After saying for months that all relevant documents about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard had been made public, the Bush administration released what it called newly-found records on Tuesday night showing that Bush flew 336 hours in a fighter jet and ranked in the middle of his flight training class.
The 17 pages of documents, released by the Pentagon, will not resolve the standoff between Bush and the Democrats, which is about where, when and how often Bush showed up for National Guard duty in Alabama in 1972 and 1973. The debate has become an issue in the presidential campaign as Democrats have accused Bush of shirking his Guard duty and the White House has countered that records show the president did not.
White House and Pentagon officials said the documents were released in response to a request by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. But neither the White House nor the Pentagon could entirely explain why the documents had not been made public in February, when the White House released a two-inch stack of paper related to Bush's Guard service that administration officials said represented everything that existed.
On Tuesday night, the White House put the blame on the Pentagon for the belated release of the newly unearthed documents. "Unfortunately, it has become clear that they didn't undertake as comprehensive a search as was directed by the president," said Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman.
A Pentagon spokesman, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said he could not explain why the documents had surfaced only now. "The short answer is I don't have an answer for you," the spokesman said.
But in a letter to AP, the Pentagon said Department of Defense officials had believed that these particular flight records did not exist because they would have been kept for only two years under Air Force and Texas Air National Guard policy. Nonetheless, when the request came in from AP, the Pentagon said, officials did a more extensive search "out of an abundance of caution" and found to their surprise that the records still existed.
The latest records do not place Bush in Alabama during the time in dispute. But they do show that Bush ranked 22nd out of a class of 53 pilots when he finished his flight training at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia in 1969.
AP reported that the records also show that Bush's last flight was in April 1972, which would be consistent with previously released pay records showing that Bush had a lapse of Guard duty between April and October of that year.
Bush went to Alabama during that period to work on an unsuccessful Senate campaign. The White House has said he transferred to the Alabama Guard and missed some duty but made it up later. Democrats say that Bush has never adequately explained his absence from the Guard and that he was able to make up his duty without recriminations because of his family connections.
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