Monday, March 21, 2005
RatherGate: The Liberal Establishment Strikes Back
If for some unknown reason you want to know the academic left's received wisdom on any topic of broad public interest, you have to read The New York Review of Books. I learned this from my father, who was a conservative medieval historian (if you can imagine such a thing) and librarian at Princeton.
The New York Review is never the first pop-intellectual paper to publish on any topic. It waits until there has been a lot of public debate, and then air drops a detailed essay from a high-powered author. In this way, The New York Review establishes a sort of final liberal position on the subject at hand.
So it is with RatherGate. James C. Goodale, retired General Counsel of The New York Times, has published an defense of CBS and the 60 Minutes Wednesday management team in the April 7 issue declaiming on "The Flawed Report on Dan Rather." Lest the Goodale essay serve the NYROB's traditional purpose and establish the liberal truth on this subject, a fisking is our bounden duty. Now, I'm no expert on the Killian memo controversy, but according to Technorati none of the blogosphere's famous experts have commented. I therefore assume this task with great humility. All corrections and improvements are welcome.
A few weeks ago former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former head of the Associated Press, released their report on Dan Rather's use of allegedly forged Texas Air National Guard (ANG) documents covering President George W. Bush's military service. The report, as is well known, excoriated CBS for the use of these documents on its 60 Minutes Wednesday program on September 8, 2004. It is, however, a flawed report. It should not be uncritically accepted, as it has been by the press and by television commentators.
These uncritical television commentators include Dan Rather, who said on the Letterman show after the release of the report, "Although they had four months and millions of dollars, they could not demonstrate that the documents were not authentic, that they were forgeries."
The report concluded that CBS failed to hire appropriate experts to clearly verify its statements and did not establish a "chain of custody" for the documents. CBS, according to the report, rushed to judgment on the basis of inadequate evidence, did not promptly acknowledge flaws in its program, and broadcast a false and misleading report.
CBS did rush to make inadequately verified allegations public and it was slow in responding to criticism. The report's conclusions on the other points are not, however, persuasive. Surprisingly, the panel was unable to conclude whether the documents are forgeries or not.
Goodale description of the Panel as "unable to conclude" that the purported Killian memos were or were not forgeries is deeply misleading. The Panel spelled out much of, but not all of, the evidence in support of and against the authenticity of the memos, and the latter overwhelms the former. It is impossible to read that evidence without concluding that the documents were manufactured recently. It is far more likely that the Panel refrained from an ultimate conclusion because no useful purpose would be served by reaching a conclusion. What good could come from it, other than final satisfaction for the bloggers and journalists who worked this story? And a conclusion would not be without costs. It would unnecessarily further degrade Dan Rather (who needs no further degradation), perhaps subject CBS to incremental liability, and turn members of the Panel into instruments of partisan politics.
If the documents are not forgeries, what is the reason for the report? The answer is: to criticize the newsgathering practices of CBS, whether the documents are authentic or not. As such, the report is less than fully credible.
This is a laughable argument. As all corporate executives have learned since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, it does not matter whether the product of your work is accurate if it is rendered in a process that is not reliable. An "accurate" outcome of an uncontrolled process is merely lucky, and does not eliminate the requirement that the unreliable process be reformed. Even if by some divine intervention evidence were to surface that substantiated the authenticity of the documents, it is clear that Mary Mapes and her team were unbelievably slipshod in the methods that they used to verify the Killian documents, and that the quality control or "vetting" process at CBS was incapable of detecting even obvious gaps in the story's narrative.
In addition, the Panel's report makes clear that the "newsgathering practices" of the team that produced the September 8 segment fell massively short of the normal standards that CBS imposes on itself. Normal checks and balances collapsed under internal pressure to broadcast the story way ahead of its original schedule, and all pretense of journalistic objectivity vanished in the ten days following its broadcast as CBS News circled the wagons.
The idea that the credibility of the report turns on the Panel's willingness to make a determination as to the authenticity of the products flies in the face of everything we understand about process control, whether in manufacturing, services, corporate quality systems, or financial reporting. It is a ridiculous argument that no responsible executive of a public company would make, and Goodale should be embarrassed to have made it.
Lost in the commotion over the authenticity of the documents is that the underlying facts of Rather's 60 Minutes report are substantially true. Bush did not take the physical exam required of all pilots; his superiors gave him the benefit of any doubt; he did receive special treatment and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush's commanding officer, was unhappy with the loss of ANG's investment in him when Bush informed Killian he was leaving for Alabama. Before the broadcast, Mary Mapes, the CBS producer of the program, confirmed the facts in the documents with retired Major General Bobby Hodges, who had been Killian's superior in the ANG. Later Hodges told the panel he did not think the documents were authentic, but did not disagree that the facts were substantially correct.
While it may be the case that the many of the allegations in the September 8 segment are, if construed very broadly, "substantially true," they were also widely publicized and understood prior to September 8. This fact was hardly "lost in the commotion." Whole books had been written on the topic, in some cases by sources relied upon by 60 Minutes Wednesday. Mary Mapes herself had been working on the story for five years, intensifying her interest in it for a bit in 2000 and then again in 2004 (i.e., when an election was looming). The news in the segment and the political consequences of it both flowed from the existence and substance of the Killian memos.
Following the broadcast, Marian Carr Knox, who was Killian's secretary at the time, confirmed the facts of the broadcast, saying, "There's no doubt in my mind that [the] information is correct." When the panel cross-examined Knox she seemed less certain of what she had told Rather but she did not contradict any of the broadcast. Since the broadcast, no one has come forward to say the program was untruthful.
