Posted on 03/09/2005 6:43:07 AM PST by Pikamax
Dan Rather’s Long Goodbye: Who Done It? by Joe Hagan
EASTLAND, TEX.—Three days before Dan Rather was to retire from the CBS Evening News on March 9, the man who gave him the suspicious memos that precipitated his departure as anchor sat in a Mexican restaurant here, 126 miles west of Dallas.
Former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, 55, has grown a full, white beard since his last face-to-face meeting with Mr. Rather, on Sept. 18, 2004. That day, the CBS anchor interviewed him for three hours at the Crescent Court hotel in Dallas, 10 days after 60 Minutes Wednesday had first presented the memos from Mr. Burkett asserting that George W. Bush had received preferential treatment in the National Guard .
Cameras rolling, Mr. Rather had asked Mr. Burkett, his former source—whom he had once promised not to "hang out"—point-blank, if he had misled the network about their provenance.
The former National Guardsman, knowing he was writing his own epitaph, said he had.
"I looked him in the eye," recalled Mr. Burkett, "and I said, ‘Dan, do you know what you just did to me? Will you attend my funeral?’"
And, according to Mr. Burkett, Dan Rather replied: "Will you attend mine? In fact, I want you to read the eulogy."
Afterward, said Mr. Burkett, "Dan couldn’t look me in the eye."
Texas is the place where Dan Rather’s career ballooned, first on local television and then in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and Texas is the place that punctured it, as Mr. Rather might say, like a rattlesnake striking the tire treads of a prairie pick-up. And in Texas, if not at Black Rock itself, the question of just what brought Mr. Rather low still remains open. Even apparently to him.
When Mr. Burkett’s admission aired Sept. 20, it did nothing to resolve the mystery behind the documents. But it did mark the point at which CBS, embattled by attacks from consumers, ideologues and politicians, stopped defending its Sept. 8 report on Mr. Bush’s National Guard service and started a massive, and somewhat panicked, clean-up.
Mr. Rather continued hunting down the source of the documents, according to sources—when CBS convened an independent panel to investigate the process behind the story, Mr. Rather sought to hire a New York–based private eye with his own money, for a price sources put in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A CBS News spokesperson denied via e-mail that Mr. Rather had made any such offer.
But sources said that Mr. Rather did just that, and that CBS News president Andrew Heyward turned him down. To supplement the panel, the network hired its own P.I., whose quest for the source of the documents abruptly faded after the November 2004 Presidential election.
CBS’s pursuit of the story was sidelined. The network, and CBS News, then became focused on righting itself in the public eye, aggressively finishing its panel report and completing what the producers of the National Guard story felt became a "corporate execution," according to Mike Smith, a freelance producer who worked on the story. Mr. Smith—a soft-spoken, 33-year-old Austin native with a ponytail and spectacles—worked closely with Mary Mapes, Mr. Rather’s faithful producer.
Ms. Mapes was fired in January 2005, after the panel’s report came out, and three other employees involved in the segment—executive producer Josh Howard, senior vice president Betsy West and senior broadcast producer Mary Murphy—were asked to resign. Mr. Howard has not. And Mr. Rather was ushered to a conclusion of his tenure on his 24th anniversary as anchor—a year earlier than the anniversary he’d planned.
Ms. Mapes, Mr. Smith and Mr. Burkett—two producers and their source—are in contact with each other every day, still puzzling over the memo scandal.
"It’s like Groundhog Day," said Mr. Smith. "Mary and Bill are trying to figure out how to get out from under this thing."
In the past week, Mr. Smith has sought to help The New York Observer reconstruct the story of the network’s investigation. The investigating panel needed him: After Sept. 20, he was the only person connected to CBS News that Mr. Burkett was willing to talk to.
"He needed someone to hold his hand," said Mr. Smith. "That was my role."
Mr. Smith had first convinced Mr. Burkett to give CBS News the memos—supposedly written by National Guard Lt. Col. Jerry Killian—which cast a negative light on Mr. Bush’s Vietnam-era service.
In early September 2004, Mr. Smith carried those four pieces of paper in his leather briefcase. But by the end of September, Mr. Smith began filling the briefcase with dozens of 90-minute microcassettes recording his telephone discussions with everyone he spoke to about the memo scandal.
