Rather's Suit Against CBS Terminated By NY Court of Appeals

Dan Rather will not pass go and he will not get a chance to collect $70 million from CBS on his lawsuit against CBS claiming that CBS violated his employment contract. The Court of Appeals (New York's top court) upheld the Appellate Division's ruling in dismissing the case, meaning that Rather's out of luck.

The decision by the Court of Appeals upholds a September Appellate Division ruling that threw out the suit in which Rather disputed his removal as anchor of the "CBS Evening News."

The folksy Rather filed suit in 2007, saying he was bounced as an anchor and sidelined as a "60 Minutes" correspondent over a disputed 2004 report about President George W. Bush's Vietnam-era military service.

Rather claimed CBS suits were trying to make nice with the Republicans by taking him off the air.

A CBS spokeswoman said the network is pleased with the decision, while a lawyer for Rather did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rather had proffered a bogus story just days before the 2004 election using bogus documents claiming that President Bush had avoided his military service obligations in the Texas Air National Guard. The documents were shown to be bogus and created using modern computers and could not have been produced by the typewriters at the time but Rather continued to claim that they were fake, but accurate.

The motion to appeal was denied in a one sentence summation here.

Motion for leave to appeal denied with
one hundred dollars costs and necessary reproduction disbursements.

Krugman: Conservative Media Caused Holocaust Museum Shooting

Hey Paul Krugman.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).

But let’s not neglect the print news media. In the Bush years, The Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week, the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

What exactly has Krugman been smoking over there at the New York Times building? Have you not been paying attention to the news, as reported by your own paper? Heck, have you even bothered to do a Google search of James Von Brunn. You'd be disabused of the notion that somehow conservative media is to blame for the murder of security guard Stephen T. Johns.

Let me do the research that Krugman clearly refuses to do since it would severely undermine his thesis. Brunn was previously imprisoned for attempting to take over the Federal Reserve. He's a convicted felon who spent six years in prison and who needed a psych evaluation as well. He believes in more conspiracy theories than one can possibly imagine. He's anti government, anti Semitic, anti Christian, and a conspiracy kook that thinks that the Jews run the government, were somehow responsible for 9/11 (which was also a government conspiracy), Christianity is a hoax, and most recently believed that Obama was hiding his true background.

That doesn't quite fit with Krugman's narrative about conservative media. After all, he's been espousing anti Semitic claptrap for decades. He's been anti government for decades. The one overriding issue with Brunn is his hatred of Jews.

That has nothing to do with the conservative media. It has nothing to do with the media at all. He's an anti-Semite to the core, and that's been his driving force for decades.

And that core belief was there well before the so-called conservative media even existed.

As to the whole nonsense about the DHS report, Krugman again hasn't been reading his own paper. The leaked DHS report on right wing extremism (and it was entitled as much so left wing terrorist groups were not included) was ambiguous and vague and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano expressed regret at its publication, but on the aspect of former military somehow linking up with right wing extremists, the concern was that former Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan veterans would be ones to profile for, not veterans from World War II. After all, who could see an 89 year old geezer as the profile of a terrorist?

Instead, Krugman is basically attacking individuals like Glenn Beck. I can't say that I've ever watched or listened to Beck, but various clips of him show that he's unhinged, but no more so than someone like Keith Olbermann, who is a leftist who gets a fraction of Beck's audience.

As to the Washington Times, might I remind Krugman that the New York Times has repeatedly been kissing the ass of President Obama, and did everything possible to see that Obama was elected, including running nonsensical stories about GOP candidate John McCain and a supposed liason with a lobbyist that existed nowhere except in the demented minds of the reporters who got the editors at the Times to run with the story.

I might even remind Krugman that CBS once tried to throw the 2004 election for John Kerry with the bogus Rathergate documents. It took bloggers to not only uncover the deception, but those media outlets did all they could to push the fake but accurate meme, despite the overwhelming evidence that they were concocted and Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes purposefully overlooked the questionable circumstances of the documents and ran with the incendiary story because of overwhelming Bush-hatred.

That the Bush Administration sought a solitary mouthpiece to get its own opinion out there in the face of an overwhelming liberal media doesn't show malfeasance on their part, only that the media isn't doing its job.

Krugman is merely playing his own part - one hit wonder.

Perhaps he should stick to the economics, because his grasp of the facts, particularly in this instance is sorely lacking.

UPDATE:
Here's a copy of Brunn's criminal complaint, which notes that Brunn was charged under 18 USC 1111 (first degree murder) and 18 USC 930 (murder at federal facility), both of which are punishable by the death penalty. The crime was also videotaped, which means that the incident will be available for the jury to view.

Rather Reaching

"If at first you don't succeed, file another lawsuit" appears to be the mantra of Dan Rather and his "legal team." After getting their first suit tossed, they're back at it trying to claim that CBS blackballed Rather in the industry after his Rathergate fiasco. The judge had allowed Rather to resubmit a case against CBS, but this one will fare no better than the first.

Again, this all goes to credibility. If this ever makes it to discovery, Rather will have to face discovery requests by CBS and depositions that cut to the fact that he purposefully used bogus documents to make a hit-piece against President Bush on the eve of the elections with the hope of causing voters to vote against Bush. He claimed that the documents were substantiated by experts when none ever viewed originals, and they were clearly exposed as fraudulent and bogus by bloggers, including Charles Johnson who put together a handy-dandy flashing image showing how miraculously the supposed documents created in the early 1970s matched precisely a standard Microsoft Word document created with default settings - down to the font, kerning, and margins.

Judge Throws Out Most Claims In Dan Rather's Suit Against CBS

According to Media Bistro, the only claims that survived motion to dismiss were the contract claims. Everything else was dismissed on a motion for summary judgment.

VNewser has learned most of issues of the lawsuit have been dismissed. What remains is the contract dispute: whether Rather was utilized appropriately in the remaining months of his deal as a correspondent on 60 Minutes. Jim Quinn, lead counsel for CBS tells TVNewser, "We're thrilled with the results. The core of the allegations of fraud and fair dealing have been thrown out. What's left is a garden variety contract dispute."

In the meantime, the contract dispute part of the case continues, perhaps for the next several months. "At the end of discovery, we'll move again for a summary judgment" to dismiss, says Quinn.

If that's confirmed, then in other words, even with the evidence proffered thus far by Rather and taken in the light most favorable to him, he didn't meet the evidenciary requirements to maintain the case.

Other wire services are making note of the case, reporting that the case will go forward, but the cases against three of CBS executives was dismissed.

A Manhattan judge has allowed Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. to go forward but has dismissed portions that named 3 of the companies' executives.