Was Killian's secretary actually able to remember that all the information in the Killian memos was correct? How could that possibly be true more than 30 years later? I can barely remember facts as obscure as this three years later, much less three decades. It turns out that Knox couldn't either. The Panel interviewed her subsequently, and there were lots of allegations in the Killian memos that she could shed no light on at all. Knox, "an outspoken critic of President Bush and an admirer of Rather," "did not remember": Bush being ordered to take a physical, Bush being suspended from flying status, typing any documents like the Killian memos, that Bush ever tried to get out of drill or that he ever failed to show up for a drill, that she ever had any trouble with Bush, that Killian ever had any trouble with Bush, or ever hearing any conversations regarding General Staudt trying to "sugar coat" Bush's Evaluation Report. (Panel Report at p. 198) She did say that "Killian liked Lieutenant Bush."
Goodale is being extremely misleading in his characterization of Knox's statement as to the veracity of the substance of the Killian memos. One might even suggest that Goodale is guilty of the same shoddy practices that landed CBS News in hot water.
The panel attacks the four experts CBS hired to authenticate the documents. One of the four, James Pierce, concluded that the signatures on the documents were authentic and that there was no reason to believe the documents were not genuine. Such conclusions are common for document examiners. A second, Marcel Matley, also concluded that the signatures were genuine.
According to the Panel Report (p. 109), Pierce told Associate Producer Yvonne Miller that the samples of Killian's signatures on the photocopies he examined "appeared consistent" with those on official Bush records. Miller also told the panel that Pierce said "the typset in the Killian documents appeared consistent with the typeset in the official documents." We will address these statements below.
Goodale's assertion that Marcel Matley "concluded that the signatures were genuine" is so misleading as to be false. Of the four Killian documents, two had no handwriting at all, one had only initials which Matley said he could not verify, and one had a signature which Matley said matched signatures in the official documents. Matley concluded nothing more than that a single signature -- not signatures -- on a photocopy of one of the Killian memos in question matched other signatures of Killian in the official record.
The other two experts had reservations about the documents. One, Emily Will, said that from the documents made available to her, she did not think the signatures matched; the other, Linda James, stated that she could not authenticate the documents without the originals. The report asserts that CBS should not have relied on Matley and Pierce. It should have known, according to the panel, that copies of documents, which these were, can rarely be authenticated. A copied document can only be authenticated when compared to the original. There were no originals.
Goodale's account does an enormous disserve to Emily Will. According to Yvonne Miller's contemporaneous handwritten notes (Panel Report at 106), Will not only did not determine that the signatures matched, but she raised concerns about the font (including the famous "th") and the structure of the address on the memo. She also told Miller that the documents "could not have been prepared in 1972 and believed that they must have been prepared using a word processor." Indeed, Will had typed the two documents into Microsoft Word and "noticed they were very similar to the documents she had been provided," and she warned Mapes that if 60 Minutes Wednesday used the memos "every document expert in the country will be after you with hundreds of questions." (Panel Report at 107) Will in fact presaged the blogswarm that would erupt just a couple of days later. But the Panel Report is quite clear that Mapes blew off Will's warming, presumably because she was the bearer of bad tidings. Had Mapes assessed Will's concerns honestly and passed them on to her superiors, the report would not have aired.
Goodale also understates Linda James's concerns. She not only would not resolve "unexplainable differences in the signatures," but she raised the superscript issue. Mapes' response: "Enough about the [expletive] 'th'."
Matley, for his part, continues to disagree with the panel's view and has demanded that it correct the eighteen places in the report where he believes he has been libeled.
Goodale does not tell us which part of the Panel's "view" Matley disagrees with, so I can't figure out whether Matley's libel claim has any merit.
Mr. Pierce had said that the signatures were authentic and he has never modified his conclusion. The panel never interviewed him. If the panel never talked to the one expert upon whom CBS principally relied, how could it determine whether he was credible?
Goodale again misleads his own readers. Only one of the Killian memos reviewed by Pierce had a signature to be verified as authentic, so Goodale's statement that "signatures" were authentic is misleading. More to the point, Pierce said only that the signature was "consistent" with other Killian signatures on official Bush records (Panel Report at 85). Goodale is right that the Panel did not say that it had interviewed Pierce, and I did not see that it explained why it had not. This omission seems to be a gap in the Panel Report.
However, Goodale misses the core point, which is that Pierce's statement is so limited that it says nothing useful about the origin of the Killian memos. These were multi-generation photocopies, so there is no way to know whether the signatures, even if copies of Killian's actual handwriting, were afixed to the one memo with a signature by Killian. Indeed, the fact that only one of the documents had a signature suggests to this skeptic that the creator of the documents had access to only one copy of Killian's actual handwriting. If the creator of the documents wasn't Killian, he obviously could not insert Killian's signature on more than one document because identical signatures would have revealed the fraud.
Moreover, if lawyers know how to hire appropriate experts even if journalists don't, why didn't the panel, which was backed by a huge law firm, hire its own experts to determine the authenticity of the documents? One suspects that if the panel had done so, it would have ended up with some experts saying the documents were reliable, others not sure. And that would have put the panel back where CBS was.
This is idle speculation and highly unlikely, since none of CBS's experts were willing to say that the documents "were reliable." Because they were photocopies and the originals were not available, even Pierce and Matley were only willing to declare that the signature on one document was consistent with official records. More tellingly, Goodale is misleading his readers again. The Panel did not "hire" its own expert, but it extensively interviewed Peter Tytell, a typewriter expert referred to CBS by Emily Will. CBS had failed in a single attempt to consult Tytell before the September 8 segment aired. The Panel produced a lengthy appendix setting forth Tytell's analysis at the Panel's request, and it is damning. It is astonishing that Goodale's criticism of the Panel turns on the detail that it did not "hire" Tytell.
The report criticizes CBS for not being able to present evidence of a "chain of custody" for the documents. Since the CBS source, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, only had a copy of the documents, CBS, the panel said, should have known where this copy came from, or, indeed, the source of the originals. Burkett later confessed he had lied about his alleged source, George Conn, whom CBS clearly should have taken more pains to reach. After the program had been broadcast, Burkett said he received the documents from a woman named Lucy Ramirez.
