Posted on 09/19/2004 9:40:13 PM PDT by 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?''
More BS from c-BS
Now that Dan is ABOUT to BREAK the story that these actually were forgeries, while keeping this story in the news, we must keep reminding everyone of his other false reporting. Rather did in 1988 exactly what Kerry did in 1970 and 1971. They BOTH lied about atrocities committed by our troops in Vietnam! In Rather's 1988 "documentary", he reported about 6 Vietnam vets who committed unspeakable atrocities. Only problem was that the author of Stolen Valor(B.G.Burkett-no relation to the forger) exposed all 6 "vets" as complete frauds. 5 were never in Vietnam and the other was there but never in combat. When confronted with the facts, you guessed it, Dan said,"we stand by our story".
True, except when the seriousness of the charge affects the left, then it's the how the damaging information was obtained. Remember the Democrat Senate judiciary committee files?
I haven't read the entire thread but I say CBS is only doing this to help the Demcrat party elect their candidate. Not out of ethical concern, journalistic credibility, advertising revenue concerns, or any of that.
They were willing to throw it all away before, so those reasons have nothing to do with their decision to backtrack.
Dan Rather's Hail Mary pass into the endzone was picked off and returned for a touchdown by a pajama clad poster.
Dan Rather lied to his diary....and other Clintonian gibberish.
Its the Miracle on 34th Street defense. Don't you trust the US Postal Service?
There is deception and then there is willing complicity. CBS is a partner in the latter and not a victim in the former.
Bush is a sitting President.
In a time of war.
Running for re-election.
I'm not stating this would be any less serious if it were directed at a private citizen. I am only stating fact when I mention any of the above.
This is really the only remaining issue here for me. If this story isn't tied to the Kerry campaign or the DNC in some way then then I think the story will lose it's legs.
Look at where we stand:
1. No chance (IMHO) of any sort of federal legal action before the election and probably none afterwords.
2. Ditto prosecution at the state or local level based on info in other threads.
3. The likelihood that the chain of custody will never be tracked beyond Kinko's and Burkett. Look at the comments by CBS from the Times article: "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." And then this from one of CBS's document experts Emily J. Will who confirmed a Newsweek report for the NYT that stated: "a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail."
If you add that all up what you get is a deceived CBS, a Burkett that got something in the mail that he believed to be true because he "knew" the story they told was true and he also innocently passed these on to CBS. Burkett will never ever admit (at least until he writes his book) to giving them to the DNC or the Kerry campaign. And without an investigation that would have to be tied to a prosecution of some sort, there is no way to unlock the records at Kinko's that might fill in the blanks and make the connection to the Dems.
Sorry to be so negative but that is the way I see it going.
Is Dan still standing by his "accuracy of the memos" comment? If he is, I doubt there will be an apology.
Yeah, how about Howlin' and TankerKC? As I recall they were right there too, along with a lot of others.
Did we expect any different?
I agree. CBS will throw Mapes under the bus in order to save Rather's pathetic ass.
They have hired OJ to conduct the golf course portion of the investigation.
I took Swift Boats off the front burner, but this story is damaging Kerry and not Bush. It was a ploy, but it was a ploy that backfired.
Okay, maybe I was just reading this too late last night. I took the statement to mean that they had a good chain of custody from the time they got them at CBS. That's why I was so outraged. Yeah, obviously a chain of custody from BEFORE CBS got them would be invaluable.
I guess I'm so used to Clintonian parsing that when the spokesperson said "we" have a chain of custody I took it to be in the narrowest possible sense.
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Awwwwwwk! Mapes is eating the buzzard pie for Dan?
The buzzards have landed - ping.
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