An Interview with Mary Mapes

Today Hunter from DailyKos conducted an email interview with Mary Mapes, the reporter who broke the story of, among other things, the Bush Texas Air National Guard story and the Abu Ghraib story. She discusses the TANG case, supplementing it with additional documents to disprove claims that the docs were forged. She also discusses why that conversation ended prematurely when their authenticity was called into question, and CBS essentially didn't try to fight back.

As a supplement to this interview, I want to take a moment to point out something that got shockingly little airtime during the whole TANG debate, so little, in fact, that even people I know who paid fairly close attention to this debate don't remember.

The story that supposedly broke the back of the "authenticity" argument was an interview with Marian Carr Knox, the secretary of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, W's squad commander and the man who allegedly dictated the memos saying that W failed to live up to his Guard commitments. Knox told CBS that she didn't write the memos, which everyone in the media jumped on immediately as exoneration for W (and damnation for Mary Mapes and Dan Rather). What they didn't pay much attention to, however, is that she also said that the information contained in the documents was true:

“I know that I didn’t type them," says Knox. "However, the information in those is correct.”

She then corroborates that Bush didn't take the required physical (a major item in the docs), got in through preferential treatment, and acted as if the rules did not apply to him.

How was this information portrayed by the press and pundits? Well, here is the headline from USA Today: "Secretary: Memos are Forgeries."

Your "liberal" media at work.