For seized drugs to be introduced into evidence, a lawyer must prove who had the drugs from the time they were seized—that is the "chain of custody." While such proof is relevant in the courtroom, it is often irrelevant for journalists. Few stories based on documents would ever be written if that were the standard.
One of the greatest concerns facing The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers was their authenticity. A major fear was that the papers had been forged by an antiwar group. If a strict standard of "chain of custody" had been applied to the Times's possession of the Pentagon Papers, this standard would have made the story unpublishable. It would have required a call to the Department of Defense or the Rand Corporation, known to have custody of the originals. Such a call would have brought the FBI to the Times's door in a second.
Goodale throws up two "straw man" arguments. First, he suggests that the "chain of custody" referred to by the Panel would be as demanding as that required in a criminal trial, and that if such a standard were imposed "few stories based on documents would ever be written." Of course, neither the Panel nor anybody else I know of has suggested that CBS should have established a "chain of custody" to the same standard required by the rules of evidence in criminal trials. But CBS literally had no idea where the documents came from! It only knew that they had been served up by a long-standing critic of George W. Bush who had documented and widely-publicized credibility, er, "issues," and who himself said that he did not know where they came from.
Goodale's second "straw man" is his lame comparison of the Killian memos to the Pentagon papers. There was exactly zero risk that a deeper investigation into the Killian memos "would have brought the FBI" to CBS's door. Indeed, CBS asked the White House to confirm or deny the accuracy of the documents in advance, so the "FBI risk" that so troubles Goodale was obviously not apparent to CBS's lawyers.
Goodale then discusses at length the process by which journalists, as opposed to experts, verify the authenticity of documents. This leads him to Mary Mapes' claim that she relied on the Killian documents because they "meshed" with other established facts in her narrative.
Apart from consulting forensic experts when it is appropriate, what journalists do when they receive copies of documents is to make judgments about the source and the contents of what they have. Are they consistent with known facts? Is it logical to assume such documents exist?
Dan Rather apparently asked few such questions. According to the panel, he knew little about the background of the charges he broadcast and depended on the reporting and research of the program's producer, Mary Mapes. To determine the documents' authenticity, she made what the panel described as a "meshing" analysis.
Mapes submitted to the panel a forty-page statement setting out this analysis. It showed how the events described in the documents corresponded with known facts about the President's Air National Guard service. The panel said it agreed with some of this meshing analysis but not all. The panel did not attach this meshing analysis to the report. It did, however, attach over seven hundred pages of other exhibits to it.
I have seen Mary Mapes's statement, and it is persuasive within the limits she set. She established a chronology of events drawn from eight official Bush documents she obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request she had made in 1999 and 2000, when she first became interested in the story. She then tried to match the six Killian documents with that chronology and concluded that they "fit like a glove."
Three of the six documents did fit well, the panel conceded. Two of them covered Killian's refusal to rate Bush's performance. The third reflected Killian's conversation with Bush in which he reminded him of the ANG's investment in him. Of the other three, the panel thought one "may not mesh," and another did "not mesh well." Another, not used by Mapes, did not mesh "at all."
The panel's approach to the document in which Killian ordered Bush to take the physical exam illustrates how it dealt with Mapes's submis-sion. Mapes believed this document was authentic for two reasons. First, it "meshed": the dates in it matched the dates of earlier physicals taken by Bush, the addresses on the document were correct, and the Air Force regulations were correctly cited. Second, Matley said the signature on the document was Killian's, and Hodges and Knox confirmed the document's contents.
The panel challenged Mapes's claim on the basis of its talks with three officers who had served in the ANG at the same time as the President. They said it was not customary to "order" an officer to take a physical. For this reason the panel concluded the document "does not mesh well."
The officers' statements, of course, do not disprove the claim that Killian ordered Bush to take a physical; nor do they exclude the possibility that there was a custom of which they had no knowledge. The panel's reasoning on this document is not particularly persuasive, nor is its reasoning persuasive about why the other documents did not perfectly mesh. In the end, even the panel, without saying so explicitly, has to concede the accuracy of Mapes's statement that "there is nothing in the official Bush records that would rule out the authenticity of the Killian documents."
On the details of Goodale's assessment of the Panel's "meshing" analysis, I can only say that I found the Panel's Report to be quite persuasive. However, I do not have access -- as Goodale does -- to Mapes' own meshing analysis.
The real problem with using "meshing analysis" to support the authenticity of documents is that it is a poor defense against deliberate forgeries. Meshing analysis, as described by Goodale, the Panel, and Mapes, tries to determine whether documents "fit" an established narrative. The narrative is the lock, and the document is the key. If a document is not inconsistent with the narrative, then the key opens the lock and the authenticity of the key is established. The problem is obvious: if the basic facts of a narrative are widely known and publicly available as was the case with Bush's Guard service (anybody who argues that the memos are "accurate" even if fake essentially concedes this point), then it is relatively easy to manufacture a document that fits that narrative. Anybody can make a key if he has access to the lock, so "meshing" proves nothing in such a case.
A major weakness of the report is that neither Mapes nor Rather was offered a chance to cross-examine the people the panel interviewed. In fact, the panel never even told them whom it was talking to. The panel did not tell Mapes or Rather, for example, that it was talking to the three officers I have mentioned; nor did it give them an opportunity to show that the officers were Bush supporters or even friends of Bush—which Mapes believes to be the case.
