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Mary Mapes website for her book Truth and Duty has a page labelled DOCUMENTS. On this page she has her famous "meshing" defense for proof that the memos were accurate. On November 16 she added 12 additional documents she got from the Texas National Guard Headquarters. Unwittingly, she posted documents that actually DISproved many of her arguments. Some of the documents were letters to the Guard Headquarters asking preferential treatment for the sons of important people, but the letters were actually refusals by the Guard commanders to these requests. They were only up for a day before someone at Mary's...

...Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired over the journalistic fiasco involving President Bush's National Guard service, is the latest in a line of lonely crusaders, defending her work more than a year after it was widely discredited. Dan Rather may have apologized for the story, an independent panel may have denounced it and CBS News may have criticized her "disregard for journalistic standards," but Mapes argues in her new book that the critics are either politically motivated, cowardly or just plain wrong. In challenging those who have questioned her work -- including The Washington Post and this reporter, who is...

November 09, 2005 Mary Mapes Names Names ("Anonymous" Ones) Posted by Bill An excerpt from page 201 of her new book: Within minutes of Buckhead's original posting, Freepers began to repeat and embellish Buckhead's thoughts. Not surprisingly, they all agreed with him, they all agreed with one another, and they all agreed this should be pursued aggressively. Freethinkers they are not. The Freepers and their lockstep like-minded fellow travelers moved as a group, like a school of sharks sweeping toward an unaware and unarmed victim. CBS was like some sunburned, overweight Florida tourist with a cut foot, floundering and flapping...

Mary Mapes is madder than a rained-out rooster, as her former boss, Dan Rather, might say. Mapes, the CBS producer who lost her job over last year's "60 Minutes II" story about President Bush's National Guard service, resurfaces with a reconstruction of that incident that savages just about everyone associated with it: conservative bloggers, the mainstream media, CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves, the Texas Air National Guard, even a few members of the Dallas Cowboys of the early 1970s. And that's just in the first 40 pages of Mapes's wonkishly named but compellingly told tale of a byzantine...

NEW YORK -- With its official-looking BBC News banner, the Web site looked real enough, but the sick tale it told seemed too preposterous to be true. "Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight," blared the headline. An article followed about a circus-like spectacle that went awry and resulted in many deaths. The page was a hoax, but it exploded across the Internet. Soon it was being repeated by bloggers, radio show hosts and a few newspapers. The New York Post published the yarn in its "Weird but True" column on May 20. The episode was another in a string...

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive. Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided...

Japan’s Sankei Shimbun reported Wednesday high-quality so-called Super X counterfeit US$100 bills were brought into Japan in March by a North Korean freighter. The notes are high-quality forgeries capable of fooling even electronic counterfeit detectors. Sophisticated notes nicknamed Super K circulated in Southeast Asia in the 1990s, but the Super X is much more accurate. Japanese police said 10 of 7,100 US$100 bills brought in by the captain of North Korean freighter Lee Myong Su 7, which docked in Tottori Prefecture on March 23, were Super X counterfeits, according to the paper. The skipper told police he was given the...

Now that the brouhaha over Dan Rather's "Memogate" scandal is no longer front-and-center in the national media, one has to wonder why there's been no closure to the issue of the documents themselves. Bill Burkett, the supplier of the documents to CBS, changed his story on the source of the documents, ultimately claiming that one "Lucy Ramirez" gave them to him. No one even knows who Lucy Ramirez is, if she exists of if she's another figment of Burkett's imagination. Surely, a scoop on where the documents came from would be huge. Reporters, even those at CBS could be working...

As Dan Rather steps down as anchor of the CBS Evening News on Wednesday, the person who deceived him with fake memos on President Bush's National Guard service last fall remains at large, spared from even the threat of a federal or state investigation. Both federal and state felony statutes exist that give law enforcement authorities the ability to pursue the culprit. But neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor prosecutors in Texas have taken up the cause. A spokesman at the Justice Department told HUMAN EVENTS that federal officials

Fired CBS Rathergate producer Mary Mapes is planning a tell-all book that could blow the lid off the scandal that ended Dan Rather's tenure as "CBS Evening News" anchorman and destroyed the credibility of the once-golden "Tiffany" network. Mapes, who obtained documents on President Bush's National Guard record that turned out to be forged, "is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal," reports the New York Observer. "The book will constitute Ms. Mapes’ defense against charges of journalistic misconduct," the paper says. Mapes' literary agent explained that...

Is there enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Maurice Hinchey has deserted his constituents in upstate New York's 22nd Congressional District and trotted off to Cloud Cuckoo Land? I'm referring to the Maurice Hinchey who, while speaking on Social Security to a meeting in Ithaca last Saturday strolled off topic to assert that Karl Rove, Minister of Dirty Tricks for the Bush Administration, had forged and planted the Rathergate memos. Hinchey: They've had a very very direct, aggressive attack on the, on the media, and the way it's handled. Probably the most flagrant example of that is...

