Memogate or Rathergate or The Killian documents controversy is raising its head again. Bernanrd Goldberg talks about it and raises some very pertinent questions.
According to Wikipedia, On September 8, 2004, Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes Wednesday that a series of memos critical of President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service record had been discovered in the personal files of Lt. Bush’s former commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian.
The authenticity of these documents was quickly called into question by a small group of bloggers, initially based on their being proportionally printed and displaying other modern typographic conventions with limited availability on military typewriters of the time. This led to claims that the memos were forgeries.
Rather and CBS initially defended the story, insisting that the documents had been authenticated by experts. CBS was contradicted by some of the experts it originally cited. CBS later reported that their source for the documents, former Texas Army National Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, had misled the network about how he had obtained them. On September 20, CBS retracted the story.
On September 19, 2007, Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS of making him a "scapegoat" in the Killian story.
In his blog, Bernie Goldberg discusses the issue and indicates an important issue ‘Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam’.
Bernard completes his piece by asking "Now the question is, did she share what she knew with her correspondent, Dan Rather. Or to put it another way: What did Rather know — and when did he know it? The answers may come out at trial, if his case against CBS goes that far. At the moment, neither side appears anxious to settle".
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