`Study Group' And Militia: On Guard In Chelan

I call up Joe Burnett, 65, a founding member of the Lake Chelan Citizen's Militia.

"Are you gonna make an article?" he asks. Yes, I tell him.

I saw Joe on the evening news, talking about law and order.

I've been to Chelan quite a few times, a nice little town on a beautiful lake, with apple orchards nearby, and plenty of resort condos for the city tourists like me. About as unruly as it gets in Chelan is kids whooping it up too much on hot summer nights.

Why would this town need a militia? To crack down on sales of 12-packs of Bud?

Joe sounds a little tired. He is. He was working on the family's 40-acre apple orchard, now run by a son.

Joe also sounds tired because he's tired of the media types who don't understand. After Oklahoma City, there's been a lot of stories recently about militias that've sprung up all over the countryside.

Portrayed as an extremist

Some of his buddies tell Joe not to talk to the media. His words will get twisted, they say; he'll get painted as some sort of extremist.

Joe, I tell him, I don't want to twist your words. But I gotta tell you, yuppies like me, we hear about militias forming out in peaceful Chelan where we drop our tourist dollars, we get nervous.

Joe seems genuinely puzzled. "It's just the opposite. People should feel more secure if there's people interested in maintaining law and order around this lake. It's a beautiful place. We sure don't want people turning away because of some unreasonable fear."

Tell me about yourself, Joe, I say. Maybe knowing more about your militia will help allay the fears.

"The main thing for people to know is that I'm a respectable member of the community. Never been in trouble with the law," he says.

Joe's lived in Chelan since 1938. He's been married twice, and has six children by his first marriage. One of the children died of cancer. "It was so traumatic, it couldn't hold the marriage together," he says. He remarried and had another child.

He handled his first gun when he was 8 or 9, shooting rattlesnakes when he was tending to the cattle, or for target practice. He hunted deer to supply meat for the family. He was in the Coast Guard, and studied for a while at the University of Washington until his dad's health deteriorated and Joe returned to the ranch.

Rush working with Newt?

I ask Joe what radio and TV news shows he likes, what he reads. Joe says he reads The Wenatchee World, although he thinks it's too liberal. He listens to Mike Reagan and Art Bell, both conservative radio talk show hosts. Joe isn't too thrilled about Rush Limbaugh, who he thinks is working with Newt Gingrich to turn the U.S. "into another state of the New World Order."

When Joe begins talking about the New World Order plot, I have an idea what else he's been reading. It is newsletters such as "Patriot Report." A recent headline in that publication had this astonishing news: "CLINTON HANDS OVER U.S. MILITARY TO U.N."

Joe wants to know if I've heard about how Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive No. 25, giving control of American forces to the U.N.

That's the kind of news that last year spurred Joe and a couple dozen other men to begin calling themselves the Lake Chelan Citizen's Militia. They used to call themselves by the innocuous American Heritage Study Group of Chelan, and would meet at a local restaurant, the topic often being Americans losing their constitutional rights. The talk led to the militia. That they did. On TV, the undersheriff for the county didn't sound too thrilled about having a militia in Chelan.

We go back to talking about Presidential Decision Directive No. 25, something which Joe believes the mainstream media won't print. I know the answer why No. 25 has been ignored. If it's a choice between No. 25 and O.J., what would you print?

"PDD No. 25 has been classified and only a summary has been released to the Congress. It started when Bush declared a state of emergency because of the Yugoslav situation, and Clinton extended it. It gives total control of the U.S. military to the United Nations in a declared national emergency," Joe explains.

I tell Joe I find that hard to believe. Maybe it has something to do with American peacekeeping troops someplace overseas, something like that.

No, Joe says, the U.N. can take over the military right here in this country. Check the facts, he says. OK, I say, I will.

I call press offices in the White House, Department of Defense, the National Security Council. After 10 calls, I find someone who's heard of No. 25. I'm faxed 20 feet of a document that summarizes the directive.

It is true that portions of the directive are classified, I'm told. That's because it deals with, for example, information about military strategy that could help the enemy if American kids are sent to fight overseas.

But the summary also is very clear about the relationship of American forces to the U.N. It says:

"The president retains and will never relinquish command authority over U.S. forces."

I call Joe and read to him that sentence and portions of the 20 feet of documents. "Evidently I only had partial information," Joe says.

I tell Joe I'm mailing him all 20 feet that I have about PDD No. 25.

Joe says he'd like that. He wants to discuss the 20 feet of documents with his friends at the militia. I'd like to know, too, and I'm planning to call back.

Finally, I ask Joe how he thinks a city slicker-type might assess him, if the city slicker happened to drive up to his orchard.

"You'd think I was just a friendly older farmer, I guess. I'm pretty friendly. We don't have that many visitors. It's nice to talk to people," he says. "Usually I let people pick fruit off the ground for nothing. Fruit in the tree, we give them a sack, charge them maybe 20 cents a pound."

Actually, I think that's probably the real Joe.

"Maybe," Joe says, "we should have stayed with calling ourselves a study group."

Erik Lacitis' column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His phone number is 464-2237. His e-mail address is: elac-new@seatimes.com. Include your phone number(s) in your messages.