It's time for David Hackworth to go back to his mother ship...
Posted on 01/13/2005 11:07:12 AM PST by Foolsgold
"Rathergate" Scandal Takes New Turn - Same CBS Source That Pronounced Phony Documents as "Genuine" Was Also Behind Abu Ghraib Prison Story on CBS
In a bombshell in the CBS "Rathergate" panel report, it is revealed that Dan Rather personally assured CBS News President Andrew Heyward that the discredited Bush National Guard story was not only true but "very big." At the same time, Rather said it wasn't "as big as Abu Ghraib," the Iraqi prisoner abuse story used by CBS and other media to blacken the reputation and image of the United States around the world. What's more, it turns out that David Hackworth, a controversial retired colonel who has emerged as a strident opponent of how the Iraq war is being conducted, was a key source for canned CBS producer Mary Mapes in both stories.
(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
Isn't Hackworth a source for WorldNetDaily, too!
az
Good find. Thanks for posting!
This is just the start of it. I think the four that were fired will sue for wrongful termination of employment. Even if they have no legal grounds they will be paid just to keep them quiet.
Anyone who has read or heard parts of the Thornburgh report will see that basically Rather tried to cover his @ss and let the others below him take the fall. He also used his influence to circumvent normal journalist reporting.
I therefore am suggesting that we coin a few new phrases in the aftermath of Rathergate.
1. The Dan Rather Syndrome
The Dan Rather Syndrome: Noun. A pervasive attitude in one's work environment where the boss often has his subordinates take the blame for any of his (or her) wrong doing so as to cover his own @ss.
For example:
"My boss has Dan Rather Syndrome. He let two of us take the hit for his screw up on those mutual funds."
2. danrathered.
dan-rath'-erred: verb 1. to be let go to cover the incompetent missteps taken by a superior. 2. using one's influence to overturn the will of a majority of people.
Example:
"My boss danrathered me. He let me take the fall for his blunder that cost us the Anderson account."
3. Danrather Journalism
danrather journalism: noun. A term that denotes politically biased journalism.
example:
"The editorial displayed evidence of danrather journalism, portraying the republican senator as a racist."
Let this be Dan Rather's legacy.
nikos
For example, if I was to claim some veteran's identity and use it to attempt to get VA medical care, I suspect it would be considered a crime. What's the difference?
Yes. He is antimilitary and antiUS.
But he's hurting the John and Jill Grunt the same way Kerry did during the Vietnam war, with his rabid anti admin, anti soldier campaign.
Re: Isn't Hackworth a source for WorldNetDaily, too!
No, they just carry his weekly columns. He lost credibility with me a long time ago, but I read WND daily.
I thought the Thornburg/Boccardi report said there wasn't any bias?
ooooh...i didn't even think of that one, good call
'Trust me, the Bush National Guard documents are not phony, they just can't be verified. Therefore you should trust everything that I and CBS says.'
/sarcasm off
So, does WND carry his pieces in the name of "balance" or is Hackworth a buddy of Farrah?
The prison story was so well documented.....it also smells of a setup.
Those little misfits look like they would take money to "smile".
NO ONE with any common sense would let a photo be taken with those prisoners. The photos were absolutely unnecessary. I'd watch them for a long, long time.
I've long believed the prison "scandal" was a deal where someone in the media (CBS/Mapes) arranged for these photos to be staged, then used them to make something out of absolutely nothing. I would LOVE to see Mapes go to prison over this, if it's ever investigated from this angle.
So perhaps Hackworth was who Rather was refering to as "an unempeachable source"?
IIRC, defamation of public figures is tortious when the publisher knows (not sure to what degree of certainty) the information to be untrue.
But W would never sue.
DEFENDING AMERICA
David H. Hackworth
January 12, 1999
I well remember the 31 January 1991 Battle of Khafji that I witnessed so closely I could smell the cordite, see the gun flashes and experience the pucker factor. When it was over, burning tanks littered the field and more than 300 Iraqi prisoners ended up in the POW cage. Iraqi columns beat feet back across the Saudi border, and then Saddam, emulating General William Westmoreland of Vietnam, declared victory. "We won the mother of all battles," he exclaimed from the bottom of his bunker.
Eight years later he's still declaring victory while here we are, readying our missiles and bombs for another serious go at the ever-more-defiant monster of Baghdad with yet another no-win plan.
