Wizbang will read 234 pages so you won’t have to. (This will updated often)
This is just too funny. The whole thing started when Mapes went cruising the lefty moonbat sites and gets suckered.
From page 59:
On Monday, August 23, Mapes learned that Lieutenant Colonel Burkett was rumored to have important documents regarding the President’s TexANG service. Paul Lukasiak, who operates a website on which he posts disparaging analyses of President Bush’s TexANG service, told Mapes that another blogger, Linda Starr, had seen new TexANG documents regarding President Bush. Starr hosts a website that recently contained the slogan, “Bush lied, Americans died,” and is the editor of Online Journal, an online newsletter often critical of President Bush.
Mapes contacted Starr, who responded that she believed that Lieutenant Colonel Burkett had a two-page, classified document regarding President Bush’s TexANG service, and Starr speculated that it might be a disciplinary report. This disciplinary report was thought to relate to an assessment of whether Lieutenant Bush was fit to fly jets armed with nuclear weapons. Starr 60 told Mapes that Lieutenant Colonel Burkett was trying to determine the best way to disseminate the information to journalists “without leaving any fingerprints.”
Many people had speculated that Paul Lukasiak was involved. His name came up again and again. Ironically, if you go to his website he declares himself part of the “Reality Based Community.” Liberals really are “ironically challenged” huh?
Linda Starr is another well known nut case. Who BTW was shilling the now discredited Professor Hailey report.
(end 12:57 entry)
On page 33, we learned why it took them so long.
The primary reason is that the investigation needed to be much broader than initially anticipated. The Panel believed at the outset that its investigation would focus primarily on the Killian documents. While the Killian documents were, indeed, important to the investigation, it also became clear relatively early in the Panel?s work that the problems affecting the Segment and its Aftermath involved much more than the Killian documents. The Panel and its counsel devoted essentially full time to this endeavor since September 22 and completed the Report in as thorough and expeditious a manner as possible.
Still, it took CBS 5 more days to release it.
(end 3:25pm update)
Is ANYONE surprised that those who led Mapes to the docs are IDIOTS and NUT-JOBS!?!?
Just watched an argument back and forth on Dayside on Fox. One of the guests said that Dan Rather should have been fired and another saying the opposite. Getting confusing. Dan Rather lied and he still has his job.
Cindy
anyone able to get onto lgf?
LGF is down…DDOS attack at HostingMatters and also a dead drive on LGF’s server…Instapundit had this info this AM.
Two things:
1. The report repeatedly, and properly, skewers Mapes et al. for not establishing a chain of custody of the memos. But after three months and the millions this episode has cost CBS, THEY STILL HAVEN’T DONE SO! Sure, we know who gave the docs to Mapes, but was he the fabricator? There are other suspects. It’s time CBS used its investigative capabilities to finally answer this question. of course, we know they won’t do so.
2. At the end of CBS’s eight page reply to the findings of the investigators, we finally get real apology from them. It’s not the hollow ‘we’re sorry we didn’t further authenticate these documents we still think are real’ bs. It reads:
“We deeply regret the disservice this flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report did to the American public, which has a right to count on CBS News for fairness and accuracy in all it does.”
This is a nice statement, even though it’s buried in a pdf rather than spoken by Moonves to the public. However, WHERE IS CBS’s apolgy to President Bush? The depth to which they sank to tarnish his reputation without cause or justification is horrible. And yet, they still won’t aknowledge that he was very much victimized by their irresponsibility. If he held anything less than the most sacred public office, they would be looking at liability costs in the tens of millions. He has too much respect for this office, and we know he won’t sue, but they can’t even bother to apologize directly to him in a public forum?
