Nothing is authentic about this CBS journalism moment

I can tell you that my sources, including some with ties to the intelligence community who have experience in such matters, contend that this whole CBS/Bill Burkett affair smells like a classic sting right out of the playbook of Karl Rove, the man behind the controls of the George W. Bush re-election video game.

CBS is on the ropes right now over airing a story based on documents critical of Bush’s National Guard service, documents that now appear to be forgeries. The documents were leaked to CBS by Burkett, who has previously claimed that Bush operatives orchestrated the destruction of National Guard records that reflected poorly on the president.

Remember the Mike Horner case, where CBS in 1997 fell for forged documents from a U.S. Customs whistleblower? Most of what Horner was saying at the time was true, my sources contend. The problem was that Horner couldn’t handle the heat in the kitchen anymore, and so he did fabricate a memo to advance his story.

In 2000, Mr. Horner admitted he forged the memo "for media exposure" and was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison.

... In 1999 Leslie Stahl read an apology on the air: "We have concluded we were deceived, and ultimately, so were you, the viewers."

That same scenario could be unfolding in the Burkett affair, true. But that assumes Burkett acted alone in fabricating the documents. Was he the lone gunman, or were their other players on this grassy knoll? Bush has been under ever increasing media pressure to release his Guard records. That pressure includes court challenges under the Freedom of Information Act. Rove had to find a way to inoculate Bush from the damage those records could cause if they did somehow become public, the sources speculate. You never know when some “liberal” judge is going to muck things up for you.

And Burkett, a former lieutenant colonel in the Texas Army National Guard, desperate to prove his case against Bush, made the perfect mark for Rove’s sting.

Phony documents -- likely based on the real thing -- get leaked to the target: Burkett, who then tries to get them to the Kerry campaign; they don't bite. Burkett goes to CBS, and they do.

Regardless of who got the forged documents out in the public eye, it serves Rove's purpose of discrediting a noisy whistleblower and distracting the media from the underlying story; it also inoculates Bush in the event that the real documents do surface. Who's going to believe anything now?

For those who think it's too complicated a conspiracy scenario, my sources point out that you need to remember who outed the documents as supposed fakes within hours of CBS airing its story; it was right-wing bloggers like Drudge and a little-known Republican lawyer with strong ties to the GOP. Who were their sources -- particularly given the fact that the White House was slow to publicly disavow the documents?

Why CBS fell for the scam -- assuming it was scam -- is still a mystery to me. I guess they gave too much weight to being first with the story and didn't pay enough attention to the larger picture of how the network might be played as a pawn in the process. Authentic journalism lessons are in order here for the CBS crew, it seems. Just because you have might as a media giant doesn’t mean you get a pass on getting the story right.

And even though it is still possible that the documents aren't forgeries, the problem, in terms of how all this has shaken out, is that CBS just can't prove it.

So these are the scenarios:

1. Whistleblower cracks up and makes up the documents.
2. Rove operatives leak phony documents to a whistleblower willing to grasp at straws; the whistleblower in turns leaks them to the media.
3. The documents are real, but no one can prove it.

Oh, I guess it's possible the Kerry campaign was behind the leaking of the documents to Burkett. The problem with that scenario, according to folks I've talked with, is that the Kerry campaign didn't need to make up documents to keep the heat on the Bush campaign on this subject; in fact, the media was doing the job for them. The longer the documents stayed under wraps, the longer the story stayed in the news and the more it looked like Bush was hiding something, so Kerry seemed to be benefiting from the missing documents.

Also, just the way it went down, the fact that Burkett couldn't seem to get through the bureacracy of the Kerry campaign with the documents. Did they suspect a rat? And CBS apparently contacted the Kerry campaign -- not the other way around. All that tends to point to the conclusion that Kerry's handlers were not the masterminds.

It is suspicious in my book that the White House didn't more vigorously deny the veracity of the documents up front; it was almost as though they were participating in baiting the hook.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan addressed the matter this way at a Sept. 15 press briefing (prior to CBS admitting it had screwed up):

Q Does the President agree with the First Lady that these are forgeries? And does he agree with the Republican Party in that the Democrats are the source of the forgeries?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Mrs. Bush was expressing her view. The view of the White House is that these are serious questions that have been raised and they ought to be looked into. Many media organizations are looking into them as we speak. They're interviewing additional experts. They have raised additional questions about it, and those are serious questions that ought to be looked into fully.

Regardless, I do think, in general, most people smell a rat. They just can't tell from which end of the docks the rat snuck in -- or where it's gone. To even get close to finding the rat, someone has to track down its trail (and the mysterious lady in red, Lucy Ramirez, who Burkett claims contacted him last month about the documents.)

Burkett allegedly agreed to meet with Ramirez at a livestock show in Houston on March 3, but she instead sent a stand-in, an unknown man who handed Burkett and envelope containing the documents and then disappeared.

The right-wing press argues that this wild story is a fabrication, just like the documents. Even if true, they ask why Burkett would sit on the documents for so long?

Good point. But what would you do if you thought you really had the goods to do in a president? Might you not want to put a little distance between yourself and the transaction that put the documents in your hands, just to take in the field to make sure there were no booby-traps set to go off, just to get the courage to move forward with the mission? Maybe Burkett was initially conflicted over the veracity of the documents. I don't think the time argument alone proves anything, other than we might be dealing with a paranoid whistleblower who eventually decided to jump off the pier.

What is a bigger question to me is why did Burkett lie to cover for this illusive woman from Houston whom he supposedly did not know? Might he know her; was Burkett paid off? Will he make his bank records and telephone records available to CBS?

Who knows?

I ran my Rove rant on this CBS moment by a big-league TV producer in New York who has done work for the major networks there. His response:

The Rove thing is interesting. People laugh -- but remember when Ed Meese stood in front of cameras and said arms were sold to Iran to finance the Contras?

Also, didn't Karl Rove bug his own office during a Texas race to damage the opposition?

All I know is that a rat always finds its hole when the lights come on. But invariably, the rat will be back when it needs to feed again.