Sidney Blumenthal: Dan Rather Stands by His Story

Dan Rather Stands by His Story
His lawsuit will attempt to show that CBS tried to suppress the report on Bush’s National Guard Service and the Abu Ghraib abuses.
by Sidney Blumenthal

Dan Rather’s complaint against CBS and Viacom, its parent company, filed in New York state court on Sept. 19 and seeking $70 million in damages for his wrongful dismissal as “CBS Evening News” anchor, has aroused hoots of derision from a host of commentators. They’ve said that the former anchor is “sad,” “pathetic,” “a loser,” on an “ego” trip and engaged in a mad gesture “no sane person” would do, and that “no one in his right mind would keep insisting that those phony documents are real and that the Bush National Guard story is true.”

If the court accepts his suit, however, launching the adjudication of legal issues such as breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference with contract, it will set in motion an inexorable mechanism that will grind out answers to other questions as well. Then Rather’s suit will become an extraordinary commission of inquiry into a major news organization’s intimidation, complicity and corruption under the Bush administration. No congressional committee would be able to penetrate into the sanctum of any news organization to divulge its inner workings. But intent on vindicating his reputation, capable of financing an expensive legal challenge, and armed with the power of subpoena, Rather will charge his attorneys to interrogate news executives and perhaps administration officials under oath on a secret and sordid chapter of the Bush presidency.

In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather’s suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his “60 Minutes II” piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained — and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.

Most cases of this sort are usually settled before discovery. But Rather has made plain that he is uninterested in a cash settlement. He has filed his suit precisely to be able to take depositions.

In his effort to demonstrate his mistreatment, Rather will detail how network executives curried favor with the administration, offering him up as a human sacrifice. The panel that CBS appointed and paid millions to in order to investigate Rather’s journalism will be exposed as a shoddy kangaroo court.

Rather’s complaint has already asserted a pattern of network submission to administration pressure, beginning with the Abu Ghraib story. In early 2004, Mary Mapes, a producer for “60 Minutes II” with more than two decades of experience, uncovered the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her sources were sound and the evidence incontrovertible, but according to Rather’s complaint, “CBS management attempted to bury” the story. In a highly unusual move, then CBS News president Andrew Heyward and then senior vice president Betsy West personally intervened to demand editing changes and ever more “substantiation.”

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/27/4160/

Too bad "The CBS Suits" upstairs answer to a higher authority, i.e., the military industrial complex. :shrug: :(

at www.HD.net. The guy--who could have comfortably retired, written books and lived a pleasant old age--is on a holy tear to expose corporate wrong-doing (including their total fuckover of our election system) and Bush/corporate predator war profiteering lies. He has FINALLY returned to REAL journalism. What he was doing before I don't know. I stopped watching TV news (except for a few harrowing glimpses visiting other peoples' homes) about three decades ago. Rather was a courageous Vietnam war reporter. And "60 Minutes" had a good rep. But the Reagan worship of the '80s--and the blackholing of that criminal's guilt for the slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND MAYAN INDIANS in Guatemala, and thousands in Nicaragua, and the beginning of the assault on the New Deal, infected all the corporate news monopolies, as they became bigger and bigger, and now, all-powerful monopolies, trying to kill off American democracy, CBS included. Rather was their "golden boy"--their new "Walter Cronkite" (not). He bought into it. It got so I couldn't stand his face.

Anyway, this is Dan Rather, transformed. I guess he found out just how nasty these fascist/corporate shits are. I didn't realize it, all that clearly, myself, until David Kelly got offed--an insider white guy--the Brits' WMD expert, who was whistleblowing on the "sexed up" prewar WMD intel on Iraq, and was found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances, four days after Valerie Plame was outed; his office and computers were searched; then, four days after that, the entire Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation network was ADDITIONALLY outed (also by Novak). If they would do that to one of their own, what wouldn't they do to you or me--or Dan Rather?

The guy is hot. I think he's approaching 80 now, and rediscovering the joy and the critical importance of truth-telling! Kudos and laurel wreaths to him! It's never too late!

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Note: Blumenthal is the only journalist I have read so far on this lawsuit who has gotten it right about Bush's AWOL. The story was never discredited. It was "buried" (and Rather along with it) by a likely sting operation, in which ONE of the documents was apparently re-typed on a later model typewriter, but the original secretary of the document authenticated its CONTENT. No one knows how it got re-typed (if it was). Freepers seemed to know about the re-typing instantly, and put on a Freeper show of "investigation," focusing of course on this one fact (that the document had apparently been re-typed) and ignoring the overwhelming evidence that the story was true (Bush went AWOL). AP and other corporate news monopolies now refer to the "discredited story," but--as per usual, when they are covering for war profiteers--ignore, bury, black-hole and "Iron Curtain" the preponderance of the facts.

This was a very important operation to Karl Rove and corporate lapdogs, not because it would have influenced any voters--what did they care about voters?--but because it would have been a stain on the PLAUSIBLE NARRATIVE they were all pre-writing and spinning, that Bush/Cheney won the 2004 election. CBS was one of the consortium partners that hired Edison-Mitofsky to conduct the exit polls in 2004, and were therefore party to the DOCTORING of the exit polls, late on election day, forcing the exit polls (Kerry won) to FIT the results of Diebold/ES&S's "trade secret" vote counting formulae (Bush won). THAT is why the AWOL story had to be buried. You had a heinous, unjust war which 56% of Americans opposed in Feb. '03--a significant majority that would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was), the Abu Ghraib horrors in May '04 (63% of Americans opposed to torture "under any circumstances"), massive theft of the federal treasury, massive federal debt, issue polls showing Americans' rejection of every Bush policy, foreign and domestic (way up in the 60% to 90% range), and people flocking to the Democratic Party to oust Bush (the grass roots Democrats blew the Bushites away in new voter registration, nearly 60/40, in 2004). Bush's AWOL would have burdened the "plausible narrative" that Rove was writing and feeding to the corporate news monopolies. It's not that any voters would be swayed either way; it's that, in this delusionary tale, it would SEEM LIKE they should have been. They were painting a picture. Bush's AWOL becoming "news" would tear a whole in the picture.

If they had failed in the sting, they would have done something else (for instance, they would have had Bush come out and apologize and go kiss some soldiers' boots--much like Richard's Nixon's "Checkers speech," way back when; and then they would have slobbered all over him, creating the narrative of it taking a 'big man' to admit a fault--oh, I can just hear them!). It's all about maintaining the illusion of legitimacy of this horrible war and other fascist policy--in the teeth of poll after poll after poll after poll showing that both things are rejected by huge numbers of Americans--including, recently, the epochal 70% opposition to the war.

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Edited to amend "re-typed" to "apparently re-typed." It has not been proved that it WAS re-typed. Could have been an early version of that IBM font-ball machine made available to the military. The secretary, while attesting to the CONTENT (that Bush refused to take a flight physical and didn't show up in Alabama), didn't recognize the document, but the matter is so obscure and the investigation of it so incomplete, that "apparently re-typed" is the most accurate way to put it.