Home > THE REAL LT. COL. BURKETT IN HIS OWN WORDS TO BBC TELEVISION

THE REAL LT. COL. BURKETT IN HIS OWN WORDS TO BBC TELEVISION

by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 6 October 2004
3 comments

by Greg Palast

Shooting the Messenger Doesn’t Discredit the Message

When Dan Rather went down for airing a document he couldn’t source, he did the courageous thing: blamed someone else.

In this case, Rather and CBS loaded their corporate guilt on a guy you’ve probably never heard of before, rancher Bill Burkett of Abilene, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Texas Air National Guard.

CBS did a no-no — used a document on air without fully checking out its source. No excuses. Shouldn’t have done it. They got the document from Burkett.

Once CBS hung out its source and painted a target on him, Rove-ing gangs of media hit men finished him off. Burkett’s an evidence "fabricator," "Bush-hater," and even, suggests William Safire in the New York Times as he fantasizes a dark left-wing conspiracy, a felon ready for hard time.

Let me tell you about this Burkett "criminal." I met him while filming for BBC’s Television documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes." Better than that, I’m posting a transcript of our hour-and-a-half interview.

Burkett a ‘Bush-hater’? "George W. Bush was an excellent pilot," Burkett told me, "He had the right leadership skills, he had the ’Top Gun’ approach."

But I didn’t go interview Burkett to chat about our President’s days when he flew high. He has an important story to tell which has not one damn thing to do with a memo by some Lt. Col. Killian. It has to do with a phone call and a shredder.

Burkett, a top advisor to Major General Daniel James at the Air Guard, was working at Camp Mabry with Major General James when a call came in from Joe Allbaugh, the Chief of Staff to then-Governor George W. Bush. Bush was about to get a political polishing up for his White House run, with a ghost-written autobiography, which would include his heroic years during the war in Vietnam. Allbaugh, according to Burkett, stated that Bush political operatives Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett would be dropping by the Air Guard offices to look at the war record and wanted to, "make sure there’s nothing in there that’ll embarrass the Governor."

According to Burkett, the General and his minions who work for the Governor, not the US Air Force, took this as an unsubtle hint from the boss to purge the record. Lt. Col. Burkett, both curious and disturbed by the call, wondered how his fellow comrades-in-arms would respond. His answer was in the trash-to-be-shredded bin: George Bush’s military pay records. "I saw what are called LES (Leave and Earnings Statements) which are pay documents. I saw Retirement Points documents and other administrative information."

He did not see their content, only Bush’s name, and therefore cannot answer the 64 million dollar question: Did those records, now "missing," indicate that our President went AWOL while others ended up on the Black Wall?

That’s Burkett’s story and it’s in the BBC film. Watch the film, read the transcript, and judge for yourself. I think you’ll find in Burkett a straight shooter, telling a piece of the larger draft-dodge story which mounting evidence corroborates.

So what about that "Killian" document? We don’t have it in the BBC film - we would not use a document we cannot source. Burkett passed it on to CBS from a third party, obviously someone still in the Guard or fearful of Bush Family retribution. Now why would they imagine that?

Under pressure, Burkett gave CBS a false name to cover for the whistleblower. Burkett should not have done that. It is understandable but inexcusable. Period. Yet, that does not tell us the document was fabricated. It was the job of CBS to follow up — they are the journalists.

And it is also the President’s job. Safire in the Times, in charging that Burkett faked the document, demanded the military open a criminal investigation. Darn right they should. They haven’t. Why not? Maybe they don’t want to check into this ‘fake’ document because maybe it’s not fake.

An investigation should begin with questions for the President. After all, he can clear up the matter lickety-split.

"Mr. President, did you or did you not ask your commander Lt. Col. Killian how you could shirk your duty to show up?"

"Mr. President, did you or did you not refuse a direct order to take a medical exam and pee into a jar?" (The record is solid on the evidence of refusing that order, Mr. Top Gun — you were stripped of your flight wings.)

"Mr. President, did Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes make any calls to get you out of ’Nam and into the Air Guard? Yes or no?"

See Dan, that’s how it should be done. It wasn’t Burkett’s job to verify the evidence, it was the job of Dan and the President.

It is for the President, not Bill Burkett, to answer the question, "Did your daddy the congressman vote to send other men’s sons to Vietnam while pulling the strings to keep you cozy and safe? Yes or no, Mr. President, yes or no?"

For a clip from the BBC Television investigative reports on George Bush’s military career, go to http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

Greg Palast’s interview with Col. Burkett for BBC can be read at http://www.gregpalast.com/documents/BurkettTranscript.pdf

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=378&row=0

Forum posts

  • You say "Bill Burkett of Abilene, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Texas Air National Guard"
    I thought he was Texas National Guard, not AIR Guard. There is a HUGE difference. They are separate and distinct, with separate chains of command.

