Yep it was Burkett.

[Tommy Duncan]

Burkett lives in Abilene. Game over. The good news for Demos is that this shouldn't touch the DNC or the Kerry campaign.

www.drudgereport.com (http://www.drudgereport.com)

CBS Guard Documents Traced to Texas Kinko's...

WASH POST: Documents allegedly written by deceased officer that raised questions about Bush's service with Texas National Guard bore markings showing they had been faxed to CBS News from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene, Texas... Developing...

[SpursWoman]

WTF? Kinko's?


:lol

[Yonivore]

Oooops!

[Spurminator]

Abilene's in the news, baby!

[Yonivore]

"The good news for Demos is that this shouldn't touch the DNC or the Kerry campaign."
Not so fast, let's see what Burkett has to say.

[DeSPURado]

Fucking Asshole!

[Tommy Duncan]

Of course now the Demos are in a slight bind because if they step off the national guard attacks then it might look as though there was some connection.

But if they continue the attacks then the fake docs issue will still hang over it.

The DNC has dug itself a fairly substantial hole.

CBS is hitting the earth's molten core right about now.

[DeSPURado]

Let's see where Burkett got the documents. And why he had access to the originals or at least knew what was contained in them and why he didn't use them.

[Tommy Duncan]

That's assuming there are originals.

Why wouldn't he use originals if they existed? Makes little sense.

[Yonivore]

"And why he had access to the originals or at least knew what was contained in them and why he didn't use them."
Who ever said there were originals? Couldn't he have just made that shit up?

[Tommy Duncan]

For Rather this is quite embarassing. This guy is not exactly the ideal source. He's been around before.

[DeSPURado]

The secratary of Killian said she knew of originals. Thats what I am basing that on.

[Spurminator]

Wait, let me give this a shot...


This entire episode was orchestrated by Karl Rove to create doubt over the allegations against Bush. By feeding the belief among the Right that the Media are liberally biased, he will filter viewers away from network news outlets such as CBS and towards Fox News, who may seem more trustworthy by comparison. Those viewers will be fed pro-Bush propaganda for the remainder of the Campaign, and will be brainwashed into casting their votes to reelect Bush.

A convenient biproduct of this charade is that it will distract the public from the failing war in Iraq and the struggling economy, not to mention Bush's questionable stance on certain social issues.

Here's how it was played out: Karl Rove created the documents based on historic allegations against President Bush's Guard service. Knowing that CBS would jump at the story, he had them faxed (from Abilene, Texas) to CBS. Knowing also that there were several "clues" in the memos that would give away their forgery, he allowed Cyberspace bloggers to figure it out for themselves, and the story snopwballed into a national event.

As the controversy began to cool down over the documents, and focus began to shift to the allegations the documents were based on, Rove's puppeteered the "discovery" that the documents were faxed from Abilene. This would push the interview with Killian's former secretary to the inside of the papers, and the CBS controversy would once again dominate the news.

This story will continue to distract the public from Bush's hesitancy to debate Kerry, as well as the mounting insurgency in Iraq. Bush will find his way to another victory (after the disenfranchisement of millions of Democratic voters through various methods), and during the next four years he will execute some of the most blatantly neoconservative policies in history... and this will go unchecked, for the most part, because people no longer trust the media as they did before Rathergate.


How'd I do?

[Yonivore]

"The secratary of Killian said she knew of originals. Thats what I am basing that on."
Hey, DeSPURate, do you know why the Police withhold some details of a crime from the public?

Ever heard of leading a witness?

I wouldn't presume to besmirch the character of Mrs. Knox, however, these memos have been in the news for a few days now...and, without going back to last Monday, B.F. (before forgeries) and having the same interview with her we'll never know what her actual recollections are.

Sorry, her testimony is tainted by the suggestions posed in the forgeries. I'm not saying she's lying, just that maybe the suggestions in the memos prodded her a bit.

I find it hard to believe she hadn't been interviewed during the 5 freakin' years Mary Mapes was doing the investigation.

[Tommy Duncan]

Pretty good Spurm. Except that Jim Moore, who's written a couple of anti-Bush books has worked with Burkett and Rather had him on last week when he first started to defend his report.

The source that CBS used was described as being someone with 'detailed knowledge of TANG operations'.

All signs already point to CBS using Burkett as their primary source without Rove having to lift a finger.

[DeSPURado]

Has that worked with anyother of the CBS witnesses? they keep claiming they've been misquoted.