February 15, 2005 League Blasts N.Y. Times re Pius XII A New York Times story smearing Pope Pius XII had about as much truth in it as the notorious "60 Minutes" Rathergate story that was based on forged documents, new facts show. The story in question is a piece in the Jan. 9 Times about an article in an Italian newspaper claiming to have uncovered a 1946 document implicating Pope Pius XII in a scheme not to return baptized Jewish children (who were hidden by the Vatican from the Nazis during the Holocaust) to their parents after the war. That...

At CBS, they still don't get it. The same holds true for the investigators of Dan Rather's "60 Minutes" report, which charged that George W. Bush, while in the Texas Air National Guard, used political pull to escape punishment for his insolent insubordination to a superior officer. For this story, at root, is about far more than just the blunders, deceptions and stonewalling of Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS. The real story is who was behind this criminal conspiracy to bring down a president of the United States, using fake and forged U.S. government documents, which is a felony. And...

Dan Rather was on the run, chasing big stories from New York to Florida to Texas and back to CBS headquarters in Manhattan. In less than a week: The Republican National Convention. A deadly hurricane. An interview for a blockbuster CBS investigation. Former President Clinton's open-heart surgery. [snip] Rather, 73, recalled somewhat vaguely that he had heard from his star producer that Burkett was a "straight-talking West Texan" with a reputation as a "truth teller." Had he turned to Google, though, the CBS anchorman would have found stories painting Burkett as something quite different: a highly controversial and disgruntled retired...

What's the newest word getting into the dictionary for the new year? Miriam Webster's editors announce it is "blog" — defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." So hoist a glass to toast perhaps the most famous "blogger" of 2004 — a brilliant Atlanta lawyer nicknamed "Buckhead." He's the pajama-clad fellow, along with a follow-up host of other Internet truth seekers, who struck a telling blow at anchor Dan Rather and his CBS TV "60 Minutes II" by quickly analyzing and questioning the proportionally spaced fonts...

CBS News is undoubtedly hoping that release of the Thornburgh/Boccardi Report, with its embarrassing admissions, will satisfy critics enough that the Rathergate scandal will be allowed to disappear into dim memory. They are wrong. Many observers, our own Clarice Feldman included, have been impressed by the extent of the incompetence (and worse) CBS has admitted with this internal report. Some, like Jim Geraghty, of National review Online, are concerned that critics of CBS should appear reasonable, and praise what is praiseworthy, while asking for more information, as a matter of political strategy. Already, Washington Post writers Howard Kurtz and Dana...

I, who never watch CBS News, spent yesterday afternoon, reading the lengthy Thornburgh/Boccardi Report. Within its considerable limitations, it is a fine, well-detailed view of the CBS TANG memo scandal. While it could have asked other questions, and utilized other investigative approaches (for example, analyzing the telephone records of various key individuals), given its methodology, it tells us quite a bit that is embarrassing to those who are paying for it. The Report reveals what most of us who don't watch network news already knew: CBS News is a shoddy operation all around, one more concerned with production values and...

John Podhoretz does a great job unpacking and re-assembling the information in the CBS Report, to show that: Mapes was not "focused on any particular event or topic." In other words, she had nothing to go on. And yet on she went, searching for a "viable story line." Mapes was on a gigantic fishing expedition. She was trying to bag a president. She did so with the consent and support of her superiors. With that aim in mind, she partnered up with one Michael Smith, a Texas journalist. Smith told her he had a "tasty brisket of information" to share...

RATHER STAYS HOME; EXECUTIVES SPLIT; MOONVES LOOKS TOWARDS FUTURE *Exclusive** CBSNEWS veteran Don Hewitt called Dan Rather's disappearance from Monday's Evening News "really stupid" during a damage control meeting on Monday, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. One top source inside the CBS Broadcast Center claimed Rather was told to stay off the air on Monday, as a form of punishment! Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer was called in to anchor the damaged ship. CBS staffers were shocked Monday when CBS president Les Moonves suddenly tied Rather's upcoming resignation to the phony document flap, a departure from CBS's official storyline. Moonves...

ARIS, May 29 — Italian and German investigators have disclosed fresh information suggesting that hints of an attack involving aircraft and the United States were more widespread among European law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11 than previously suspected.The disclosures come after weeks in which the Bush administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced a shake-up today, have come under sharp criticism that they did not pay sufficient heed to signs of Al Qaeda plots in the United States that may have alerted them to the Sept. 11 attacks.A Central Intelligence Agency spokesman said today that before Sept....