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September 9, 2004 Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and RALPH BLUMENTHAL ASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the National Guard came under renewed scrutiny on Wednesday as newfound documents emerged from his squadron commander's file that suggested favorable treatment. At the same time, a once powerful Texas Democrat came forward to say that he had "abused my position of power" by helping Mr. Bush and others join the Guard. Democrats also worked to stoke the issue with a new advertisement by a Texas group that featured a former lieutenant colonel,...

'Minutes' man gets Rather curt CBS legend Don Hewitt hasn't been shy about criticizing Dan Rather, but the grand old man of "60 Minutes" had stopped short of publicly recommending termination for the central figure in CBS News' painful 2004 Memogate flap. Until yesterday. "Should Dan Rather have been fired?" Time magazine managing editor Jim Kelly asked the 83-year-old Hewitt during a Court TV journalism panel at Michael's. "Yes," Hewitt answered. He suggested that the 74-year-old Rather - a "60 Minutes" correspondent since stepping down last March as "Evening News" anchor - was politically motivated in airing a controversial pre-election...

ROCKEFELLER SEDITION:WHO IS CALLING THE SHOTS?" Mia T, 01.14.06    MEMOgate: democrat party treasonSecret Democrat manifesto detailing the undermining of President Bush in wartime by the seditious misuse of classified intelligence data from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.     Saturday, November 08, 2003 If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin. The ones responsible - be they staff or elected or both - should be dealt with quickly and severely sending a lesson to all that this kind of action will not be tolerated, ignored or excused.   Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga....

Taylor, a Canadian blogger has uncovered a number of irregularities with Liberal ads that suggest that Martin purposely got in a dispute with the US for political gain. Take a look at the link.

I just noticed this after another freeper commented that the Wikipedia article on memogate was generally favorable to free republic yesterday. Literally a few moments after the post, some leftist wacko essentially rewrote the entire Wikipedia article on memogate using talking points that supposedly "refute" each evidence item that shows they were forgeries. He added a bunch of citations to TANG-Bush conspiracy sites and the site he used the most (12 times) was www.truthandduty.com. In case you don't know www.truthandduty.com is Mary Mapes' website pushing her new book. Here's the link of all the changes that were made - it'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...

This week, the book "Truth and Duty" by Mary Mapes, former CBS producer, was released. The book contains several inaccuracies in the description of my participation. Because the book is a public document, I see it as my duty to publicly state the truth about what I said and did.

MEMO-GATE On Friday, September 3, 2004, I was closing down my office and thinking about the Labor Day Weekend ahead when the phone rang and the caller asked whether I would be willing to work over the weekend on some important, time-sensitive documents. This was the beginning of my involvement in the examination of documents in the Bush National Guard Document/Memo-Gate news story. This week, the book "Truth and Duty" by Mary Mapes, former CBS producer, was released. The book contains several inaccuracies in the description of my participation. Because the book is a public document, I see it as...

Mary Mapes, making the rounds on her new book, appeared on The Situation Room today to argue her story with veteran reporter Howard Kurtz. Kurtz gave Mapes the HOWARD KURTZ: What is amazing to me Wolf is that 14 months after this story blew up we are still talking about a story that was retracted by CBS news, an independent commission found that Mary Mapes and her colleagues had failed miserably to authenticate. I can’t prove the documents aren’t real, but unfortunately for Mary, I sympathies for anyone who has gone through the battering she has, she can’t prove that...

Mary Mapes, the CBS producer that was in collusion with Dan Rather on the 60 minutes II MemoGate story has written a book about her adventures with "Dan Dan The News Man" and "Wild Eyed Bill Burkett". No reason to read the book unless you like modern day fables.  Mary is in fantasy land and is trying to pull everyone into her dreamworld and portray it as fact. TigerHawk &Little Green Footballshave more on Mary's imaginary journey. Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin, again...

