Posted on 09/14/2004 7:44:41 PM PDT by PDR
Peter Principles: A fraud, not a mistake
By PETER ROFF
WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- Though it is not a certainty, the documents produced by CBS News to support the assertions of former Texas House Speaker and Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes that George W. Bush was the beneficiary of special treatment throughout his service in the Texas Air National Guard are likely fraudulent.
This is no small issue.
It is unusual for a contemporary U.S. presidential campaign to give as much attention to the military service of the candidates. The Kerry campaign, as many have said, has been based almost entirely on the idea that the Massachusetts senator's 4 1/2 months on a Swift boat on the Mekong Delta qualifies him to be president of the United States. The Bush campaign, while not making much if anything about the president's close to six years in the National Guard -- it left it to the Democrats to raise the issue -- has made much of Bush's firm hand on the tiller of the ship of state as commander in chief during the war on terror.
The documents, which rather neatly tie up the many allegations made against Bush by the Democrats over the years, are on the surface too neat a package to have surfaced so late in Bush's political career -- which began in 1978 -- to not immediately be suspect.
Even the Democrats appear persuaded that they are forgeries. Several prominent party operatives, including former Al Gore press aide Chris Lehane, have suggested they were fabricated by senior White House adviser Karl Rove as an artful political dirty trick.
Unfortunately CBS and its news anchorman Dan Rather have added to the suspicions by building a stone wall of increasing size around the documents in an attempt to fend off questions about them.
Rather dug in his heels quite deeply on Friday's network news broadcast. He explained that whether the documents were forgeries -- he says they are not and that they were given to CBS by a credible source -- is not the issue; the issue is the questions they raise.
This, of course, is something of an inherent contradiction, since the issues raised depend on the documents to suggest their validity. CBS's assertions that the authenticity of the documents was verified by its own outside experts have been called into question by experts retained by the other news networks, while its explanation of charges that the technology to produce those documents was in fact available in 1972 and 1973 does not stand up under closer scrutiny, at least as far as these specific documents are concerned.
Nothing short of a successful search for the typewriter on which they were typed -- shades of Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers -- can at this point affirm the authenticity of documents that have given "Black Rock" a "black eye."
There is, however, a larger issue at stake -- a considerably larger issue involving freedom of the press, the presidency and the integrity of the U.S. electoral process.
Lest this be consigned to the trash bin as meaningless hyperbole, consider that, if the documents were in fact forged, they were produced for only one reason: to sway the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
This is, to use the vernacular, a big deal indeed.
In the age of three and only three broadcast news outlets, such an action might have succeeded. In the age of the Internet, the blogger, the chat room, the cable news channel and the .pdf file, such chicanery is much less easy to pull off -- leaving CBS exposed to all sorts of charges that put the entire U.S. news industry at risk.
There are those who will suggest -- give it a few more days -- that Rather and company are bravely resisting calls they step forward to protect the integrity of the relationship between the journalist and his source and the First Amendment freedom of the press. I think it is just the opposite: Their stonewalling is putting all those things at risk.
It is important that a thorough, independent and, most importantly, open investigation into the provenience of the documents be conducted. If they are a deliberate attempt to deceive, to sway even a small portion of the electorate in what is expected to be the closest presidential election in a century, then CBS and the media are being used for nefarious purposes. The First Amendment guarantees are, to be sure, a constitutional right -- but they are also a trust that must be wielded wisely lest they be infringed upon.
In order to set things right, several things should occur.
First, CBS should make the documents -- the originals that were given to them -- public.
Second, they should identify by name the parties involved, including the source of the documents, but also the names of all those who verified their authenticity.
Third, CBS management should give Dan Rather a simple choice: Take a leave of absence until after the November election lest the network's reporting continue to be questioned, resign outright or be fired.
In the motion-picture version of "All the President's Men," Robert Redford -- as Bob Woodward -- tells Deep Throat during one of their parking-garage rendezvous that they "are resigning" if they got a critical component of a particular story wrong.
At that time, as the book recounts, the stakes were high. Today, with the nation at war and the country so closely divided, the stakes are even higher. An error such as the one Woodward and his former colleague Carl Bernstein made could even now be tolerated; a deliberate act of deception -- such as the one the memos now appear strongly to be -- cannot.
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(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)
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what is certain is that you can not prove the documents to be real or authentic. because the documents cBS has are photocopies and NOT the originals
true enough -- but until cbs makes the original documents they were given public it is a point that can be debated.
Take the CBS copy and hold it up to the light with a MS Word (default settings) copy. If the format fits, you must convict.
That's it. A major network cannot be that gullible, therefore they were doing it deliberately and were knowingly complicit in the perpetration of a fraud.
When is the president of CBS resigning, right after he fired Rather?
LOL i have done this, it fits! and im convicting...
> what is certain is that you can not prove the documents
> to be real or authentic. because the documents cBS has
> are photocopies and NOT the originals
But if CBS was handed physical paper memos, they may
well be the ORIGINAL forgeries, complete with nth-gen
copy artifacts, noise, blur and optical distortions.
On the bright side, as long as CBS stonewalls, they
are sidelined from any serious play for the opposing
team.
Good article.
the only way you can believe that cBS has the origional memos is to believe that Killian wrote in XEROX !
"CBS DOES NOT HAVE THE ORIGINALS!! AND NEVER HAD THE ORIGINALS!"
Bingo.
Influencing the outcome of an election by KNOWINGLY using fraudulent documents on a national television network program that is purporting to offer news, rather than opinion, does not serve the public interest--and isn't that why there is an FCC?
If this had been a forgery that attacked Kerry, Woodward would have certainly weighed by now. Seems doubtful that we'll hear from him on RatherGate at all.
Bump for later reading.
No...I think that CBS and the media are trying to use their viewing public for nefarious purposes...specifically an attempt at electing liberals. This happens every election, only this time it seems to be blowing up in their pompous faces.
The closest presidential election in a century?! How quickly they forget!
This is certainly a little more serious than prematurely calling a very close election...... This is direct intervention.
It appears to me that Rather cannot whether this storm. Affiliates and advertisers are soon going to be getting in on the act, if they are not already. Dan Rather going out as a discredited Dimwit hack whose lack of judgment single-handedly gave omniscient power to the Republicans for a generation or more is a fairy tale ending to this episode, to be sure. But we can dream, can't we?
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