THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
September 2004
Week Two
"Rathergate"
- September 8: CBS's 60 Minutes airs an exhaustive and damning report on George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service record, documenting the facts that he was given preferential treatment in getting into the TANG in order to avoid Vietnam service (this topic is covered exhaustively elsehwhere in this site).
Conservative media slant
Unfortunately, the report, anchored by CBS's star reporter Dan Rather and produced by veteran Mary Mapes, uses several documents that cannot be fully authenticated, known colloquially as the "Killian documents." The documents, which some on the right claim to be forgeries, are secondary to the thrust of the presentation, showing that the late Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush's commander at the time, purport to show Killian was critical of Bush's service, but not particularly important in the context of the report. Within minutes, right-wing Internet blogs and commentary sites begin making allegations of forgery, focusing on alleged typographical inconsistencies and anachronisms in the wording of the documents (largely disproven within days, but the debunkings never get the airplay that the accusations receive). For two weeks CBS defends the authenticity of the documents, but on September 30, reverses course, with Rather saying publicly, "[I]f I knew then what I know now -– I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question." CBS News President Andrew Heyward adds, "Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret." - The media focuses, not on the content of the report, which shows Bush's systematic lying about his military service record, but on the allegations of forgery. A two-member investigative panel consisting of former Republican attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Louis Boccardi, retained by CBS to investigate the incident, produces a report in January 2005 highly critical of Rather, Mapes, and CBS; CBS fires Mapes, asks senior officials Betsy West, Josh Howard, and Mary Murphy to resign, and Rather later resigns under a cloud of opprobrium and criticism. The entire debacle shifts attention away from Bush's fraudulent military service and onto the "false" allegations of CBS, garnering unwarranted sympathy for Bush as the election nears.
- Killian documents allegedly show that Bush disobeyed orders while in the Guard, and had undue influence exerted on his behalf to improve his record. They include the following accusations, many of which are documented by other, indisputable evidence besides the Killian memos:
- An order directing Bush to submit to a physical examination. Bush never took the exam.
- A note that Killian had grounded Bush from flying due to "failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards," and for failure to submit to the physical examination as ordered. Killian also requested that a flight inquiry board be convened, as required by regulations, to examine the reasons for Bush's loss of flight status. Independent documents confirm Bush was grounded for failure to complete a physical.
- A note of a telephone conversation with Bush in which Bush sought to be excused from "drill." The note records that Bush said he did not have the time to attend to his National Guard duties because of his responsibilities with the Senate campaign for William Blount.
- A note (labeled "CYA" for "cover your *ss") claiming that Killian was being pressured from above to give Bush better marks in his yearly evaluation than he had earned. The note attributed to Killian says that he was being asked to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance: "I'm having trouble running interference [for Bush] and doing my job."
- CBS pins much of the blame for the "forged" documents, which have never been provided for definitive authentication, on its source, retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett. Burkett is a controversial figure in the story of Bush's service, having provided a tremendous amount of evidence and documentation to earlier investigators looking into Bush's service record. He claimed in 2000 that he had been forcibly transferred to Panama for refusing "to falsify personnel records of [then-]Governor Bush," a claim he later retracted; he also claimed to have witnessed several Bush officials conducting a scrub of Bush's military records. Though none of Burkett's claims have ever been refuted, he is considered a hateful and grossly inaccurate source by Bush defenders, and their accusations against Burkett are enthusiastically adopted by many in the media, among others the New York Times's William Safire, who characterizes him as a felon who should be serving hard time in jail. Allegations that Burkett and CBS, particularly Mapes, produce the report in collusion with the Kerry campaign are staunchly refuted by the Kerry campaign and never proven.
