Posted on 09/16/2004 4:17:04 AM PDT by hispanarepublicana
HOUSTON, Sept. 15 - Bill Burkett once said his job was to make Gov. George W. Bush a hero.
As a lieutenant colonel working on the readiness of the Texas National Guard, Mr. Burkett, a lay preacher's son from Portales, N.M., was brought in with a high commission in 1996 to work on mobilization plans that would make the Guard shine.
"I was very supportive of Bush," he said in an interview this year.
But it was not long before Mr. Burkett, whom colleagues call a stickler for rules, fell out with senior commanders and ended up in a suit against the Guard and its leaders. He also became disillusioned with Mr. Bush, who he said was not supporting needed reforms in the Guard.
The bitterness, he later said, moved him to go public with what he said he and a fellow officer, George O. Conn, witnessed one night in Austin in 1997. That was when, he said, commanders, in touch with Mr. Bush's political advisers, left documents in the trash while sanitizing the governor's service records. .
Now, Mr. Burkett, whose account last February was derided by the White House, has been drawn into another fray, this one on documents supplied to "60 Minutes II" on CBS. On Tuesday, a person at the network named Mr. Burkett as a source of records critical of Mr. Bush's Vietnam era service that CBS said last week came from the personal files of Lieutenant Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984.
Citing discrepancies in the typeface and wording of the documents, a growing number of experts, as well as Mr. Killian's wife and son and his former secretary, have called them fakes. The secretary, Marian Carr Knox, said they appeared to reflect Colonel Killian's sentiments that someone might have sought to recreate from lost originals.
Mr. Burkett (pronounced BURR-kit), 55, did not respond to numerous messages in recent days and turned away a reporter for The New York Times on Wednesday who called several times from outside the locked gate of his ranch in Baird, Tex., east of Abilene.
His lawyer, David Van Os of San Antonio, repeatedly declined to answer when asked whether Mr. Burkett had a role in obtaining or providing the documents.
"Bill Burkett is tired of being speculated about when the real story is and should be where was George Bush?" Mr. Van Os said. "The possibility that Bill Burkett would falsify documents or falsify any story is zero."
Robert Strong, a former Guard officer interviewed on "60 Minutes,'' said documents that CBS showed to him for authentication bore a facsimile stamp of a Kinko's store in Abilene. Mr. Van Os, asked whether that pointed to Mr. Burkett, said he had no information about that.
Mr. Conn, who vouched for Mr. Burkett in his suit in 2002, has a United States government job in Germany and did not respond to an e-mail message and a telephone message left at his home in Dallas. In an e-mail message in February, Mr. Conn said: "I know LTC Bill Burkett and served with him several years ago in the Texas Army National Guard. I believe him to be honest and forthright. He 'calls things like he sees them.' "
Mr. Conn declined to say whether he had seen any cleansing of Mr. Bush's files with Mr. Burkett.
Harvey Gough, a restaurateur in Dallas who was in the Guard with Mr. Burkett and Mr. Conn, said this week that he had recently spoken with Mr. Conn in Europe and came away convinced that Mr. Conn had no knowledge of the Killian documents.
Mr. Gough said he also had no idea of their origins and had never discussed the matter with Mr. Burkett.
Yet another officer who served with Mr. Burkett, Dennis Adams, a retired lieutenant colonel now working as a security officer at the State Capitol in Austin, said this week, "I don't know of anybody I'd put in a higher category than Bill."
Mr. Adams said that Mr. Burkett had told him afterward of having witnessed the sanitizing of Mr. Bush's Guard file "and that some of the things in the trash were pulled out.''
"He never did say by whom," Mr. Adams added. "I don't have the foggiest idea what documents of any kind he ever had," Mr. Adams said.
In addition to describing what he said was the destruction of documents, Mr. Burkett said in the February interview that also overheard a conversation in mid-1997 between Gen. Daniel James, head of the Texas National Guard, and Joseph M. Allbaugh, a top aide to Governor Bush, that discussed the Guard records.
Contacted in February, Mr. Allbaugh acknowledged the conversation, saying he had talked with General James in an effort to ensure that the records would be helpful to journalists who inquired about Mr. Bush's military experience. He called Mr. Burkett's account about the destruction of documents "pure hogwash.''
