Hunter has posted an amazing interview with Mary Mapes on Daily Kos. Ms. Mapes was the producer of the infamous Sixty Minutes II broadcast which revealed to the world the truth about George W. Bush’s (dis)service in the Texas Air National Guard. She is also the author of a new book about that experience, Truth and Duty.
I realize this is my second link in two days to posts on Daily Kos, but this interview truly is fascinating and worth your time to read, no matter which side of the fence you happen to fall on. The right-wing bloggers absolutely hate Ms. Mapes (actually, they hate anyone who disagrees with their slanted view of the world). In this excerpt, she discusses why:
The criticisms of the documents’ physical characteristics — that typewriters couldn’t do that stuff in 1972 — have turned out to be pure bunk. The bloggers’ claims that the typing features showed the documents were forged were themselves a fraud. They succeeded, however, in hijacking the discussion about the story and even pulling the wool over the eyes of a lot of critics of George Bush and his Guard record. NO mainstream reporter (or blogger for that matter) has followed up on the fraudulent but very effective charges that radical right bloggers made and that other media repeated. Or on the many shortcomings of the so-called independent panel that CBS executives, in their panic, put together. It sure seems that the panel members, for the millions they were paid, could have fairly easily and definitively determined whether early-1970s typewriters had proportional spacing, for example. Lifelong Republican Dick Thornburgh, a team of lawyers from his firm, and former Associated Press chief Lou Boccardi conducted a legalistic, not journalistic, investigation. (Keep in mind that this panel concluded that we should not have included former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes in our 60 Minutes II story because we could not PROVE that he helped get George W. Bush into the Guard). Good grief.
The web site for my book, truthandduty.com, offers many newly found documents from the archives at Texas National Guard headquarters at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas, which clearly display the characteristics that conservative bloggers said were impossible on early 1970s-era typewriters.
These internal memos from the late ’60s and early ’70s, which researcher Steve Jones obtained, contain proportional spacing, which critics of the memos claim was “not invented” until much later. We also now have documents that were laid out in formats very similar to the Killian memos. The verbiage is very much the same, as are the abbreviations, the right-hand signature blocks, and other elements that came under fire immediately after our story aired in September 2004.
Bloggers and many reporters in the mainstream media used these criticisms as supposed “proof” that the Killian documents were “obviously forged.” They were wrong, but our best efforts at CBS to get people to slow down and realize that all of these characteristics were commonly available at the time the memos were purportedly written were knocked aside. Conservative critics just kept repeating mistakes until they’d said this long enough and loudly enough that truth no longer mattered. Bloggers on the far right badly wanted to believe the memos were “forged” and, to our great detriments, our media competitors were way too eager to play “gotcha” and show that CBS and 60 Minutes II and Dan Rather and Mary Mapes hadn’t done their jobs. The media declared that the memos were false, that conservative bloggers were the new kingmakers and that the story was destroyed. The problem is that those conclusions are simply incorrect.
The new documents now on my web site seem to have had little impact on the “freepers” or the Powerline followers. But then reality has no impact on these people. They just didn’t like the content of the story and they would have used anything to try to knock it down.
Luckily for them, they hit on the issue of fonts and thirty year old typewriter capabilities, something so mind-numbingly dull that no one cared to devote the time to seeing whether the critics’ charges were true or not. I had no choice but to chase the details of their type-related criticisms — which NO mainstream reporter has bothered to follow up on — and I ultimately obtained new material from the Texas Guard, which completely debunks the critics’ claims. Just as important, these new documents reveal that the true story of Bush’s service in the Guard is not settled. Not by a long shot.
