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So 60 MINUTES’ excuse for using forged memos is that Burkett told them he’d gotten them from “another former Guardsman:”
In the statement, CBS said: “Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point.”
And that unsupported, unverified statement by Burkett was enough for CBS to go on? From Burkett, who had published something as hostile, and paranoid, as this:
In January of 1998 and what seems like a full lifetime ago, I was stricken by a deadly case of meningoencephalitis. I was returning from a short duty trip to Panama as a team chief to inspect the hand over of Ft. Clayton to the Panamanians. I had been ‘loaned’ from the senior staff and state planning officer of the Texas National Guard to the Department of the Army for a series of these special projects after angering George W. Bush by refusing to falsify readiness information and reports; confronting a fraudulent funding scheme which kept ‘ghost’ soldiers on the books for additional funding, and refusing to alter official personnel records [of George W. Bush].
George W. Bush and his lieutenants were mad. They ordered that I not be accessed to emergency medical care services, healthcare benefits I earned by my official duty; and I was withheld from medical care for 154 days before I was withdrawn from Texas responsibility by the Department of the Army, by order of the White House.
I was a pawn then caught in a struggle for right and wrong, but also caught within a political struggle between a man who would do anything to be ‘king’ of America and an institution of laws that we knew as America.
This is no excuse. The excuse itself exposes just how unreliable they were. It exposes the unacceptably low standards of evidence used by 60 MINUTES to endorse these documents for the purpose of influencing a Presidential election during wartime.
“Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting,” Heyward continued. “We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust.”
They broke that faith by taking Burkett’s unverified, unsupported word as sufficient evidence to promote these forgeries to the nation.
“I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers,” [Rather] said.
“We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,” Rather added.
And what was the sophisticated scheme that misled Rather? Apparently nothing more than a lone unproven statement from a wildly partisan activist. That was all it took—if 60 MINUTES’ excuse is really the whole story.
Is this what they were stonewalling us on? To avoid exposing how they made no effort at all to verify the memos?
Or are they still hiding something more?
