I Deduced NSA Was Spying in Journalists in 2006 From the Dan Rather 60 Minutes Case

[McCamy Taylor]

...and anyone else who paid attention to the story could have figured it out, too.

Recall that within minutes of the "Bush AWOL" story airing on 60 Minutes Atlanta attorney and GOP busy bee Harry MacDougald aka Buckhead was posting on the Free Republic that he had a copy of the Bush AWOL document and that he was an expert in old typewriters and the document was a phony.

As Mary Mapes pointed out in her book, Truth and Duty , MacDougald (who is not a typewriter expert, so I guess someone else told him what to say) had a faxed copy of the AWOL documents. As she revealed in her book, no typewriter expert could make an assessment of a document's authenticity one way or another based upon a fax, because the process of faxing changes the character of the type. Any type expert who was employed to analyze the documents would have said as much, which may be why they had to get someone like MacDougald with no expertise and no professional reputation as a typewriting expert to uphold to make up shit to post online.

If the Republicans could have gotten their hands on the real document or a perfect copy, they could have found an expert to say they were fake. Or that their authenticity was debatable. In cases like that, there is always fudge room. But without the real document, they were out of luck.

So, the question became, how did they get a fax when they were in no position to get the real thing?
If the bosses at 60 Minutes or some mole was the source of the leaked documents, they should have been able to get a decent copy of the documents to the Republicans. The only reason the Republicans would have had to rely on a fax would be if they intercepted a phone transmission---say if someone at 60 Minutes like Mapes faxed the documents back to the office, and the phone call was intercepted.

Who was busy intercepting phone calls in 2004? The NSA, in a scheme concocted by Cheney in 2001, way before 9/11. How would the NSA have been able to justify wiretapping the Rather/Mapes 60 Minutes team? They could point to the Abu Graib story and say that they were a national security risk.

Here is the illustrated version of this story that I did at my website a while back. I call it "Party like its 1984." I am sure that people thought I was just being paranoid when I speculated that the NSA was wiretapping our journalists.



I hope that Dan Rather is prepared to call Harry MacDougald and the NSA to the stand in his upcoming lawsuit. We all need to know how that fax fell into the hands of the Republicans.

[defendandprotect]

1. And . . . I'm guessing that NY Times also knew about ALL of this . . .

[McCamy Taylor]

5. I guess. I have been posting my suspicions for years.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. You, too?

I was thinking more along the lines of Bernie Goldberg's old-boy network at CBS, but massive NSA spying could certainly explain it.

--p!

[inthebrain]

3. There's gonna be a lot of stuff coming out

about the BA in the next six months. It's gonna be uglier than many of us suspect.

And yeah, I expect this 60 minutes controversey is going to come up.

[defendandprotect]

6. It usually starts to happen . . . and then they seem to get threatened . . .

I'm looking at Obama and wondering if we'll see any signs of that --

I'm overjoyed he's off to a fast, happy start!!

[EFerrari]

4. I've just always assumed that journalists have no privacy from the feds.

This isn't really new, is it? This is our history since FBI was established.

[McCamy Taylor]

7. Dick Nixon only dreamed of this. It took Dick Cheney to do it.

[EFerrari]

8. Sure! Cheney had the tech available.

Great job catching the fax problem.

[aquart]

9. Excellent reasoning.

[EFerrari]

10. Kick for really good work.

[thesquanderer]

11. I don't think so...

re: "no typewriter expert could make an assessment of a document's authenticity one way or another based upon a fax, because the process of faxing changes the character of the type"

It depends. Some things you can easily tell, even in a fax. So I think that's too broad a statement. For example, if a letter uses proportional type (i.e. a W is wider than an i), that can easily be determined from a fax. If a document was supposed to be created before proportional typewriters existed, you could tell that was a fraud even from a fax.