Bush AWOL: CBS partially recants

CBS is now saying that it was mistaken to use the now-famous "Killian documents" in its story on Bush's Air Guard career.

CBS Statement On Bush Memos 09/20/04

Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret. Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting. We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust.

A CBS news story notes (CBS: Bush Memo Story a  'Mistake' CBSNews.com 09/20/04):

The network did not say the memoranda — purportedly written by one of Mr. Bush's National Guard commanders — were forgeries. But the network did say it could not authenticate the documents and that it should not have reported them.

Dan Rather issued a separate Dan Rather Statement On Memos 09/20/04:

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

Nick Confessore has an interesting observation on how CBS may have allowed a non-denial of the documents by the White House prior to publication to mislead them in Rope-a-Dope09/20/04:

There's little doubt in my mind that the White House is in posession of every relevant document from George W. Bush's National Guard record, and knew more or less as soon as CBS provided its memos that their authenticity was questionable. Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove knew what they were doing. It was quite smart of the White House to let CBS shoot itself in the foot, because it shifted attention away from the indisputable evidence that Bush pulled strings to get into the Guard and then skipped out on his obligation. Thanks in part to the media's obsession with itself and individual reporters' eagerness to take 60 Minutes down a notch, the controversy over whether CBS relied on fake documents has received far more ink and attention than the rather more interesting questions regarding Bush's Guard duty. The irony is that the rap on Bush's service doesn't really rely on anything aired during the 60 Minutes segment.

Mary at the Left Coaster takes this idea a little farther in Anatomy of a Rove Dirty Trick 09/19/04.

I'm not convinced that it was quite so Machiavellian, though it's certainly conceivable that it could have been.  The fact that the Republicans had the memos prior to publication meant they could take a shot at discrediting them.  They may have just been throwing mud on the wall to see what stuck.

What the CBS statement of 9/20 says is that one of the sources (Bill Burkett) misled them about the provenance of the memos, i.e., how they got from the National Guard files (if genuine) into CBS reporters' hands.  The documents may well be genuine, and the "Killian documents" story itself has provided more reinforcement from witnesses about the story of Bush's inglorious career in the Texas Air Guard.

But the logic of Karl Rove deliberately setting this up escapes me.  There's always the possibility they did something illogical, of course.  But I would think Bush's political team would prefer to have the story fizzle out completely, rather than giving it a detective-story/mystery documents angle that threaten to keep a focus on the Bush Guard story.