Judicial Hearing Officer Ira Gammerman on Thursday struck down the parts of the suit that name Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, CBS President Leslie Moonves and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

Rather's last months at CBS were clouded by a disputed story on President Bush's Vietnam-era military service. The Texan says his employers made him a "scapegoat" to placate the White House after questions arose about the story.

A lawyer for all of the defendants, James Quinn, says: "We are very pleased with this. The rest is what we consider a garden variety contract dispute."

I'm sure Rather couldn't wait to get the frequency on the legal truck that ran him over.

Get Your Popcorn: Rathergate Trial Moving Forward With Discovery

It looks like former CBS News anchor Dan Rather will indeed get his day in court. On Wednesday evening Justice Ira Gammerman of the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan made a preliminary ruling denying the TV network's motion to dismiss Rather's $70 million lawsuit. "I think discovery should go forward," said Gammerman. Rather's suit, you'll recall, claims CBS unfairly shuffled him off the air after that infamous 60 Minutes Wednesday story about Bush's performance (or lack thereof) in the Texas National Guard. Rather alleges that being shown the door was just the network's misguided attempt to placate the White House and shield CBS's then-parent company Viacom from political fallout. You know, the usual reasons for dismissal from a high-profile media job.

Now that the case will be moving forward, Rather's lawyer Marty Gold wants CBS to start forking over internal emails and documents to prove his case, including exchanges between network brass and the White House. Naturally, this has CBS lawyers asking the court to limit the scope of the discovery. "It seems pretty clear they don't want to produce [the documents]," said Gold.

The article is clearly biased towards Rather, because discovery is a two-way process. Rather is going to have to get into the chair and testify as to his own conduct in this matter, where he and his producer used bogus and fabricated documents to claim that President Bush never completed his Texas Air National Guard service as required.

CBS doesn't want to produce tons of materials - that's what all defendants do, but you can be sure that they're going to be asking lots of uncomfortable questions of their own of Mapes, Rather, and everyone else involved in the process. And the end result isn't going to be pretty for Rather. Or CBS, which allowed Rather to ruin the network's reputation (such as it was) by peddling bogus documents as a legitimate story.

Pun-able

It's been quite a while since any of us has ever seen a grouping of news stories that can provide headlines so ripe for punning.

Norman Hsu - who's nefarious activities and criminality span the coasts. He's accused of running a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors of $60 million, bundling millions of dollars for Democrats, including Hillary, Biden, Obama, the DSCC, and dozens of other Democrats across the country, and was a fugitive in California for leaving the country to avoid sentencing on a grand theft conviction.

Dan Rather - he's back in the news. Actually, he's the news as he's filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS over the Ra^thergate mess and he and his lawyers still think that those bogus documents are fake but accurate.

Last, but not least, is the mother of all media salivations:

OJ Simpson.

Is this a great country or what?

Rather Delusional

Yesterday, I noted that Dan Rather is filing a lawsuit against CBS for not getting enough airtime following the Rathergate mess. Well, today brings a copy of the actual complaint, and it's a laugher. Actually, it is tragicomic since it shows just how delusional some people are about the whole incident and the lengths to which some people will go to grasp at straws.

I'll let Beldar take it from here:

The law firm that Rather has retained, Chicago-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, is indeed a good firm. The complaint that Sonnenschein's New York office has filed on Dan Rather's behalf, however, is a nicely buffed and polished piece of garbage. The lawyers who wrote it appear to have been infected with Rather's own delusions, as becomes clear when one gets to numbered paragraph 3 on the second page:

The Broadcast incorporated copies of documents written by Mr. Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian ("Documents"), corroborating important aspects of the story.

Not "purportedly written" or "allegedly written," mind you, but just "written." Later in the complaint (at pp. 19-21), while not quite affirmatively asserting that the "Documents" are indeed genuine, Rather's lawyers come very close to that by alleging that Erik Rigler, a private investigator hired by CBS, had reported to a CBS executive that "he was of the opinion that the Killian Documents were most likely authentic," but that Rigler's conclusion was covered up in the report of the CBS Investigatory Panel, and that CBS then prevented Rather from having any further contact with Rigler.

Well, this further supports the whole idea that discovery will prove to be quite entertaining because CBS will have to show exactly how they came to the conclusion that the documents were not authentic. Heck, CBS expressed reservations about the authenticity of the documents even before the segment ran. Their limited investigation, resulting in the Thornberg report, was not nearly as conclusive as it should have been, and that's probably due in part to limiting the collateral damage to only those immediately affected by Rather, and not the CBS News division or CBS at large.

Discovery may show just how far down the rabbit hole things went, and CBS might have to revisit the authenticity of the documents once again - this time to conclusively show that they were frauds as part of their case.

After the Bush documents segment ran, all heck broke loose, as the documents were examined closely by a bunch of pajama clad bloggers, who discovered among other things - problems with the lingo contained in the documents that suggest that whoever wrote them was not familiar with policies and practices of the Texas Air National Guard, the documents themselves appeared to match fonts and spacing common to a Microsoft Word document using default settings, and not a typewriter common to the era (1970s).

As it is, Rather has managed to find a lawyer just as delusional as he is. His lawyer, Martin Gold, believes that the documents were never proven to be frauds. Right.

Rather and his cronies at CBS never authenticated the documents despite his claims to the contrary and there are so many questions about where and how he came to obtain them that verification is dubious at best. The means and methods by which Rather claims to have verified the documents is dubious - giving only selected portions to experts, or giving them photocopies of the originals, rather than the original copies.

The fact that one of the document matches up perfectly with a Microsoft Word document, when Microsoft was a mere flicker in the eye of Bill Gates suggests that document was nothing more than a poorly crafted fraud.

Still, I expect one of two possible scenarios at this point: 1) CBS to craft a motion for summary judgment to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a cause of action; or 2) a settlement without this every going beyond the filing of the complaint.

Rather probably looked at what happened with Don Imus and figured that he had a shot at cashing in, and therefore larded up a farcical complaint in the hopes that it might cow CBS into doling out a few bucks to keep things quiet. He may be right, but that will not change the authenticity of the documents - they're just as bogus today as they were when they were first presented.

UPDATE:
From Kurtz's WaPo piece, which lays out the history of Rathergate:

Several document experts hired by CBS said later that they had not authenticated the memos, as the network originally claimed, and the commander's former secretary said she did not type them. The source who gave CBS the documents, Bill Burkett, initially said he got them from a fellow National Guardsman. But Burkett later admitted he had lied to the network and could not establish that the papers came from the commander's files.

