Dan Rather...Leaker for the PTB?

[kissing blarney]

Rachel Maddow interviewed Dan Rather last night on her show on MSNBC. It was a rather humdrum plug for a special he'll be airing soon on Afghanistan. It started to get interesting at the 5:20 mark when Richard Holbrooke's name came up, and more interesting still at the 6 minute mark when Rather said "once the snow clears in the mountain passes, there's going to be a lot of killing done in that part of Pakistan".

Perhaps even more disturbing, Rachel didn't even bat an eyelash at Rather's statement, but just continued on with her next talking point.
Great, an escalation of the insanity already occuring there. Not a change I can believe in.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#28922812

[operator kos]

Everyone knows about DR's comments regarding Building 7, and then there's also this 25-second gem about bombs on the GW Bridge on 9/11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06VX8ijYihU

[Col. Quisp]

I thought it was interesting that Rachel said in the teaser, "You won't want to miss this..." interview with Dan Rather. I must have spaced out when he said that about Pakistan though. I don't remember hearing it.

I might have heard it subconsciously though, because I had terrible dreams of lots of killing going on, and people were reveling in the blood being spilled. As if it were a computer game.

[MinM]

Everyone knows about DR's comments regarding Building 7, and then there's also this 25-second gem about bombs on the GW Bridge on 9/11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06VX8ijYihU

Dan Rather was/is a tool -- but he was fairly solid in covering the 1993 WTC Bombing:

YouTube - Rare TV NEWS report about WTC bombing FBI Foreknowledge

and 9/11.

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewt ... p?p=227761

[ninakat]

Here's a fairly recent clip of Rather giving a talk about how the media is all about the money. Of course, money and gov't go hand in hand, so I would add that the media is bought and paid for not just by corporations/big business, but by the gov't itself since the line between Wall Street and gov't is VERY blurred nowadays. Anyway, at least he's helping expose part of the problem.... and it IS important that he's pointing this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25T0BspJ7c

[elfismiles]

Dan Rather Starts Career With Huge Error
(or Dan Rather deceives a Nation)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXi0usMq30E

[compared2what?]

Dan Rather got majorly fucked by the right-wing's Mighty Wurlitzer for doing the right thing -- ie, his job wrt reporting on the circumstances of Bush's discharge from the National Guard. They did go on the air with the absolutely most minimal level of reliable sourcing that you can have while still being duly diligent by, like, the skin of their teeth. It was a very, very close judgment call. But I would have made it the same way. They had the story, barely; CBS gave them a choice of either that date or never; and they wanted to get it out in time for the rest of it to develop before the election, to which it was highly relevant. Because they genuinely thought it was not only true, but just the beginning of the truth. As do I. As would almost any impartial person who looked closely at the facts.

Of course he's a tool. You don't go into that line of work at all if you're not. You certainly don't rise to the top of it. But within those admittedly very loose parameters, he was a journalist of good repute. All of whom err sometimes. And he didn't deserve to go down for a story on which the odds are that he wasn't substantially in error. I mean, that's show business, and there are certainly bigger tragedies in the world. So I have no very major quarrel with anyone about it. I'm just saying.

[MinM]

The modus operandi was much like Karl Rove's candidate accusing his opponent of bugging his office, and pushing the Bush-Coke story on the easily discredited J. H. Hatfield.

Rather was prevented by CBS (subsidiary of Viacom) from going after the GOP operatives who doctored the documents

October 1, 2005 (waynemadsenreport.com)—Former CBS News anchor Rather says CBS wouldn't allow him to do a follow-up story on Bush's Texas Air National Guard (TANG) files.

Speaking at the National Press Club on September 26, Dan Rather responded to a question posed by moderator Marvin Kalb concerning the controversial TANG files of George W. Bush. Kalb asked Rather why he did not return to the story and investigate those who created the guard files, passed them off to a former TANG officer and hence to CBS's 60 Minutes, and tipped off right-wing bloggers before the airing of the pre-2004 election exposé by 60 Minutes. Rather responded, "You'll have to ask CBS that question."