Goodale, the former general counsel of The New York Times, simply has to know that this is an absurd argument. I have either been the general counsel or supervised the general counsel of public companies for more than a decade, and I have never granted employees who are the subject of an investigation the right of cross examination. I have never heard of any company that has ever granted investigated employees that right, and I have never heard of any law firm that advised that it be done. Indeed, I would be flabbergasted if The New York Times gave, say, Jayson Blair, the right to cross examine the witnesses against him. I cannot imagine why Goodale would suggest that cross examination would be appropriate under these circumstances, unless he distinguishes this investigation because the report was to be made public. He did not give that as the basis for his argument, though, so I am only speculating.
Nor is the panel convincing when it says that telephone contact between Mapes and a member of the Kerry campaign was "highly inappropriate." Mapes made a call to the Kerry campaign office after Burkett told her that he wanted to speak to the campaign about strategy to counter the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." At that point, Mapes had only some of the documents and she needed the rest. She telephoned Kerry campaign headquarters to get the phone number of Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to the campaign. By the time she talked to Lockhart, she said, she had received all the documents. Lockhart eventually telephoned Burkett but testified to the panel that he had "said very little during the call and the subject of documents never came up." In effect, Mapes traded access to the campaign for access to the documents. She did not turn over the documents to the campaign before the broadcast. Investigative reporters must be wily in getting their stories and what Mapes did does not seem reprehensible.
I agree with Goodale in general, but this was no garden-variety news story. Mapes was eager to launch it into the teeth of a very hotly contested presidential campaign. She had to know that any communication with the Kerry campaign would at least appear improper. It showed bad judgment, if nothing else, and the significant inconsistencies between the accounts of Mapes and Lockhart warrant further examination.
Perhaps the least credible part of the report is its decision to label parts of Dan Rather's program false and misleading, even though those parts were not directly related to the documents. For example, it concluded that one interview, which implied that "President Bush was in the TexANG to avoid service in Vietnam," was inaccurate and misleading because there were other sources who would say the President wanted to serve in Vietnam.
The panel said a flight instructor had told Mapes that Bush "did want to go to Vietnam but others went first." Mapes may not have believed this statement, and she would have had good grounds for being skeptical about it. It was well known at the time that joining a National Guard unit such as the ANG was one of the best ways to avoid going to Vietnam. And no one has disputed why Bush joined. It is hard to believe he changed his mind afterward. But even if he did, it has no bearing on his initial decision to join the Guard.
The panel also labeled as "misleading" Dan Rather's interview with the then speaker of the Texas House, Ben Barnes, who made a call to get George Bush in the Guard. Why is this misleading? Because, the panel said, CBS has no proof that the person who received the call was influenced by it. Can the panel be serious about this? Should CBS not have reported this call?
Goodale, of course, does not tell us that CBS had countervailing testimony that there was actually no waiting list for pilots to get into the TexANG, because there was a shortage of jet jockeys. Surely the Barnes interview becomes misleading in light of that omitted factoid.
The CBS report reads as if it were written by lawyers for lawyers, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Boccardi is a journalist. The report, it may be noted, is signed not only by Boccardi and Thornburgh but by seven other lawyers in Mr. Thornburgh's law firm. The report might well have been better if it had been written by journalists for journalists and the public. The report convincingly points out that CBS moved too quickly in airing the broadcast and too slowly in discovering that its source would change his story about how and from whom he got the documents. Those are fair and telling comments. But they take up little more than 25 percent of the report.
The rest of the report, which is directed to the newsgathering process of CBS, is flawed. The panel was unable to decide whether the documents were authentic or not. It didn't hire its own experts. It didn't interview the principal expert for CBS. It all but ignored an important argument for authenticating the documents—"meshing." It did not allow cross-examination. It introduced a standard for document authentication very difficult for news organizations to meet—"chain of custody"—and, lastly, it characterized parts of the broadcast as false, misleading, or both, in a way that is close to nonsensical. One is tempted to say that the report has as many flaws as the flaws it believes it has found in Dan Rather's CBS broadcast.
Flawed the Panel Report may be, but not for any of these reasons. One is tempted to say that James Goodale is misleading the readers of The New York Review, most of whom do not have the good sense to read Power Line.
UPDATE: Wizbang! reports that Mary Mapes is going to write a book. Crain's:
St. Martin's Press has agreed to pay in the high six figures to publish a book by Ms. Mapes tentatively titled The Other Side of the Story. According to publishing executives who met with the news producer last week, the book is still in the early stages, but will focus on the 60 Minutes Wednesday report that filled in the missing details--and painted a highly unflattering picture--of President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service. The story was discredited when memos at the heart of the reporting could not be authenticated.
Ms. Mapes continues to insist that the story was accurate, and that the documents were not forged. The book will present a detailed counterattack against an independent panel's findings that the segment should not have aired, and will include documentation and analysis that she says backs up her reporting and which the panel did not release.
We may need a team of blogs to fisk an entire book.
25 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Mar 21, 10:26:00 AM:
Seems to me Bush was "ordered" to report for a physical on a specific date and that specific date was a holiday. No one would have been present for him to report to!
By 
Sluggo, at
Mon Mar 21, 02:33:00 PM:
I'm curious where I can find the testimony about the lack of a waiting list. That's the first time I've heard about that.
Another factoid usually left out is that at the time of his enlistment units of that air wing were being deployed to Viet Nam. That changed a year later, but W could have had no expectation of staying stateside.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 03:31:00 PM:
Perhaps I just don't understand "Meshing analysis." That alone seems most damning evidence against Mapes and Rather. It seems to me that if you have six documents from a single unverified source, and two of them definitely don't fit established facts, you don't simply set those aside, you question the entire batch.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 03:37:00 PM:
Gandalf: "That changed a year later, but W could have had no expectation of staying stateside."
You have placed your staff precisely on the invisible flaw in so much of these arguments -- they imply precognition by Bush that what actually did happen later, would in fact happen to his advantage.
When Bush made his choices, there was no way to predict who would be going where, to fight whom -- I remember being his age in that same milieu, and everybody had a different idea of what was likely to happen or not.
