http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
National Guard Correction
In Friday's column, I linked to a Ralph Blumenthal story in the New York Times about how the Pentagon was saying that some of Bush's payroll records had been "inadvertently destroyed."
I added my own comment: That I found this surprising, given that Associated Press Assistant General Counsel Dave Tomlin had told me two weeks earlier that the AP, which has filed a lawsuit demanding Bush's Vietnam-era records, has been informed that the microfilm in question did indeed exist.
Several alert readers e-mailed me to suggest that I had conflated two sets of microfilm. And in fact, I did just that. (Thank you, readers.)
I reached Tomlin yesterday and he set me straight, so now I can set the record straight myself.
The microfilm that the Pentagon reported destroyed was housed at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Denver and consisted only of a few months of payroll records -- albeit some of them from during the hotly contested third quarter of 1972.
The Associated Press lawsuit that Tomlin filed is for the microfilm of Bush's entire personnel file from the Texas Air National Guard. Those records are in Austin.
The Denver microfilm was the subject of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request -- and the Austin lawsuit was filed in response to the denial of a FOIA request.
But they were different FOIA requests.
"There have been numerous FOIAs," Tomlin told me yesterday. "The lawsuit in particular is focused on microfilm that we believe to be in the possession of the State of Texas. . . . Not just payroll records, but the entire personnel file."
In fact, Tomlin said, "There could be payroll records in there that might duplicate the lost records. . . . But we're not sure."
Muwhahahaahahha!