Rather stated it was his desire to continue to delve into the story and the set-up. According to CBS insiders, the original TANG files were scanned by GOP dirty tricks operatives using a sophisticated text scanner that changed the original IBM typewriter Courier font to a Times Roman font, automatically created a "th" superscript for date numbers, and created margins and pagination. An independent panel commissioned by CBS and headed by former GOP Attorney General Richard Thornburgh never concluded the documents were bogus.

In fact, the GOP operatives had to be very careful in their dirty tricks operation: forging or counterfeiting official government documents is a felony. However, scanning original documents technically does not fall under the category of counterfeiting. Nevertheless, the GOP quickly tipped off right-wing bloggers, including Free Republic.com, that the CBS documents were forgeries. In doing so, Karl Rove and his team successfully refocused attention away from Bush and his AWOL status in the Guard and on to Dan Rather and 60 Minutes. People like Karl Rove and, as reported by The New York Post, long time GOP dirty tricks operative Roger Stone, got away with the entire caper, thus eliminating Bush's phony military record as a campaign issue.

Silenced Rather Sues CBS- Read the story behind the lawsuit Greg Palast
DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSED Greg Palast
Steve Clemons, over on Washington Note, Has A Very Interesting Take | Corrente
The Washington Note

Bush: "If I Crashed, Where's the Plane?" | Corrente

[MinM]

Terror Watch: What 60 Minutes™ Didn't Run - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

Sept. 22, 2005 - In its rush to air its now discredited story about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same “60 Minutes” broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger.

The journalistic juggling at CBS provides an ironic counterpoint to the furor over apparently bogus documents involving Bush’s National Guard service. One unexpected consequence of the network’s decision was to wipe out a chance—at least for the moment—for greater public scrutiny of a more consequential forgery that played a role in building the Bush administration’s case to invade Iraq.

A team of “60 Minutes” correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell NEWSWEEK. The group landed the first ever on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to European intelligence agencies.

Although the edited piece never ended up identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.

But just hours before the piece was set to air on the evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on the CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a direct order to take a flight physical while serving in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.

“This is like living in a Kafka novel,” said Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer and a Web blogger who had been collaborating with “60 Minutes” producers on the uranium story. “Here we had a very important, well-reported story about forged documents that helped lead the country to war. And then it gets bumped by another story that relied on forged documents.”

[compared2what?]

It's not so clear those documents were forged. Or not forged. It's just traditionally unclear. I mean the Killian memos, not the Niger stuff. It's a red herring anyway, though, because those memos are not where the heart of that story really is. And the press really has no fucking excuse for following the sparkly object rather than keeping their eyes on the ball on that one -- the official explanation for his service record makes no damn sense at all. It pissed me off so much that I was actually moved to take a futile shot at it. (Futile because unless you got incredibly lucky, you'd probably need the resources of a network or a news-service or a major daily to nail that story. Wrt stuff like time and money and someone to pay for your attorney. Anyway. It's just on an imo-basis, but: His full personnel file does still exist, in at least one place, I am 99 percent certain. However, I couldn't get to it, so I don't know for sure. It's a very interesting story, though, in every single one of the different iterations in which people apparently solemnly tell you it off-the-record. One of which is probably more or less true, though who knows? Not me. I haven't a (reliably sourced) clue. But since I do have a favorite story, on an informal basis, I have arbitrarily choose to believe that one, whether it's disinfo or not. Because if you can't know something that you want to know and there's absolutely no way around it, you might as well believe in whatever non-established truth you find the most personally diverting. I feel. It's kind of like The Loch Ness Monster Axiom.

[RocketMan]

Interesting stuff.

And how about that Maddow character? I used to think she's da bomb (and I happen to think she's hot as heck which has led to myself questioning my heterosexuality because she kind of looks like a pretty boy) but then her swift ascendacy has had me thinking (did her popularity REALLY soar that fast? anyone?)... She's a Rhodes scholar and what also gave me pause was an article about her where her partner said something to the effect that "national security issues" are really close to Maddow's heart. She's done some stuff critical of Obama which of course is good but other times she has that soft-selling the empire thing going on. Thoughts?

[MinM]

Reverse Rathergate?

Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch? - The Playboy Blog

The Raw Story | Bloggers charge 'Tea Party' anti-stimulus protests are corporate front

[MinM]

This is getting more Ratheresque by the minute:

Bloggers charge 'Tea Party' anti-stimulus protests are corporate front
Muriel Kane
Published: Sunday March 1, 2009

UPDATE (at bottom): Playboy's story apparently taken down.

When a few hundred protesters showed up in each of some 30 or 40 cities nationwide on Friday to object to President Obama's stimulus plan, they claimed that the well-coordinated protests had arisen spontaneously in response to a tirade against mortgage bailouts, delivered just over a week earlier, on February 19, by CNBC's Rick Santelli.

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin enthusiastically called the "Tea Party" protests "a fledgling grassroot movement" and some of the protesters even described themselves as the vanguard of a "new conservative counterculture." Those claims naturally aroused a certain amount of skepticism, since similar activities in the past have proven to be not genuine grassroots activity but so-called corporate "astroturf."

Now fresh revelations suggest that the skepticism may be well-placed. Mark Ames and Yasha Levine allege in their blog at Playboy.com that the protests were planned well in advance, coordinated by old-line anti-tax organizations, and funded by right-wing corporate interests.

"What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s 'tea party' rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine," they write, "from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called 'astroturfing') to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that's because it was."

As described by Ames and Levine, Santelli's call for a "tea party" in Chicago next summer was quickly picked up by a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com and spread from there to the Drudge Report. However, the ChicagoTeaParty.com domain is not new. It was registered last summer by the producer of a right-wing radio show in Chicago and, the writers allege, is one of several tied to the anti-tax group FreedomWorks, which is among the sponsors of the current protests.

FreedomWorks is the latest incarnation of an organization formerly known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was founded in 1984 "to anonymously leverage corporate contributions into debates on public policy." CSE had close ties to Koch Industries and became one of the major recipients of grant money from conservative foundations and major corporations such as Exxon, Philip Morris, and General Motors.

In 2003, CSE's affiliate, the Citizens for a Strong Economy Foundation, split off and renamed itself Americans for Prosperity. (That group is also a sponsor of the current protests.) CSE itself merged the following year with Empower America -- another fake grassroots group created by Republican Party insiders to promote conservative candidates -- and formed FreedomWorks.

Posters at Democratic Underground have found that a number of anti-bailout and anti-stimulus groups are hosted by the dedicated servers of Citizens for a Sound Economy. In addition to cse.org, empoweramerica.org, and freedomworks.com, those servers also host such domains as angryrenter.com (which was registered in March 2008 to oppose bailouts for mortgage holders), destimulus.com, earmarkpledge.com, nowallstreetbailout.com, and usteaparty.com.

Any connection ChicagoTeaParty.com may have to this network is not clear, since it is not among the domains hosted on the CSE servers. However, the involvement of FreedomWorks in the protests and the appearance of the apparently related domain "usteaparty.com" suggest that those seeking the origin of the "Tea Party" protests in this area may be on the right track.

UPDATE:

Playboy has apparently taken down its story. The Atlantic's Megan McArdle has the full text.

The link between Santelli and the so-called astroturfing groups "is potentially libelous, which is, I assume, why the article disappeared this morning," wrote McArdle.

"If I were Santelli, I'd sue. Aside from the fact that I have absolutely no reason to question Santelli's sincerity, I find it pretty hard to believe that any private group would be willing to front enough money to make it worth a television correspondent's while to risk all his future salary payments."

Republican blogger/pundit Michelle Malkin laid down covering fire for the "tea parties," lampooning their alleged ties to Santelli.

"The wheels of the 'Tea Party' movement had already been set in motion by folks who probably had never heard of Santelli — let alone the Koch Foundation — when they decided to take to the streets," she wrote, after calling reporters Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, who authored Playboy's piece, "loons."

A phone call to Playboy media relations went unreturned late Monday.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Tea_Party ... _0301.html

[DrVolin]

Dan Rather was built up with juicy chicken feed for many years. He was a very valuable asset, and he learned to trust his sources more than he should have. When the time came to use him, they didn't hesitate.

My guess is that one of his highly trusted sources sent him the content of those service record memos, saying the real thing was in his hands and would follow. Rather ran with the story, banking on a source that had never failed him in 30 years of reporting. And then the source failed him.

