Bush AWOL documents fake?

First, Find the Forger
I agree with Bill Safire. I, too, would like to learn the identity of the forger. ---BBB

I very much agree with Safire's thrust as well. In particular, I agree what happens to Rather, Mapes, and CBS essentially is inconsequential. The issue here is attempted election fraud abbetted by document forgery. I imagine the ultimate unravelling of the failed, amaturish, clumsy scheme will be a matter requiring some months, however, I see no near, mid, or long-term benefit accruing to The Democrats. I suspect, in fact, quite the contrary will, in every instance, prove to be the case. This has the very real promise of doing for The Democrats what Watergate did a generation ago for The Republicans.

The only benefit for the Dems is if Rove's fingerprints are found on the documents...which is a stretch.

CBS Names Memo Probe Panel
CBS Names Memo Probe Panel
NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2004

(CBS/AP) CBS News on Wednesday named former Pennsylvania governor and U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and retired Associated Press president chief executive Louis D. Boccardi to an independent panel to probe a story about President Bush's National Guard service.

The network this week said documents cited in the 60 Minutesstory, which suggested lapses in the president's military record, could not be authenticated. CBS News anchor Dan Rather, the reporter of the story, apologized, while CBS News said the story was a mistake and promised to name an investigative panel.

"The two-person review panel will commence its work this week and will have full access and complete cooperation from CBS News and CBS, as well as all of the resources necessary to complete the task," the network said in a statement. "The panel will report its findings to CBS News and CBS. The findings also will be made public."

The panel was named amid accusations by Republicans of a partisan motive to the CBS News report.

On Tuesday, White House communications director Dan Bartlett accused CBS and a high-level adviser to the Kerry campaign of coordinating a personal attack on Mr. Bush, reports CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante.

A top Kerry campaign official now says Mary Mapes, the producer of the story, put him in touch with Bill Burkett, the former Texas Air National Guard officer who provided the documents to CBS news.

"She said he was interested in talking to me and she gave me his number," said Joe Lockhart, a Clinton White House spokesman who recently joined the Kerry campaign. "I called him. He gave me some advice on how to respond to the Swift Boat smears against John Kerry. We talked about three to four minutes, the guard document issue never came up. And that was the end of it."

Mapes declined Tuesday to discuss the matter. CBS News said in a statement: "It is obviously against CBS News standards to be associated with any political agenda. As to what actually happened here, it is one of many issues the independent review will be examining."

Republicans saw the story as evidence that CBS News was coordinating with the Kerry campaign to attack the president. The chair of the Republican National Committee demanded answers.

"What was the nature of the conversation between various senior campaign advisors for Sen. Kerry and a person who apparently provided the documents? What were the agreements that they had with one another, CBS, the Kerry campaign and whoever provided the documents?'' asked Ed Gillespie.

Democrats insist it wasn't them - and fired back.

"The Kerry campaign had nothing to do with these documents. There is nothing to this story, and if there was anything to this story, they wouldn't be afraid to debate me on it. What this is is a gutless political attack,'' said Lockhart.

CBS' original Sept. 8 report featured an interview with former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, a Democrat who claimed that in 1968 he pulled strings to get young Mr. Bush into the Guard, a popular option for men hoping to avoid the draft and possible service in Vietnam.

The piece also featured four documents purported to be memos written by one of Mr. Bush's Guard commanders, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.

The purported memos appeared to answer longstanding questions about a period of Mr. Bush's service in 1972, during which he missed a physical and did not drill for months after he joined an Alabama unit to work on a campaign there.

The questioned documents indicated that Mr. Bush had disobeyed a direct order to appear for his physical, and that friends of the Bush family tried to "sugar coat" any probe of the young lieutenant's lapses.

Questions about the documents surfaced on the Internet soon after the piece aired. CBS stood by its story until last Wednesday, when it said there were some doubts about them and it merited further investigation.

The source of the documents, Burkett, admitted this weekend to CBS that he lied about obtaining the documents from another former National Guard member, the network said. CBS hasn't been able to conclusively tell how he got them or even definitely tell whether they're fakes. But the network has given up trying to defend them.

CBS said it approached Burkett initially about the memos purportedly written by Killian. Rather said Burkett was well known in National Guard circles for several years for trying to discredit Mr. Bush's military record.