Anyone else happen to catch Mary Mapes on CNN's American Morning just now? It was much the same stuff we heard last night on Larry King; however she sounds a tad more bitter and combative today. She deeply resents being made the victim of a "drunken blogging brawl (because that's what it was)". Good people, this tippling-in-front-of-the-computer has to stop now. Just imagine how we could change America if we were all posting sober.

RUSH: Okay, gotta hear this. We got a lot more sound bites of this, but this is the money sound bite. Brian Ross today talking to Mary Mapes of CBS says, "After 12 years of defending him, CBS and Dan Rather later admitted they couldn't vouch for the authenticity of the documents, Bill Burkett's documents, and that they should not have been used and the story should not have aired. Do you," Mary Mapes, "still think the story was true?" MAPES: The story? Absolutely. ROSS: This seems remarkable to me that you would sit here now and say you still...

Mary Mapes was Larry King and it was bizarre. The crux of her arguement is that the nature of her story on the Bush National Guard Service cannot be disproved. This disregards, of course, any journalistic responsibility for accuracy in reporting. Most interesting was the follow-on panel consisting of the former President of the AP, David Gergan and Michael Medved, all of whom absolutely destroyed her. How do people like her even have the nerve to ever appear in public again?

In her first interview since being fired, former CBS News producer Mary Mapes maintains that her controversial "60 Minutes II" story on President Bush's National Guard service was "true" and that "no one has proved that the documents were not authentic."... In her interview with ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, to be broadcast Wednesday morning on "Good Morning America," Mapes says she is unrepentant about her role. "I don't think I committed bad journalism. I really don't," she says.... Mapes says Rather did not have "any obligation to resign" from his position, as CBS correspondent Mike Wallace recently...

<p>"The scandal at CBS involved the use of phony documents to make charges against President Bush regarding his Air National Guard service that were not only unsubstantiated, but contradicted by evidence and information known to CBS at the time."</p> <p>In memory of Reed Irvine, founder of Accuracy in Media, AIM is awarding its first annual Reed Irvine Investigative Journalism award to two of the bloggers responsible for exposing Rathergate—Dan Rather's use of forged documents to smear President Bush. This episode was a milestone in the history of journalism.</p>

Document advised leaders to 'pull the trigger' on investigation A controversial memo [(aka Rockefeller Memo)] by a Democrat on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that surfaced in 2003 appears to contain the playbook party leaders used yesterday when they made the rare move of closing the chamber. The memo, offering ways Democrats could make the greatest gain from controversies over intelligence data used in the run-up to the Iraq war, says "we can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time." Democrats, the document advised, should, "Prepare to launch an independent investigation when...

When newly-promoted CBS News president Sean McManus gets around to chatting with Dan Rather about the fallout from his Bush National Guard story, we hope he uses more tact than Mike Wallace. According to sources inside the network, Wallace recently got into a shouting match with Rather after telling the disgraced journo he should have resigned over “Memogate”—while the two men were standing side-by-side at a urinal. The argument erupted in a men’s room at CBS headquarters in New York, we hear, after Wallace sidled up to his whizzing 60 Minutes colleague of three decades and told him he had...

If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald. We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion...

Here is a pretty good current summary of the situation: The Shot Heard Round the World   The echoes of the big Internet bang which annihilated a 60 Minutes story in under 12 hours are still resounding. The key riffs apparently started at Powerline and as Samizdata notes, the distributed intelligence of the Internet took over. Under the scrutiny of thousands of analysts, the CBS story began to melt down.   The start of it all:  Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard   -more- The Thread that broke the Camels Back:Post 47, and the Freepers who busted C.B.S. Let us...

RUSH: I want to now go to these Dan Rather sound bites. Dan Rather was interviewed last night at the National Press Club in Washington by former CBS News employee-reporter Marvin Kalb. Marvin Kalb now runs the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and you know something? When you hear these bites you're going to understand what I'm saying here. This is one of the problems of the mainstream media today. When these reporters that get long in the tooth get laid off or retired, they farm them out to these think tanks and these journalism...