Mr. Smith said he made the recordings to guard against being used by CBS to lay blame on people he sympathized with—Mr. Burkett and Ms. Mapes—and because he felt uncomfortable with his position: CBS News was paying him to get the angry Mr. Burkett to cooperate with the panel. Meanwhile, the panel was investigating Mr. Smith himself.
"It would be stupid not to tape," he said.
The conversations consisted of daily exchanges with Ms. Mapes and Mr. Burkett; with a private eye named Erik T. Rigler, who was hired by CBS; and with Linda Mason, the CBS News senior vice president who was coordinating interviews for the panel. They portray an investigation that bred confusion, occasional desperation and a deep suspicion in its subjects. Mr. Smith said they document how "no one really seemed to be interested in the truth."
In a tape from late December, days before the report was released, Ms. Mason was asked by Mr. Smith if CBS News would ever regain its former glory after the incident.
"I certainly hope so," she said, "but this has shaken … Mike, we’re part of this huge corporation now. And [Viacom C.E.O.] Sumner Redstone commented on it at one point. Who needs him commenting about things? Let him stay with his entertainment.
"In the news, when it was first happening," she continued, "he was away in Hong Kong or something. He made some kind of stupid statement about how he didn’t like this, but he was out of town and he had to learn more about it or something. I mean, wow, right?"
On Sept. 2, 2004, Mr. Smith and Ms. Mapes met with Mr. Burkett and his wife, Nicki Burkett, in a Whataburger restaurant in Clyde, Tex. They discussed the possibility of procuring the Bush National Guard documents. Mr. Smith had worked with Ms. Mapes on a number of 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News pieces starting in 2000. He was hired again as a freelancer in August to work on the National Guard story.
"The road to the White House leads through the Clyde Whataburger" was the group’s joke.
Mr. Burkett gave them one of the documents that day.
"He said, ‘Well, what do you think about this?’" Mr. Smith recalled. "It contained a lot of the elements that had happened with Bush. We read it and our jaws dropped: ‘Wow, that’s exactly what we heard happened.’ So we were stunned when he pulled this document out."
Mr. Burkett has said that this document and the others he gave CBS were provided on a "stand-alone" basis—meaning he wouldn’t vouch for their authenticity—and under a promise of the utmost secrecy. He had first told Ms. Mapes that the memos had come from a former Guard colleague named George Conn.
In the Sept. 18 interview and thereafter, he has maintained instead that a woman calling herself Lucy Ramirez phoned him—from a number later traced to a Holiday Inn in Houston—and instructed him to attend a livestock show, where he was handed the papers in an envelope.
Despite Mr. Burkett’s desire for secrecy, as CBS News came under fire for peculiarities in the documents’ format, newspapers began citing him as the possible source. With scrutiny mounting, Mr. Burkett requested a conversation with Mr. Rather himself.
The anchor called him at a Holiday Inn in Bozeman, Mont., where the Burketts were staying to avoid attention. Mr. Rather promised to protect his source, according to Mr. Burkett.
"It was very candid—very hard," recalled Mr. Burkett. "Twenty minutes. He said, ‘Bill, I believe in you. I realize you’re a truth-teller, and I understand we have a commitment to you. We’re not going to hang you out.’"
On Sept. 16, while the media surrounded his house with cameras, Mr. Burkett set up a conference call with CBS News president Andrew Heyward, Mr. Rather, Ms. West and Ms. Mapes. He said he wanted to set the record straight, fearing that, in his poor health, he might die of a heart attack.
"We agreed that we would do an interview—initially, we would do an interview which we would store," said Mr. Burkett, his voice growing somber and tears welling in his eyes. "It would be so Nicki would have it in case I died, for the protection of me. We talked about name-clearing for Bill Burkett, not for CBS."
Mr. Burkett insisted that the full taped interview of Sept. 18—a copy of which he said CBS promised him and never delivered—would correct the record regarding his involvement in the segment.
The tape, he said, would show Mr. Rather admitting that CBS had promised him absolute anonymity—a promise that he said was broken, and that unleashed events that ruined his life, from media attacks to health problems to a flagging cattle business.
Asked if Mr. Burkett had been treated fairly, CBS’s Ms. Mason was silent for at least 30 seconds.
"There was no agreement," she finally said. "There was never an agreement with Burkett. He decided to speak without his lawyer’s permission. In Burkett’s mind, there was an agreement."
