Posted on 03/15/2005 7:29:33 PM PST by lainie
As published in The New York Review of Books of April 7, 2005
Report of the Independent Review Panel on the September 8, 2004
60 Minutes Wednesday Segment “For the Record” Concerning President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard Service
by Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi.
January 5, 2005, 224 pp.
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.
http://www.jamesgoodale.net/pages/6/index.htm
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgoodale.net ...
This summary quote is attributed to Mary Mapes' husband, Mark Wrolstad (via Poynter Online):
"Former New York Times counsel James Goodale ... strongly and correctly questions whether the panel's work was complete or fair. He takes on the conventional ignorance that the Guard story was pushed onto the air without proper checking or vetting. In fact, the documents were carefully corroborated through interviewing, document analysis (which the panel mischaracterized) and a "meshing" of the new documents with the known record.
Mr. Goodale is the first to have access to the 40-page meshing analysis that Mary provided to the panel. He and Joe Hagan of the New York Observer are among the media few who have not accepted the panel's conclusions as inviolate.
The public will eventually know the full story behind the Guard story. Until then, truly inquiring minds at least have James Goodale."
I'll leave it to you to have fun with this. Let 'er rip!
He is the former Vice Chairman of The New York Times where he also served as its General Counsel. He represented the Times in the Pentagon Papers case and led the Times' legal team in that case. The Times' regular outside counsel, Lord, Day & Lord, refused to represent the Times since its senior partner, Herbert Brownell, the former Attorney General of the United States, disagreed with Mr. Goodale's advice that the Pentagon Papers could be published under the First Amendment. Mr. Goodale assembled a new legal team overnight and directed the strategy for the case which resulted in a resounding victory for The New York Times in the Supreme Court. According to Second Circuit Judge Robert Sack, who reviewed the book The Day the Press Stopped: The History of the Pentagon Papers, " Goodale is portrayed in the book as one of the heroes of the affair."
He hasn't heard that back-slappin' sixties' journalism livin' will get you laughed at these days. Join the new century, man!
"The known record"? Would that not consist of an honorable discharge?
Methinks Ms. Mapes and her collaborators take their fantasies too seriously.
Most definitely. And now they're apparently on serious spin patrol.
I think the secret word is "meshing", like meshing the known record with fictional ones.
Any attempt to justify those documents must be viewed as the product of a deluded mind.
There is nothing Mapes can say or do that can possibly justify a belief in the "accuracy" of those documents.
She's going crazy...in her own little self-made hell.
Well, she's taking first-amendment icon James Goodale with her. It's a bit surprising that he's not savvy enough to see what's going on here. The so-called rebels of that generation with media acumen just keep their mouths shut these days. Seems to me. The ones still blabbing are the famewhores and small minds.
Wonder where Mapes will end up. And what does this Mark guy husband do for a living?
Dear Mr Goodale,
Please call Art Bell (East of the Rockies - 800-825-5033) and explain to us how Microsoft Word was time traveled back to 1972.
Cordially,
BurbankKarl
Pajamadheen, Burbank Chapter
I caught that! Meshing. It sounds almost like a confession.
"James C. Goodale is former vice chairman and general counsel of The New York Times"
The strong odor of vermine is present. Methinks I detect bias.
Cartwright recites text from a book written by Rather decrying the "Hollywoodization of the news." In it, Rather wrote about "the feeling that what counts is the name on the marquee, not the integrity of your news."
And there we have the "Memogate" scandal in a nutshell. While everyone has focused on Rather-mania, almost no one has pursued the essential answer to the essential question: Real or fake, where did the memos come from?
Almost no one, that is.
A reporter for the New York Observer, Joe Hagan, has done a marvelous, if lonely, job of chasing the source of the documents. And while he has gotten no closer than the former National Guard employee who gave the documents to CBS, Bill Burkett, Hagan has raised a fascinating issue that few media outside of Texas have explored at all:
If these government documents are forgeries - and, my goodness, they certainly have struck some of us that way - why are the coppers not chasing down the source themselves?
As Hagan notes, forging a government document is against Texas law - see Chapter 32.21 of the Texas Penal Code.
It's not as though no one is interested in pursuing the matter as a crime. Last October, 51 members of Congress sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asking for just such an investigation.
An Abbott spokesman told me Friday that the AG kicked the matter over to the Texas Department of Public Safety. A Texas DPS spokeswoman told me a few minutes later that the state police were "not looking into it," off-handedly suggesting that it would be a "federal offense" and, therefore, a federal problem.
You sort of get the impression that everyone involved - cops, state attorneys, monthly magazines, independent investigators and nationally renowned junkyard dogs included - would just as soon assume the amorphous "Lucy Ramirez" had plopped the docs in Bill Burkett's lap, and leave it at that.
But, somehow, I really don't think the real junkyard dog is going to let the story end there.
You go . . . Joe.
Doug MacEachern
Gore was robbed, Kerry was cheated, Rather was unjustly abused, Mary Mapes is a folk hero, yada, yada, yada.
Oh, and Alger Hiss was innocent.
These folks live in an alternate universe. No connection to reality whatsoever.
So the investigators never verified that the documents were forgeries? ROTF. Everyone... EVERYONE knows they were forgeries.
Yeah, he and Mary seem incensed that the panel didn't waste time proving what everyone knows. If only government subcommittees were so sensible.
Ooooh! When Art gets his answer, I hope he shares it. I'd like to go back to 1981 and fix some stuff.
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