You may recall a blog about six months back, "The View from Baghdad," written by an anonymous guy working with budding democrats in Baghdad, that disappeared suddenly in April. It posted a lot of photos and gave personal accounts of what was going on with every day Iraqis. Well, I am back and no longer anonymous.

I came back from Iraq in May, and got disgusted with how the media was portraying events in Iraq, and thoroughly nauseated by Michael Moore (who has never been to Iraq) and the lies he is propagating, so I started The Truth About Iraq. I've decided to use the polling information from Iraq to debunk some of the myths that have been created by the media.

Domestically, our organization also did a poll of swing state media markets - Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Philly - and found out that a lot of the messages we have on our site about how life is improving for Iraqis move voters. Given that more than 7 million people watched Dan Rather last night, and Fahrenheit 9/11 has sold some 13 million tickets, I figure the only way to counter such massive disinformation is through paid television commercials.

Did you see the big headline or watch the top-of-the-newscast story about the success of our sons and daughters in Samarra, Iraq?

Of course, you didn't.

...[M]edia emphasis on Iraq being in chaos has coincided with John Kerry making the same pitch to voters. It makes you wonder, just as we did on the authenticity of Dan Rather's reporting. And now America knows about Rather's ruse.

''Samarra is a beaming success story over here,'' writes Lt. Col Jim Rose, a Tennessee Marine whose parents live in Old Hickory. ''We were getting ready for a take-down there right after Najaf. We told the locals, 'Hey, see what happened in Najaf? Is that what you want? Cause we're coming.' It took the locals about two days to get the bad guys out.''

Rose asked: ''Why isn't the media covering Samarra?''

The claim here is that the Akron Beacon Journal emphasizes the negative news in Iraq, and excludes the positive, because of a political agenda, one that is anti-President Bush.

For me, that raises two questions.

First, why don't we see more photos of content Iraqis and more articles about improvements in their lives? One reason could be that safety concerns largely prevent American journalists from moving around the country.

My second question: Is it the newspaper's responsibility to instill hope and optimism about Iraq, even in the face of growing violence and daily deaths among American military?

For me, this clearly would be manipulating the news for a political agenda. The media's role is not to put a happy face on Iraq so that everyone can feel better about our presence there.

Nor does accurate, though discouraging, reporting indicate a lack of support for our troops there. No one is served by misinformation, including the brave men and women sent there to face death daily.

The blogs terrorizing Dan Rather and CBS the past couple of weeks represent only a small part of the Internet media devoted to criticizing other media, particularly TV and print journalists. Whether they realize it or not, many of these armchair mediaphiles have been heavily influenced by James Wolcott, whose cultural criticism appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire before settling in Vanity Fair, where he is the culture critic.

The news media helped create the modern campaign, and now they seem to be stuck in it. The bloggers, by contrast, adapted quickly. By the time the Republican convention rolled around in August, they had figured something out, staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison Square Garden. They had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another's best lines.

What I think is so fantastic [about blogs] is that there is so much more talent and braininess out in the country than you would know from just reading magazines.

Producer Mary Mapes reportedly had been working on the story for five years. If a story doesn't come together in five years, it's usually a good idea for a news organization to, shall we say, move on. - Thomas Bray, in the Detroit News

"Do I think they're forged? No," Rather said. "But it's not good enough to use the documents on the air if we can't vouch for them, and we can't vouch for them."

Rather said he had no regrets for his defense of the story.

"I believed in it," he said. "I wouldn't have put it on the air if I hadn't of believed in it. And what kind of reporter would I be if I put something on the air in which I believed, and as soon as it's attacked and under pressure, you run, you fold, you fade, you side-wind? That's not the kind of person I am, and it's not the kind of reporter I am."

Here I was thinking the people behind "the hit" were the retards at CBS who put documents on the air that any eight-year-old who's ever used MS Word could have told them were bullshit.

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support "of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question-and their source-vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

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.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

60 Minutes -- so named for the length of time it takes somebody to disprove its stories -- got it wrong. CBS now apologises, in a mealy, hopeless kind of way:

CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, the reporter of the original story, apologized.

That sentence lacks the conclusion: "and resigned". Might be an early draft.

"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," Heyward continued. "We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust."

Heyward mistakenly speaks in the present tense.

Maybe we should feel sorry for 60 Minutes, running on a tiny budget and all:

"The show is not so lavishly budgeted that we have tons of people doing this," said Harry Moses, a "60 Minutes" producer not connected to the story. "You do the pre-interviews yourself and then bring in the correspondent."

At which point the budget suddenly increases:

The next stop was Texas. Rather was in Florida, so CBS chartered a plane to get him to Austin.

Priorities, people.

-CBS apparently didn't bother to verify the documents because the White House didn't tell them they should. (See?! It's Bush's fault!)

-Dan Rather, just a few weeks before running the memo story:

"In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn't do during the Vietnam War? In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns."

-Bill Burkett apparently told a friend that Rather called him after the show and expressed his and the network's "full support".

