http://www.usatoday.com/news/politic...-exguard_x.htm

Ex-Guardsman: I contacted Kerry campaign

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A retired Texas National Guard official mentioned as a possible source for disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Guard said he passed along information to a former senator working with John Kerry's campaign.

The retired Guard official, Bill Burkett, said in an Aug. 21 e-mail to a list of Texas Democrats that after getting through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids" in the Democrat's campaign, he talked with former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland about information that would counter criticism of Kerry's Vietnam War service. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the e-mail Saturday.

"I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. (Cleland) said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with," Burkett wrote.

The e-mail was distributed to a Yahoo list of Texas Democrats. The site, which had about 570 members Saturday, is not affiliated with the state party.

Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke suggested collaboration between Burkett and the Kerry campaign. "The trail of connections is becoming increasingly clear," he said.

Burkett, who identifies himself as a Democrat, did not return several phone messages left by The Associated Press over the past week. There was no answer at his telephone number Saturday.

Burkett's lawyer, David Van Os, a Democratic candidate for the Texas Supreme Court, issued a statement this week saying Burkett "no longer trusts any possible outcome of speaking to the press on any issue regarding George W. Bush."

Burkett, who retired from the National Guard in 1999, has been cited in media reports as a source for the CBS News 60 Minutes story about documents allegedly written by one of Bush's former commanders that indicated the future president ignored an order to take a physical.

The authenticity of the documents has been called into question by experts and relatives of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who supposedly wrote them when he supervised Bush in 1972 and 1973. One of the memos indicated that Killian had been pressured to sugarcoat Bush's performance.

CBS has stood by its reporting, but said the network would redouble its efforts to determine the authenticity of the documents. (Whatever that means... )

Burkett, 55, told the AP in a lengthy telephone interview in February that he now is a supporter of Democrats, although at the time he said he didn't necessarily back Kerry.

He said he overheard a conversation in 1997 between then-Gov. Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, and then-adjutant general Daniel James of the Texas Air National Guard in which the two men spoke of getting rid of any military records that would "embarrass the governor."

Burkett said he saw documents from Bush's file discarded in a trash can a few days later at Camp Mabry in Austin. Burkett described them as performance and pay documents. Allbaugh and James denied the allegations.

Burkett retired from the National Guard after more than 28 years of service because of medical reasons. He was involved in a lawsuit against the Guard over his medical benefits, which he lost on appeal.
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Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.

__________________
"John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and my comrades in the prison camps in North Vietnam took torture to avoid saying. He sold us out."
- Paul Galanti, US P.O.W.

I still think Dan's daughter and Sasso are in it somewhere. I predict that Dan won't rat on them. Watch the bags under Dan's eyes get bigger and bigger. There's not enough Nitol in the world to get him a good night's sleep.

__________________
Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

...is:

How did CBS and Burkett come together? Did CBS find him? How? Did Burkett contact CBS? Did anyone in the Kerry campaign (Max Cleland?) act as a "go-between" for Burkett and CBS?

Look for a lot of obfuscation from Rather and Burkett tonight on these important questions.

Burkett said he contacted Max Cleland and he was interested.....and Cleland put him in contact with someone else with the Kerry campaign. That was in about the 3rd week in August.

Unless Burkett was contacting CBS separately at the same time.....I'd say these documents came through the Kerry campaign.

It should be pretty easy....by looking at phone records......who Burkett faxed them to. The public needs to know if the Kerry campaign was involved in this attempt to thwart an election.

__________________
“I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.” — Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007

Burkett DOES admit that he was the forger. I wonder If there will be criminal charges brought against Him and or CBS. It is a crime to forge documents and act as if there were a Federal Document. Someone is in deep S***T for this. And trying to change an election outcome.

Unless Kerry's campaign was involved, which I am skeptical of until I see some strong info saying otherwise, a hearing would have appeared like a partisan campaign to hurt Kerry. This is a crime, but it should be handled by the local or federal authorities (depending on the jurisdiction), not congress.

...this isn't going to go away any time soon, no matter how many times Danny boy says he's sorry.


CBS News: A Source of Contention
By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Anne Belli Gesalman
Newsweek

Sept. 27 issue - CBS insiders are increasingly worried that the credibility of the network's news division has been grievously damaged by anchor Dan Rather's persistent defense of a story which relied on questionable documents about George W. Bush's National Guard service. "This has clearly hurt us," one veteran correspondent told NEWSWEEK.

Network sources describe finger-pointing within the news division, with concerns greatest among "60 Minutes" producers, who fear the issue has tainted their entire program. While CBS News president Andrew Heyward has publicly backed Rather, the network has quietly assembled a team of additional producers to work the case. Rather is privately telling colleagues he remains "confident" that the story, and the memos, will be vindicated.