- Within hours of the report being aired, bloggers on the Internet begin challenging the authenticity of the Killian documents, fueling speculation that the organized challenges had possibly been orchestrated and prepared before the report was aired. Many of the challengers are posters on the FreeRepublic Web site, the home of many of the members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organizers and authors. Other conservative sites, including the Drudge Report and RatherBiased.com, which routinely accuses Rather and CBS of liberal bias in their reporting, get in the act within hours. It is not long before the mainstream media picks up on the accusations. Rather initially dismisses critics of the story as "partisan political operatives." but within weeks CBS backs off of its support of Rather and the report. As investigative journalist Greg Palast later writes, acidly, CBS president Leslie Moonves "bullwhipped his network's stars and, with his own spit, polished the soiled war record of our President, declaring that Mapes "ignored information that cast doubt on the story she had set out to report -- that President Bush had received special treatment thirty years ago, getting to the Guard ahead of many other applicants." Moonves ignores the tremendous amount of documents aside from the Killian memos, which Palast freely admits never should have been used, that prove the substance of the report. Neither Rather nor Mapes exhibited a large amount of journalistic integrity themselves, rushing to blame Burkett for the use of the documents though they knew Burkett never claimed to be able to authenticate the documents. Palast asks an interesting question: if Burkett did indeed forge the documents, a crime, then why has the government never brought charges against him for forgery? "Maybe they don't want to check into this 'fake document,'" Palast speculates, "because maybe it's not fake."
- The "independent panel" is a joke. Thornburgh was Attorney General under Bush's father, and is now a lobbyist who trades on his close relationship with the Bush family for his income. Thornburgh may be best remembered for his whitewash of the Exxon Valdez investigation, which allowed Exxon to duck out of billions of dollars' worth of possible fines. Boccardi, as former executive editor of the AP, routinely spiked story after story on the then-burgeoning Iran-Contra scandal, while taking part in private discussions with Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North. Two less objective "investigators" would be hard to find. Of course, the report castigates CBS, Rather, Mapes, and Burkett, and dodges the issue of Bush's fraudulent military service.
- Why did CBS News sell out its star reporter and one of its best producers rather than pursue the truth? Perhaps it has to do with CBS's parent company Viacom, whose chairman and CEO, Sumner Redstone, says weeks before the November elections, "From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.... I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one."
- A number of amateur sleuths on both the left and the right have investigated the typefaces of the documents, with right-wing pundits and bloggers claiming that the typefaces of the documents "prove" the documents are forgeries. Veteran Daily Kos blogger "Hunter" puts paid to many of the claims presented by such sources as the rightist Powerline blog. First, the claim is that examination of the typeface proves that the document could well have been created in Microsoft Word, because the typewritten document looks almost identical to that of the original. Hunter shows that the only reason one might draw this conclusion is if one shrunk the original document considerably; when examined in its original size, the document has numerous typeface discrepancies with a computer-generated document, such as a floating "e." The claim that the typeface -- Times New Roman -- didn't exist in the 1970s, when the document was produced, is easily discarded, as examination of the original document shows considerable differences between the typewriter font and the computer font. Additionally, IBM used several fonts almost identical to today's Times New Roman font for its typewriters. The Times New Roman font itself was created in 1931. The claim that typewriters in the 1970s didn't have superscripted "th"s and other such niceties is just plain wrong; the IBM Selectric, for one, had such superscripting capabilities, as did the IBM Executive. The document also uses proportional spacing, which several rightist bloggers claim didn't exist in the 1970s. Turns out that IBM made a number of typewriters that indeed did have proportional spacing as early as 1947. After the document is compared with the typewriters of the time, it seems logical to conclude that the document was produced on an IBM Executive typewriter, one commonly in use at the time. It is also possible that a version of an IBM Selectric typewriter could have produced the document. The upshot: the document cannot be proven a forgery by the examination of the typefaces as conducted by a number of sources. However, the claim will continue to be used in most mainstream media reports, even though it is almost immediately debunked.
- Palast reveals the contents of a letter locked away for years in the files of the US Attorney in Austin, Texas that reads in part, "His [Bush's] dad called then-Lt. Gov. Barnes to ask for his help to get his son not just in the Guard, but to get one of the coveted pilot slots which were extremely hard to get. [Barnes, through a 'cut-out,' a third party] contacted General Rose at the Guard and took care of it. George Bush was placed ahead of thousands of young men, some who died in Vietnam." The Bush administration has never challenged the authenticity of the letter, which has been confirmed to be accurate by the person identified in the letter as the cut-out, who refuses to allow his identity to be made public. The BBC first reported the contents of this letter in 1999, but CBS ignored the letter as part of its report, and the American mainstream media has consistently refused to report on it. Barnes now says he got the younger Bush into the Guard because he wanted to "collect chits" from the powerful family.