WHERE EXACTLY DOES HACK STAND ON THIS ISSUE 5 YEARS LATER? INQUIRIN MINDS WOULD LIKE TO KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"...where a public figure attempts to bring an action for defamation, the public figure must prove ... that the statement was made with 'actual malice'. In translation, that means that the person making the statement knew the statement to be false, or issued the statement with reckless disregard as to its truth..."
I'm not surprised. Hackworth is a disgrace, anyway you cut it.
Oh, I don't know about crazy. A bit of a stretch, perhaps. Then again, I would have never believed CBS would have used fake memos to try and change the outcome of a Presidential election, either. And boy did they try!
Welcome to FR!
It may or may not be relevant that hackworth got his start writing for Soldier Of Fortune magazine. He was a gasbag malcontent then, and still is. I suspect he's still bitter about not getting that last promotion.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2381/sidebar/51012/
Part 2: Why Hackworth Left the Army
On May 16, 1996, Adm. Jeremy Michael Boorda, the chief of naval operations, committed suicide. Newsweek had planned to confront Boorda that day with evidence that he had worn two valor medals that he had not earned. Hackworth had tipped Newsweek off to the story; Hackworth had been tipped off by Roger Charles, an old friend who writes for the National Security News Service. On the surface, Hackworth seemed the perfect person to expose Boorda's lie. Hackworth is, after all, "America's most decorated living soldier." Who better to judge Boorda's false claims of valor?
And judge Hackworth did. Before Boorda's body was cold, Hackworth was thundering about military honor and the soldier's code. In Newsweek, he declared that "[t]here is no greater disgrace" than wearing unearned valor medals. In his newspaper column, he announced that Boorda's deception threatened the bedrock integrity of the armed forces:
Midshipmen at Annapolis, cadets at West Point, the Air Force Academy, all the ROTCs and other officer-producing schools of this land are taught the code, "I will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate anyone who does."
These sacred rules don't apply only to cadets, NCOs or junior grade officers, but to every leader who wears the uniform, from cadet to general, midshipm[a]n to admiral.
In recent years, there's been an epidemic of violations of these rules, many by senior officers. These offenses range from lying under oath to stealing to misusing government property.
But Hackworth was not always so righteous about the sacred rules. Here is his history.
In 1971, Hackworth commanded Advisory Team 50, a unit that advised Vietnamese forces in the Mekong delta. He had been fighting in Vietnam more or less constantly since 1965, and he was a legend. But the war disgusted him. He blamed American generals for underestimating the North Vietnamese, and for using archaic, suicidal tactics. Hackworth decided to retire early and torch his bridges. He gave a long interview to ABC, in which he savaged the idiotic commanders and declared that America could not win the war.
This--understandably--infuriated the Army, which set investigators on Hackworth. They didn't have to dig hard. In an August 1971 report, an Army deputy inspector general alleged that:
Hackworth sanctioned the operation of a brothel--the "Steam and Cream"--in the Team 50 compound.
Hackworth gambled with enlisted men.
Hackworth smoked marijuana with subordinates.
Hackworth lived in the compound with a woman who was not his wife.
Hackworth broke currency regulations by exchanging U.S. dollars for military payment certificates on the black market.
All these activities violated military regulations, not to mention traditional standards of ethical conduct. The report concluded: "Col. Hackworth lacked the character, integrity and moral attributes required of an officer and a gentleman, acted without honor in dealings with his subordinates and superiors alike, and was derelict in the performance of his duties as Senior Advisor of Advisory Team 50." Gen. Creighton Abrams, the Army commander in Vietnam, and Lt. Gen. William J. McCaffrey, his deputy (and father of Clinton drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey), wanted to court-martial Hackworth. But Hackworth retained Washington superlawyer Joseph Califano to represent him, and, in September 1971, the secretary of the Army stopped the investigation and allowed Hackworth to retire. "Gen. Abrams and I were astonished and chagrined when [the secretary] let him go," says McCaffrey today.
And how does Hackworth answer the charges? In About Face, he says the Army retaliated against him because he blew the whistle. This is undoubtedly true. Yet, Hackworth concedes most of the Army's allegations, all the while offering self-righteous excuses that don't fit with his haughty denunciation of Boorda. He established the brothel, he says, so that his troops would sleep with disease-free women. He may have smoked marijuana once, but only when he was very drunk. He lived with a woman who was not his wife because his marriage was falling apart (and besides, the troops liked having her around). He gambled and violated currency regulations to build himself a nest egg for his retirement. (Incidentally, he also admitted to stealing jeeps from other Army units, faking drug tests for his soldiers, and fraternizing with enlisted men, all Army no-nos.) Hackworth writes: "It was the regulations that were wrong. ... The real question was, did discipline on Team 50 break down as a result of these command irregularities? No. ... Did morale improve with the implementation of these irregularities? No one could deny it."
