CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say

New York Times ^ | 9/20/04 | Jim Rutenberg

[LibWhacker]

After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

Those officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins, and that it was mounting an intensive news investigation of where they came from.

But these people cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials were meeting last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it has collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision.

People at the network said it was now possible that officials would open a formal internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report, which officials now say they are beginning to believe was too flawed to have gone on the air.

The report relied in large part on four memorandums purported to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat'' the record of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct order to take a physical.

Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings, but that the documents' authenticity is now in grave doubt.

The developments last night marked a dramatic turn for CBS News, which for a week stood steadfastly by its Sept. 8 report as various document experts asserted that the typeface of the memos could have been produced only by a modern-day word processor, not Vietnam War-era typewriters.

The seemingly unflappable confidence of Mr. Rather and top news division officials in the documents allayed fears within the network and created doubt among some in the news media at large that those specialists were correct. CBS News officials had said they had reason to be certain that the documents indeed came from the personal file of Colonel Killian.

Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said last week, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents.''

But officials decided yesterday that they would most likely have to declare that they were misled about the records' origin after Mr. Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with a man who was said to have helped the news division obtain the memos, a former Guard officer named Bill Burkett.

Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos came from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material.

It was unclear last night whether Mr. Burkett told Mr. Rather that he had been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one who did the misleading.

In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any questions about the documents.

Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents had said they were obtained anonymously and through the mail.

During an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told her this but said that the producer had been in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face questions from documents experts.

In the coming days CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the memorandums were not genuine.

Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he had only vouched for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not rule out that the signatures were cut and pasted from official records pertaining to Colonel Killian.

In examining where the network went wrong, officials at CBS News were turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network.

In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report.

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility.''

He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.''

Ms. Mapes has not responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented them on the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the cake'' of the other reporting the network was conducting on the documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to challenge documents that had been presented by a credible news organization.

Several people familiar with the situation said that they were girding for a particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the network announce its new doubts.

One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?''

[vollmond]

That means instead of using a hoe, you use a backhoe. Or instead of using, you know, a regular old standard typewriter, you use a computer.

Sweet. He calls out the Dem "hoes" as well here.

[beyond the sea]

Their defense is stupidity?

Stupid maybe.......not as smart as most around here that's for sure, but for sure SeeBS IS EVIL and is a barrel of communists left over from the 50's!

[beyond the sea]

make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived

"deceived" -- Yeh, right! LOL!

[beyond the sea]

it sure took that clown outfit CBS long enough to figure out what the rest of the world knew a week ago.

11 days ago.

[StayAt HomeMother]

I just got up and this may have already been covered, but as of "Sept. 20, 2004 6:20am ET" the CBS web site still is posting its story "Bush Guard Docs Flap Marches On" which is focused not on the memos themselves or who created them or how CBS got them but about the Buckhead's identity.

An Internet writer considered the first to accuse CBS News of using fake documents in its report on President Bush's National Guard service is ---. ... His posting, published on the conservative Web site www.freerepublic.com hours after the CBS News broadcast on Sept. 8, concluded the records were forged. It based the conclusions on a technical analysis of spacing and font styles. ... [His] associates believe he acted alone when he wrote his criticism of the documents. ...

Buckhead acted ALONE? Did they even glance at these threads? Guess its time for me to join the Spartacus army and state "I am Buckhead."

[beyond the sea]

Buckhead acted ALONE? Did they even glance at these threads?

Right, there were dozens of FReeper experts who contributed to the very serious technical input here on various threads at FreeRepublic the very first hours after the lying CBS presentation.

[snopercod]

When will he apologize to Blockhead?

Apologize to himself? Dan Rather IS Blockhead.

[madison46]

Story=toast (again)

[snopercod]

Grima Rathertongue ROFL! Too funny!

[snopercod]

Do you think it would work if Ra^ther claimed he has just been diagnosed with Alzheimers?

[MacDorcha]

"Bush got faulty information from literally all over the world and passed it on to us, therefore he lied. But CBS simply got misled, and we shuold let it go...." What media bias?

