Calpundit: An Interview With Bill Burkett
February 12, 2004...
And I left out something. George Conn is a smoker. George Conn knew everything that was happening on Camp Mabry, he picked up every rumor, he knew where everybody was, what they were doing, George knew it all. When I asked him where we were going, I believe I asked him three times in our little walk, and once I remember he said, "Trust me." There may have been a little retort at some point, but basically it was a "trust me" response, whether it was one time or three or two or whatever.
We go behind the building, headed toward the academy building, which goes behind a dormitory structure, and then we go over to the museum and we walk into the doors of the museum. The museum is an old armory, World War II-Korean War era vintage armory, which is a large structure. You walk into these doors and there's a concrete floor there with a larger open space than a high school gymnasium.
To the left of that are several offices built in Korean War style with basically little or no top to them, they're basically walled units, and offices are 8 by 12 to 10 by 12, in that size. And at approximately 30 or so feet from that on this concrete floor, or as we call it, the drill hall floor area, was a folding table, just a commercial grade folding table, and what I recognized as a — and you may know what I'm talking about. Do you know what a 15-gallon trashcan looks like?
Yeah, sure.
A metal gunbarrel style that we used for years and years in the military, that's what it was, and it was setting at the end of the table. George obviously knew General Scribner extremely well, and he says hello to him and there's little pleasantries and we walk up there, and as soon as we get there he introduces me to General Scribner, who I did not know. I said hello and very little if anything more. General Scribner was very polite, very punctual, very nice, and George carried on a conversation with him, basically asked him, OK, what are you doing, how's it coming? And obviously they had had previous conversations that he was working on files.
At that point I remember General Scribner saying that people downtown were coming out and they were going to do a book, and Bartlett and Hughes were coming out, and he'd been told to get all the files together and go through them and kind of clean them up a bit. And George said, well, what are you finding? And he says, well, he says he's been through it, and I'm paraphrasing all of this, he says, obviously lots of people have been through it, you know, there's just not as much here as I'd expected, mostly old press releases and that sort of stuff.
I'm standing there on one foot and another, very uncomfortable with this situation, I knew I'd been guided here and I knew why at that point. I was standing right next to the trash can. I mention that only for one reason, and that is my own alibi to my own conscience. I believe if I'd been one step away from the trash can I would not have done what I did, I would have been forced to make an obvious decision.
Instead I looked down into the trashcan. Underneath most of the trash — the trash level was within two inches of the top — I saw that the trash on the bottom was basically packing cartons, I do remember that there were a couple of elastic type straps and that sort of thing, and on top there was a little bit of paper. And on top of that pile of paper, approximately five-eighths of an inch thick, and Jim wanted me to estimate the number of pages and I said probably between 20 and 40 pages of documents that were clearly originals and photocopies. And it wasn't any big deal, I looked at it, it was a glance situation, and it made no sense to me at all except at the top of that top page was Bush, George W., 1LT.
And I look back at it now and I know I was troubled that those documents were in the trashcan. I did ruffle through the top six to eight pages.
And what were they?
Those documents were performance, what I term performance documents, which would include retirement points, [unintelligible] type documents, which would be a record of drill performance or nonperformance, and there was at least one pay document copy within the top six to eight pages of that stack that was in the trash….
No time to respond to your several incredible posts just now, Mike. But I promise to do so before responding to anything else here. You have done your homework, and shown your research abilities, beautifully … yet again!
I just want to quickly tell you about a sad experience I had last night.
The twenty-year-old son of a friend is home from Iraq for a two-week leave, and we went over to visit with him last night. I would need hours to tell you how sad I felt after witnessing the physical and emotional difference in this young man, since his leaving for Iraq. The content of some of the hundreds of photographs he took over there, and the incredible stories he told (both horrifying and uplifting), were almost beyond description. I hope to be able to write at least something about it here sometime soon.
But one relatively superficial, and yet maddening, thing that I want to mention is this:
In virtually every picture of ‘civilized Iraq’ that he showed us, almost all of the (hundreds) of cars in the photos were Nissans. Even the brand new cars purchased for the Iraqi police department.
Nissan is ~50% percent owned by (French) Renault.
I do not know the specifics, and I would imagine that American funds paid for at least a portion (and most likely all) of those new Iraqi police cars. And I suspect they were probably obtained by lowest-bid contract. But there is something inherently wrong with this picture. And it has nothing to do with the darkroom process.
Back soon …
~ joanie