CBS aired the story on Sept. 8, 2004, at the height of the presidential campaign, hours after White House official Dan Bartlett did not challenge the authenticity of the memos when asked about them by CBS. Bartlett said later that he had no way of knowing on such short notice whether the memos were real.

Gold, Rather's lawyer, maintained that "nobody's proved the documents were forgeries. The way we look at it, it's more than likely the documents are authentic."

An outside panel, appointed by CBS and headed by former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief executive Lou Boccardi, accused the network of having "failed miserably" to authenticate the memos and of making false and misleading statements in defending the story afterward. Three top executives resigned under pressure, and Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, was fired.

Gold is claiming that this is all to restore Rather's name and reputation. I don't think so. I think it's about seeking filthy lucre and cashing in because the facts and law do not support his position. He's left to pounding on the table, not unlike a petulant two-year old who has just been caught lying.

Dan Rather Sues CBS Over Lack of Airtime

Here's a memo for Dan Rather. When you produce a story based on bogus documents and then use nonexistent sources to verify said bogus documents, don't expect your employer to give you choice assignments or air time. Indeed, count your blessings that you've got a job at all.

You should have been resigned to the ash heap of history for your stunt to manipulate the outcome of the US Presidential elections with just days to go, but instead, you still manage to get air time.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.” As plaintiffs, the suit names CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its chief executive, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

No, what happened was you claimed that you found memos showing President Bush's Texas Air National Guard record was something less than sterling.

What a bunch of pajama clad bloggers found was nothing more than a fraud and hoax. The documents claiming to be made contemporaneously with Bush's service in the 1970s, was instead found to match precisely the default settings of a Microsoft Word processing document. The type font did not match that which would be found in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard, and no sources could come forward to show that the documents were valid.

Instead, we got fake but accurate nonsense from Rather and leftists who thought that if you bluster enough, you might get someone to believe the documents even if the documents themselves weren't valid.

UPDATE:
Bummerdietz salivates over the possibilities during discovery. It should be rich fodder indeed.

Someone Is Lying

Ann Althouse points out what I and others have been saying from the outset in the ScottScam mess at The New Republic.

Someone is lying.

If that someone (or group of people) is lying to the US Army, they're going to face serious repercussions under Army regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they're lying to TNR, the problem becomes TNR's.

Note that the US Army says that they interviewed all members of Beauchamp's unit and found no truth to the matters asserted in Beauchamp's TNR pieces. TNR claims that they spoke to five members of Beauchamp's unit and TNR claimed that they corroborated Beauchamp's story.

The Army said this week it had concluded an investigation of Beauchamp's claims and found them false.

"During that investigation, all the soldiers from his unit refuted all claims that Pvt. Beauchamp made in his blog," Sgt. 1st Class Robert Timmons, a spokesman in Baghdad for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan., said in an e-mail interview.

That's the Army's angle, and they investigated the matter under oath. Those who made statements did so with the threat of violating the UCMJ if they lied. So, what did TNR do? Well, they didn't exactly fact check before publication, and it took questions from milbloggers and curious readers to get TNR to reexamine Beauchamp's work:

After the pieces were questioned, the magazine said it extensively re-reported his account, contacting dozens of people, including former soldiers, forensic experts, war reporters and Army public affairs officers.

The New Republic said it also spoke to five members of Beauchamp's company, all of whom corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes but requested anonymity.

Actually, TNR never named any of their sources - in the military, forensic experts, or war reporters. They did mention Major Lamb, but his comments saying that the Army found Beauchamp's pieces were baseless was curiously missing from TNR's 8/2 statement. TNR continues to ignore the US Army position in its ongoing hole-digging exercise.

Ace still wonders how TNR is counting their corroborating witnesses. Hot Air notes that TNR's vacation can't last forever [me: sure it could - a permanent vacation could be forthcoming for the editors who pushed the bogus stories in the first place and then defended the indefensible]. When you have the AP and other outlets banging down the door asking questions on the journalistic ethics of running the Beauchamp stories, you know you have problems.

UPDATE:
Michael Goldfarb weighs in on the latest AP report.

UPDATE:
TNR's behavior has gone into Rathergatesque territory. As you may recall, CBS claimed that they had experts review the materials and they claimed it proved the veracity of the documents showing that President Bush didn't complete his service in the Texas Air National Guard and that his reviews were less than stellar. Well, those experts turned out never to have actually seen the documents.

TNR claimed to have gotten in touch with the manufacturer of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which was featured in one of Beauchamp's pieces, and was last seen running over dogs and running through reinforced concrete buildings.

Well, Bob Owens got in touch with Doug Coffey [ed: incorrect attribution/typo fixed], who is spokesman for BAE, which makes the Bradley. That's when things got interesting.

Let's just say that the permanent vacation option for editors at TNR just got a whole lot more real.

UPDATE:
Did someone say Permanent Vacation?

Over and Out and the Black Eye

CBS, WFAN, and Viacom have caved to pressure from the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and canned Don Imus. Eight days after Imus uttered that reprehensible phrase (transcript here), CBS determined that it went over the line and fired Imus.

CBS has been down this road before (see Rathergate). They wanted to test the waters. They didn't act to force an apology the day after the incident happened, and Imus was claiming that it was a joke gone awry. Then the likes of Sharpton and Jackson got involved and things took on a life of its own. Executives apparently didn't think there was much of a problem after the segment happened and only began to consider the situation to be serious once Sharpton and Jackson got involved.

Just a day ago CBS President Les Moonves was considering the options. What changed between yesterday and today other than the fact that they axed Imus in the middle of the annual telethon that supports the foundation founded by Imus to help kids with cancer among other charities? More sponsors decided to pull out and MSNBC canceled their simulcast. Money was quickly becoming an issue, but the sponsors were reacting to what Sharpton and Jackson were doing, not necessarily because they had a problem with Imus - who's been paid handsomely over the years because he generated tens of millions of dollars a year for all involved.

Imus made his apology (multiple times) however forced or coerced it may have been. He was supposed to meet with the Rutgers team that he denigrated to discuss the matter face to face. That goes by the wayside (and was not canceled because of despite a completely unrelated incident when Gov. Corzine was injured in a car crash on his way to attend the meeting).

"There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society," CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision. "That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision."

If that was the consideration, he should have been fired long ago for various other indiscretions and hateful statements made on various broadcasts. Yet, no action was taken then, and none was taken until today.

Why did Moonves act now and not against others within the organization that have engaged in other acts that affect young people, minorities, and women?

