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June 07, 2006
Moron Mary Mapes
She just can't let it die:
Page Six restates the conservative canard that our report "was found to be based on forged documents." That is just not true, no matter how many times Page Six or the Washington Times or some bitter conservative blogger repeats it.
Hmmm, would "phony" documents be precise enough for you? How about "bogus" documents? How about documents that weren't worth the laser printer they were printed on?
When our story aired on September 8, 2004, it was savaged in an unprecedented outpouring of political vitriol. The Bush administration was then at the height of its ability to summon a terrifying whirlwind of criticism from right wing bloggers, hate talk radio yackers, FOX News "reporters," conservative columnists, and those hollering people whose heads always appear in little boxes on cable discussion shows. None of these critics cared anything about the facts of the story, only about their politics.
Pot, meet kettle. If anybody didn't care about the facts of the story, only her politics, it was Mary Mapes.
The laundry list of problems that critics claimed they saw in the memos has turned out to be bunk. There never has been any definitive proof that they were forged or falsified in any way, despite a multi-million dollar investigation into the story by Viacom.
Because Viacom knew that proving them forged would require checking every possible machine that could have created them. Quite sensibly they settled for proving that there were enough problems with the documents that they should never have been used.
The reasons we put them on the air remain valid: the content of the memos was corroborated by people familiar with Bush, his unit and his commander; the dates, times and details intricately matched what we know of the record; and two experienced and respected document analysts, who examined copies that had not been faxed or digitally recreated, concluded that the papers showed every indication of being real.
Bull. The Thornburgh Report notes:
Significantly, all four of the examiners told the panel that they informed Mapes and Miller that they could not authenticate the documents because they were copies. And her complaint about "faxed and digitally recreated documents" doesn't cut it; those were the versions CBS itself put online in support of the story.
Posted by pat at June 7, 2006 03:52 PM
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Comments
This is bordering on pathetic and sad. Shame on Huffington Post for enabling this and using it to feed their kook readers...
Oh, wait,...
Posted by: aaron at June 7, 2006 09:31 PM