The title of the chapter in which he describes the "irregularities" is "A Law Unto Himself." He does not mention the Army's sacred, universal rules. He calls his behavior "Hackworth-honorable."
"Hackworth-honorable" or "sacred rules"--which will it be? You can say (self-righteously), "I'm a Boy Scout who is outraged by any violations of the sacred military code," as Hackworth does about Boorda. Or, you can say (self-righteously), "I'm a macho guy who plays by his own rules and is too big to be hemmed in by petty bureaucrats," as Hackworth does about himself. But you can't have it both ways.
Yeah, there was a column about it yesterday - can't remember who wrote it - but it nailed the "panel" with a direct link to SeeBS' legal group - who of course would want to protect SeeBS from any criminal liability for the FORGING of GOVERNMENT (military) documents.
I think this story of the CBS treachery against a sitting President is MUCH BIGGER and MUCH NASTIER than we could have imagined.
Either Rather is suffering from dementia/Alzheimers or the like .. or the Mary Mapes team has totally taken over CBS and used it as her personal attack-Bush machine.
That's what I was thinking. Show me some evidence otherwise it's almost like the Democrats trying to blame their missfortunes on Rove. We have higher standards here.
You're more right than you know. Anyone who's read "About Face", or otherwise followed Hackworth's career, knows that he came out of the closet against the Vietnam war (and if memory serves, he did this publicly on CBS) only after he discovered that he was not on the "fast track" to Chief of Staff of the Army (or even Brigadier General, for that matter). Hackworth seemingly redeemed himself (in many conservatives' eyes) after he sent back glowing reports of our soldiers' exploits in Desert Storm, but when the going got tough in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Hackworth allied himself with the Wesley Clark/Kerry camp (ironically, Hackworth had once labeled Clark, "the perfumed prince"). The common denominator here is that whatever gets David Hackworth the most favorable MSM attention is the position "Hack" will embrace.
Link doesn't work for me.
Try this:
http://www.aim.org/press_release/2508_0_19_0_C/
I started to notice Hack was nutty about a year and a half ago as he seemed more and more to be shouting over the interviewers on TV and often was off track. I never realized his history of his own self rule (s) went back so far, nor his deluded sense of how he knows more than the entire military chain of command about EVERYTHING.
Hackworth was regularly posted here in FR during the clinton years and generally admired. He was critical of clinton, Clark, and the other clintonoid leaders in a way that we could all agree with. Whether the inside stuff he gave us was accurate or not is anybody's guess, although it seemed convincing at the time.
After clinton left office, he seemed to go off the rails. Maybe because there were no longer real abuses of power and stupid leadership mistakes he had to invent them.
In any case, he soon became unpopular around here and began to be seen as part of the enemy team.
Pity. I think he started out with some genuine feeling for the predicament of ordinary troops under bad leadership, but his ego grew too big and his judgment went haywire. Now he's nothing but a meddlesome jerk, or even a co-conspirator with the worst traitors out to destroy our military capabilities--a sad change from where he started out.
I knew he was involved in Abu Ghraib, but hadn't realized he was also involved in Rathergate at an early stage.
He said back then that Clark was widely known by his fellow soldiers as "the Ultimate Perfumed Prince."
I took that at face value, and it certainly seemed to fit what I saw of Wesley Clark. Now I'm wondering if anything Hackworth has said is true and can be trusted, or whether he just says whatever makes the biggest impression on his audience.
Look in Webster's under the word hack and that is all you need to know about the RatBast__d Hack.
Abu Grab would be a non-story by now if the President were a Dem. This is a dead old story that the media keeps on life support, talk about bias influencing news.
Sent Crapworth a note that he should defend himself.
IMO he is a traitor of enormous magnitude. The Huey Long of the Armed Forces.
Actually, I think CBS's actions probably would meet the legal standard of "reckless disregard for the truth".
But its never gonna go anywhere because W has too much class. And he won!
What's the link? The one here doesn't work. Thanks.
I can report that the same person who gave Mapes the phoney memos also hired Craig Livingston for the Clinton White House..
Bump
Kilroy was here- on restroom walls..
Dan Rather was here...
That having been said, I think Hack was way to hard on Boorda. There is good evidence that Boorda thought he was entitled to the V devices, and just made a mistake. That is certainly possible, and likely, considering he had nothing to gain by wearing decorations he didn't earn, and everything to loose.
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