The memos as released are such a poor excuse that as soon as I saw them, I set about the house looking for the tools to make better ones. I found my mother's old typewriter in a closet, still in its leather case, and a sheaf of old paper from the mid-60s and a spare ribbon in the inside pocket. Done.

If the goal had been to fake the documents, it could easily have been done. Clearly, the goal was not to forge anything.

[compared2what?]

Dan Rather was built up with juicy chicken feed for many years. He was a very valuable asset, and he learned to trust his sources more than he should have. When the time came to use him, they didn't hesitate.

My guess is that one of his highly trusted sources sent him the content of those service record memos, saying the real thing was in his hands and would follow. Rather ran with the story, banking on a source that had never failed him in 30 years of reporting. And then the source failed him.

The memos as released are such a poor excuse that as soon as I saw them, I set about the house looking for the tools to make better ones. I found my mother's old typewriter in a closet, still in its leather case, and a sheaf of old paper from the mid-60s and a spare ribbon in the inside pocket. Done.

If the goal had been to fake the documents, it could easily have been done. Clearly, the goal was not to forge anything.

There's actually no need to guess. The process whereby that story was put together has been reported on extensively in the press; Mary Mapes wrote a book about it; and CBS put together a panel that issued an extremely lengthy, detailed, and frankly kind of misleading report on it.

Rather didn't get the memos from a source. Mary Mapes got them from a man called Bill Burkett, who unwisely but not maliciously told a fib about where he had gottem them in an attempt to protect a source. Burkett's pretty plainly not a disinfo agent, although he may have been played by one. Because it's not totally clear where he got those documents, still, to this day. At least as far as I know. I haven't kept up with the story, but I spent a few months looking into it not too long after the controversy erupted, I guess I should add at this point.

In any event: The copies that CBS was working with can't definitively be said to have been forgeries or not to have been forgeries, because they're copies. There was and still is every reason to believe that they're substantively accurate. It's also crystal clear that the hue and cry about their authenticity was a very well coordinated right-wing propaganda campaign. (For example, the blog that first made the forgery charge had copies of them up before the CBS website did. Which must have come from somewhere.) And...there's a moderately decent circumstantial case that either Viacom or CBS itself set Mapes and Rather up to take a fall before the report aired. Although that's hardly worth speculating about, since there are (a) more interesting tangents; and (b) I imagine that if there's any non-circumstantial evidence, it'll come out in Rather's suit against the network, so why waste speculative energy?

But this is the thing: Those memos weren't very damning, in themselves. And the issues they reveal are trivial compared to whatever the papers that explain exactly how Bush was honorably discharged a year before his service obligation was up so that he could attend Harvard Business School. During wartime.

Because that's just fucking unheard of. Also, there should be multiple copies filed in multiple locations of all the documentation surrounding whatever the hell happened in (my best guess is) late 1972 that led to whatever horrible thing had been covered up and resolved by the fall of '73 when he got the early discharge. And in my personal opinion, some of it actually probably is (or was as recently as several years ago) on microfilm at the Texas State Archives. And probably in one or two other places as well.

IIRC, the segment was rushed onto the air owing to scheduling conflicts. And I at least retain an impression, if not an actual memory, that one of the factors in that decision on the Mapes/Rather side was their expectation that it was not going to be the only segment they aired on the subject before the 2004 election. Whether I remember that rightly or not, though, they had to have known there was and also to have been looking for a bigger scoop than the one they aired. Because you really can't look at the parts of his service record that are public without seeing that there's apparently a huge, huge problem not showing up in the '72 - '73 time-frame.

Anyway. Before I went on that rambling digression, I was going to observe that if the Killian memos were forged, given how very mildly damning they are, I think logic suggests that it was more likely to have been a Rovian disinfo op than it was an incompetent oppo op. Also, they may not have been forgeries. But either way, they're functionally a red herring and should be ignored, therefore.

I guess I'll shut up now and go try to redeem this post by looking for some links of interest with which to return to it. If I can find any.

ON EDIT: There's a lot out there, actually, but it would take the thread way off topic. If anyone cares about it, let me know and I'll put a timeline in the data dump.