Burkett had earlier claimed that as a Guard official, he had in 1997 seen allies of then-Gov. Bush discuss destroying military files that might embarrass the governor, who was mulling a presidential run. The allegation has never been proved.

Burkett, in an interview with Rather aired on the CBS Evening News, said he was pressured by CBS to reveal his source for the documents, and "I simply threw out a name that was basically, I guess, to get a little pressure off for the moment."

He said he did not fake or forge any documents.

"I didn't totally mislead you," he said. "I did mislead you about one individual."

Burkett said he also insisted CBS authenticate the documents on its own. Two document experts consulted by CBS later said they raised red flags that network officials apparently disregarded. Rather acknowledged CBS failed to properly determine whether the documents were genuine.

Alex Jones, director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, said it appeared to be an honest mistake by CBS. But he said the network was too slow to respond.

"I think that their delaying and obvious resistance to acknowledge the evident realities has kept the story alive a lot longer than it needed to be and was a lot more damaging to CBS than it needed to be," he said.

Its a stretch The Democrats are giving a frantic, panic-stricken, thoroughly absurd, but Official-Party-Position, reach at.

Boy, this is really gonna leave an ugly scar, and prolly a real serious limp.

No, it won't.

You just are hoping it will, once again, because you are rabidly partisan.

Cycloptichorn

panzade
panzade, this caper has Karl Rove's and his minion's pattern of dirty tricks written all over it. I would be disappointed and disgusted to learn that Democrats were behind it.

Unfortunately, learning who the culprit(s) is won't stop these sort of things from happening. Politics is a dirty gladiator sport.

LOL!!! I seriously doubt that, as the hatred for George W. Bush is unprecendented, not only in this country, but around the world. Bush' reception at the U.N. was one of the coldest I've ever seen towards an American leader. Why? Because he's an embarrasment of mammoth proportions. I still find it fascinating that the veracity of the charges within these now fake documents hasn't been refuted. It's been the forgeries themselves that has predominated the news. That, in classic political theater, is called a DISTRACTION.

Rove is just famous for this kind of set-up and smear. I do not doubt that he probably took advantage of that Bush hatred by those who truly cannot stand the man nor his policies.

It's going to be interesting to see where this originated. I work too hard for my money to bet on, or against, anyone with this.

I can see who it would benefit most to have a forgery determined, but I'm not convinced they're smart enough to have set it up.

Cyc, while I have partisan leanings, as do we all, I consider myself at core pragmatic. I submit my appraisals of and conjectures regarding ongoing politico-economic developments, while at variance with majority opinion on this board, have proven to more closely track the evidenced course of those developments than have the appraisals and conjectures of the majority of our members. Sure, I've mis-guessed from time to time - I really did not anticipate the WMD story would develop as it has, and, initially, I misguessed the eventual star of this spring's primaries, for two examples among others, but I stand on my record. Its out there for anyone to examine.

ehBeth


Karl Rove IS very smart. As I said, this issue matches some of his past capers that he's carried out himself. But being the very smart man that he is, he could have OKed someone like Roger Stone to do the dirty deed. The republicans have a long history of masterful dirty tricks.

The Democracts are not nearly as good at it.

What convinces me of Rove's involvement is that the forgeries were so easily detected. Anyone who really wanted to pull off such forgeries would have done them well to avoid discovery. The fact that they were poorly done leads me to believe that they were designed to be discovered and discredited. Why? To inoculate Bush against any further inquiry into his national guard service history and records.

As I said, Karl Rove is very smart and a master of manipulating the Media---and it worked. The Media won't touch the issue Bush's record again.

BBB

Timber
Timber, that's the problem. We remember your record. Do you remember the records of those with whom you disagree?

BBB

The only "Distraction" going on here is the focus on CBS, accompanied by The Democrats' refusal to believe they exclusively could have been and indeed were complicitous in the fraud. I submit for your consideration the now thoroughly refuted defenses of the provenance and authenticity of the documents at question ... a more clear example of blind, rabid partisanship is difficult to imagine. I submit further the core allegation - the "Bush Shirked" meme - is itself unfounded, as clearly evidenced by the resort to forgery and other duplicity to support the allegation in the absence of valid evidence. The meme is dead. Denial will not revive it, nor will denial in any way further The Democrats' recovery from their own institutionalized failures. Thats the pragmatic take. Now for the partisan take. Cool.