CBS canned him because he supposedly violated some kind of standards. This is what I find so incredible distasteful. If he violated the standards last week, CBS should have fired or suspended him on the spot. They chose not to until pressure from outside sources became too great.

So much for standards. That's just cover for the fact that the suits thought that the network might suffer more economic harm by keeping Imus on than by letting him go.

Then, there's the issue of applying those standards to other aspects of CBS and CBS sister companies. How about applying those standards to the other divisions of Viacom (CBS's parent company). Movies? Music? Television?

CBS had no problem considering a season of the show Survivor where the participants were split along racial lines and didn't change its tune until people complained about the concept. No action was taken against the people who thought up that idea.

CBS had no problem trying to defend the wardrobe incident at the Super Bowl where Justin Timberlake ripped a portion of Janet Jackson's top revealing her nipple for all the world to see over and over and over again on TiVo. How long did the network stonewall on that one? No action was taken by the network against those involved.

Imus claimed originally that it was part of a joke gone awry. To him, it was art. Is that any different than Snoop Dogg saying nasty things about women? Oh, is there a difference because Dogg lived in the neighborhoods about which he sings and writes exploitative lyrics and Imus is an Upper Manhattan rich white guy?

The problem here isn't solely Imus. The problem is the way CBS operates. We saw problems with the way the network handled Rathergate. That was a big black eye for the network, and yet network executives are still tone deaf over crisis management.

There's a larger issue over the way people react to indecency and repugnant speech. Everyone has a right to free speech and a freedom from government interference in that right, but that doesn't prevent companies from acting to fire people who make stupid comments. I don't agree with the firing or its timing, but the company was well within its right to do so. Demanding that the FCC get involved or having politicians getting involved demanding he be fired were uncalled for here since there were no laws broken. This is one of many gray areas that people like Imus have inhabited for years. That doesn't just include talk show hosts, but cable television programs and other media outlets.

The inconsistency over standards and what people find decent or indecent is the issue. Consider that ABC has no problem allowing Rosie stay on the air despite the despicable and hateful things she's said (not to mention stunningly stupid things relating to 9/11 conspiracies). No one called for her to be fired.

Opie and Anthony got run off regular radio and ended up on satellite radio because of an on-air stunt that. Now they're back on regular radio. Bob Grant was also fired and ended up back on the radio some time later, but never recovered from the incident where he made insensitive comments about Clinton era Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who died in a plane crash.

So, who will replace Imus in the morning? That's going to be none other than Mike Barnicle, who was a frequent guest on Imus's show. Barnicle has issues of his own, including being involved in a plagiarism scandal and fabricating a story. This is who CBS thinks is a suitable replacement? Then again, they just fired one of Katie Couric's producers for plagiarizing a piece on libraries. They must have a blind spot for folks who have ethical or moral problems.

Actually, Paul at Wizbang has the kicker of the day: Don Imus was fired and Mike Nifong still has his job.

UPDATE 4/13/2007:
Despite Gov. Corzine's serious car crash, the meeting between Imus and the team went on for three hours and was described as being very intense and productive.

The Jamil Hussein Saga Continues

Curt at Flopping Aces has a definitive posting on where we are with the hunt for Jamil Hussein. He notes recent developments, including Confederate Yankee's demands for AP to take major corrective actions, along with a tantalizing possibility that Hussein was in cahoots with the fedayeen Saddam.

He also notes that the AP is consistently reporting casualties at twice the rate of the Iraqi or MNF-I. Something has to give here. Someone isn't telling the full story, and it would behoove everyone to get the facts straight. If the media is consistently reporting inaccurate information, it makes it all but worthless as a source.

What do we have thus far? There may be several Jamil Husseins, and one of them might not even be a Hussein. How exactly is AP sourcing its stories under such circumstances? Well, they've figured out that they wont take as much flack if they simply run the anonymizer and don't attribute their stories to anyone. Sorry, but that doesn't cut it. It might make it more difficult for bloggers to track down the sources of various incidents that are alleged to have occurred, but the stories have to be substantiated in some form or another. If X number of people were killed or wounded in an attack, there would be a paper trail. Let's see it. Police or hospital records? MNF-I or Iraqi military response to scenes of bombings? It's there for reporters who actually want to report instead of inventing or exaggerating news.

This goes beyond whether Jamil Hussein exists (after all, if you throw enough money around in Baghdad these days, you could get invented Jamil Hussein(s)). It's about the verification of multiple news stories that have questionable sources. You would think that AP would want their stories verified, but their continued stonewalling makes it clear that they're worried that their reporting will turn out to be less than stellar.

Others blogging: Patterico, Hot Air, Winds of Change, Jules Crittenden.

UPDATE:
Wuzzadem takes down the AP frame by frame.

UPDATE:
In a far more serious update, it would appear AP is trying to cover up its tracks by rewriting its earlier articles to delete confirmation of burned bodies by morgue workers. Now, why would AP do this? The original version can still be found at the USA Today. Ace calls this amateur hour but posted the flaming skull because it would appear to be a purposeful act to hide their malfeasance. I'd call this purposefully withholding and/or altering evidence after the fact. Instead of using the Reuters playbook of handling a crisis, they're running with the CBS News one. We know how the CBS Rathergate story ended. Black eyes for CBS News and Dan Rather forced out along with Mary Mapes.

UPDATE:
Others picking up the story of the AP trying to rewrite its coverage and the Jamil Hussein story in general: Don Surber, Mary Katherine Ham, Pajamas Media,

Cassandra is still not willing to jump on the bandwagon, and I can understand her reluctance, but here's the thing; the AP is acting in a mighty suspicious way if they didn't do anything wrong in their reporting, editing, and processing of the story.

UPDATE:
Allah at Hot Air also wonders whether AP is covering its tracks, but thinks that the omission of key details included in earlier reporting and subsequently stealthily removed suggests that AP wasn't confident of the facts. The question would then become why didn't AP issue clarifications or retractions of those key details which would otherwise have provided color on the story. Others picking up the story: Wake Up America, Bill's Bites, and Patterico.

Technorati: fauxtography, jamil hussein, journalism.

NYT Public Editor Admits Publication of SWIFT Story Wrong

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

The source of the data, as my column noted, was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. That Belgium-based consortium said it had honored administrative subpoenas from the American government because it has a subsidiary in this country.

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken.

The basic facts of the situation have not changed in the intervening months. The Times published not only details of the SWIFT story, but that of the NSA program to track calls into the US from foreign sources.

It takes three months to realize that these stories undermine US national security? That there was no illegal activity on the part of the US government? Or that the NYT should have held the stories because of the beneficial data that these programs could provide in deterring and thwarting terrorism against the US and our allies?

