Background

The Rathergate memo of 8/18/73 was likely forged by Bill Burkett himself between August 14-25 of this year. Three issues raised by Burkett in his review suddenly and mysteriously are answered two weeks later in the forged August 18, 1973 Killian memo. Also, the book draft that Burkett was reviewing makes the OER/OETR error which also shows up in the same forged memo.

Moreover, Deserter is full of examples of official 1970’s official government forms to use as templates, and Burkett’s review shows his immersion in the minutiae of dates, places and acronyms of Lt. Bush’s TANG service, precisely as revealed in the forged documents.

OER versus OETR

You will recall that the August 18, 1973 forged memo below (available at CBS) makes reference to Bush’s OETR, which is absurd, and not Bush’s OER, as many commentators have discussed. Here’s Jeff Goldstein’s discussion as a primer. Both the OER and OETR acronyms appear — mistakenly, as interchangeable — in the Paul Lukasiak book draft of Deserter, discussed today in the American Thinker by Steve Gilbert. Deserter was reviewed on August 13, 2004 on the Democrats.com website by Bill Burkett. Copying the Lukasiak mistake is the simplest explanation we have seen for the OER/OETR flap.

Burkett raises 3 Issues which mysteriously get answered, days later, in the forgery dated 8/18/73

In addition, Burkett makes references in his piece to 3 elements which also show up in a phony Rathergate memo. As excerpted in the American Thinker piece from Burkett on 8/13/04:

I have found no documentation from LTC Killian’s hand or staff that indicate that this unit was involved in any complicit way to either cover for the failures of 1LT Bush, or to provide him pay or certification for training not completed. On the contrary, LTC Killians’ remarks are rare, indeed, especially considering that 1LT Bush was known clearly as a congress-man’s son and had utilized his position as such, to gain a favor of his failure to train while in Alabama. I have to believe that earning that favor was completed by false pretenses also due to LTC Killian’s officer evaluation comment.

Documentation of complicitous activity may have surfaced within the flurry of drill training activity following the Alabama period. The exact and irrefutable evidence of such is not convincing, yet to me based upon a review of the same records, though there are serious changes within the methodology employed both at the unit and at State headquarters for 1LT Bush. It could be argued that this could have occurred by a wake up call at all levels sounded by LTC Killians comments and the justifications he would have been required at higher levels of command to make such comments.

So on August 13, 2004, we get from Burkett, referring to a small section of the Lukasiak book that (1) there is no Killian documentation about covering for Bush; (2) references to non-existent Bush training in Alabama; and (3) inferences that Killian did or would have received pressure from superiors regarding Bush; and finally (4) the OER/OETR mistake. Compare these with the 8/18/73 Killian memo that surfaced only a couple of weeks after Burkett’s review:

Note that this phony memo covers the items mentioned in Burkett’s just-written review: OER/OETR, “documentation from Killian’s hand,” missing Alabama service, and pressure from above to sugar-coat the Bush record.

Conclusion

It appears almost certain that Bill Burkett himself is the forger of the phony Rathergate memos, and did so, at least with regard to the 8/18/73 CYA memo, in the August 14-25, 2004 time frame. (The time frame is bracketed by the 8/13 book review and Burkett’s claim to have “reassembled” the Bush files on 8/25/04.) Not only does the “August 18, 1973″ Killian memo resolve the questions that Burkett himself raised in his book review of 8/13/04, it refers to a section of the Lukasiak outline that makes the same OER/OETR mistake that is made in the phony 1973 memo. It is difficult to ascribe these four big similarities to chance.

This is particularly true since Deserter is full of examples of official 1970’s official government forms to use as templates, and Burkett’s review shows his immersion in the minutiae of dates, places and acronyms of Lt. Bush’s TANG service, precisely as revealed in the forged documents.

Implications and Next Steps based on the Conclusion

(1) Lucy Ramirez is as real as Lucy Ricardo, and Ethel isn’t around to bail her out. You don’t have to be Freud, Jung, Michael Dobbs, or Ed Morrissey, to know that Bill Burkett has plenty of problems with the truth, and otherwise. It continues to be possible, however, that Burkett forged others of the memos at earlier dates.

(2) What is the chain of events such that Burkett told someone of his Killian memos, they told CBS, and CBS called Burkett? There are many possibilities of course, but my favorites are (a) Burkett to his lawyer Van Os to Ben Barnes to Mapes/Rather; and (b) Burkett to author Jim Moore to Ben Barnes to Mapes/Rather. In either case, the road to CBS would head straight through the Travis County Democrats. We have outlined some of our speculations about a central role for Ben Barnes here and in other links.

(3) It is certainly possible that some of the other Rathergate memos were done at earlier dates, as is suggested in Clarice Feldman’s article in The American Thinker. However, this does not appear to apply to the 8/18/73 Killian CYA memo; please also see this outstanding Steve Gilbert compilation of Burkett’s August 2004 rants.

UPDATE

This is the accurate Jeff Goldstein link referred to above on OER /OETR. Excerpt:

To the best of my knowledge it isn’t a question of which acronym (OETR/OER) is current; both acronyms are in current use. An OER is a report used for various things, among them evaluating promotions. It’s also interesting to note that it’s not exclusively an Air Force acronym; the Army uses the acronym OER in the exact same context. It was a well known acronym when I was an enlisted soldier (as opposed to an officer) stationed at Ft. Hood in the early 90s. Enlisted soldiers knew what the OER was because when an officer was due to be evaluated it fell on the enlisted ranks to work harder to make the officer look “high speed and low drag”.

AFI 36-2501, which references OERs, (see “Attachment 1, Abbreviations and Acronyms”), is online [here] OETR doesn’t stand for Officer Efficiency Training Report. The OETR is not a report at all, rather it’s the place where educational transcripts are kept. It’s just an office at the AFIT (Air Force Institute of Technology).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004 at 12:07 pm and is filed under General, New Media, Red Shift. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.