-A biography blurb on one of Burkett's own essays claims he was a source for Fahrenheit 9/11.

As an example, Schlesinger cited a recent Reuters story, in which the original copy read: "...the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which has been involved in a four-year-old revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank."

In the National Post version of the story, printed Tuesday, it became: "...the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that has been involved in a four-year-old campaign of violence against Israel."

For the second time in less than a week, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings has erroneously reported on an aspect of so-called "assault weapons," claiming in an ABC Radio report broadcast Monday afternoon that the husband of Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) was killed with an assault rifle.

"That is not true, and even the slightest research effort by Jennings or a research assistant would have shown that Dennis McCarthy was killed with a 9mm pistol, purchased legally in California by a racist lunatic named Colin Ferguson," said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF)....

The 9mm Ruger pistol was not covered under the 1993 ban on so-called "assault weapons["]...

"Last week, Jennings and correspondent Bill Redeker teamed up on a report for ABC's World News Tonight about the ban that started off with footage of the North Hollywood bank robbery in 1997, showing the robbers using fully-automatic machine guns," Gottlieb noted. "The image of that shootout gave viewers the impression that the end of the ban would allow people to purchase machine guns, and that is simply false.

"We realize that the end of this ten-year gun ban fraud is big news with anti-gun broadcast media," Gottlieb said, "but is there no shame with these people? Don't they at least owe the public some semblance of informed objectivity? Must they be so blatantly biased that they distort even the simplest report?"

Every day in this country, thousands of journalists try hard to earn and keep the trust of their readers, listeners and viewers. Now, with what looks like shoddy reporting on George W. Bush's career in the Texas Air National Guard, anchorman Dan Rather and his colleagues at CBS News have made it harder for all those other journalists to earn and keep trust.

On Wednesday, Rather finally acknowledged questions about the memos' authenticity--but insisted the sentiment they conveyed was correct. As if to say: This just in! We think George W. Bush got special treatment!

Nice try, but that charge is old news. The new news was CBS' "Gotcha!" memos. The fact that Adolf Hitler allegedly had thoughts similar to some in those long discredited "Hitler's diaries" doesn't make them more than sleazy frauds.

The president of CBS News now says the network will "redouble its efforts" to investigate the documents. The time to do that was before the story aired. And some journalists wonder why many Americans think we're biased, arrogant and inaccurate. The burden of proof here was on Rather and Co. If they did ignore warnings from experts, they hurt a lot of honest reporters.

CBS anchor Dan Rather acknowledged for the first time yesterday that there are serious questions about the authenticity of the documents he used to question President Bush's National Guard record last week on "60 Minutes."

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story," Rather said in an interview last night.

"Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.' "

"This is not about me," Rather said before anchoring last night's newscast. "I recognize that those who didn't want the information out and tried to discredit the story are trying to make it about me, and I accept that."

"I think this is very, very serious," said Bob Schieffer, CBS's chief Washington correspondent. "When Dan tells me these documents are not forgeries, I believe him. But somehow we've got to find a way to show people these documents are not forgeries."

"I take very seriously her belief that the documents are not authentic." If Knox is right, Rather said, the public "won't hear about it from a spokesman. They'll learn it from me."

Last week, Knox said she had no firsthand knowledge of Bush's time with the Texas Air National Guard, although she did recall a culture of special treatment for the sons of prominent people, such as Bush and others.

From which memo does that particular signature, with its telltale "J", come? That's right: The June 24, 1973 memo. One of the two mystery memos that only USA Today is known to have. One of the two memos that doesn't appear in the sidebar on CBS's website, but which, it now seems clear, CBS had in its possession and gave to Emily Will to analyze.

If they had it, why did they withhold it? Maybe, just maybe, because Will did tell them it was bogus and they knew that sharing those findings with their viewers would destroy the credibility of not only that individual memo but the entire set.

Of the four Killian memos CBS has released, two are signed and two are unsigned. Matley says he saw three that were unsigned, which means almost certainly that CBS also had the unsigned February 2, 1972 mystery memo that only appears in USA Today's cache.

The Daily Recycler has high resolution video of the ABC News segment. Watch it yourself....There's no question the one Emily Will was looking at came from the June 24, 1973 memo.

It's right there in the WaPo story. CBS had the [2 USA Today] mystery memos and didn't use them. Why?

September 14, 2004--Twenty-seven percent (27%) of voters believe that the CBS Memos concerning President Bush's National Guard service are authentic. However a Rasmussen Reports survey also found that 38% believe the memos are forgeries.

Among voters who are following the story very closely, 56% believe the memos are forgeries and 27% believe they are authentic. Overall, 38% of voters say they are following the story "very" closely and 34% say they are following it "somewhat" closely.

I specifically addressed this question:

On the preponderance of the available handwriting evidence, are all the purported "Jerry B. Killian" signatures by the same person?

My expert opinion from examining the first documents submitted to me was confirmed by examination of the several that were later submitted to me.