So far Burkett has not responded. And he rebuffed a Times reporter who showed up at his Baird, Texas, ranch yesterday.

But the former Guardsman's San Antonio lawyer, David Van Os, told the Times, "The possibility that Bill Burkett would falsify documents or falsify any story is zero."

The paper inexplicably characterized Os's denial as a refusal to answer.

Burkett, however, has been complaining for years that he saw documents from President Bush's National Guard file being tossed in the trash in 1997, with top Bush aide Joe Albaugh allegedly overseeing the file cleanup.

In the last weeks of the 2000 election, he went public with his story for the first time - but failed to produce any records, forged or otherwise, to back it up.

When Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe resurrected the Bush Guard story last February, Burkett was in the spotlight again.

He told the Dallas Morning News that Allbaugh ordered the National Guard chief in Texas to get the Bush file and make certain "there's not anything there that will embarrass the governor."

A few days later, said Burkett, he saw Bush's file and documents from it discarded in a trash can. He said he recognized the documents as retirement point summaries and pay forms.

But he made no mention at the time of any memo from Bush's commander, Lt. Col. Killian, who, in the Rathergate forgery, complained about orders to "sugacoat" Bush's records.

Unnoted in today's Times report fingering Burkett was the most telling non-denial to surface so far in the Rathergate imbroglio – a refusal by an unnamed senior CBS executive to deny that Rather got the Killian forgery from the Kerry campaign.

According to Sunday's New York Post, the network exec said he "couldn't answer that question," then hung up.

Also overlooked: an intriguing detail cited repeatedly over the last two days by radio host Sean Hannity from Saturday's Dallas Morning News report on Rathergate.

"Earlier this year," reported the paper, "Kerry aides raised the exact points the memo seemed to address."

The evidence of a Kerry connection may be scant so far – but it's a whole lot more persuasive then efforts by the Times and CBS to turn Bill Burkett into Rathergate's fall guy.

Editor's note: