How did Buckhead know?

Buckhead is the Atlanta attorney who originally questioned the authenticity of the documents used to attack President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service in the September 8, 2004 60 Minutes II broadcast. He preferred anonymity for professional reasons, but a diligent reporter for the Los Angeles Times tracked him down and identified him in the immediate aftermath of Rathergate. A reader forwarded Buckhead’s comments on the documents to us on September 9, and I included them in our original “Sixty-first Minute” post that morning. For the most part he has kept his silence.

Now Mary Mapes is out peddling the same fraud she was peddling on September 8 on 60 Minutes, only now it’s called Truth and Duty and she’s charging $24.95 for it. Whatever the state of her knowledge was on September 8, 2004, the fraud she is now peddling can only be described as deliberate and knowing. She is abetted in her fraud by a respectable publisher and its public relations arm, taking advantage of the ignorance of her interlocutors and reviewers regarding the most basic facts of the case. In some cases, such as Jonathan Alter in the review in yesterday’s Times Book Review, the ignorance must be willful.

For the most part MacDougald has maintained his silence. In the wake of Mapes’s book and accompanying public relations campaign, MacDougald has stepped forward to speak. Last night he wrote us:

About 14 months too late, I have put up on the web an accounting of how I knew enough to spot the Killian memos as fakes: “How Did Buckhead Know? Clues for the Clueless.”

Some lies, it seems, will never die.

I don’t attempt to tell the whole story, just part of my part. It’s pretty crude in the web authoring department – semi-hopeless newbie here. Only through the dumbed down facilities of .mac am I able to muster even this lame effort.

If you have any interest in this important story, please check it out.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses