Warriors is convinced that CBS would not have made the same
mistakes had this story been about John Kerry.
NEWS UPDATE - CBS News said that the producer of its flawed report about President
Bush's National Guard service violated network policy by putting a source in touch with a
top aide to Senator John Kerry.
"It is obviously against
CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be associated
with any political agenda," the network said in a statement. The rebuke of the
producer, Mary Mapes, also broadcast on "The CBS Evening News," served to
underscore the change in Ms. Mapes's status.
Leading up to the report on Sept. 8, on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes,"
about the records, records that the news division now says it can no longer vouch for, Ms.
Mapes was one of the most respected producers at the network.
Her reputation was burnished in the spring, after the Wednesday edition of
"60 Minutes," then called "60 Minutes II," reported in detail the
abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.
Privately, network officials said they were caught off guard on Monday when Joe
Lockhart, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry, told reporters that he had spoken to
Bill Burkett, the source for the questionable documents, at the behest of Ms. Mapes.
The CBS news division announced that Mr. Burkett had misled Ms. Mapes and Dan Rather, the
network anchor who presented the report, about the origins of the documents.
In an interview with Mr. Rather, Mr. Burkett admitted lying about their provenance, saying
first that they came from a former Guard officer overseas and then that they came by way
of a mysterious couple.
Officials of CBS News and CBS management have announced that they will name their
own independent committee to investigate how the report was prepared and
broadcast.
Ms. Mapes, through a network spokeswoman, declined to comment. For a week after the
report, CBS News executives said they were confident about the authenticity and origins of
the documents, even as experts stepped forward to say they could only have been produced
by modern word processors.
Top network officials, who face questions about their roles in broadcasting the report,
say part of that assuredness came from the confidence that Ms. Mapes showed in her source
and the report.
In recent days, two correspondents for the original Sunday edition, Morley Safer and Steve
Kroft, have said the Guard report did not live up to their program's standards.
Mr. Rather and CBS executives said Mr. Bush's Guard records had been intensely important
to her, a subject she had been chasing with Mr. Rather off and on for
five years. Some colleagues and associates questioned whether her politics could have
interfered.
John Carlson, a colleague of Ms. Mapes at KIRO-TV in Seattle in the 1980's who is now the
host of a conservative radio talk show there, said she was "ardently liberal.''
"When I heard about this story,'' Mr. Carlson said, "I said, 'I wonder if that's
Mary, because she was someone who, like many advocacy journalists, went into journalism to
try to change society to her own political idealogies
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Where did CBS and Dan Rather get the memos it used to attempt to discredit President
Bush's military service? The Democrat National Committee and Kerry Campaign - connections
being investigated. in their "60 Minutes II". We are dealing with the alleged
forgery of government documents to influence a presidential race during war. This is not
politics as usual. It is dangerous and possibly criminal. Investigations linking the CBS
documents to the Democrat National Committee are beginning to uncover some clues. The
public can accept hard ball politics but not foul ball deceit
The new "Rather-gate" scandal shows government does not have a monopoly on
corruption. It seems every document expert consulted for an opinion, even the experts
purportedly relied upon by CBS News, has suggested that the documents highlighted by CBS
concerning President Bush's service in the National Guard are forgeries. Rather than admit
that he had been had, Dan Rather's dishonest reaction is to claim that the substance of
the forgeries are true. Imagine if the swift boat veterans credibly challenging John
Kerry's military service were caught pushing forged documents. Would Dan Rather say that
the issue of forgery should be ignored and the substance of the forged documents be our
only focus? Of course, CBS has to yet to do any serious reporting to its viewers on the
allegations of the swift boat veterans (or the fact the Navy Inspector General has
initiated an investigation in response to a related Judicial Watch complaint). In fact,
viewers of CBS News know more about the substance of forged documents than about the
substance of credible, sworn accounts about John Kerry's dubious Vietnam War record. And
taking a page from Bill Clinton, Rather blames the controversy for his own poor reporting
on conservatives, telling today's Washington Post: "I don't back up. I don't back
down. I don't cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political
ideological forces." Many have asked Judicial Watch if any laws may have been broken.
Our lawyers' preliminary research shows that if a government official was somehow involved
in the forgeries, a federal law or two may have been broken:
18 U.S.C. Sec. 2071(b) states: "Whoever, having the custody of any such record,
proceeding, map, book, document . . . willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes,
mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined not more than
$2,000 or imprisoned for more than three years . . . " 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2073 states:
"Whoever, being an officer, clerk, agent, or other employee of the United States or
any of its agencies, charged with the duty of keeping accounts or records of any kind,
with intent to deceive, mislead, injure, or defraud, makes in any such account or record
any false or fictitious entry or record of any matter relating to or connected with his
duties . . . shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or
both."
Would laws have been broken if only non-government individuals had been involved? We're
still looking at that. Our research thus far shows why CBS News must release its source
(or sources) for its forged material. Assuming CBS was innocently used, its news division
is under no obligation to protect a source that defrauded it. Because of CBS News' refusal
to release the source(s) of the forged materials, one might presume that CBS News lied to
its viewers and presented as authentic documents it knew or suspected were forged. If only
Dan Rather could be impeached! |