BBB, my record may not be to the liking of some, but it is not characterized by indication of significant misapprehension on my part of overall political, economic, or military developments as have occurred. That itself irritates some folks.

Please.

Noone is more annoying than those who consider themselves to be pragmatic and everyone else to be partisan.

You're one of the most partisan people on here, Timber! You can't see that by reading your own posts?

Your opinions, consistently, are that you (and the positions you support) are unequivicably right and others are completely wrong.

Surely you can see that in any instance, that is almost never true? For example; you call the attack on Bush's record - 'a more clear example of blind, rabid partisanship is difficult to imagine.' Yet you yourself were all over the SBVfT ordeal, much like many who consider themselves 'neutral' yet are consistently conservative.

In truth, there is little difference between either attack; the SBVfT and the Nt'l Guard accusations against Bush are both silly and partisan, but I sure never saw you condemning your own side.

It's hypocracy to believe that you are neutral when you so clearly are not. I am not neutral. At least I have the guts to come out and say it.

Cycloptichorn

Timber
Timber, want to bet your treasure at what we will find out when Bush's sabatoge of the Presidential Records Act is undone and historians get a look at the actual records of the past two decades? That is, unless the shreaders are working overtime ala Ollie North.

BBB

timberlandko:

Hee, hee. You're crackin' me up with that over-the-top rhetoric. What is it about the ACTIONS of those involved that completely shuts you off from all objectivity? It's really amazing.

Why is it, then, that the initial arguments coming from the rightwing media about the forgeries (i.e., typesetting, spacing, hypertext, etc.) were ALL disproven, and that it actually had to take a person who CONFIRMED the information to be correct in those memos to completely conclude that the documents were fakes? Remember, all those techniques that a typewriter couldn't do but Microsoft could? Then it turns out that IBM selectric typewriters COULD do all that, and they were being used back during the year in question.

Is it remotely possible for someone as rabid as yourself to possibly look at things a little more objectively? CBS is now so heavily maligned by the rightwing goon squad because of this, while on a daily basis, idiots like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Savage, Hannity, Coulter, and the rest, are spewing the hatred and amazing litany of lies that doesn't get ANY media coverage.

One big difference: Rather APOLOGIZED!!!

And please, unless you can point to ANYONE from the Bush administration who has directly refuted the contents of those memos, the facts are still in place:

Bush left the National Guard early to help run an election. He was a NO-SHOW. He didn't show up for his medical exam. His excuse was that his own physician was out of town, which is bogus, because you can easily be examined by a National Guard physician on base.

Bush was a party animal, drank alot, and did other drugs. This is just no mystery to any rational mind. Bush operates like a dry drunk. There's been obvious brain damage up there, and he shows tell-tale signs of that damage.

So, the memos are forgeries. But Bush's past, coupled with both confirmation of the forgeries alongside with confirmation of their content, only reaches a more concrete conclusion:

Bush was AWOL from the National Guard.

Cyc, I am not nor do I claim to be neutral. If nothing else, my avatar clearly shows that. I offer my opinions and present my reasoning behind them, often doing so by way of response or rebuttal to counter opinion - that's how debate works. I did not, as you erroneously claim, say " ... the attack on Bush's record - 'a more clear example of blind, rabid partisanship is difficult to imagine", but rather I laid that charge against the defences of the documents some here presented and endorsed.

And BBB, I'll be more than happy to enter into a wager based on your most recent, blatantly partisan, conjecture.

Does anyone else find the phrase "confirmation of the forgeries alongside with confirmation of their content" funny?

I am sure the guy who pays $1.5 million for a forged Rembrandt won't be concerned, after all, it's the content of the painting, right?

As there isn't any way Bush & Co. can seem to prove he had enough points to obtain an honorable discharge, so it will be equally difficult to ever prove the documents are authentic. The furor has succesfully obscured many questions unanswered about Bush's "service" and the CBS fact checkers don't deserve to keep their jobs as it's only added to the controversy.