There are those who believe this unknown man and Hispanic sounding woman were the friends of Karl Rove, the infamously nasty Roger Stone and his Cuban wife, Nydia Bertran-Stone. Stone most recently turned Elliot Spitzer in to the FBI last year after a vicious battle while serving as a consultant to the New York state Republican party.
Burkett did nothing with them for months – until the lies of the Bush campaign, particularly the swift boat ads, became too insulting, and he offered the memos to Abu Ghraib reporting producer Mary Mapes at CBS, the bonus target.
And when the 60 Minutes II report aired, the attack on the veracity of the memos was too ready, too fast, too organized. Witnesses were pressured into denial, and Rather and Burkett were discredited and shamed. Mapes was fired.
Soon, Rather was gone, too. Burkett, already in poor health from an illness picked up during his military service for which the government refused to provide healthcare, suffered greatly.
And thus the memos, perhaps sent to Burkett to discredit the honest witness, must have delighted the White House when Burkett chose Mapes and Rather, the best and most dangerous in mainstream news broadcasting.
It is thrilling now to see Rather stand up to CBS with his $70 million lawsuit. The panel CBS formed to investigate the memos was ridiculously lead by Richard Thornburgh, Papa Bush’s Attorney General, who was known during his reign for re-classifying the most federal papers as top secret and unavailable in history, thus protecting many involved in Iran Contra and the BCCI scandal, as well as helping to hide the legal and financial scandals of the Bush sons. Oh, yes, he was the man to get to handle this Bush National Guard records problem.
In the interim, Rather has been reporting on Hdnet, a channel the huge controlling cable giant Comcast refuses to carry. So, most people can’t see the good work he’s doing at "Dan Rather Reports."
Perhaps Rather’s most important achievement there was in August 2007, Episode 227, when he documented the former employees of Sequoia, the company that had long produced the punch card paper ballots, and their story of the changes in quality and specs made for the ballots being shipped to Palm Beach, Florida for the 2000 election – all of which has lead to the Bush presidency and the implementation of HAVA (authored by the indicted Bob Ney), handing elections over to hackable voting machines produced by corrupt private contractors – and thus, Bush’s second term (PDF of Transcript available on this page -- don't pick the "View Online", it's not even broken into paragraphs).
So, I dedicate this posting of my own presentation of Know Bush Facts to Dan Rather and his courage and re-dedication to investigative journalism, and to Bill Burkett, a man of integrity, and to Mary Mapes -- all victims of the Bush White House lies.
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