A CBS News spokesperson said that Mr. Rather had not promised Mr. Burkett absolute anonymity and rejected Mr. Burkett’s claim that the interview backed him up, asking, "Why would you do an on-camera interview if you wanted to remain anonymous?"
From then on, Mr. Burkett refused to talk to CBS. He said he distrusted the investigative panel, led by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press head Louis Boccardi Jr., which he saw as bought and paid for by CBS.
"It was nothing more than a corporate damage-control plan," said Mr. Burkett.
He was not alone in having reservations about the panel. A number of critics and observers—including Mr. Rather—complained that the panel was tilted by the inclusion of Mr. Thornburgh, a Republican and Bush family friend. The nonpartisan Mr. Boccardi was supposed to be the neutralizing factor.
Convinced that it had made a mistake in broadcasting the report, CBS seemed more interested in trying to atone for its confessed error than in trying determine whether the memos were a hoax or not. On Oct. 5, CBS president Leslie Moonves promised at a Goldman Sachs media conference that the network would withhold the report until "after the election, so it won’t affect what is going on."
Still, CBS did take at least one step to dig into the document mystery: After Mr. Rather offered to hire his own private eye, Mr. Heyward stepped in, promising him and Ms. Mapes that Mr. Rigler would pursue the case.
Mr. Rigler is an employee of the New York–based corporate investigative group Safir Rosetti. The company was founded by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s ex-police commissioner, Howard Safir.
Mr. Rigler, a former F.B.I. agent, first introduced himself via e-mail to Mr. Smith and to Mr. Burkett. In that message, sent in early October, Mr. Rigler said his "client" was a "investigative firm hired by CBS." But Mr. Rigler seems to have been confused about his assignment: In a tape from late October, he complained to Mr. Smith of uncertainty about exactly whom he was working for—the independent panel, which could presumably want to know the source of the documents in order to judge the broadcast, or CBS, which had hired him for the express purpose of finding the documents.
Mr. Rigler said that he would be filing reports directly to Mr. Thornburgh, according to Mr. Smith. On Oct. 25, Mr. Rigler told Mr. Smith: "I got to talk to the former Attorney General at length. What it means is they have enough trust in me to talk to [Bill Burkett] and then carry his message back to them."
But that apparently wasn’t the CBS plan. Mr. Rigler said on tape that Ms. Mason, the CBS News senior vice president, didn’t want him interacting with the panel. In the recording, he said that he’d consulted with her about questions the panel had asked him: "‘You know, these people are asking a lot of questions about this. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to answer—so what’s my role in all of this? Am I CBS’s investigator or the commission’s investigator?’"
Ms. Mason, he told Mr. Smith, "promptly chewed me out," saying explicitly: "You should never talk to those people!"
"I said, ‘Wait a minute—you’re the one that told me to call them!’" he recalled. "So it’s like, I guess, a runaway grand jury or something like that."
The incident in question took place on Oct. 27, after Ms. Mapes discovered that the panel had spoken with Mr. Rigler and received a two-page report on Ms. Mapes herself.
On Feb. 22, Michael Missal, the lead council for the panel, told The Observer that the memo was for cross-checking other things Ms. Mapes had told them.
But Ms. Mapes was infuriated by what she considered to be a double-cross by Mr. Heyward, who had told her the private eye was strictly for searching out the source of the documents, not for investigating staff. In a conversation taped in late December, Ms. Mason told Mr. Smith that Mr. Rigler’s investigation was separate from the panel’s and that his information only passed on through her.
"He was independent," Ms. Mason said. "Well, through me. If we had gotten information, I would have passed it on to the panel. But he was independent."
On March 1, Mr. Missal told The Observer that, contrary to what Ms. Mason had said, the panel had been in direct contact with Mr. Rigler on a regular basis and received a number of leads from him, including information about a possible source, J.R. Rodriguez, a former National Guardsman who worked with Lieutenant-Colonel Killian.
Reached for comment, Ms. Mason said via e-mail that Mr. Rigler had spoken to the panel "only twice."
"You may want to ask [Mr. Missal] again," she wrote.
In the late October tape, Mr. Rigler suggested that CBS News was only interested in the documents if they could get them before the Presidential election. After Nov. 2, he said, his services would no longer be needed.