UPDATE:
Quite a few folks are taking Calame to task for admitting his error. The problem is that it wasn't simply his error. It was the error of the editorial staff - up to and including Bill Keller - who believed that their judgment was better than that of the Administration to determine what was an important national security issue and what should be published for all the world to see.

They substituted their judgment for that of the elected Administration.

Calame admits he was wrong. Great. The damage has already been done. He admits that he let his passions get in the way of making the correct call on the SWIFT story. What else has he and the editorial staff at the Times gotten wrong because of their passions. It's revealing that he mentioned passion, because it underlines the serious problems at the Times, Washington Post, and other national media outlets who have run stories exposing national security programs based more on the gotcha principle than on sound judgment. Passion and politics over national security during a time of war when anyone following the counter terrorism news knows that tracking the money can lead to undercovering terror threats and improve national security for the US and our allies.

Ed Morrissey has more. Patterico wants Calame to resign. I disagree. Calame has owned up to his mistake, though three minutes late. Keller has not, and he was the one who made that decision to publish. Calame should resign because he appended his mea culpa to a completely unrelated story.

Dan Riehl suggests keeping Calame right where he is, admitting that the Times doesn't like Bush.

That his newspaper published the SWIFT story in a moment of gotcha journalism when there was no story there, and made details of that program more widely distributed, shows a lack of good judgment that is pervasisve at the Times.

Macranger thinks that this is laying the groundwork for even worse times ahead at the Times.

Others blogging: The Anchoress, Sister Toldjah, Michelle Malkin, JunkYard Blog, Tom Maguire, Discarded Lies, Eugene Volokh, and Greg Tinti.

UPDATE:
Powerline dissects the claims that the Bush Administration engaged in vicious criticism of the paper for its publication of the SWIFT program details. Perhaps Calame is confusing the Bush Administration for the legion of bloggers who castigated the Times for the publication of the NSA program, SWIFT program, and other details that could prove beneficial to terrorists and undermine US national security.

Don Surber notes that if the New York Times made a mistake, it reflexively had to blame Bush for the mistake. And Calame didn't place the blame for the fiasco on Keller et al.

Chapomatic is impressed at the skill Calame exhibits in burying the lede.

Secular Blasphemy notes the curious priorities of Calame and the NYT. Politics over national security.

Quite a few folks are noting the Emily Litella/SNL skit ('never mind') in relation to Calame and the Times' treatment of the SWIFT program along with questioning the timing (why did it take three months to realize the serious mistakes made in publication of the story): Flopping Aces, Lorie Byrd, The Squiggler, Carol Platt Liebau, Bill Quick, Newsbusters, Blue Crab Boulevard, Right Voices, and Rathergate.

Technorati: calame, swift, byron calame, nyt, keller, national security.

The Photo Wars

The current conflict in Lebanon and Northern Israel continues to bring indelible images to inboxes, news sites, television sets, and webcasts. The scenes show carnage on both sides of the border, and civilian casualties are hard to look at, especially those that include children.

That's why questions about photographs taken in Lebanon are problematic. Do they portray the scene objectively without editing, corrections, or staging or have the photographers taken liberties with the scenes to enhance their physical appearance and/or emotional impact?

The questions were first raised on some of the photos belonging to Adnan Hajj, whose collection of 920 photos has now been pulled by Reuters because two of his photos clearly show that they were photo edited in violation of Reuters standing policy on editing images for publication.

Those photos include the usage of a clone stamp tool to exaggerate smoke rising from buildings in Beirut and adding flares fired from Israeli jets flying missions over Beirut. The two photos are most obvious frauds, but there are several classes of hijinks involved, and Zombie has put together a handy dandy guide to the problems (specific to Reuters, but the types of problems can be applied to other media outlets):

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

It's getting to the point that it's almost impossible to keep track of all the hijinks. Some of these are wild goose chases, where items that appear to be out of order can have plausible explanations or have scientific explanations. Others are far more difficult to explain, or show signs of being staged or photo edited.

Photos of the same scene appear to be recycled in one instance - Drinking at Home has the details.

Problems aren't just confined to photos. Captions are also a huge problem. Too many members of the media are completely ignorant of things military. Anything that has a track is considered a tank, such that self propelled artillery has been called tanks, rockets are confused with artillery shells, and then there's the whole nomenclature issue of calling Hizbullah a terrorist group.

Rockets fired from Lebanon are mischaraterized as being fired from Israel, and there are even questions over how those photos were captured in the first place.

Individuals are captured on film, and the background appears to change significantly but there's no way to know whether the photos are what they claim.

While Reuters has been hit hard by this problem, the company has taken swift action to get ahead of the problem by killing the photos and firing the stringer, Adnan Hajj. Reuters appears to have learned from the Rathergate fiasco by dealing with the problem quickly. Problem is that the photo kills do not eliminate the photos that have already been published in magazines, newspapers, or on websites and used as propaganda, which was their original intention. It also doesn't deal with the internal problems that let these photos get published all along.

The most important thing to realize is that this problem isn't confined to Reuters. Other media outlets are going to get hit by this mess. The New York Times has a captioning problems at a minimum. Gateway Pundit has the details, but it appears that there are problems with captions, if not with posed shots to maximize the effect for Hizbullah propaganda purposes. Michelle Malkin has further details.

Allah notes more smoke and fire with the US News and World Reports cover.

Photos are being taken down all over the place, including one at the Washington Post.

Some think that this is all about framing the issue. Well, some issues are better framed than others.

And reporting from South Lebanon means dealing with the devil - quite literally. Hizbullah controls the reports coming out of Hizbullahland, and they take their control quite seriously. Threats to journalists are not uncommon. They take journalist passports as a matter of doing business. LGF has more. Indeed Michael Totten was hassled by Hizbullah last year and wrote about his experiences:

There were two separate entrances, one for women, the other for journalists and VIPs. A gaggle of Hezbollah security agents manned the doors. Several sat behind a long table. This, apparently, was where I was supposed to check in.

I showed my passport and press credentials to the man who looked like he was in charge. He stuffed them in his briefcase.

“Which hotel are you staying at?” he said.

I didn’t like the idea of telling Hezbollah where they could find me. Fairly or not, they are listed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. But I answered his question. I didn’t tell him I planned to move into an apartment two days later.

A security agent stepped behind me as I scribbled in my notebook while I waited. He craned his neck and tried to read over my shoulder. I frowned at him and abruptly turned so he could not read what I was writing.