– Carl Bernstein on FOX reinforces the “plastic gun” excuses that the MSM is going to support CBs with, mea copas all over the place with terms like “zeolous” and “competition” etc etc. What you aren’t hearing is any admissions that would be legally chargable. They’d be nuts to do that so its not at all surprising. The question is how will the Rep party/ Congress/ Public react to all this stonewalling. Will Mapes decide to hit back. Will any of the “innocents” hurt by this garbage decide to seek redress. As of now there is a strong chance that CBS is still in possession of forged government documents. That those same documents formed the core of an attempt to directly effect the outcome of a presidential election. Nothing else really matters. Thats what they’re trying to smokescreen over. They don’t really care about anything else except avoiding those two questions. Worse having to answer them under oath in front of a congressional hearing….
CBS is far from out of the woods on this. Its just begun……
Ask any conman out there, you can’t sucker an honest person. She would have been perfectly capable of checking the documents, the story, and the sources out and rejecting all three if the subject’s name was John Kerry. And probably all in one day. The same goes for Rather and the rest of the staff there. I don’t remember them reporting the Swiftvets story as true when they had public statements and signed afadavits from the Swifties and were able to interview them live, no seance or hearsay required.
Even the Democrats are seeing the light, check out this self lament: The New Democrat
I don’t see how anyone could not know blabbermouth Burkett was a nut if they perused the internet. I thought it was funny when after all the statements Burkett made, and his sudden drop from sight, people felt any finger pointing at him was defamation.
Marc: For a while we heard that there was to be all this introspection by the dnc. So, where is it? One poor blogger? I am still waiting to see results. But frankly, when they talk about Dean as head of the dnc, they sound just as crazy as ever. Still, why would I want them to change? Can people who let their party (my party) get so far a field be trusted? They are merely going to change their tactics. They will never stand for what is good and true about this country.
My track on predictions is mixed (right on the dioxin poisoning, wrong on the mortar attack), but here’s one I will virtually guarantee:
We have not heard the last from Mary Mapes.
I can’t wait too see where and on behalf of what left-wing cause she pops up next. That should give the lie to the claim there was no political agenda here.
You’re right, Dave. Not much of a punishment in that they will be hired at the same or higher salary and treated like victims by the moonbats.
What I want to know is now that the report is out, what should we do about it? I guess I can write a letter of disgust and tell them as much as I enjoy CSI, I will never view cbs again. Yeah, that’ll show them!
And let me also say:
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
PWNED!! PWNED!! PWNED!!
– Actually julie, based on the most current ratings of their news casts, if you follow through they’re numbers might fall another 20%….
I just finished reading the report. Overall I felt it outlined a pretty thorough investigation. THe part that killed me is at the very end discussing Rather’s on air apology. Basically he still believes the story and my impression was he still believes the documents may be genuine.
– Well they needed the extra time to get all the “plausible deniability” ducks lined up to counter the large laundry list of evidence that this was not only “politically motivated”, but was intentionally aired for that reason alone. Mapes worked on this for FIVE years, yet the chief excuse given is they had to “rush” it to air because of competitive pressures. Right. Check. Of course….
– Mapes didn’t get the documents from Burkette…Hes a foil in all this…. a straw man…. the whole bullshit trip by Rather down to question him after the fact was for the record and for show… She got them from the guy in the midwest whos name escapes me right now and I don’t have my notes… He’d tried for years to peddle them to the DNC and someone finally thought they had a cute way to get them public with clean hands. The DNC mavins knew they were bogus but they hand them off to Mapes and company and let the CBS’s liberal zombie crew do the heavy lifting. If the whole thing blows up the DNC is clean and above reproach. The contacts between Mapes and the DNC can be covered as “normal” reporting and investigation. I think the Starr thing is another smokescreen….
– Every time the Dems try to emulate Rove they get their asses in a sling……
LGF is still offline because of the DOS attacks over the weekend, but I’ve posted about the report at Discarded Lies.
– Ahh….there you are Charles….I thought you might be suffering from “terminal disbelief” after reading the report…. *chuckle*
Big Bang: Thanks! Do you happen to know the names of the other four people so I can contact them?