- Palast provides powerful evidence of Barnes's complicity. Barnes, who left office under a cloud of impropriety, became an industry lobbyist in Austin. He received a fee of $23 million for representing a company called GTech, which he helped land the contract for handling the Texas lottery. In 1997, GTech's illegal payoffs to the former lottery director's boyfriend led the new lottery director to cancel the contract and open the lottery up for bidding. But, at the behest of then-Governor Bush, the new lottery director was fired, the bids tossed out, and GTech given back the contract without bidding. The letter in the US Attorney's office in Austin confirms that "Governor Bush thru [another cut-out] made a deal with Ben Barnes not to rebid because Barnes could confirm that Bush had lied during the '94 campaign. During that [gubernatorial] campaign, Bush was asked if his father...had helped him get in the National Guard. Bush said no, he had not, but the fact is his dad called then-Lt. Gov. Barnes...." The deal is simple: Barnes stays quiet about his covert assistance to the young Bush, in return for his client GTech keeping the lucrative lottery contract and paying Barnes quietly under the table. The letter also states, "The Governor talked to the chair of the lottery two days later and she then agreed to support letting GTech keep the contract without a bid." The new lottery director? Harriet Miers, Bush's personal lawyer, who accompanied Bush to Washington in 2001 and, in October 2005, will be nominated by Bush for the Supreme Court, a position to which she is spectacularly unqualified and for which she will withdraw her name after a firestorm of criticism.
- As a side note, Palast later speaks with a former TANG colleague of Bush's, who refuses to let his identity be revealed; the source says that the other pilots in Bush's unit had strong feelings about Bush. They hated his guts. They viewed him as a "goof-off and a coward," because he was one of the only pilots who ran from combat service. While TANG flyers were not required to fly combat runs in Vietnam, nearly all did, voluntarily, except for Bush. Palast concludes, "I don't blame Bush Sr. or [Democratic senator Lloyd] Bentsen for keeping their sons out of Vietnam. I do blame them for sending other men's sons in their place."
- Video clips of Barnes's statements confirming his successful attempt to get Bush preferential placement in the TANG can be accessed here. (Wikipedia [including links to many documents featured in the 60 Minutes report, CBS, Los Angeles Times/Concord Monitor, Rathergate [final Thornburgh/Boccardi report], Austin4Kerry, Daily Kos, Washington Post, Greg Palast)
- September 9: Novelist E.L. Doctorow pens an eloquently scathing commentary on Bush's inability to feel any real grief for America's war dead.
Iraq war and occupation
He writes in part, "I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. ...He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn or a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life...they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret, and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. - "He wanted to go to war, and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to. Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. ...But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. ...The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
- "Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves." (Houston Chronicle/Fro-Daddy Hal)
- September 12: St. Petersburg Times columnist Martin Dyckman warns readers that Americans who let their fear of terrorism overwhelm their judgment put themselves in jeopardy of allowing a dictatorship to take over their government.
Anti-terrorism and homeland security
Dyckman writes, "The 'man on horseback' mentality, the belief that a leader's strength is more important than where it leads them, defines a population that is vulnerable to dictatorship. This is not to call Bush a dictator or suggest that he wants to be one. But let no one believe that it couldn't happen here, as has happened so often elsewhere. It has happened here, and by the design of better statesmen than Bush. John Adams, an original American patriot, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that put people in prison for what they said or wrote. Abraham Lincoln, one of our three greatest presidents, suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Woodrow Wilson, a scholar by profession, jailed and deported people for opposing a war that, nearly a century later, still raises the question of what American interests compelled our participation. Franklin D. Roosevelt put 110,000 men, women and children in concentration camps because of their race. In each instance, danger was the pretext for suspending democracy and decency." Dyckman says the seeds of dictatorship have been sown in his own state of Florida: "In December 2000, the Florida House of Representatives, in broad daylight, voted 79 to 41 to steal the 2000 presidential election by formally appointing the Republican slate of electors regardless of what a recount might show. Though presumptively legal under the Constitution, that was a dictatorial act in light of the modern expectation that the people, not the politicians, elect the president. Florida rewarded the perpetrators by sending Tom Feeney to Congress and re-electing nearly everyone who followed his orders. If that disgraceful vote ever became even an issue in any of their campaigns, I am unaware of it. The Senate did not follow suit, but only because of President John McKay's shrewd strategy of waiting to see what the Supreme Court would do. Nonetheless, a precedent was set for use in the next state where one party controls both houses and opportunity knocks." (St. Petersburg Times)
