New development, Burkett admits he reassembled Bush guard files.
September 16, 2004
Burkett: I 'Reassembled' Bush Guard Files
Captain Ed
Bill Burkett, the man suspected to be the source of the forged Killian memos, wrote a scathing editorial piece for Online Journal as an open letter to George Bush, explicitly calling him a "liar" several times. More to the point of the recent controversy, Burkett made a startling assertion in the body of this op-ed piece:
George W. Bush, you may be the president [sic]. But I know that you lied.
I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to "obey the orders of the officers appointed over you". I know that you not only lied to the American people in 1994, but have lied consistently since then. Mr. Bush, not every serviceman except you is incompetent. When you failed to show up as ordered for duty, they simply recorded the truth. And the truth was, they didn't think you were especially important enough to jeopardize their own careers to cover for your absence by fraudulently counting you as present in any piece of documentation when you clearly were not present.
Now Mr. Bush, we have finally confirmed the truth concerning your failure to complete your minimum satisfactory drill participation in 1972 and 1973.
Burkett said on August 25th of this year that he had "reassembled" Bush's TANG file and specifically called out the years 1972 and 1973 - the same years that the Killian forgeries were purportedly written. As Bandit notes in his discovery of this hateful rant, he repeatedly talks about "orders" and being "ordered" to attend specific drills or tasks, which again the forged memos also reflected.
So we have Burkett writing this rant on August 25 -- and within two weeks, the memos are faxed to CBS from a Kinko's 21 miles away from Burkett's home. It appears very clear that Burkett "reassembled" the memos and passed them off to CBS as genuine, and that CBS simply took his word for it despite Burkett's history as a Bush-hater and his discredited testimony regarding document-shredding at the TANG offices in Texas.
Now that we have an admission, if not a confession, from Burkett, will CBS finally come clean about its sourcing?
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