BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Monday, January 10, 2005
THE HILARIOUS COLONEL
HACKWORTH. The following is my absolute favorite part of the CBS
report. It appears on pages 96 and 97:
Colonel David H. Hackworth
was interviewed by Rather as an expert to evaluate the documents
that Mapes obtained from Lieutenant Colonel Burkett. Colonel
Hackworth is a retired Army officer who has been a columnist,
commentator and reporter for various news organizations. Mapes
said that she asked Colonel Hackworth to "look at the back and
forth" in the Killian documents because he had worked in the
Pentagon and knew about Pentagon politics. Even though Colonel
Hackworth was never in the TexANG, did not know Lieutenant Colonel
Killian or any of the other relevant individuals, had no personal
knowledge of President Bush's service in the TexANG and had no
personal knowledge regarding the Killian documents, he reached
some highly critical conclusions in his interview regarding
President Bush's TexANG service based solely on the purported
authenticity of the Killian documents and his general knowledge of
the military.
First, Colonel Hackworth
concluded that the documents were "genuine." He reached this
conclusion by relating his own experience at the Pentagon during
the Vietnam War when he was running the "Army input system for ...
basic training." Colonel Hackworth said that, while in that post,
he received and refused requests by members of Congress and
generals to assign certain men to particular units and wrote
"cover my own butt" memoranda in many cases to document his
refusals. Colonel Hackworth then concluded that Lieutenant Colonel
Killian was "in the same kind of pickle that I found myself in"
and proceeded to discuss what Lieutenant Colonel Killian was
thinking at the time he wrote the memoranda. Rather asked Colonel
Hackworth whether there was any doubt in his mind that the
documents were real, and Colonel Hackworth replied, "Having been
down that road before I would say that these are genuine
documents."
Second, Colonel Hackworth
concluded that, by not taking his physical, then-Lieutenant Bush
was "insubordinate" and would have been treated more harshly had
he been "an unconnected Lieutenant." Third, Colonel Hackworth
stated repeatedly throughout his interview that then-Lieutenant
Bush was "AWOL" and that a person would have to reach that
conclusion when reviewing the documents "unless you're the village
idiot." Colonel Hackworth appeared to be referring to the fact
that he had seen no evidence that President Bush was "present for
duty" once he left for Alabama in 1972, although he did not
articulate clearly how he reached his conclusion. Finally, Colonel
Hackworth concluded that "the bottom line here is - is the abuse
of power." He said that "[I]t's how people up at the top
can ... lean on the little people."
Rather thought Colonel Hackworth
was a "strong and valuable expert witness." Mapes also believed
that Colonel Hackworth was important for the Segment and included
excerpts of his interview in early drafts of the September 8
Segment script. These excerpts were ultimately cut from the final
script by Heyward and West.
Note the report authors' deadpan
humor in the last graf.
Here's
a link to the PDF of the
full Hackworth interview, although I'll confess that I haven't read
it and don't intend to - it's 38 pages long, and I'm going to trust
that the investigators found the best laugh lines.
posted at 3:42 PM |
1 comments
|
link
1 Comments:
CBS Report comments in the blogsIgnoring the wilder musings in Blogistan, two fairly rational voices express concern:
Armed Liberal at Winds of Change has a provocative take on what's wrong with Liberalism, the Media Elite and the Democratic party as evidenced in the responses to the CBS report, entitled
Risk, Reality, and Bullshit. In short, a biased media indirectly harms those it is presumed to favor. It's a nice analysis.
Kevin Drum / Political Animal has fact-checked the contradictory information regarding Burkett's alleged source(s) of the alleged memos, and says that Burkett's standing story on how he got documents seemingly checks out, even though the one he gave CBS didn't. This gives the Forged-but-not-Fraudulent (authentic contents, but reyped=forged ) hypothesis legs yet.
Stepping back from rationality, one possibly rational point the Rightie wingnuts make repeatedly is that the executive summary faults the competive urge to rush the story and fails to mention partisanship or bias (or even forgeryin the executive summary).
- Bill R
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