Mr. Burkett was at home on Wednesday working on his ranch about six miles south of the tiny town of Baird, far from the swirl of attention around CBS News. His gate, on a dusty and little-traveled dirt road, was padlocked. He briefly answered the phone in his house on the far side of his tidy pasture to decline to comment.
This week, The Abilene Reporter-News identified Mr. Burkett as a suspected source of the CBS documents. At the Callahan County Farmers' Co-op in Baird, a gathering place where Mr. Burkett has been a frequent presence, his role as a public accuser of the president stirred strong emotions. Pete Mendez, a former firefighter who says he is one of the few open Democrats in the county as well as one of Mr. Burkett's few defenders, said the reports had made Mr. Burkett a pariah. Mr. Burkett has recently complained that when he sat down at the co-op table, all his neighbors rose and left, Mr. Mendez said.
"If you buck the system around here you are kind of an outcast or radical," he added. "A lot of people around here seem to think he was just upset because he was turned down for something or other."
Mr. Mendez said he had known Mr. Burkett for a few years and recently lent him a valuable tool.
"In my opinion - which is no more than I have known him - I feel that he is truthful and whatnot,'' the neighbor said. "He has always treated me fair."
In a book published this year, "Bush's War for Re-election" by James Moore, Mr. Burkett is quoted as reporting having received numerous death threats, including telephone messages and a bullet with his name on it that he says he found in his mailbox. More recently, he told people that his son's car had been burned.
In interviews with The Times in February as he was publicizing his tampering charges, Mr. Burkett said he grew up in New Mexico and majored in agribusiness and economics. He said he joined the New Mexico National Guard in 1970 to avoid service in Vietnam.
"I did not believe in what we were doing there," he said.
He became deputy commandant of the New Mexico Military Academy and, Mr. Moore's book said, headed training and planning for troops sent from Fort Hood, Tex., for the gulf war in 1991. Mr. Burkett said he worked on Defense Department projects for Boeing and, because the Texas Guard could not pay his civilian rate of $154 an hour, was commissioned a lieutenant colonel to revamp the Guard in 1996.
He clashed with General James, who, he later said, was the official whom he overheard and saw directing the censoring of the files at the behest of the governor's top advisers. The Guard gave him an assignment in Panama, where he contracted a tropical disease.
In letters to state legislators and a later suit, he said he collapsed at the Abilene airport in 1998 and was "willfully and maliciously" denied military medical care by Guard officials, worsening his condition. Before finally obtaining medical benefits in July 1998, he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression, he told The Times.
An appeals court dismissed his suit in August 2002 because commanders enjoy broad legal immunity from their troops.
David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Baird, Tex., for this article.
Not only are the documents forged, but the important points made in them are clear fabrications. Specifically, the two important points, harped on endlessly by CBS and the other liberal media, are:
1. Bush disobeyed a direct order of his commanding officer. The memo states that Bush is ordered to appear for a physical on May 15. Bush did not do so, and the media concludes that Bush disobeyed the order, and so was insubordinate. There is only one problem: It did not happen. Other pilots point out that pilots were not ordered to appear for a physical. The deadline for the physical was established by Air Force rules, and was the pilot's birthday. The pilot was required by rule to appear for a physical every year on or before his birthday. Bush's birthday was July 6, so it would not have been appropriate to order him to appear for a physical on May 15. Of course, Bush never appeared for a July 6 physical either, but that's because he had already transferred out of the Texas Air National Guard by that time. The obvious conclusion is that the part of the memo which orders Bush to appear for a physical is a fabrication.
2. Bush's commanding officer was asked to sugar coat Bush's record and give him a rating even though Bush was absent. In the memos, Killian expresses consternation that he is being asked to rate Bush even though Bush was absent. The implication which is drawn by the media is that Bush's performance was substandard. The implication drawn by the Democrats is that Bush was AWOL. However, that aspect of the memos is also a clear fabrication. The reaons is that Killian had no reason to be consternated by Bush's absence because Killian himself had already signed an order (which is clearly authentic, and looks completely different from the forged orders), which authorized Bush to transfer out of the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard. So why would he now be upset that Bush was not there? It makes no sense, and was obviously a fabrication by the forger.
