Bush and numerous other service members had been inadvertently ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. The records lost included those covering July through September 1972, when Bush's claims of service in Alabama were in question, and the Pentagon reported that no paper backups could be found.

On July 23, 2004, the Pentagon reported that the records it had previously reported destroyed had been found. A Pentagon official said the earlier statement that the records were destroyed was an "inadvertent oversight." The Pentagon released computerized payroll records covering Bush's 1972 service. Like the records released earlier by the White House, the newly released documents did not indicate that Bush performed any drills, in Alabama or elsewhere, during May through September 1972.

On September 7, 2004, the White House released the flight logs recording the flights done by Bush as a pilot. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the logs were found at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, which is the central repository for veterans' records. She said the logs were found among a batch of records sent to St. Louis from Norton Air Force Base in 1993, which were originally thought to contain records of active-duty officers rather than of National Guardsmen such as Bush.

On September 24, 2004, under court order resulting from an earlier FOIA lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, the Pentagon released more documents.

On September 29, 2004, the White House released a November 1974 document, saying it had been in Bush's personnel file and that it had been found by the Pentagon.

On October 5, 2004, more than a week after a court-imposed deadline to turn over all records of Bush's military service, the Texas Air National Guard produced two previously unreleased documents (four pages of records) that included Bush's orders for his last day of active duty in 1973.

On October 14, 2004, two weeks after Texas National Guard officials signed an oath swearing they had turned over all records, the Texas National Guard released 31 additional pages of documents found by two retired Army lawyers who went through Guard files under an agreement between the Texas National Guard and The Associated Press, which sued to gain access to the files. A Guard spokesman defended the continuing discoveries, saying Guard officials did not find all of Bush’s records because they were disorganized and in poor shape. "These boxes are full of dirt and rat and dead bugs. They have never been sitting in an uncontrolled climate," said Lt. Col. John Stanford. "It’s a tough task to go through archives that were not set up in a way that you could easily go through them."