Charles, I just read your piece and I agree with your analysis for the most part, the one exception is on that of political bias. The report doesn’t explicitly deny that political bias was a factor. It say’s that the panel could not prove it was and they couuldn’t disprove it either. Once it got to the point of defending the story I got the impression that everyone was more concerned with saving their jobs/reputations than anything to do with the election, withe the possible exception of Dan Rather.
– julie – I can only read two of the names… Shep and Moe…the other two are too blurry after 25 passes through the FAX machine at Kinko’s….
Wasn’t USA Today an early source of the now debunked memos? Shouldn’t we be seeing a similar internal investigation from them?
OhionaForBush: No. If I remember correctly, cbs did not put all the memos on their website for the public to view. After the shit hit the fan, USA Today made public all of the memos, which aided in proving they were forgeries. So, no spanking for them.
I wouldn’t say USA Today is free of all liability, but their 6 doc-pdf inadvertently showed me how the forgeries were faked!
USA Today’s set of the fake docs are here.
Scroll down below the picture to: “(Related items: Text of the four new memos – See the memos in PDF)” Click on PDF. There are actually 6 memos all in one pdf. (CBS received all 6, but only published 4 of them.)
Per USA Today, these 6 were PERSONALLY obtained by a USA Today reporter from Burkett who was visiting friends in Montana on the night CBS aired the “AWOL/Fortunate Son” story.
This is important because it means that set of 6 was not faxed. USA Today got copies closer to the first “draft”. If you have a laptop (i.e. plasma screen), you can easily see the cut-and-paste crop markings around the text, the signatures and the various square “dots” all over the pages. Move your screen angle a little back and forth to get darker and lighter versions and you’ll see it.
You can also see these same markings on a 7th document at Paul Lukasiak’s AWOL Project site: here. (First referenced here at wizbang on 9/18/04 and later.) Paul Lukasiak’s site also has the mis-acronym “OETR” seven times on one page.
So, the new data from the Thornburgh Report is that Lukasiak contacted Mapes. One question is whether Lukasiak was a DNC or Kerry campaign worker or volunteer.
I agree that Burkett was just a patsy to forward the fake docs to the media.
…More on USA Today
Brit Hume, on Special Report/Political Grapevine segment, reported this evening that USA Today had an editorial that chastised CBS.
He also noted that they had utilized the memos early on, but they have not yet issued an official retraction.
Can you say HYPOCRISY?!?
FoxNews has not put the transcript/video of the Grapevine section up on their web site yet. I’ll post it here tomorrow once it’s available.
Yep, Ohian, hypocrisy for sure. USA T’s pdf of the 6 memos has a creation date of 9/9/04 at 9:57:09 AM, modified 9/11/04. Boston Globe is another case in point. They were also part of the MSM co-ordinated AWOL attack line, as evidenced by their 9/8/04 and 9/9/04 articles. Boston Globe had earlier interviewed Burkett, but after Rathergate broke, one of their reporters was eager to announce that they found Burkett unreliable because they checked with George Conn in Germany, who denied Burkett’s story.
By the way, Paul Lukasiak (mentioned in the original article of this thread as having contacted Mapes) has posted a long refutation of the Thornburgh Report. It seems he resents being labelled a blogger in the Report, among other things. He’s still trying to assert his many months of research to prove Bush was AWOL. Perhaps he has a vested interest now not only to save his credibility, but to save himself from legal repercussions.
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/1/10/183312/357
Here’s the link to the FoxNews Political Grapevine report on USA Today I promised; both transcript and video availalble.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,144144,00.html
Text of Transcript:
Correction coming?
USA Today (search) is weighing in with disappointment over CBS’ conduct, saying in an editorial today, “Journalism, by its nature, puts two priorities at odds: The need to get a story to readers as soon as possible, and the [greater] need to get that story right. … CBS News … reversed those priorities.”
But USA Today never says in its editorial or even in its front-page story on the CBS report that it also went with the story, based on the same memos. USA Today has yet to issue a retraction or a correction for its own reporting, though it did cover the controversy over the CBS report in its news pages.