I hadn’t noticed, but a military band was assembling behind me. The drummer banged once on his drum like a rifle shot. I jumped in my seat. A Hezbollah security agent who looked distinctly Iranian laughed not with me but at me.

More journalists showed up and were allowed to enter the building with minimal hassle. What was their problem with me? My passport and press ID were stuffed into the briefcase and that was that. They were making me wait for no apparent reason at all.

Intimidation and threats are par for the course of a terrorist group. This is how they do business all the time, and it's even more apparent as the fighting continues that Hizbullah is doing all it can to control the flow of information out of Hizbullahland because the reality would show just how badly beaten Hizbullah has been in the fight despite the rocket launches on Israel and Israeli soldiers they've managed to kill.

We've repeatedly seen Hizbullah exaggerate its success against Israeli forces, claiming hundreds of Israelis killed, tanks wrecked, planes downed, ships sunk, and mass carnage in Israel. The reality is quite different, and Confederate Yankee calls this the ghosts in the media machine. Hizbullah so tightly controls the media images coming out of South Lebanon that you would be hard pressed to know whether a single Hizbullah rocket launcher has been destroyed or Hizbullah member killed. The only images coming out are those approved by Hizbullah - namely those showing ostensible civilian casualties, particularly women and children and shattered buildings. Israel has published videos and still images of their view of the battlefield, including videos showing Hizbullah rockets launched from and between residential buildings or rocket launchers driving along roads to dart into buildings to hide. Hizbullah is doing all it can to win the media war, and unless and until the world's media ceases doing business with Hizbullah, the terror group will continue to get its message out to Israel's detriment.

Investors Business Daily thinks Reuters is quickly becoming the source of your anti-Semitic, anti-war buck up. That's the problem when you're relying upon stringers in Lebanon some of whom do not have a problem shilling for Hizbullah.

A new term has been coined out of this mess: Fauxtography.

You can bet that this issue will continue snowballing as Ace of Spades warned. This is far from over. Media companies must do a far better job of picking out both the obvious and nonobvious frauds, setups, and exaggerations in the photos coming out of Lebanon and must do better factchecking on the captions attached to them. And those that aren't caught will be picked up by the bloggers, who have already shown that the factcheckers and editorial controls thus far have been wholly inadequate.

UPDATE:
There are multiuse buildings, and then there are multiuse buildings. When you have captions saying that the same building is bombed and destroyed on three different dates, all with identical damage, one ought to wonder about them. Whether its caption problems or photographers lying about the content, who knows for sure.

Technorati: beirut, photoshop, adnan hajj, smoke, photo manipulation, reuters, fauxtography.

The Phrase That Pays

This document is of limited evidentiary value.

That's the phrase that pays, and one that CBS probably wishes it had used when it ran bogus documents as proof that Bush lied about his service in Rathergate. This is the phrase that ABC News is using in association with one of the documents captured in Iraq and now translated into English that show linkages between Saddam and al Qaeda:

(Editor's Note: The controversial claim that Osama bin Laden was cooperating with Saddam Hussein is an ongoing matter of intense debate. While the assertions contained in this document clearly support the claim, the sourcing is questionable — i.e. an unnamed Afghan "informant" reporting on a conversation with another Afghan "consul." The date of the document — four days after 9/11 — is worth noting but without further corroboration, this document is of limited evidentiary value.)

It's also a way of dismissing the evidence. The reality is that the evidence is growing that these links extended beyond initial meetings and discussion, not shrinking. And the names of those involved in suspicious activities keep popping up all over the place - see also Ambassador, Russia.

About The Katrina Teleconferencing Videos

Kevin at Wizbang has the details. What exactly did we learn from the AP report? Nothing that we didn't already know, and people are trying to make more out of them than they probably should.

However, it is interesting to see how President Bush was 'vacationing' on his ranch. That's where the teleconferences were taking place. But some folks would much rather believe that being away from the White House means that they're not working. Bunk. Pure unadulterated bunk.

UPDATE:
Captain Ed has more, and calls this a media hack job. I'd agree considering that the source material clearly does not state that anyone advising the President considered levee breaches in New Orleans to be a concern, even on the 29th. Overtopping was the primary concern, and even that concern was lessened as the storm track took the brunt of the storm to the east of New Orleans and into the Louisiana/Mississippi border.

Again, the entire briefing that related to levees only focused on the effects of the wind on Lake Pontchartrain and its effect in pushing water over the top of the levees. Mayfield never even addressed the possibility of breaches in the levee walls. And in fact, the storm track shifted eastward in the final hours before Katrina hit, which eliminated much of the predicate for even the worries Mayfield expresses in this transcript.

The media got it wrong yet again on Katrina. The notion that the experts warned of levee breaches is nothing more than a hack job initiated by the AP and continued by the rest of the Exempt Media even after the source material has proven it false.

UPDATE:
Paul at Wizbang also picks up on the whole vacationing in Texas meme that the Left wants folks to believe. What's in a word? Quite a bit. All that video undermines the claim that the Administration didn't take the hurricane threat seriously. There's videotape from sessions over the course of six days. Sounds like they took it quite seriously.

UPDATE:
The Times Picayune has more, and wonders when the rest of the media will finally debunk the myth that Bush wasn't deeply involved in the Katrina preparations:

On the day that Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, President Bush and a top presidential aide were worried about whether New Orleans' levees had held, according to a transcript of discussions among disaster officials on the front lines of the storm.

Those concerns, expressed about midday Aug. 29, are in contrast to an image of a detached president.

UPDATE:
There are plenty of people who are taking the AP to task for the hatchet job, including the following: Flopping Aces, Outside the Beltway, The Anchoress, Instapundit, and others added as found.

And is it a coincidence that the AP report was put together by a staffer who was associated with 60 Minutes 2, which put together the Rathergate hatchet job on President Bush mere weeks before the Presidential elections. Wizbang, The Jawa Report, and Don Surber.

UPDATE:
Expose the Left is not a happy camper with the media. In fact, the media has had the transcripts from these videos for six months. They're running them now as though this is some new story. It's not. Patterico takes the LA Times to task for their dishonest coverage. Big Lizards echoes the sentiment. And then posits the key question. Even if Bush did know that the levees were going to be breached, what could he actually do? Stop time? The options available to the President are limited by the US Constitution and federal law. Violate those, and you've got yourself impeachable offenses (Posse Comitatus Act anyone?) The President could only cajole Nagin and Blanco to take steps to evacuate people out of harms' way and neither was particularly effective at the decisive moment. Both failed miserably. They took too much time to make the decision to evacuate, and then when they did, they failed to use all the means to get people out of harms way (Nagin's Memorial Motor Pool).

