Reply #10: Mary Mapes (Rather's producer) book excerpt has a lot on this

[emulatorloo]

expecially more on Buckhead

http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/051114roco01?print=true

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As it turns out, Buckhead is no stranger to conservative causes. The Los Angeles Times revealed that his name is Harry W. MacDougald, and he is an Atlanta lawyer with years of experience working on right-wing issues. In his day job as a litigator—where MacDougald presumably uses his real name—he is affiliated with two conservative legal groups, the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Federalist Society.

MacDougald was also a key player in drafting the petition that eventually won a five-year suspension of Bill Clinton's Arkansas law license after Clinton's misleading testimony in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case.

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From earlier in her piece

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Things began to change at about 11 a.m., when I started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far-right Web sites were saying the documents had been forged.

I was incredulous. That couldn't be possible. When we'd shown the president's people the memos, the White House hadn't attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president's communications director, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then Lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.

Within a few minutes, I was visiting Web sites I had never heard of: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. People posted their questionable recollections that electric typewriters in the 1970s did not do "superscripts," the small "th" or "st" suffixes following a number and lifted higher than the other letters. This was important because, in the Killian memos, "111th" was sometimes typed with a superscript. Other bloggers claimed there was no proportional spacing on old typewriters—using different widths for different characters—even though some of the old official documents had proportional spacing. The claims snowballed.

I remember staring, disheartened and angry, at one posting. "60 Minutes is going down," the writer crowed.

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