Clean Records or None at All

AP reports on the inspired excuses awaiting anyone who files a sensitive FOIA request:

Defending the failure to find the documents, Guard spokesman Lt. Col. John Stanford said searching the old, disorganized boxes was tough.

"These boxes are full of dirt and rat . . . (excrement) and dead bugs."

Comments

[Twba]

Don't ask nancyboys to get desiccated rat shit on their hands.

[GUYK]

Sooooo, what was Kerry's excuse? Has he released his military medical records yet? I would to see the extent of a couple of those wounds that earned him purple hearts.

[rob]

It's obviously a conspiracy, especially since they included damaging smoking gun evidence such as "orders for high-altitude training in 1972, less than three months before Bush abruptly quit flying."

Wow. Big news. Get Mulder & Scully on the case of the "Inefficient Bureaucracy."

It always amazes me how people seem to think that every piece of paper the federal and state gov't ever used are all kept in a central location, filed by Dewey Decimal System and cross-referenced in an easily searchable database - kind of like the Pentagon basement depicted in the X-Files.

Almost as amazing as the people who expect people engaged in bureaucratic occupations are going to be so thrilled about a FOIA request (cause it's THEIR request) that they'll act in exactly the opposite manner of most bureaucratic apparatchiks. (The most enlightening passage: "Corallo said the department relied on recommendations of career experts to handle information release requests.")

Go figure that a couple of ANG guys without any real interest in the issue failed to turn up 31 pages of bug-gut-&-rat-feces-covered pages that a couple of other guys who WERE motivated did.

The ANG guys probably believed that they had dug up all of it. Kind of like I can swear I REALLY looked for my car keys before my girlfriend finds them "hiding" in plain sight.

Cue the X-Files theme!

[SPD]

Something tells me these boxes are the only things full of shit.

Thank you! I'll be here all week!

[GUYK]

SPD: I REPRESENT THAT REMARK!