Now this is interesting.
Documents allegedly written by a deceased officer that raised questions about President Bush’s service with the Texas Air National Guard bore markings showing they had been faxed to CBS News from a Kinko’s copy shop in Abilene, Tex., according to another former Guard officer who was shown the records by the network.
I was wondering when, and if, someone was going to be able to get a hold of the faxes themselves and trace them. Fax machines leave marks indicating their origin, and sometimes other information. Kudos to Michael Dobbs at WaPo for doing the legwork on this.
So you’re thinking, “A Kinko’s. So what? That doesn’t narrow the trail any. There are zillions of those shops.” Ah, but apparently not in Abilene, there aren’t. There’s exactly one. That means there are employees who might be questioned (although that’s unlikely to yield anything useful, since thousands of people go in and out of Kinko’s all the time). But what other interesting factoids might be relevant?
There is only one Kinko’s in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.
Bill Burkett has a personal axe to grind with Bush, as a result of denied medical care for an illness he suffered while in the military in 1998. He is the apparent source of the claim that Bush’s people deliberately purged Bush’s TANG records in order to cover up something potentially embarrassing. Burkett has written voluminously and frequently about his gripes with the Bush administration, U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and various other viewpoints-lacking-evidence that can be charitably described as “speculative”.
Kevin Drum has written at length about Burkett (and believes Burkett is telling the truth, in spite of the lack of hard evidence). Hat tip to Fried Man.
But although Burkett may be credible, and may indeed be telling the truth, the intensity of his vitriol toward Bush gives him motive and predisposition to providing (if not actually creating) the forged memos to CBS. Of course, the evidence that he did so is entirely circumstantial right now, but Burkett is a plausible suspect, and was a suspect even before the apparent source of the faxes became known.
Whether the information actually related in the memos is true or not is completely irrelevant. At issue here is the fact that CBS acquired documents that are obviously false, and based a major hit piece on 60 Minutes II on those documents even after being told by their experts that the documents were probably fake.
Further, CBS is not entertaining any serious investigation of this fraud, and neither is Dan Rather. Both are stonewalling in the hopes the controversy will go away (perhaps as hurricane news dominates the media in the following days). CBS was supposed to issue a “statement” at 12pm EST on Sept. 15. Noon came and went with not a peep from CBS. A statement finally showed up at around 6:15pm on Drudge, followed by a longer one at 7:39pm.
Why the delay? That kind of “dead air” is fatal to news organizations, especially in this day and age. CBS did not comment on the delay itself, so it was presumably not the result of some kind of technical malfunction beyond their control (although how every single one of their computers, phones, and cameras might fail simultaneously is an exercise I leave for the reader).
The most likely explanation is that there was infighting going on. The people at CBS could not come to an agreement on exactly what stance they were going to take. Perhaps the suits were trying to get Dan Rather to come clean, or resign, or something, and he refused. It suggests, at least, that there are still people at CBS who have some kind of sanity and/or journalistic integrity. It will be interesting to see if any of those people jump ship and start selling their story.
If I were the President of CBS, I would be utterly livid that Dan Rather had torpedoed my company’s reputation like this. I would fire him in a heartbeat. So why hasn’t that happened? Does Dan Rather really have that kind of clout? Does he have some kind of dirt on the CBS brass?
WaPo link via Instapundit.