[RaceBannon]

All that mattered was the serousness of the charge, not the validity of the charge itself...Just like they did to his dad concerning Iran-Contra...all that mattered was the seriousness of the charges

[Enterprise]

(I know - it's a common saying to illustrate that degrees don't confer intelligence. It is an easy saying to argue both sides because people can be pointed out who have degrees and are obviously highly intelligent, as well as those who are pretty stupid. And the same can be done for people without degrees.)

[Enterprise]

It must have missed big time because it won't display the link. (Darn!)

[Mia T]

 

RATHERGATE IS ANOTHER WATERGATE: The Nexus
So where are the grand juries, special prosecutors + indictments, anyway? (HEY! Where are the calls for them?)^{(computer-generated superscript) BUMP}

Bill Burkett, the former Texas National Guard officer who has been caught up in the mystery of how CBS News acquired memos that seem to question President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, unsuccessfully offered information and advice to help the Kerry campaign attack Mr. Bush, according to a posting Mr. Burkett wrote in an e-mail newsletter.

"I spent some time on the phone with the Kerry campaign seniors yesterday," Mr. Burkett wrote on Aug. 21 in an e-mail letter circulated to a list of about 600 Texas Democrats.

He complained that he had to "get through seven layers of bureaucratic kids trying to get a job after the election."

"I talked with Max Cleland," Mr. Burkett continued, referring to the former senator from Georgia who has been supporting Senator John Kerry's Democratic presidential bid.

Alluding to advertisements by a veterans group that deprecates Mr. Kerry's Vietnam service, Mr. Burkett continued, "I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack."

"So I gave them the information to do it with," Mr. Burkett wrote. "But none of them have called me back."

Mr. Burkett did not say what information he offered. Earlier this year, he gained attention for saying that in 1998 he saw aides to Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and Guard officials dispose of pieces of Mr. Bush's National Guard record that could prove politically embarrassing. Mr. Bush's aides have denied his account.

"I volunteered to come back out with more," Mr. Burkett wrote.

Mr. Burkett, who was at home on his ranch in Baird, near Abilene, on Friday, declined to comment.

Mr. Cleland said in a telephone interview that Mr. Burkett called him "a couple of weeks ago," as he was out campaigning for Mr. Kerry.

"I couldn't swear to it whether he used the term documents or information," Mr. Cleland said. "It was some kind of stuff, some kind of information he wanted to get to the campaign, or something, regarding Bush's National Guard service. I referred him up to somebody in the campaign."

Texan Involved in CBS Report Tried to Help Kerry Campaign
The New York Times | 9/16/04 | DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JIM RUTENBERG

Remarkably, Cleland did not become an embittered man when John Kerry's self-inflicted, bacitracin + bandaid-treated, tickets-out-of-Vietnam-and-onto-the-JFK-career-path scratches were deemed worthy of three purple hearts while his three missing limbs were deemed worthy of none; this, even after insult was added to injury when he was dispatched to Texas to lend his phantom limbs to Kerry's self-serving cause....

If Max Cleland lost nobility last week, John Kerry lost any semblance of decency. Harnessing and fomenting Max Cleland's denial and bitterness, Kerry sought finally to bring to fruition his cynical 1971 scheme that would shamelessly exploit a crippled vet for his own self-aggrandizing purposes.

Mia T
EXPLOITING MAX CLELAND

 

CARL BERNSTEIN: RATHERGATE MAY BE ANOTHER WATERGATE

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)

 

[anton]

Just like Bill Clinton was seduced by Monica.

[tdadams]

officials now say they are beginning to believe was too flawed to have gone on the air

They're just now beginning to believe it, while everyone else has known it since it aired.

Just call them "Swifty".

[jetson]

" I believe you Dan...I really do."

[InvisibleChurch]

get to the point, will ya?

: )

[Principled]

Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings, but that the documents' authenticity is now in grave doubt.

If the documents are fake (and they are fake), what then gives rather any indication that the sentiment accurately reflects Me. Killian's feelings?????????