TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Now that CBS has announced the infamous "Guard memos" were indeed bogus, it's a good time to compare this incident with the 1999 revelations that George W. Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession.

First, did anyone else find this item unusual? From AP September 8, 2004 :

After the broadcast, the White House, without comment, released to the news media two of the memos, one ordering Bush to report for his physical exam and the other suspending him from flight status.

In fact, according to Los Angeles Times September 18, 2004 :

Nine hours before "60 Minutes" was to air...

John Roberts, the network's White House correspondent... just completed an on-camera interview with Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Bartlett, it appeared, had no quarrel with the authenticity of the documents.

Now get how the documents came to CBS' source. Textbook definition of shady skullduggery:
From USA TODAY 2004-09-21:

Burkett now maintains that the source of the papers was Lucy Ramirez, who he says phoned him from Houston in March to offer the documents. USA TODAY has been unable to locate Ramirez.
[...]
Ramirez told him she had seen him the previous month in an appearance on the MSNBC program Hardball, discussing the controversy over whether Bush fulfilled all his obligations for service in the Texas Air Guard during the early 1970s. "There is something I have that I want to make sure gets out," he quoted her as saying.

He said Ramirez claimed to possess Killian's "correspondence file," which would prove Burkett's allegations that Bush had problems as a Guard fighter pilot.

Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.
[...]

Hmm. Could those documents have been planted by the likes of Karl Rove as obvious fakes in order to discredit the who Bush/Guard story? Within hours of the CBS report, a GOP operative based in Atlanta -- with no experience in the field of typography -- posted an expose of the forged documents to FreeRepublic.com.

All of this sounds a lot like what happened with J. H. Hatfield's Bush bio Fortunate Son in 1999.

According to Soft Skull Press owner Sander Hicks, July 2001:

In the late 1980’s in Texas, Hatfield had made the acquaintance of Clay Johnson, Bush’s lifelong friend and advisor to Bush as Governor. An author of several nonfiction books, Hatfield decided that his personal connections to the candidate would make for a great insider’s biography of Bush. He contacted Rove and Johnson and interviewed them at length. Hatfield mistakenly assumed that Johnson and Rove weren’t aware of his 1988 conviction for solicitation of capital murder (the result of a workplace conspiracy gone horribly awry). ... Rove and Johnson realized that, in Hatfield, they had found their solution to Bush’s drug problem.

Hatfield’s book was in final proofing stages when a story broke on the online magazine Salon. The piece stated that Bush had been arrested in the early ’70s for drug use, and that he "was ordered by a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing illicit drug use," according to an anonymous tip-off. This article was the first to suggest that Bush did community service in Houston in exchange for having his record expunged. Hatfield went to work corroborating this story through Johnson and Rove, his regular sources of information. According to Hatfield, Rove and Johnson discussed the cocaine arrest on the phone, under condition of anonymity. Rove had earlier taken Hatfield on a fishing trip to Lake Eufaula, Oklahoma, to discuss Bush.

Rove and Johnson apparently altered key facts in the story in an effort to discredit Hatfield–and thus they raised the burden of proof for future reporters. At one point, Hatfield was told that the arresting judge was a Republican, a falsehood which, although easily detected, served to damage Hatfield’s credibility. St. Martin’s rushed the cocaine arrest story into the book as an Afterword...

The Dallas Morning News happened to suddenly receive private, confidential information on Hatfield’s criminal background, and published an article about Hatfield’s felonious past.

Hatfield was ARKANCIDED vis drug overdose soon after.

| Posted at 17:39 | PERMA-LINK |

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