You can't disregard testimoy because its inconvenient. Besides the Dallas morning news did the interview:

Here's her quote:

“These are not real,” she told The Dallas Morning News after examining copies of the disputed memos for the first time. “They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him.”

“The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones,” she said.

[Yonivore]

What does she mean by correct?

Correct address? Correct signature?

Sorry, it's not good enough...

And, spurm, the public is very tired of the "vast right wing conspiracy" excuse. I think they're going to force Demoncrats to take the hit this time.

[Guru of Nothing]

Abilene's in the news, baby!

Buy more Nathan Hamilton CDs.

[Tommy Duncan]

www.washingtonpost.com/wp...p15_2.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24635-2004Sep15_2.html)

CBS Guard Documents Traced to Tex. Kinko's
Records Reportedly Faxed From Abilene

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, September 16, 2004; Page A06

Documents allegedly written by a deceased officer that raised questions about President Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard bore markings showing they had been faxed to CBS News from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene, Tex., according to another former Guard officer who was shown the records by the network.

The markings provide one piece of evidence suggesting a source for the documents, whose authenticity has been hotly disputed since CBS aired them in a "60 Minutes" broadcast Sept. 8. The network has declined to name the person who provided them, saying the source was confidential, or to explain how the documents came to light after more than three decades.

There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.

Robert Strong, who was one of three people interviewed by "60 minutes," said he was shown copies of the documents by CBS anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes on Sept. 5, three days before the broadcast. He said at least one of the documents bore a faxed header indicating it had been sent from a Kinko's in Abilene.

Strong's comments came as CBS News President Andrew Heyward in an interview acknowledged that there were "unresolved issues" that the network wanted "to get to the bottom of." Since the broadcast, critics have pointed to a host of unexplained problems about the memos, which bore dates from 1972 and 1973, including signs that they had been written on a computer rather than a Vietnam-era typewriter.

"I feel that we did a tremendous amount of reporting before the story went on the air or we wouldn't have put it on the air," Heyward said in an interview last night, while acknowledging "a ferocious debate about these documents."

Asked what role Burkett may have played in CBS's reporting of the report, Heyward said: "I'm not going to get into any discussion of who the sources are."

Burkett, who has accused Bush aides of ordering the destruction of some portions of the president's National Guard record because they might have been politically embarrassing, did not return telephone calls to his home. His lawyer, David Van Os, issued a statement on Burkett's behalf saying he "no longer trusts any possible outcome of speaking to the press on any issue regarding George W. Bush and does not choose to dignify recent spurious attacks upon his character with any comment."

In news interviews earlier this year, Burkett said he overheard a telephone conversation in the spring of 1997 in which top Bush aides asked the head of the Texas National Guard to sanitize Bush's files as he was running for a second term as governor of Texas. Several days later, he said, he saw dozens of pages from Bush's military file dumped in a trash can at Camp Mabry, the Guard's headquarters.

The Bush aides Burkett named as participants in the telephone conversation were Chief of Staff Joe M. Allbaugh and spokespersons Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett. All three Bush aides and former Texas National Guard Maj. Gen. Daniel James have strongly denied the allegations.

Suspicions that Burkett could have been a source for the CBS documents first surfaced earlier this week when Newsweek magazine reported that Mapes flew to Texas to interview him over the summer. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that a CBS staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Burkett was a source for the "60 Minutes" report but "did not know the exact role he played."

Yesterday reporters from several news organizations were camped near Blair, Tex., outside Burkett's home, which is on a working ranch, with a gate barring access to a one-story farmhouse and a pickup truck outside. At 6 p.m. Central Time, Burkett walked to the gate on his cane with a black dog by his side to collect his mail. He refused to answer questions over whether he provided the documents to CBS.

"Get out my way," he told the reporters. "You need to go home."

Earlier this year, Burkett gave interviews to numerous news outlets, including The Washington Post, alleging corruption and malfeasance at the top of the Texas National Guard, many of which have never been substantiated. He has also been a named source for several reports by USA Today, which reported Monday that it had independently obtained copies of the disputed memos soon after the broadcast.

Like CBS News, USA Today has declined to name the source of its memos on the grounds of confidentiality.

Burkett, who served with the Texas National Guard in an administrative capacity before his 1998 retirement, has been involved in a bitter dispute with the Guard over medical benefits after suffering from a tropical disease following a military assignment to Panama. He has told reporters that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for depression after he left the Guard.

