The memos are forged, but they're telling the truth.Mind: boggled.
...
This is a bluff of epic proportions. The forger wanted people talking about the Bush Guard record, s/he had a lot of information about Bush, and s/he knew about the CYA file. There couldn't be too many people who knew that --- Killian's widow and son didn't even know that.I'm not convinced that the forger gave a damn about being discovered, either. Whether the memos were written on Word, or the forger located a Selectric Executive D to do it right seems to be irrelevant. Being discovered would just be more publicity about the contents. But if enough of the right people thought the gig was up and started talking about what they knew, the bluff would have worked.
And it did. Hodges may be backpedalling for all he's worth, but he's confirmed the details of the memos' content.
16 September 2004
A lie that reveals the truth?
Only for folks who have been fascinated by the Bush Guard Duty "CYA" memos --- which it seems almost certainly really are forgeries --- the Bolo Boffin takes us down the rabbit hole with the implications of a Dallas News article.
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3 comments:
No, it's a lie that obscures the truth. When I frst saw the superscripted, proportional, New Times Roman text and the clumsy attempts to stop Word's auto-superscripting (by putting a space after the number, like "111 th"), I marveled at either the utter ineptitude of some Dem partisan (perhaps Bill Burkett) or the diabolical genius of Karl Rove. Being in a tinfoil hat sort of mood, I came down on the latter. I mean, what better way to cast doubt on the facts about your candidate's past behavior than to forge some documents that more or less accurately describe those facts and then release them to CBS. They run with the story, because people who were involved say the documents reflect what happened, and then you wait for the rightwing blogosphere to harp on the fairly obvious flaws in the documents. Now the story's about the forgeries and the identity of the forger, instead of what actually happened in 1972. And you've successfully innoculated your base from the pesky evidence of W's failure to fulfill his Guardy duty with the handy rejoinder, "Oh, those documents were forged. Rather should resign."
Now I'm thinking it's a case of both utter ineptitude and diabolical genius. As Nick Confessore says:"There's little doubt in my mind that the White House is in posession of every relevant document from George W. Bush's National Guard record, and knew more or less as soon as CBS provided its memos that their authenticity was questionable. Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove knew what they were doing. It was quite smart of the White House to let CBS shoot itself in the foot, because it shifted attention away from the indisputable evidence that Bush pulled strings to get into the Guard and then skipped out on his obligation. Thanks in part to the media's obsession with itself and individual reporters' eagerness to take 60 Minutes down a notch, the controversy over whether CBS relied on fake documents has received far more ink and attention than the rather more interesting questions regarding Bush's Guard duty. The irony is that the rap on Bush's service doesn't really rely on anything aired during the 60 Minutes segment."
Equally plausible. Equally unconvincing.
Hadn't the Bushies already buried the National Guard story? Or do they see a new wrinkle coming, and want to pre-empt it with this?
And if the Bushies did concoct this thing, how did they know that CBS would run with the bogus memo? Why didn't CBS catch the forgery? Did they somehow put it into the hands of a credible source? Who?
Why hasn't CBS revealed the source yet? What's there to lose by burning a bogus source?
I'm boggled and stumped.
Agreed, such a conspiracy might require more Sith powers than even Rove can muster. But the Bushies have played the hand CBS dealt them brilliantly.
And it just keeps getting worse. Why didn't CBS run this story about documents that we already knew were forged?
"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."
- JD
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