"I’m going to be unemployed after the election," Mr. Rigler said on the tape. "I know what’s coming. I think 5 p.m. Friday, I’m gone—which makes me wonder if this whole thing wasn’t so CBS could tell Mary Mapes, ‘Well, we tried.’ Whatever you’re going to do … if they take any employment action against her and she says, ‘Well, wait a minute, you didn’t even try to verify my side of the story or make an attempt to contact this guy …. ’"
A CBS spokesperson said via e-mail that Mr. Rigler’s investigation ended on its own schedule. "CBS News wanted to find the source of the documents," the spokesperson wrote. "When all the attempts failed and the leads dried up, we stopped looking. That occurred before the election. If there were continuing leads, we would have followed them."
On tape, Mr. Rigler described spending an afternoon with J.R. Rodriguez and his wife, Charlotte, a woman whom Mr. Rigler and a number of reporters refer to by the nickname "Cookie." The couple lives outside Houston, the site of the livestock show where Mr. Burkett said he received the documents.
Mr. Smith had urged CBS to look into the Rodriguezes, and CBS had Mr. Rigler investigate the two. Mr. Missal said the panel actually called Mr. Rodriguez too, counting him as one of the 66 people the panel interviewed.
But Mr. Rigler said he came away unconvinced that they were related to Lucy Ramirez. In a taped conversation with Mr. Smith, he said, "I don’t see it. She’s Anglo, and he’s retired and patriotic."
Mr. Missal wouldn’t describe conversations the panel had with Mr. Rodriguez. But when contacted, the former Texas Air National Guard senior master sergeant said he’d never heard of Mr. Thornburgh, had only vaguely recalled the word "panel" in conversations he’d had with reporters and had no recollection whatsoever of Mr. Rigler.
In any case, Mr. Rigler went on to say that interviews with former National Guardsmen were leading him to believe the truth of the documents, if not their authenticity.
"It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard," he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s. "It was just so very, very common. You know, he didn’t even show up out there during his whole eight-year tenure as governor and commander in chief of the Texas Air National Guard—not once did he go to Camp Avery. So most people just sort of looked at him as a draft dodger. They didn’t hold him in very high regard at all."
He continued: "The story—and I’m talking to some people at Camp Avery—the story about the files, the non-service, the memos, stuff like that, had floated around for years. For that reason, it makes you think it’s likely true."
By Nov. 23, when Mr. Rather announced he was retiring, Mr. Rigler was long out of the picture. He told Mr. Smith that the investigation was a "black hole," calling his awkward position between the panel, Ms. Mapes, CBS and Mr. Burkett a "no-win situation."
"This is not a real investigation," he told Mr. Smith.
By Dec. 30—10 days before the report was released—Mr. Smith’s last-minute attempts to get Mr. Burkett to cooperate had failed. Mr. Burkett had offered to answer the panel, but only on the condition that his answers be confidential. The panel refused.
Mr. Smith was crestfallen.
"You’ve made a heroic effort," Ms. Mason told Mr. Smith on one of his tapes. "You know how you follow a lead until you hit a dead end? Well, we’re at a dead end. We’re at an impasse here. He’s not going to do something, and we’re running out of time. So I would fold my tent and leave."
So he did. But Mr. Smith said a powerful memory stayed with him from the whole ordeal. When Mr. Burkett’s Sept. 18 interview with Mr. Rather was completed after three hours, Mr. Smith said that Mr. Burkett’s wife Nicki had wept and said, "They set a trap. They set us up."
Shortly after, other witnesses said, a cheerful and relieved CBS News senior vice president named Betsy West walked into the makeshift green room in the Crescent Court hotel to find the Burketts. She discovered them on their knees, praying. According to people who were there, Ms. West was highly unsettled.
FReepers have become legendary. FReepers took down an anchor.
Dan's tombstone
LOL. A real con.
;-)
Wow! Hunter S. Thompson and Dan Rather ride the shark in the same week (or, so). The Times (really) are a-changing!
To me this is a flat admission that this entire group had a tacet mission to install Kerry as the next president. These people spend their lives breaking their arms patting themselves on the back only to be revealed as villainous partisans. Of course, they don't understand the "villainous" part as they are so cock-sure that their motivations are the noble and correct ones: To remove from office a president with whom they disagree.
To them, the end justifies the means. May fools like these always be exposed and expelled from the public forum.
Though, in fact, they deserve much worse. Much worse indeed.