Burkett has provided different accounts of exactly what Bush records he allegedly saw in the trash can at Camp Mabry. At times, he has described them as "payroll-type documents" and performance assessments. But in an Aug. 14 posting to a Web log, www.steveverdon.com, he said he saw "a two-page counseling statement" signed by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, the officer named by "60 Minutes" as the author of its Bush memos.

Author James Moore, who relied on Burkett as a primary source for a book attacking Bush as having wriggled out of his Guard service, said in an interview yesterday that he did not think Burkett provided the memos to CBS. "His life is complicated enough already, and I don't why he would make further complications for himself," Moore said.

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, 39 Republican House members, led by Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.), wrote a letter to Heyward demanding that CBS retract its report. Accusing the network of becoming "part of a campaign to deceive the public and to defame the president," the lawmakers said: "CBS reporters would not accept such behavior from public officials like ourselves, and we cannot accept it from them."

Separately, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), citing reports in The Post and the Dallas Morning News, asked that a House communications subcommittee investigate what he called "the continued use of CBS News of apparently forged documents" intended to damage Bush's reputation and "influence the outcome of the 2004 presidential election." But the panel's chairman, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), rejected the request, saying that the oversight of network news should be left to the viewing public and news media.

In a related development, White House press secretary Scott McClellan hinted that more documents regarding Bush's National Guard service may soon be released. Asked whether officials in the White House have seen unreleased documents, McClellan called that "a very real possibility." Other officials with knowledge of the situation said more documents had indeed been uncovered and would be released in the coming days.

Staff writers Howard Kurtz and Dana Milbank in Washington and Sylvia Moreno in Baird, Tex., contributed to this report.

[Tommy Duncan]

www.nationalreview.com/ke...ryspot.asp (http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp)


WANT ANOTHER REASON TO SUSPECT BURKETT? [09/15 11:25 PM]

Marion Carr Knox, the secretary to Col. Jerry Killian, President Bush's National Guard commander, this evening, during her interview with Dan Rather:

"And there are words in there that belong in the Army, not to the Air Guard. We never used those terms."
From the Veterans for Peace web site:

Lt. Col. Bill Burkett completed 28 years of decorated service and was medically retired from the US Army National Guard in 1998.




BILL BURKETT USES ABILENE KINKOS [09/15 10:50 PM]

The Blogosphere has resources like nobody else.

Blogger and radio talk show host Kevin McCullough (http://kmclive.com/):

JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH ABILENE KINKOS: Bill Burkett has a standing account with the Kinkos in Abilene Texas, and while the lady who answered the phone would not be more specific she did say Burkett was in there last week - she waited on him on last (a week ago) Tuesday....



Good God. :lol

[Yonivore]

I wonder if Kevin was wearing pajamas when he wrote that...

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

[exstatic]

The information in here was correct

You're getting all Clinton on us, Yoni. This seems pretty clear cut and unambiguous to me. She came out and said that they weren't originals, which you liked. Then, suddenly, when she says that the info was correct, all of her recollections are tainted as some feeble old lady in your mind. WTF?

[NeoConIV]

Excellent dig Tommy. That's hilarious. 'I'm safe here! They'll never trace it back to Kinkos!'

Libs on this board should really just cut their losses and fight another battle. It's over.

CBS and The Dan got found out (of what we all aready knew to be true) and now the question is how far will The Dan fall.

[Yonivore]

She talked about Killian "snickering" about what Bush was getting away with. She never suggested that Killian was upset or that he wrote any memos or had her write any memos.

And, she never said there were original counterparts to the forgeries or memos that;

1) Said he was receiving special consideration;
2) Said he was insubordinate;
3) Said he was ordered to take a physical;
4) Said he did not fulfill his Guard Service;
5) Said Killian was being pressured to sugar coat stuff.

Sorry, I saw her as a lady who believed what Rather and Burkett believe...that Bush was there on a favor and was getting special consideration. Unfortunately, she didn't provide any support for that characterization, nor did she specifically say that any such memos ever existed.

Looks like Bush may have been guilty of being an uppity rich boy, that's about it.

[Tommy Duncan]

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/a/f/afn1/scrc/Airshow_1998/Real_Stop_Sign.jpg

As long as the Left wants to hit Bush on whether he missed a physical 30 years ago then they are going to lose. Just like Clinton's imbroglio's were all about youthful indiscretions or "just sex" in the eyes of the average American well that standard is holding true for this president.

This is what happens when your political party becomes about nothing more than a consuming hatred of the opposing candidate.