His Daddy was a fighter pilot and he decided he wanted to be a fighter pilot too, and he passed the tests, and got in line -- a short line, because flying jets was most certainly NOT the 'safe haven' in the National Guard that so many others were seeking (like the slot Lloyd Bentsen found for HIS son).
In my non-rated USAF days I peeled more human remains off more runways than I ever care to smell again and my hat is off to anybody who put their fanny atop one of those monstrous flying machines. Not a one of them was ever trying to hide out in a safe spot, thank you very much.
Jim Oberg
www.jamesoberg.com
rocket scientist and writer
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 03:39:00 PM:
TigerHawk,
Nice job. Let me add this reminder.
When the authenticity of documents was first questioned, recall Dan Rather's initial response: anger and naked bluff. On tilt. and unaccustomed to being questioned, The Dan announced his full support for the phony story. For-the-record, and on-the-air, he said the documents came from an "unimpeachable source."
I'd say an "unemployed source" is a bit more accurate.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 03:51:00 PM:
"The panel also labeled as "misleading" Dan Rather's interview with the then speaker of the Texas House, Ben Barnes, who made a call to get George Bush in the Guard."
*********
I find this aspect of cbs's smear campaign and the nytimes "retired general counsel's" statements one of the easiest to challenge.
1. barnes is a highly partisan democrat still active in Texas politics.
2. barnes was a member of kerry's Texas campaign staff.
Neither cbs or this retired"gc" mentioned those facts.
3. No one has ever stepped forward to substantiate the statement by barnes.
4. barnes has never provided any proof that he made such a call nor has he identified the person(s) he called.
5. Neither cbs or barnes have offered any proof that even had such a call been made, it had any effect on Bush's entry into the TANG.
6. The retired"gc" comment shows he accepted the statement of barnes with no verification, as if the statement itself is all of the verification required.
Basically, the retired"gc" seems to accept every document and statement presented by cbs without question and damns any challenge to those documents and statements. I'd strongly suggest to the nytimes that they have a competent attorney review every document that this "retired gc" touched. Based upon his critique of the cbs invetigation, this individual's abilities as an attorney should be called into question, immediately.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 03:57:00 PM:
Even an unsophisticated forger, using con-man tacticts, will attempt to mesh in the forgery with known documents and information. "Meshing" does not disprove forgery; it may be the product of forgery.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 04:35:00 PM:
Sluggo, here is some info for you.
http://www.catholicsandsurvivors.net/bushDallasMorningNews1999.htm
Somewhere on the net is an interview with Gen. Staudt in which he said that they were very careful about who to accept for pilot training because they were going to fly with that person.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 04:37:00 PM:
TigerHawk & folks:
I posted much of this on LGF’s “Not Quite a Whitewash” thread (post #6) on 10 January http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14268.
“I wish I would have known about this site when that story hit. That same day, 9 September, I saw those documents and immediately threw the bullshit flag on the field. Not because of typewriters which I knew nothing about from 30 years ago, not because of the suspect P.O. box, much less one numbered “34567”, but because the documents claimed Lt Col Killian – a sitting fighter squadron commander had ORDERED Lt Bush (or any pilot for that matter) to take a flight physical.
It would never happen. NEVER. No commander would ever have to. My husband is a graduated fighter squadron commander and that was a HUGE hands down, no way Lt Col Killian wrote that red flag to him also.
~~~This is the part most average bubbas don’t understand about fighter pilots. Most think they spend all if not most of their time flying…am I right? The truth is, unless they are learning to fly a particular type of aircraft and studying to do just that, they all have desk jobs of some sort. They’re all officers and therefore in charge of “things” and many times other personnel. My point is, THEY LOVE TO FLY, and they sure as heck would rather be flying than going to meetings or doing pretty much anything else on the planet.
In my husbands 20+ year career, he has only known of one pilot EVER who hadn’t taken his flight physical by the cut-off date (which is the last day of your birth month and NOT your actual birthday as Killian’s ex-secretary had stated). That particular Lt Col’s commander didn’t order him to take his physical, he fired him a few days later because of it…and he flew heavies, not fighters.
And now included in the report, we come to find out Killian’s boss, a 2-star general had told CBS the exact same thing BEFORE they ran the story!
"A key factor in the decision to broadcast the piece was a telephone conversation between Mapes and Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, Killian’s commanding officer during the period in question. Mapes told the panel Hodges confirmed the content of the four documents after she read them to him over the phone.
Hodges, however, denied doing so. He also told the panel he had given Mapes information that should have raised warning flags about the documents, including his belief that Killian had never ordered anyone, including Mr. Bush, to take a physical."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/10/national/main665727.shtml
Note that “ordering” Bush or anyone to take a flight physical is the one thing Gen Hodges shot right out of the sky. Like I said, it just doesn’t happen. Ever.
I won’t rehash all the details, but someone in the media asked me what I thought about the P.O. box, the “little ‘th’” and the fact that the name of the base wasn’t on the letterhead. Both my husband and I went through more than 20 years of Air Force documents and letters – several inches thick - and never saw one P.O. box and not one little “th”. If the documents we had hadn’t come from the “Dept of the Air Force”, the name of the base was ALWAYS listed – either in addition to a street address, or more often times, the name of the base was listed in lieu of the city’s name.
Another thing that the media drove me crazy on was in stating that Lt Bush had been “stripped” of his wings.
That he was “stripped of his wings” was an absolutely FALSE statement! Pilots aren’t “stripped of their wings” because they choose not to take flight physicals.
They were using the wrong terminology – to say he was taken off flight status or grounded would be a true statement. To say that he VOLUNTARILY chose not to keep flying is a true statement.
What no-one took the time to research is the fact that once a fighter pilot EARNS his wings – NO-ONE can take them from him EXCEPT an FEB (Flight Evaluation Board). Period. “Stripping” a pilot of his wings is serious business, and only even considered doing because they’ve done something dangerous, stupid, or they are incompetent and cannot meet the required standards.