Massive amount of time, money, and network airtime to prove the truth of these memos! Nothing but scorn (and very little airtime) toward swiftboat vets.
In the late October tape, Mr. Rigler suggested that CBS News was only interested in the documents if they could get them before the Presidential election. After Nov. 2, he said, his services would no longer be needed.
and it shows, beyond a reasonable doubt, that CBS was attempting to fix a presidential election.
Quote:
"In any case, Mr. Rigler went on to say that interviews with former National Guardsmen were leading him to believe the truth of the documents, if not their authenticity.
"It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard," he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s. "It was just so very, very common. You know, he didn’t even show up out there during his whole eight-year tenure as governor and commander in chief of the Texas Air National Guard—not once did he go to Camp Avery. So most people just sort of looked at him as a draft dodger. They didn’t hold him in very high regard at all."
He continued: "The story—and I’m talking to some people at Camp Avery—the story about the files, the non-service, the memos, stuff like that, had floated around for years. For that reason, it makes you think it’s likely true"."
Yes, and so the story goes. The problem is, nobody can actually prove it IS true. Hence why there is this scandal. Someone wanted to get this accepted "truth" out so badly, that they accepted the memos as being authentic. Afterall, they merely reflect that which is common knowledge, i.e. Bush the draft dodger.
I just have to wonder if CBS ever took the other approach, namely, to ask if perhaps the accepted "truth" was not true at all? Aren't journalists supposed to be skeptical? I bet if the shoe were on the other foot and this was a story about the Dem nominee skipping out on his/her National Guard service, the MSM would have approached it with doubt.
Oh well, Dan is done. Now lets see how much time elapses before Mr. Jennings steps in the same dog doo as Dan. tick tick tick tick.
What did Dan Rather know and when did he know it?
Pretty well covers the media's whole attitude these days.
Rove set em up ...I have the documents to prove it
Either Mr. Burkett created the documents or someone gave them to him. If someone gave them to him, then they could have been created by any number of entities, including an anonymous Bush hater, the Texas Democrat Party, the Kerry Campaign or Dan Rather's daughter. Why isn't there some kind of official investigation to find out who (besides Dan Rather) tried to sabotage President Bush's campaign?
Burkett got one thing right...the Thornburg panel was definitely a "corporate damage-control plan." The tip off was their finding that there was no political bias at CBS! Even the old execs at CBS have said the slanting of the news there was blatant.
Wonder when the NYObserver will quit beating the dead horse story of the President's TANG service?
Tape, we got tape.
Roll tape!
These people need to read some banned literature - the ten commandments. There is one in there that says "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor." If they can't figure out what that means, they should look up Luther's explaination and study it for a few minutes.
So where did he learn to fly a fighter jet?
Too bad CBS didn't spend their time and $$$ investigating Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia.
Texas is conservative but when she produces a liberal, it usually the most virulent strain. LBJ to GungaDan to ??? Be afraid, be very afraid.
Sounds like gossip, rumor and innuendo were floating around Camp Mabry to me. People always are eager to float around something juicy they've heard--until they have to come up with proof or sources.
I agree that the MSM doesn't seem interested, not like they are about who outed Valerie Plame. Trying to derail a presidential campaign using forged documents is vastly more serious than that.
ping...
To me this is a flat admission that this entire group had a tacit mission to install Kerry as the next president.
Right on!
Add to that..In the late October tape, Mr. Rigler suggested that CBS News was only interested in the documents if they could get them before the Presidential election.
Proof positive.....
WHERE ARE THE INDICTMENTS?
Or his discharge document, or his multiple conflicting citations including a one for a non-existant medal.
Your question is what drives me nuts about this whole story. After 8 years of Clinton, a president that openly and admittedly dodged the draft, why is the Bush service even an issue? Yes, Bush sought the ANG to avoid being drafted. So what? Kerry signed up with the Navy while still at Yale to avoid being drafted. Being drafted meant carrying a gun as a Marine or Soldier in the rice fields of Viet Nam. You did not get drafted to serve as a stateside pilot and a low level officer on a ship.
It would be nice to know the truth, whatever it is.
MoodyBlu
Excellent points. Agree!