Jeff Goldstein is not amused. And he notes that the videos show that Michael Brown was doing his job quite competently, but the media ran him out of Washington because they needed a scapegoat. Is it possible that Brown was behind these videos surfacing - both to slam the media types who ran him out, and also to restore his name? It's possible - the Potomac two-step is a common dance in DC.

AJ Strata thinks that the AP has drunk the Kool Aid. Willisms thinks that Wizbang has uncovered Rathergate2, with the dishonest attack piece being cobbled together and taking items from different days to completely rejigger the facts to suit their political tastes, not the facts.

UPDATE:
Now, after the news cycle is nearly over for today, the AP runs a story headlining that Gov. Blanco said that the levees were safe. Famous last words?

In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana's governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans' protective levees were intact, according to new video obtained by The Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials.

"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29, according to the video. "We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee. I think we have not breached the levee at this time."

In fact, the National Weather Service received a report of a levee breach and issued a flash-flood warning as early as 9:12 a.m. that day, according to the White House's formal recounting of events the day Katrina struck.

This clearly doesn't put Blanco in a positive light. She had no idea what was going on, and relayed incorrect information to the President.

Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; kanye west; impeach bush; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.

Congrats to Little Green Footballs

Amazing as it may be, LGF has exceeded 2 million comments. I came upon the blog shortly after 9/11 and Charles took to exposing media bias and the inability of the media to accurately portray events in the Middle East, the War on Terror.

The most extraordinary moment on the blog was when Charles exposed the Rathergate documents as a fraud. CBS had used faked documents in a story critical of President Bush's Texas Air National Guard record right before the 2004 election. Charles not only showed that the memos were faked, but showed it conclusively - using Microsoft Word, he simply copied the text of the memos into a new Word document with default documents and the text matched up precisely. Spacing, kerning, font. Everything.

CBS was castigated and unrepentant, but Dan Rather was forced from the Evening News. Bloggers flexed their muscles - using critical analysis they managed to show a major news network actively engaged in perpetrating and furthering a fraud that could have affected the outcome of a national election.

Charles' blog took off as the media began paying closer attention. The hits continue to come in - and here's hoping to many millions more!

Congrats Charles Johnson. You deserve it.

Able Danger: Hold The Phone

Now this is where the story gets interesting:

The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned.

“I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued,” Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

For the last week, all people had to go on was Rep. Weldon's comments, and many folks could discount them because Weldon was shilling a new book that touts the benefits of data mining as an intel tool, which is one of his pet projects. Now, we have someone involved in the actual project, but his comments contradict nearly everything that the 9/11 Commission has stated about information related to Able Danger to this point.

John Podhoretz explains:

So now we have some manifest contradictions:
He says he told 9/11 commission staffers about this in Afghanistan in 2003. They dispute it. So somebody isn't telling the truth.

The Able Danger papers shown to the 9/11 Commission at the Pentagon after the Afghanistan meeting did not feature anything mentioning Atta. So the 9/11 Commission says. So either the Commission staff is lying. Or no paper mentioned Atta and Shaffer is just wrong. Or the Defense Department misplaced the paperwork mentioning Atta. Or somebody at the Defense Department deliberately didn't give the Commission the material.

In the first case, if the 9/11 commission staff is lying, the hell to be paid is going to be colossal. Among other things, it could shake the current State Department to its foundations, since the 9/11 commission staff director, Philip Zelicow, is one of Condi Rice's most trusted aides.

In the second case, if the Defense Department withheld critical information on this matter, it's almost impossible to imagine the intensity of the bloodletting that will follow.

With nothing more to go on than Shaffer's name and his statement, I think it's appropriate to remain skeptical.

Ah to be young and skeptical. It's interesting to see leading journalists on the right continue to act skeptical about the information being developed about Able Danger, instead of taking everything at face value. It's also interesting to compare and contrast that reporting and analysis with the analysis and reporting of a Rather famous episode of media myopia (Rathergate), which saw absolutely no skepticism on the part of the media about those forged memos.

Jim Geraghty also echoes the need for skepticism and why everything needs to be double checked for veracity:

The reason I’ve been writing about this – and so many readers have been reading about it, and clamoring for more information – is because it’s so darn big.

* It would completely change the way we view our intelligence agencies. They weren’t bumbling before 9/11 – at least, Able Danger wasn’t.
* It would be a useful lesson for fighting terror from now on: Listen to the data-mining guys.
* This would be a smoking gun, proving that the single most significant impediment to effective counterterrorism before 9/11 was “the wall.”
* It would prove that the wall was worse than we ever imagined, rendering military intelligence’s tracking al-Qaeda moot, because they were forbidden by law from passing their findings on to anyone who take action on it.
* It would utterly destroy the 9/11 Commission’s reputation. A report that ignored a revelation like this is worthless.
* Everyone who said Jamie Gorelick belong testifying before the Commission instead of on it would be platinum-level vindicated.
* The Clinton administration Justice Department’s rejection of Mary Jo White’s objections to the wall would look unforgiveable.
* Everyone would have intense questions about what role, if any, Hillary Clinton played in recommending Jamie Gorelick for her Justice Department job. This is the sort of thing that can ruin a party’s reputation and derail a 2008 campaign.

And don’t even get me started on how much worse this makes Sandy Berger look.

The fact is that we need to get to the bottom of this, and we should not hold back because some people on the Left or the Right might get offended at the questions or the skepticism because basic information has not been verified. If everything about Able Danger proves to be accurate, it does change everything, and there will be hell to pay. It would also raise questions on what the Bush Administration did to alter or amend the policy after taking office, or a reevaluation of the policies on information sharing.

Bogus Stories, Redux?

Story 1
Mark Steyn demolishes any remaining arguments that certain members of the Democratic Party (Sen. Dick Durbin, D-irrelevant) who continue to claim that GitMo is akin to the death camps, concentration camps, the gulag archipelago, and the killing fields, has an agenda that isn't anything but anti-Americanism at its core.

No wonder the Democrat Party cannot win a national election. Most Americans do not buy their argument. Well that would be most Americans who do not live in what amounts to threetwo coastal enclaves - the LA to SF corridor, Seattle, Washington DC to NYC and Boston.

