Time to Say It

With the available evidence - of which a small fraction is here, here, and here - it is now beyond reasonable doubt that Dan Rather and CBS are peddling forged documents as a key element of libelous charges against a sitting President; and I suspect that they not only know that these documents are fake, but that their refusal to provide indications of their sources and the provenance of the memos shows that the true source is either not credible as a witness to their authenticity, or is in fact a Kerry campaign or DNC operative or a CBS employee. Of the first part, that the documents are false, I am certain. Of the second, that CBS knows they are false, the only alternative is that CBS is complete unable to determine the credibility of information that comes to them (which makes them useless as an information source in and of itself). Of the third, that the documents' source would discredit the documents' authenticity, I am reasonably certain. Otherwise, CBS would have produced the source (given that there is no harm to the source if the documents are genuine).

Had CBS admitted the possibility of error, and made a forthright attempt to investigate (including the identification of the provenance of the memos), they might have been able to come out of this looking silly but not complicit. As it is, they've attempted to bury the charges under misdirection they would never stand for had it come from any elected official.

Dan Rather is either lying or a fool. CBS has no further credibility as a news organization, and any information whose only source is CBS must henceforth be assumed true until and unless another source confirms it from a separate line of evidence.