On Sept. 2, 2004, Mr. Smith and Ms. Mapes met with Mr. Burkett and his wife, Nicki Burkett, in a Whataburger restaurant in Clyde, Tex. They discussed the possibility of procuring the Bush National Guard documents. Mr. Smith had worked with Ms. Mapes on a number of 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News pieces starting in 2000. He was hired again as a freelancer in August to work on the National Guard story.
"The road to the White House leads through the Clyde Whataburger" was the group’s joke.
This is blatant evidence that the intention was to bring down President Bush, yet the "panel" declared they could not find political partisanship as motive.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think Dick Thornburgh disgraced himself with the report this panel issued. Even without the above admission from the group that the reason for the story was to elect Kerry, it was clearly possible for the panel to have reached that conclusion based on the evidence we had on the public record.
"It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard," he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s. "It was just so very, very common. You know, he didn’t even show up out there during his whole eight-year tenure as governor and commander in chief of the Texas Air National Guard—not once did he go to Camp Avery. So most people just sort of looked at him as a draft dodger. They didn’t hold him in very high regard at all."
He continued: "The story—and I’m talking to some people at Camp Avery—the story about the files, the non-service, the memos, stuff like that, had floated around for years. For that reason, it makes you think it’s likely true."
Boy! I'm glad Rigler didn't bother us with dreary details like names when he made these claims about what "people" have said. Evidently he wasn't asked for them, either, as I don't see any reference to "Mr. Rigler refused to name the people he claims made these statements".
And we've had to be subjected to lectures from the MSM about what constitutes "real journalism"? We're not going to take it anymore. We demand documented facts.
Adios you fruitcake! Believe me, you won't be missed.
That's the short version of this article, in case anyone wants the Cliff's Notes.
CBS has never been interested in finding out the true origins of the forgeries; furthermore, CBS is not interested in looking itself in the mirror.
I wonder how any reasonable reporter, hell even ones with giant biases, could go with anything Bill Burkett handed them.
Burkett had a well known grudge against Bush and was unstable as any of them could see.
I would not be at all suprised if Burkett himself made the "documents" himself and sent Rigler and everyone else on a snipe hunt. That is an explanation that fits the facts better than these vaporus "leads" he gave them.
I am comming to the conclusion that these CBS reporters are every bit as stupid as they are biased.
What's with "Camp Avery"? That sounds like an Army Gaurd facility, not an Air Base. I thought Bush served most of his time in the TANG at the Ellington Field in Houston.
I can find no links for a Camp Avery. Any Texans know where/what it is?
If I were investigating this, Burkett would be the prime suspect. He is both obsessed with Bush and demonstratively unstable enough to have fabricated the documents without considering the consequences.
There is no indication that anyone even considered the possibility that Burkett made them. He handed them the documents that went on the air and lied about their provenance. That should have set off alarm bells.
Unless their collective stupidity rises to heights I cannot believe and I am speaking of their basic skills as reporters and sense of self preservation,not their political views, they must have so much invested in the authenticity of these documents they have to proceed as if they are real.
If Burkett simply fooled them, as is certainly the case in part, and probably in total, they look even worse. They went with bogus materal from a dubious source and do not even have a conspiracy beyond Burkett to blame it on.
Gosh, you're right! I wonder how that slipped by a "real journalist" like Joe Hagan?
Gosh, to me it raises questions about Rigler, who Hagan informs is a "former FBI agent". How could your obvious point have gotten by this "investigator" that Bush was never assigned to "Camp Avery", and more...I just Googled and can't find a Camp Avery in Texas. Maybe our intreped investigator and former FBI agent got lost...or maybe he's lying.
Did he tell the vaunted "panel" this tale of all of these people at "Camp Avery"? I can see how the "panel" couldn't make any judgements about CBS or their motives.
Color me more disgusted than ever (and I hope my comments are taken with the tongue in cheek tone they are meant to taken as).
What do you think of the posssibility of a prosecutor in Texas or elswhere going after Mapes ,Burkett, et al?
anchor called him at a Holiday Inn in Bozeman, Mont.,
I see a Holiday Inn/Whataburger conspiracy here
Uh oh!
The stuff about the rumors being all over "Camp Avery" for years so-there-must-be-something-to-it is hysterical, because they are essentially using Burkett's rumors from while he worked at Mabry to confirm his later credibilty on the Killian memos!