In addition, once a pilot has EARNED his wings, UNLESS they are “stripped” of them by an FEB – even IF they choose not to continue flying (as is the case with Bush) – they can (and do) continue to wear their wings.”
YourLastFour
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 04:39:00 PM:
It is a question of political bias. Clearly, CBS in general and Dan Rather in particular are Democrates. Can anyone deny this statement?
The issue is who produced those documents? Clearly, CBS has the resources to have answered this qustion. Why didn't CBS answer this question?
The answer is obvious. Because CBS doesn't want to proscute another Democrate.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 05:12:00 PM:
Pedantic nitpicking of Mr. Oberg: Pres. Bush's father wasn't a fighter pilot... he was a light bomber pilot, flying the Avenger. :-)
Bush flew the F-102, called the Delta Dagger, and it was one of the nastiest chunks of machinery flown when it first came out... fast, but with unfortunate tendencies to fall out of the sky at random times. Eventually the nits got ironed out, but it was NOT a particularly safe plane to fly at any time.
Nevertheless, despite its main role as a strategic bomber interceptor, it did serve in Vietnam according to this article:http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0185.shtml , for what it's worth. It seems to be just a matter of training time that prevented Bush from going overseas (you needed 500 flight hours, and he had about half that).
One could say a lot of bad things about President Bush and have a lot more to back it up than this pile of detritus. *shrug*
Isn't this over with yet?
-Wonderduc
By Theo p., at
Mon Mar 21, 08:38:00 PM:
Thank you for analyzing This article although much much more can be said. The documents can be reproduced exactly on Word* in ten minutes using the default Word setting line by line space for space. The probabilty that the "Killiam" documents were not written on a computer using word with default setting and just happened to coincidently line up letter for letter, space for space, font for font is so low as to be virtually zero. The probability that they were written by a man who never typed on 1972 TANG technology that did not use Times Roman (or any technology available in 1972) and just happened to coincedentally create documents that match line for line, space for space documents created by word with default settings is zero. The Killiam Documents are crude forgeries. These facts are available on line with a ten minute search. Doesn't Thornburg's Law Firm have internet or interns that know how to use Google or Lexis/Nexis? If it does Thornburg knows or should know that the Documents are forgeries. That the Goodale's of this world think the documents might be anything but forgeries is a testment to the fog the MSM has managed to create regarding this issue. Where did the documents come from no one knows. Maybe Bill Burket reproduced them himself. We don't know and no one seems to want to ask the questions required to find out. One thing is for sure CBS wasted Forty Million Dollars if they were looking for the truth.
*Word is a trademark of Microsoft
By Sluggo, at
Mon Mar 21, 08:54:00 PM:
James82,
SLUGGO=WRONG
Phew, I've never heard it put quite so forcefully before, but I'll take it under advisement.
I think you're talking about 1972 when they were encouraging separation, but I'll keep an open mind and look around some.
By John A, at
Mon Mar 21, 09:27:00 PM:
james82, read it again. Those are the facts as of the time Bush went to the East Coast, very much not true when he enlisted. Members of TexANG served in 'Nam while Bush was training, and he could expect to go.
==========
About your "It is far more likely that the Panel refrained from an ultimate conclusion because no useful purpose would be served by reaching a conclusion."
Or, they were told not to. Remember the panel on Bellesisles assembled by Wheeler U? They were explicitly instructed not to look at most of his book - the parts that had been questioned. Despite this, they of course did so, and while making no specific references (as per instructions) nevertheless managed to get across their conclusion that what had not been fabricated had been lied about... Would that the CBS panel had similar integrity, but their conclusion was "while noone has found a machine that could have done this at that time, noone has looked at every typewriter ever made: it is possible that fire-breathing dragons do make off with the village maidens, noone has tracked down every scaled being on the planet and asked them."
"Bush did not take the physical exam required of all pilots..." who are actively flying (and it is optional, albeit not taking it leads to grounding). He did, however, take all physicals required of him: the flight physical was not "required" once he had stopped flying, only normal physicals. Oh, and he stopped flying for the Guard on his own initiative, he was not "suspended".
"... his superiors gave him the benefit of any doubt" which I would hope they do for everyone.
"Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush's commanding officer, was unhappy with the loss of ANG's investment in him when Bush informed Killian he was leaving for Alabama." Would he have been upset if a goof-off and unqualified nepotistic barracks lawyer left?
"Before the broadcast, Mary Mapes, the CBS producer of the program, confirmed the facts in the documents with retired Major General Bobby Hodges..." er, no, as the General has scathingly stated.
"The panel attacks the four experts CBS hired to authenticate the documents. One of the four, James Pierce, concluded that the signatures on the documents were authentic and that there was no reason to believe the documents were not genuine. Such conclusions are common for document examiners [note, only two of the four were document examiners, the ones he quotes are were handwriting analysts, a different subject]. A second, Marcel Matley, also concluded that the signatures were genuine." Funny, one of the two only said that the signature looked OK but he could not verify without the original. The other wasn't even that sure. And no, none of the four could say much about the 'documents' being fake - or real: not without originals.
"Matley, for his part, continues to disagree with the panel's view and has demanded that it correct the eighteen places in the report where he believes he has been libeled." Probably for saying he is not a document expert (he is not, he is a handwriting expert) and that his handwriting expertise is questionable (here I agree they may have messed up, he is self-taught but that does not mean inexpert.)
"Mesh"? Hey, the Hitler Diaries "meshed" just fine - in fact, too well.
Bah. I give up.
