Calling all FOIA specialists

Recently I blogged on 1LT Dubya's Dubious service. I received several emails suggesting that I try and follow up on the missing DD-214 from our glorious leaders service record. Some parts of his service record and another link here have been redacted (gee, that's a shocker) but mostly to conceal personal info like his social security number and his height, weight, and other alarmingly personal details (no, really). However, in the collections of documents that have been released by the Bush Campaign and others, (I think the Bush Campaign might have part of the original source material and we all know how great the media has been in following up on GWB materials, to paraphrase Fox, Ari Speaks they Transcribe. Apologies to the Boston Globe, they "broke" this story originally.

The DD-214, for those of you not familiar with them, is a document given to everyone who separates from the service. The reason it's important is that it contains a "characterization" of the serviceman/woman's service. Pre-1974 or so, the program used what were called Separation Program Codes or Numbers (they are called both) which gave a very interesting set of characterizations to the separating member. Some of them were things like "bed-wetter", "homosexual"; you get the picture. Now for the punchline, a person could get an Honorable Discharge and have an SPC/SPN which was far from a characterization of Honorable. This system was amended in the '70's after it became common knowledge about the unfairness of the system and its often arbitrary application to people who were ummmm not mainstream or just not great performers or just did not show up, but you couldn't Courts-Martial sound like anyone we know?

The reason that this could be interesting, is that the 214 for Bush was most likely prepared not in Texas, where he would have most likely been assured of protection, but by his last command which according to the records is what looks like some part of the Air Force Reserve Personnel Command in Colorado, where his DD-214 would have been prepared by someone who would have been a relatively disinterested clerk, who might have seen that he (1) was off flight status by virtue of disobeying an order to show up for his physical, (2) ordered to extra days to make up for "lost time", (3) officially cited in a fitness report for not "appearing in this base", I am unsure if a clerk in the Air Force would see any previous Officer Fitness reports or not, in the Navy they would not. Why a bad SPC/SPN would not have been easy to expunge is that it takes an appeal to the Board for Correction of Military Records for the appropriate branch of the service to remove or change an SPC/SPN, not any easy thing to do, even for someone who is politically connected.

Also, interestingly about a week after the Supreme Fools appointed Bush, the list of SPC/SPN's on the DoD website was removed as "unnecessary".

So this offers intriguing possibilities. If you are blogrolling me, please mention this to try and get the word out to a FOIA expert who might not read DEMVET (you mean there's someone who doesn't? I'm shocked! Just Shocked!!) Please e-mail any help you might think you can bring/suggestions to usndemvet-at-hotmail.com.

You never know what we'll find, after all, pre-1974 honorable service had many different meanings.