  • What I don’t understand about this whole Bush-National Guard affair and the actually quite related Kerry-funky medals of honor/early release affair is why nobody is bringing up how lax whole military, especially the National Guard, was during the Vietnam era. I can tell you from first hand experience that it was, at least by today’s standards. [I had three bottles of absolute (100%) undenatured ethyl alcohol in my personal luggage when I entered basic training at Ft. Polk, Louisiana and the drill sergeants let me keep it. I had labeled the bottles “insect preservative” which is what I used them for. Entomology was my thing back then. There is no way that today’s military would allow that. I went pleasure-camping, fishing, bird watching and insect collecting innumerable times during basic training and every weekend but one during AIT and still managed to be the distinguished graduate of my AIT cycle. Piece of cake. I stayed sober.]

    During the late 60s, I went to college with the then automatic (everybody got one who went full time) and very legal college deferment knowing that if I did not progress, I would lose it and be drafted. When I graduated, I was drafted. I expected that. I was also accepted into grad school and given a teaching assistantship and this presented a problem. My college advisor told me that the teaching assistantship would be guaranteed if I used it for one semester before I went to basic, but if I did not use it, I had to reapply. No guarantee. I really wanted the assistantship, the grad status, the girls, and I began to get desperate.

    One week before I was scheduled to report for active duty, I walked into my hometown National Guard Armory, explained my situation and asked the first sergeant if there was any way that I could join the Guard and get a one-semester deferment from basic training. Fat chance, right? Not if you ask. He did it on the spot. He even back-dated my papers to make them “legal”. He then helped me cheat on a test I had to take. I could have passed on my own, but I didn’t want to spoil the mood. I even signed a form that said that I had been sworn in by the company commander at the earlier date. The good Captain wasn’t even in the state the day that I signed the paper but signed it when he came back. I have an honorable discharge from the Army National Guard and I was never sworn in! I started grad school that fall and basic training the following February. When I got back from basic in late June, my major professor asked if I would like to go on a collecting trip with him and a professor from The University of Chicago to Mexico. Now I was suppose to go to summer camp at Camp Atterbury (Indiana) in just two weeks, but I asked my company commander if he could get me out of it — and he did. He got my orders changed. I went to Mexico. I never went to camp that year.

    What I want everybody to understand is that I’m a relative nobody. My mom was a first-generation American with a fifth-grade education. Her parents immigrated from Poland and her dad was a coal miner in Appalachia. My father was raised on a tiny wooded farm in southeastern Illinois and never went to school. When he returned from WW II, he got a job for a printing company that made advertising knickknacks. Yep, that’s spelled N-O-B-O-D-Y in today’s material world. If I, with no rich daddy to pull strings for me, received flexibility from the same branch of the military during the exact same time period that Bush did, so what if Bush did? Big screaming deal. Maybe he asked.

    What I do understand is that the Vietnam era sucked honor out of everybody it touched, especially the baby-boom generation. Lets face it, Bush and Kerry were both tainted by that era. We all were. We boomers started out with good values and I honestly think we could have risen to a WW II, a winnable war with bona fide bad guys and a supportive press, but we were dealt Vietnam and the beginnings of the pontificating political media circus that is all so Rather common today. When that war went sour, we boomers became The Craven Generation so we only have craven leaders to offer the world.

    Now I won’t blame our loss of honor on Nam and an unelected but prideful electronic media, but I will blame it on something else. There were simply too many of us — so when the “Father Knows Best” dam broke, nobody could stop us. Cheating was rampant in college and nobody would dare turn someone in. One of my classmates in college would practically blacken his desk top with crib notes before tests and he graduated with honors. We deserved Enron. We made love, not war. There was even a cot for the purpose in our Episcopal campus religious center, you know, the one with the pornography in the study area and the baby-boomer priest that would tongue pretty coeds after mass. Maybe our children don’t deserve AIDS . We streaked and flashed and drank and smoked and cheated and back-stabbed. We pretended to high moral values on social issues but pandered to lower values in our personal life, and no one could stop us, even with riot batons, tear gas and fire hoses. There were simply too many of us.

    A few years back, one of my classmates was honored as one of the top graduates from my large public University in the Midwest (no names please). He had his own special day on campus. His day, complete with pomp and press. This guy went on to teach at John Hopkins. I asked him that day what his favorite memory of “life in graduate school” was. He smiled and his eyes glowed and he said “Streaking on top of S... Hall.” YUP, that’s my generation! (Try this one for yourself. When you see an article about someone arrested for indecent exposure, or some other similar offense, if they give the miscreants age in the article, figure out how old he was during the Vietnam era. Check it out. Its uncanny.)

    My baby-boom generation is a rather painful bolus that somehow has to pass through the bowels of our nation’s history. Unfortunately, we are today’s leaders and if you want squeaky clean you’re not going to get it. You’re going to get Clinton, Bush, Gore and Kerry. Live with it while you can. The worst is yet to come. Just wait till we reach retirement age and start drawing out our retirement money all at once. Then add in all the medical bills. Ouch. I hate to think of what that will do to the economy. We’re really going to stink things up is just a few years. Maybe our children will simply choose to (mercy) kill us for their own convenience. That’s what we did to them.