By TigerHawk, at
Mon Mar 21, 09:31:00 PM:
Sluggo and James82, re the waiting list issue:
I am no expert on this story, not compared to many other bloggers or even commenters on this post. But I note that the Panel Report discusses the waiting list controversy at p. 46, the footnotes at p. 48, and again at 115, 116 and 131. My statement on the issue in the post above was perhaps too definitive or insufficiently nuanced, for which I apologize. In 1968, when Bush entered the TexANG, there may have been a waiting list of about 150 people to get in. However, there seem to have been 3-5 unfilled pilot positions, and the waiting list was for non-pilot jobs. When you add it all up, the Panel was unable to confirm that there was a waiting list for the TexANG when Bush entered the Guard, or that anybody pulled any strings to get him in.
Anyway, it does not matter whether there was in fact a waiting list or not, because the Panel Report makes clear that CBS had no convincing evidence that there was a waiting list and it had lots of evidence in the form of statements that there was no waiting list, none of which it mentioned when it ran the Ben Barnes interview. See particularly the discussion on page 130 and 131 of the Panel Report, including the footnotes. This evidence tends to impeach Barnes' statement that "[t]here were hundreds of names on the list of people wanting to get into the Air National Guard..." The Panel found that running with Barnes' statement without mentioning the impeaching evidence was misleading. Goodale skates over all of this.
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 10:14:00 PM:
Theo P nailed it. The fact that MS Word recreates a key document using its out of the box default settings and that no typewriter of the era could do that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the document is a fake. That is game set and match regardless of all of the diversionary arguments made by CBS employees or their shills. BTW, it was Charlie Johnson at Little Green Footballs who discovered the MS Word default settings match.
VRWconspiracy
By , at
Mon Mar 21, 10:55:00 PM:
It's amazing that people are still talking about this, but I have to admit, it's fascinating. The thing which I have never understood is why anyone ever thought this was an important story even if all of the fake memos were true. It was 30 year old stuff. There was still nothing in the official military record to indicate that gwb did not fullfill his military obligations. If there had been, or if several ex tang people who knew gwb had come out and said that he was a slacker, unsafe to fly with, and got special treatment because of his family then these memos wouldn't have mattered because he probably would never have become governor or president. As we now know, when your former comrades come out against you, it can have a powerful effect. Just ask john kerry.
By , at
Tue Mar 22, 01:00:00 AM:
As I recall there were five memos in all, or some number like that. Two came back from CBS's authenticators as bogus and were not used on the Rather show, but turned up in USA Today shortly afterward. It looked like CBS was shopping for authenticators, because they used very odd people, without good standing in forensic circles, located in widely separated places. Also, they did not send ALL the memos to ALL the authenticators, which anyone making a fair attempt to verify them would have done, (giving the experts as much evidence as possible). CBS is inept, but no big corporation in midtown Manhattan is likely to be THAT inept. -- From this and a few other things, I conclude that CBS producers always knew the memos were forged, probably because they forged them. And they probably had a man deliver the papers to Burkett, figuring (rightly) he was too thick-headed to be let in on the origination, and because using him as their "source" would provide a modicum of plauisble deniability. Yet the M.O. of forgery better fits the Kerry office, as we saw from the John Lehman medal citations, so they could have done it, also. If CBS had been duped by a third party, where was the outrage, where were anguished demands the culprits be found? Of course, if Kerry's office had done it, and CBS knew it, you can understand why there were no such cries. If CBS was innocent of forging, the post mortem investigations would have concentrated on the origination of the papers, the forging, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Yet it hardly seems to have concerned them. They hired private eyes later, but it looked like window-dressing, and their report was never released.
By , at
Tue Mar 22, 05:12:00 AM:
Both Killian's wife and son told Dirty Dan in May the fake docs were bogus. The son served in the same TANG unit and said the dead father had great respect for Bush. I heard them interviewed on Larry Elder's show last Sept. Viacom knew four months before Rathergate that they were running a story that was a lie based on fake docs. They went ahead because just like "Deepthroat" the author was dead, had been for over 20 years. So like "Deepthroat" there was no way to cross examine him. Just another bogus attempt by the MSM to smear America. This time they got caught with their pants down.
Rod Stanton
Cerritos
By , at
Tue Mar 22, 05:16:00 AM:
Both Killian's wife and son told Dirty Dan in May the fake docs were bogus. The son served in the same TANG unit and said the dead father had great respect for Bush. I heard them interviewed on Larry Elder's show last Sept. Viacom knew four months before Rathergate that they were running a story that was a lie based on fake docs. They went ahead because just like "Deepthroat" the author was dead, had been for over 20 years. So like "Deepthroat" there was no way to cross examine him. Just another bogus attempt by the MSM to smear America. This time they got caught with their pants down.
Rod Stanton
Cerritos
By , at
Tue Mar 22, 05:16:00 AM:
Both Killian's wife and son told Dirty Dan in May the fake docs were bogus. The son served in the same TANG unit and said the dead father had great respect for Bush. I heard them interviewed on Larry Elder's show last Sept. Viacom knew four months before Rathergate that they were running a story that was a lie based on fake docs. They went ahead because just like "Deepthroat" the author was dead, had been for over 20 years. So like "Deepthroat" there was no way to cross examine him. Just another bogus attempt by the MSM to smear America. This time they got caught with their pants down.
Rod Stanton
Cerritos
By , at
Tue Mar 22, 05:16:00 AM:
Both Killian's wife and son told Dirty Dan in May the fake docs were bogus. The son served in the same TANG unit and said the dead father had great respect for Bush. I heard them interviewed on Larry Elder's show last Sept. Viacom knew four months before Rathergate that they were running a story that was a lie based on fake docs. They went ahead because just like "Deepthroat" the author was dead, had been for over 20 years. So like "Deepthroat" there was no way to cross examine him. Just another bogus attempt by the MSM to smear America. This time they got caught with their pants down.