One problem is that the network has not explained where the purported Texas National Guard records have been for the last 30 years and why they happened to surface in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign. Emily Will, a documents expert approached by CBS to examine the memos, told NEWSWEEK that she was told by a CBS News producer that the network's source had received the memos anonymously through the mail.

Intense scrutiny has centered on the role of William Burkett, a former National Guard official who charged last February that he saw Bush Guard documents in a trash can in 1997—an allegation that Guard officials strongly denied. A source who worked with CBS on the story said Burkett was identified by a producer as a conduit for the documents. Three days before the broadcast, Burkett e-mailed a friend that there was "a real heavy situation regarding Bush's records" about to break. "He was having a lot of fun with this," said the friend, Dennis Adams.

[b]Burkett told a visitor that after the story ran, Rather phoned him and expressed his and the network's "full support." CBS has declined to comment on the sourcing of the network's story.

Burkett's lawyer told the press his client would never "condone forgery," but did not respond to detailed questions posed by NEWSWEEK. Burkett himself refused to talk to reporters camped outside his house last week, although he did tell a journalist that since he began speaking out, unnamed assailants had killed his dog and threatened to rape his wife.

White House aides say Burkett has serious credibility problems. Internet sleuths last week discovered that Burkett had been a regular contributor to a Texas Democratic Web site; in one posting a few days before the CBS story, he wrote "There is no doubt that Kerry can't win this election without us." A biographical sketch appended to another anti-Bush essay Burkett posted on an Internet site in late August describes him as "one of the sources" for Michael Moore's anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11." Former Democratic senator Max Cleland confirmed that he got a call from Burkett in mid-August offering "valuable" information about Bush. He told Burkett to contact the Kerry campaign.

A Kerry campaign official said the campaign could find no record of any contacts with Burkett. The campaign official acknowledged that the CBS docs are probably forgeries—a frustrating development, the official said, because it has distracted attention from legitimate questions about Bush's Guard service.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6039850/site/newsweek/

I agree. I am not in support of a congressional hearing. I say just let the Democrats stew all on their own. Don't give them a chance to turn it around and accuse Republicans of being partisan. You're right......whoever forged the documents should be dealt with by local authorities....or perhaps military authorities since it was military documents they were trying to forge.

And I do think it's important to know if they came to CBS through the Kerry campaign. You say there's no solid proof....but there's at least something fairly strong. Burkett was trying to get through to the Kerry campaign on August 20th of this year....and he finally got in touch with Max Cleland, an advisor to Kerry. Cleland admits that he passed him to a person higher up in the Kerry campaign. We need to know what happened after that. And we need to know who....exactly.....Burkett faxed those documents to. Because they are they ones who tried to pass them off as authentic to CBS news. Did they know they were forged? Did they even check them out at all before passing them off to a news organization? Did they not even question Bill Burkett and his obvious troubled past and bias? After all...any low-level staffer could have done a Google search on Burkett and known that these may well be bogus documents.

I also think there's enough interest now by other news and media outlets, that we will get these answers without Congressional involvement.

__________________
“I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.” — Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007

I mean the conspiracy theorists in here who gloss over actual facts with gleeful spin, spin, spin of non-existent connections, e-mails that aren't from the Kerry campaign but to and from a group of Democrats not connected with the campaign, and wild predictions about fraudulent campaign maneuvers (anyone remember the Swift Boat veterans lies and more lies that were trying to affect the election from major Bush supporters?) are really living in the la-la land of denial.

But they just got their first taste of defeat -- Bush isn't going to be able to limit the number of debates. And he sure isn't going to be able to take his blankey into the debates with him.

Until then you guys keep your dervish whirling going - it makes me laugh out loud its so funny and pathetic. And it sure keeps the American people aware that George W. Bush has NOTHING to run on but just negative attacks on his opponent. Kerry talks about jobs. Bushies talk about Rathergate. Kerry talks about Bush's mess in Iraq and how to go about cleaning it up. Bushies talk about Kerry's Vietnam medals. Kerry talks about fiscal discipline and the massive debt of the Bush administration. Bushies talk about Al Queda attacking the US to affect the election. Kerry talks about the issues; Bushies talk about any smear against Kerry but they sure don't want to answer questions about issues. Lord forbid the American people judge Bush solely on his record in office. Now that's funny!

Aren't you one of the people who said the memo was real? If so, no wonder you don't want to talk about it. And no one said Kerry's campaign was involved, just that Cleeland apparently had some involvement. We'll see if there is more to it.