TUESDAY
NOVEMBER 7
2000
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ELECTION 2000
Gore protected
military thieves?
Police investigator says
Al 'just shut us down'
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By Charles C. Thompson II and Tony Hays
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
When Daniel Scott Burrus stole gas masks, flight bags, flak jackets, helmets, magazines for .223-caliber ammunition and night-vision goggles from the Oklahoma Air National Guard this year, he was indicted by a federal grand jury. Shawn Timothy Nelson was shot and killed after he stole a tank from a California National Guard base in 1995. But when several National Guardsmen in Al Gore's backyard were caught filching military equipment from area Guard units in 1992, then-Sen. Gore, according to the investigator that handled the case, stepped in and kept the thieves from being court-martialed.
The 1990s saw a plethora of cases involving theft from U.S. military facilities, many from the National Guard, as in the 1993 case of Mark S. Carter, a former Michigan Guardsman who told a congressional committee that he hawked M-16 rifle parts at a gun show because of "severe financial difficulty."
In Tennessee, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, many of the National Guard units came back with quantities of equipment they had not previously been assigned, much of it surplus. Some 2 or 3 million dollars worth of that equipment disappeared from National Guard units surrounding the Cookeville, Tenn., area.
Then-National Guard Capt. Richard Holt, a lifetime police officer and later chief of police in Cookeville, was assigned by the Tennessee National Guard to track the missing equipment. His investigation led him to a number of local guardsmen and other citizens.
"It wasn't tremendously difficult" to find the culprits, he told WorldNetDaily. When the dust had settled, Holt had relocated $1.2 million worth of the missing property, mostly on the farms and property of guardsmen and other prominent citizens of the Cookeville area. One non-commissioned officer had two expensive graders on his property.
Holt retrieved the property and set about preparing cases against his suspects.
"I wanted to prosecute all of them," Holt remembered, "but I especially wanted to court-martial the guardsmen involved. They deserved to be drummed out of the service." But before he could bring charges, a letter came from Gore's office urging a halt to the courts-martial.
"He just shut us down," said Holt of the 1992 investigation he headed. "He said the whole matter should be dropped."
Nothing Holt could do kept the cases active. He has since retired from the National Guard and now works with the Tennessee District Attorney General's Conference.
Just as perplexing as Gore's alleged protection of the government thieves, is what happened to the equipment that wasn't retrieved. According to federal government sources, much of the material that has gone missing from military installations now has links to militia and white-supremacist groups.
A 1996 Dayton, Ohio, Daily Herald story details a June 1994 incident when a self-storage unit was found to contain numerous military items including several crates of "military explosives." Other searches related to the incident uncovered photographs of camouflage-dressed men atop an armored vehicle equipped with large caliber machineguns. The storage unit was located in Hendersonville, Tenn. -- less than 100 miles from Putnam County.
In fact, an analysis of government records by the Dayton Daily News indicates that during the Clinton-Gore years, theft of military weapons has been rampant -- but has netted the defendants little or no jail time.
"More than three times every week," reported Russ Carollo and Jeff Nesmith of the Daily News, "the military reported losing explosives and other weapons." Of 166 weapons-related courts-martial studied by Carollo and Nesmith, less than half (78) were sentenced to more than six months. Another third received confinements of 90 days or less.
But that's just when they're caught. The growing lack of fiscal and property oversight during the Clinton-Gore years seems to have aggravated an already severe problem. A 1997 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article notes that many thefts go unreported by the Army, such as the 1996 Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., case involving the theft of 54 claymore mines -- more than the Army had reported in the previous seven years. The Air Force Audit Agency reported in 1994 that some 1,200 M-16 rifles were unreported in the Air Force's small-arms registry. Las Vegas Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agent Ed Verkin recalls that when he called a military base to notify officials of one of their weapons he had recovered -- which was then lying on his desk -- military personnel denied that it was missing.
For Holt, these stories make perfect sense.
"When politicians interfere with prosecution, civilian or military, it sends a message to everybody else that they can risk stealing government property with a fairly good chance at impunity," he told WND. "In the case I investigated, Al Gore seemed more interested in protecting his friends than safeguarding the taxpayers' money."
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Charles C. Thompson II, a longtime newsman and producer of both ABC's "20/20" and CBS's "60 Minutes," is the author of "A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion on the U.S.S. Iowa and Its Cover-Up."
A veteran print journalist, Tony Hays' recent 20-part series on narcotics trafficking received an award from the Tennessee Press Association.
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NEWS:
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COMMENTARY:
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Times up, Bill and Al
by David Limbaugh
Equal pay for equal work?
by Joseph Farah
Al's visit to the Temple of Doom
by Paul Sperry
... Before he could bring charges, a letter came from Gore's office urging a halt to the courts-martial.
He just shut us down. He said the whole matter should be dropped.
-- Richard Holt, then a National Guard captain, describing then-Sen. Al Gore's throttling of Holt's 1992 investigation into the theft of military equipment in Tennessee
In the case I investigated, Al Gore seemed more interested in protecting his friends than safeguarding the taxpayers' money.
-- Richard Holt
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