Rod Stanton
Cerritos
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Mar 22, 06:26:00 AM:
Rod, CBS didn't know about the documents until late August, and didn't get them until early September, so I'm not sure I know what you referring to when you cite the May interview.
By , at
Tue Mar 22, 02:26:00 PM:
"The panel said a flight instructor had told Mapes that Bush "did want to go to Vietnam but others went first." Mapes may not have believed this statement, and she would have had good grounds for being skeptical about it. It was well known at the time that joining a National Guard unit such as the ANG was one of the best ways to avoid going to Vietnam. And no one has disputed why Bush joined. It is hard to believe he changed his mind afterward. But even if he did, it has no bearing on his initial decision to join the Guard."
I have not seen any substantiation of an allegation that Bush joined the ANG to avoid service in Vietnam. This is a hypothetical invented by Mr. Goodale, and is contrary to the evidence that Ms. Mapes herself collected. It was well-known that ANG units were deployed to Vietnam, including pilots from Bush’s unit.
"Following the broadcast, Marian Carr Knox, who was Killian's secretary at the time, confirmed the facts of the broadcast, saying, "There's no doubt in my mind that [the] information is correct." When the panel cross-examined Knox she seemed less certain of what she had told Rather but she did not contradict any of the broadcast. Since the broadcast, no one has come forward to say the program was untruthful."
The Family of Killian has come forward and said that Ms. Cox was mistaken and that the program was untruthful.
"The report criticizes CBS for not being able to present evidence of a "chain of custody" for the documents. Since the CBS source, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, only had a copy of the documents, CBS, the panel said, should have known where this copy came from, or, indeed, the source of the originals. Burkett later confessed he had lied about his alleged source, George Conn, whom CBS clearly should have taken more pains to reach. After the program had been broadcast, Burkett said he received the documents from a woman named Lucy Ramirez.
For seized drugs to be introduced into evidence, a lawyer must prove who had the drugs from the time they were seized—that is the "chain of custody." While such proof is relevant in the courtroom, it is often irrelevant for journalists. Few stories based on documents would ever be written if that were the standard."
It is correct that the term “chain of custody” is a legal reference. The journalistic and historical counterpart term for this requirement of authentication is “provenance”. Where did the documents originate? Ms. Mapes initially tried to determine the origination (provenance) of the documents, and found that her source (Burkett) had lied about where the documents came from. This fact about the actual documents should have increased skepticism regarding authenticity, but Ms. Mapes dropped surprisingly simply dropped the issue and never bothered to seek out alternative sources to authenticate the provenance of the documents. Those sources existed, and the CBS team found them only after airing the program. Maj. Killian’s Secretary, Ms. Hodges, was not contacted to establish provenance. The family of Maj. Killian was not contacted to establish provenance. Both of these alternative sources would have raised additional questions about the authenticity of the documents.
"Nor is the panel convincing when it says that telephone contact between Mapes and a member of the Kerry campaign was "highly inappropriate." Mapes made a call to the Kerry campaign office after Burkett told her that he wanted to speak to the campaign about strategy to counter the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." At that point, Mapes had only some of the documents and she needed the rest. She telephoned Kerry campaign headquarters to get the phone number of Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to the campaign."
While Ms. Mapes may be “ingenious” about getting a source, Mr. Burkett, in releasing documents by placing a call to the opposition party, she knew that this would alert the Kerry campaign to the upcoming “scandal”. Despite her ingenuity, Ms. Mapes was guilty of a serious lapse of ethics in alerting an opposing campaign in the midst of a hotly contested election on the eve of the vote. A journalist’s first job, as with a doctor, is to “do no harm”. Reporters should not create news, they should merely report it. By alerting the Kerry staff, she essentially created news.
"A major weakness of the report is that neither Mapes nor Rather was offered a chance to cross-examine the people the panel interviewed…The rest of the report, which is directed to the newsgathering process of CBS, is flawed. The panel was unable to decide whether the documents were authentic or not."
Of course, the right to “cross-examine” is a legalistic requirement, not associated with journalism. To say the review was flawed because it did not permit “cross-examination” would have been to allege that this was a legal document, not a review prepared for journalists and manager of news dividions. The people responsible for “cross-examining” were the editors and management of CBS news. Mr. Rather, a senior editor, failed to “cross-examine” the producers and reporters when the story was developed. So did all of the management of the CBS while the story was being finalized. After these obvious failures and disaggregated responsibility to all levels, the only acceptable method was to ask outside “auditors” to review the process. The auditors were not charged with assessing guilt, they were charged with reviewing process. They did not need “expert” document authenticators because their function was not to evaluate the document authenticity. The report did not evaluate Ms. Mapes “meshing” because the consistency of pieces of evidence was not the focus, it was whether Ms. Mapes followed ethical guidelines for journalistic practice as well as CBS policy, neither of which lay out guidelines for “meshing”. It is unquestionable that the 60 minutes News report was misleading in exaggerating the documentation, the scholarship in preparing the report, and the amount of time allocated to investigate the pertinent facts.The Report concluded that the process was weak to begin with, and that the guidelines were not followed. There was not need for “cross-examination”.
"The officers' statements, of course, do not disprove the claim that Killian ordered Bush to take a physical; nor do they exclude the possibility that there was a custom of which they had no knowledge. The panel's reasoning on this document is not particularly persuasive, nor is its reasoning persuasive about why the other documents did not perfectly mesh. In the end, even the panel, without saying so explicitly, has to concede the accuracy of Mapes's statement that "there is nothing in the official Bush records that would rule out the authenticity of the Killian documents."
Of course, there is nothing in the histories of either Ms. Mapes or James Goodale that would rule out that the possibility that they are indeed, agents of North Korea.
By A. Scooterdawg, at
Sat Oct 01, 01:38:00 AM:
CBS's defense of the story always seemed to be at heart an appeal to the lack of evidence. After all, if I cannot disprove your statement, then your statement must be true.