Burkett made a bunch of claims of seing discarded memos back in Feb/March of 2004, months before the CBS memos, plus weird claims of having "reassembled" the trash memos. Google various combinations of "James Moore, Burkett, trash, files, reassembled" and some of the articles from Spring 2004 will surface. Including this fascinating one:
The Cleansing of Bush's Gaurd Duty: White House Ally, George Conn, Caught in a Lie [sic]
How any rational adult could not seriously question whether Burkett had somehow "reassembled" the Killian memos he conveniently produced for CBS defies belief. They have just wanted to believe it for so many years, this has cropped up every election since Bush ran for Governor the first time in '94.
Burkett was peddling a version of lost Bush memos at least in early '04, and when that didn't have the desired effect, he just HAPPENED to finally find the missing documents that would prove what they just KNEW was the truth! It's a miracle, LOL!
The disgusting thing isn't that these professional journalists are a bunch of morons--it's that they think WE are.
Even if they screwed up the name of the post, they still need to tell us why they think a Pilot assigned to the Air National Guard at an Air Base in Houston should have been reporting to an Army Guard base in Austin?
"It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard," he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s.
Perhaps we give these newsies more credit than they deserve. Hell, even if your intentions is to produce a fraud, you still need to have basic facts if you want it to be believable. These people apparently don't even know the basics.
I would like to think something would be done but don't think so.
I was so disgusted with the "panel" and its report and I don't see any activity seeking to hold these people accountable.
It's outrageous and when I think of the dems/media having fits about the RATS ad (for one example that comes to mind) and compare that phony trumped up brouhaha to this real attack on the President I could spit.
I do not expect any legal action. Unfortunately.
Exactly.
Rather flat out stated they had an "unimpeachable source" for these fake documents and as you note, the public record documents what type of character that source, Burkett, was. Yet the vaunted panel couldn't make the conclusions that are writ large...practically in flashing neon.
I rarely write to journalists...but I have on occasion and I think Hagan is going to hear from me on this issue of where GWB was stationed.
It's so ironic that during the recent Gannon flap the media adopted their most sanctimonious attitudes and decided to lecture us about what constitutes a "real journalist".
bump for later
Not much of an effort was taken to find out who "Lucy Ramirez" was, and I'd be inclined to believe that Burkett just made the documents up himself if it weren't for that one little detail of the phone call from the Houston Holiday Inn. Somebody called Burkett, and it was almost certainly a dem political operative. I'm sure nothing short of a subpeona would get the guest list from that Holiday Inn on the day the phone call was made, but that could very well be the only way we'll ever know for sure who delivered the "memo's" to the fool Burkett. Hmmmm, freeper project anyone?
Here is my email to Hagan (Subject was the title of his article):
From your article:
"It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard," he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s. "It was just so very, very common. You know, he didn’t even show up out there during his whole eight-year tenure as governor and commander in chief of the Texas Air National Guard—not once did he go to Camp Avery. So most people just sort of looked at him as a draft dodger. They didn’t hold him in very high regard at all."
-end excerpt-
Point of fact: George W. Bush was never stationed at "Camp Avery". In fact, I can't find a Camp Avery in Texas.
George W. Bush was stationed (and appeared and served ) at Ellington Air Force Base.
Bill Burkett, however, served at Camp Mabry.
Why is Burkett granted one shred of credibility and what kind of fact checking goes on when dealing with someone like him? It appears he is free to babble to various media and these "real journalists" for some reason have decided he does not need any vetting whatsoever. It seems clear to me that Burkett's statements have time and again been demonstrated to be false. Therefore, I would expect the average person--let alone a "real journalist"--to take what he has to say with a shaker of salt.
At any rate, a correction is in order for the assertion that George W. Bush served at this "Camp Avery" and, since he did not, also correct the slam at him for not visiting this phantom camp.
Thank you,
Name and Town
True enough, but it also made him the perfect patsy to clean the true source of the documents, which I believe was either the DNC or the Kerry campaign. Burkett acting alone is certainly plausible, but someone placed that call from the Houston Holiday Inn. It could have just been an acqaintance of Burkett's and the time frame happened to work, but for some reason I just don't think Burkett was smart enough to come up with all of this on his own. "Lucy Ramirez" was probably real, and employed as a dem political operative using Burkett as the ideal mark. I also don't totally rule out that Rather and Mapes knew ahead of time that Burkett would be recieving the package, and just waited on the call from Burkett so they could press ahead with the story.
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