In Steyn's own words:

By now, one or two readers may be frothing indignantly, “That’s not funny! Bush’s torture camp at Guantanamo is the gulag of our time, if not of all time.” But that’s the point. The world divides into those who feel the atrocities at Gitmo “must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others” (in the widely quoted words of Senator Dick Durbin), and the rest of us, for whom the more we hear the specifics of the “atrocities” the funnier they are. They bear the same relation to the gulags (15-30 million dead), the Nazi camps (nine million dead) and the killing fields of Cambodia (two million dead) as Mel Brooks‚ “Springtime For Hitler” does to the original. Nobody complained at Auschwitz that the guards were playing the 78s of The Merry Widow (the Fuhrer’s favorite operetta) with the volume knob too high. When that old KGB hand Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as the big guy in the Kremlin, he was reported in the western press to be a big Glenn Miller fan. But to the best of my knowledge no-one suggested he was in the basement of the Lubyanka torturing the inmates with “I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo”.

The first time the full-blast junk-pop treatment caught the eye of the media was a decade and a half back, when US troops bombarded the Panamanian strongman General Noriega with the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought The Law (And The Law Won)”. In those days, nobody reckoned it was torture. But these days torture seems to be in the ear of the behearer. Because the jihadi find western culture depraved — and I’m not necessarily in disagreement on that, at least where Christina Aguilera’s concerned — we’re obliged to be extra-super-duper-sensitive with them.

Says who? Again, the more one hears the specifics of the “insensitivity” of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we’re being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean”. Fair enough, each to his own. But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn’t wear gloves to the bookstore. If that’s “disrespectful” to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.

I’m not arguing the merits here so much as the politics. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about how to categorize these people. As things stand, they’re not covered by the Geneva Conventions — they’re unlawful combatants, captured fighting in civilian clothes rather than uniform, and, when it comes to name, rank and serial number, they lack at least two thereof, and even the first is often highly variable. As a point of “international law”, their fate is a matter entirely between Washington and the state of which they’re citizens (Saudi Arabia, mostly). I don’t think it’s a good idea to upgrade terrorists into lawful combatants. But if, like my namesake the British jurist Lord Steyn, you feel differently, fine, go ahead and make your case.

Where the anti-Gitmo crowd went wrong was in expanding its objections from the legal status of the prisoners to the treatment they‚re receiving. By any comparison — ie, not just with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot — they’re getting better than they deserve. It’s the first gulag in history where the torture victims put on weight. Each prisoner released from Guantanamo receives a new copy of the Koran plus a free pair of blue jeans in his new size: the average detainee puts on 13 pounds during his stay, thanks to the “mustard-baked dill fish”, “baked Tandoori chicken breast” and other delicacies. These and other recipes from the gulag’s kitchen have now been collected by some Internet wags and published as The Gitmo Cookbook.

Story 2: The Downing Street Memos?
Are they bogus and does it even matter? Are they frauds replicated by someone who was associated with Mary Mapes, formerly of CBS's Rathergate?

My take, after being away from the blogosphere for a week is that it does matter. The chain of custody seems to be shaky. Why would someone have to destroy the original documents? To what end does destroying the originals and claiming to copying them on a typewriter have? It does not seem logical for someone to take the effort to replicate them on a typewriter because of the need to preserve someone's identity. Why did the publisher of the original story not include that bit of information when running the original story?

The whole situation seemed fishy from the start, and now smells like a rotten fish.

Real World Effects of Rathergate

Russian leader Vladamir Putin asserted that the US government was behind Rather's demotion at CBS, which belies the fact that it was CBS acting on its own. It is as though Putin was getting intel from sources like Democratic Underground, which peddles such nonsensical ravings as fact.

But when Bush talked about the Kremlin's crackdown on the media and explained that democracies require a free press, the Russian leader gave a rebuttal that left the President nonplussed. If the press was so free in the U.S., Putin asked, then why had those reporters at CBS lost their jobs? Bush was openmouthed. "Putin thought we'd fired Dan Rather," says a senior Administration official. "It was like something out of 1984."

The Russians did not let the matter drop. Later, during the leaders' joint press conference, one of the questioners Putin called on asked Bush about the very same firings, a coincidence the White House assumed had been orchestrated. The odd episode reinforced the Administration's view that Putin's impressions of America are often based on urban myths fed to him by ill-informed aides. (At a past summit, according to Administration aides, Putin asked Bush whether it was true that chicken producers split their production into plants that serve the U.S. and lower-quality ones that process substandard chicken for Russia.) U.S. aides say that to help fight against this kind of misinformation, they are struggling to build relationships that go beyond Putin. "We need to go deeper into the well into other levels of government,"

It's incredible the lack of accurate information that a national leader such as Putin has about the world. No wonder he's leading Russia down a dangerous path when dealing with the Iranians. If he can believe that the US is sending sub-level chickens overseas, then he likely believes that the Iranians are indeed using their nuclear program for peaceful purposes.

NY Observer: The CBS Three Won’t Slink Off; Hiring Lawyers

Reputation is an important thing...

Maybe these folks should have thought about it before airing questionable materials that couldn't be authenticated definitively.

Mr. Howard and two other ousted CBS staffers—his top deputy, Mary Murphy, and CBS News senior vice president Betsy West—haven’t resigned. And sources close to Mr. Howard said that before any resignation comes, the 23-year CBS News veteran is demanding that the network retract Mr. Moonves’ remarks, correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name.

Mr. Howard, those sources said, has hired a lawyer to develop a breach-of-contract suit against the network. Ms. Murphy and Ms. West have likewise hired litigators, according to associates of theirs, and all three remain CBS employees and collect weekly salaries from the company that asked them to tender their resignations.

None would agree to participate in this article.

Legally, CBS and the ousted staffers are in an unusual stalemate: The network cannot be sued for breach of contract unless it actually fires them. Theoretically, the network could refuse to offer an apology or correct statements and simply drag its feet, continuing to write paychecks to the trio until their contracts expire. (Neither side would discuss how long the contracts are scheduled to last.)

But Mr. Howard’s complaint about Mr. Moonves’ remarks could pose a serious problem for CBS. Sources close to Mr. Howard said he believes that the report—which was assembled by an outside team of former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press head Louis Boccardi Jr.—contradicts Mr. Moonves’ statement about Mr. Howard’s share of the blame.

Mr. Howard also believes, those sources said, that the report itself excludes evidence that would implicate top management at CBS and restore Mr. Howard’s reputation in the television news business.

It's funny that Howard is concerned about his reputation being dragged through the mud as a result of being named and told to resign as a result of Rathergate. Perhaps he should have made sure that their reputations weren't tarred by doing all the proper checks on the stories before they ran. Howard is probably right that he's being used as a fall-guy to protect those higher up the food chain at CBS, not to mention Dan Rather, and his claims appear persuasive.