Dan Rather's insistence that the orders may be fake but the information is trues is itself obviously a lie. This whole episode really is worse than Watergate. It's like Watergate with a complicit media. In Watergate, most of the people went to jail because they lied to investigators or to Congress. As in Watergate, I think we need an investigation by the DOJ and by Congress, though I would suggest that we wait until after the election to get it going in earnest. No sense in risking a liberal backlash at this point in time.
TRANSLATION:
Barney Fife tries to get even; shoots self in foot
It is interesting how we become like the people that we passionately hate. Dan Rather hated Nixon and now has become just like him.
LOL....AAAANNNNNDYYYY!!
I think thats pretty much the Jist of it. Here we have this hero Burkette who admits he joined the Guard to stay out of the war trying to spin that accusation on to George Bush.
OH: what a tangled web we weave. Looks like the local folks are shunning Burkette,perhaps with good reason.
good summation.
Killian died in 1984. According to ms Knox, his secret file which is supossedly where these memo's came from, were destroyed atthis time, shortly after his death.
But Mr Brikett claims Killians personal secret memo's suddenly turned up in Bushes files which were being "cleansed" in 1997.
Which is it? Do we now believe ms Knox, who said they were in his person secret file lock in his desk drawer, and destroyed shortly after he died? or were they in Bushes files in the trash?
Nice try Dan, but see what happens when you lie? You loose track of them.
I was a member of the media and at the press conference when Nixon asked rather if he was running for office and Rather asked Nixon the same question.
AT that press conference rather instead of asking Nixon a question went into a long accusatory speech accusing Nixon of all sorts of things while offering no proof. Rather made a political speech at a press conference where he was supposedly a jouralist asking a question.
Nixon replied to the accusatory political speech by asking Rather if he was running for office. Rather certainly was not acting as a journalist asking a question at a press conference. Dumb Rather was taken aback,and could only ask Nixon the same question Nixon had asked Rather.
I don't think that Burkett is the one who created the docs.
He knows NG stuff and would not have created these cheap fales, and with her help he could have had her create something a lot harder to detect.
I still think that we are being misdirected from the true source, the Kerry campaign.
I agree with you. We need to be very careful with this.
But....the Kinko's records will tell the tale. They have phone records and perhaps fax records that would show documents being faxed to CBS, USA Today, the Boston Globe and, perhaps, the DNC and the Kerry campaign. If we can get at these records we can solve the riddle without a full disclosure by CBS, a disclosure that I don't expect to see in my lifetime. OTOH, USA Today could vouch for the Kinko's timestamp and that would add some credibility to the WP story.
"The bitterness, he later said, moved him to go public with what he said he and a fellow officer, George O. Conn, witnessed one night in Austin in 1997. That was when, he said, commanders, in touch with Mr. Bush's political advisers, left documents in the trash while sanitizing the governor's service records. ."
A question comes to mind: When Burkett saw those Bush documents in that trash can, right out in front of God and everybody, why didn't he scoop them up and hold onto them? Just think; he could be waving them under our noses right now. This riff reminds me of sKerry's BS about all the atrocities he witnessed but, alas, never got around to reporting to the proper authorities!
Rather reported that serious questions were raised about the memos. He did not "concede" that they were "suspect."
Were the "originals" more invective? Or is trying to recall adverbatim a document from 32 years a bit of a stretch for any mind on this planet? Did Rove Inc replace the original with a censured less castigating memo?
CBS should've said. Go f*ck yourselves!
F*ck You GOP. You did Clinton, We'll do George. Even if this precious idiot wins, We'll get him Impeached. So don't worry - one way or an other, he is TOAST. Deal with it.
The documents may have been pulled out of a chimp's butt, but that don't change the truth: he was an awol ahole.
A thought. What if the memos WERE forged...by the GOP? It would make a perfect "poison plum" for Rove to insert into the discourse, causing all future talk of Bush's miserable service to be discounted as "unverifiable" and "oh, you know that's fake, right?" This would fit in with Rove's modus operandi quite well.
Does it really matter if the memo is 'real' or 'fake'?
Bravo Dan Rather DAN Thanks for having guts DAN You're A True American DAN You're A Great Patriot DAN I Could Kiss You DAN GREAT WORK
Ok how can they be fake and accuarte all at the same time? Alice please do join me in going through the looking glass And if they are fake... can we all say KARL ROVE?
No, not a pauper's file. And a search of the Abilene Reporter News archives turns up frequent references to "Burkett Cemetery."
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