Gore protects his buds?
worldnetdaily.com.
ELECTION 2000
Gore protected
military thieves?
Police investigator says
Al 'just shut us down'
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." |
