James Woodard spent 27 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. He was released last week as a result of DNA evidence gathered through an unprecedented cooperative effort between Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, a Democrat and the first black DA in the history of Texas, and the Texas Innocence Project.

Together they re-examined hundreds of cases and have freed 17 Texas inmates so far — their effort still has 250 more cases to review. Last year NPR’s Morning Edition profiled DA Watkins. Last night 60 Minutes did a segment on the DA and the Innocence Project that featured the story of James Woodard. Convicted in the 1981 murder of his girlfriend, Woodard served 27 years and four months, the longest of any inmate in the nation to be cleared with the help of DNA.

Woodard had always maintained his innocence, he says, including every one of the 12 times he came up for parole:

“They always told me, as long as you deny your guilt its saying something about you, you know you are not willing to own up to your deed. And we gonna deny you,” Woodard says.

But Woodard refused to admit guilt. “I wasn’t guilty,” he says.

“You chose truth over freedom,” Pelley remarks.

“I mean, a man has to stand for something,” Woodard says.

Jeralyn at Talk Left  called it “one of the most moving segments ‘60 Minutes’ has ever done” and points to a summit on the wrongfully convicted in the Texas Senate on May 8.

A Georgia resident, I am reminded of the case of convicted “cop killer” Troy Anthony Davis who sits on death row here despite the recantations of seven witnesses who testified against him, despite the fact that no murder weapon was ever found and no physical evidence linked him to the crime, and despite the fact that he has maintained his innocence throughout.

There will be a Rally for Troy Davis at the Capitol in Atlanta on May 17.

RELATED: 60 Minutes was at the top of its game last night. Crooks & Liars and Think Progress both applaud the What Really Happened to Pat Tillman? segment. Said Pat’s mother Mary Tillman, “this isn’t about us. It’s about what they’ve done to the public. This was a public deception.”

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show did a segment last night on a 60 Minutes interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

I went back to watch the full 2-part profile by Lesley Stahl and found it to be an outstanding piece of television journalism.

Stewart made fun of Scalia on two points. Read the rest of this entry »

The repercussions of a recent New York Times article about how the Pentagon manipulated the American media have begun to be felt in the foreign press.

Serge Truffaut writes for Montreal’s Le Devoir,

“The old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth” is one to which the Pentagon has stuck to with unheard of will, strength, and consistency. Thanks to the Benedictine work a journalist from The New York Times - and there is no better word to describe it- we now know that the U.S. executive has applied itself to building a propaganda machine so powerful, that it highlights the disdain that Bush and company feed on with respect Read the rest of this entry »

Gen. Tommy Franks was off the mark when he called Douglas Feith the dumbest effing guy on the planet. On 60 Minutes last night, Feith showed that stupidity alone is not enough to describe a clueless academic intoxicated by power and willing to stoop to intellectual dishonesty that would shame any used-car salesman

“What we did after 9/11,” he told Steve Kroft, “was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.”

“So you’re saying,” an incredulous Kroft followed up by asking, “you didn’t think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it–more important to go after people who weren’t responsible for it?”

Feith, who helped cook the intelligence to justify the invasion, was pimping his doorstop book that blames everyone else, especially L. Paul Bremer, who ran the Iraq occupation for the first two years, for the ensuing fiasco.

If he had had his way, Feith claims, he would have turned the country over to con man Ahmad Chalabi, who fed him and his Neo-Con rubes $33 million of false information to lie us into the war.

Dumb isn’t enough. Try shameless, arrogant and deceitful. There is at least one like him on most campuses. Just our luck that this specimen ended up in Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s admission that she “misspoke” — a political word usage sort of like “pre-owned cars” instead of “used cars” — in the dramatic anecdote she told of having to run to avoid sniper fire in Bosnia undermines a campaign theme and now plops her in the middle of that dangerous credibility danger zone where reporters and editors will now carefully check her every assertion.

She can expect editors to look at every nook and cranny of the Clintons’ tax returns and research future statements of experience on specific issues or dramatic anecdotes. And she can probably expect the footage of contradictions to surface in a campaign ad by Democratic Presidential nomination front runner Barack Obama because the Bosnia revision puts the underlying issue on the table.

The Clinton campaign had argued that the press needed to vet Obama more thoroughly, but this incident likely means Clinton will come under closer media scrutiny: if the press sees smoke and fire, it sniffs to see if it can detect more smoke and find another fire.

It was bad enough that videos surfaced on the Internet produced by various individuals. But the political killer for Clinton came when CBS News, which had the original footage that surfaced on You Tube, ran this devastating report using even more footage and juxtaposing Clinton’s campaign version of what happened with what really happened:

The resulting press coverage has been nothing less than disastrous for a candidate who needs to blow Obama away with a massive landslide of votes in Pennsylvania and try and peel away Superdelegates, arguing that she’s the stronger most electable candidate.

In reality, GOPers probably already have campaign ads set up using footage of Obama’s pastor and Clinton’s a-misspoke-caught-on-video moment. One candidate will be painted as uncertain and perhaps dangerous, the other candidate as someone you can’t believe.

The New York Times’ The Caucus story was pretty blunt about the potential impact on Clinton:

As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.

Yet on Monday, Mrs. Clinton admitted that she “misspoke” about the episode — a concession that came after CBS News showed footage of her walking calmly across the tarmac with her daughter, Chelsea, and being greeted by dignitaries and a child.

The backpedaling was a rare instance of Mrs. Clinton’s acknowledging an error, and she did so on a sensitive issue: She has cited her “strength and experience” since the start of the presidential race, framing her 80 trips abroad as first lady as preparation for dealing with foreign affairs as president. That argument was behind her campaign’s “red phone” commercial, which cast her as best able to handle a crisis.

In terms of the image she has spent millions to create via ads and in campaign stops, the controversy has not helped:

Mrs. Clinton corrected herself at a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board; she did not explain why she had misspoken, but only admitted it and then offered a less dramatic description.

Mrs. Clinton said she had been told “that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire,” not that actual shots were being fired.

“So I misspoke,” she said.

However, if you watch the CBS video, the earlier version was so specific that it’s hard to accept it as simply a slip of the lip. Meanwhile, her advisers were giving various spin explanations to try and bury it once and for all.

Just how serious the Clinton camp can be seen by reading this link IN FULL from the Philadelphia paper’s Attytood blog. Here’s just a small part of the account of Clinton talking to the newspaper and shows how her advisers were trying to soften the political fallout:

Read the rest of this entry »

After the Tet offensive in early 1968, the Most Trusted Man in America announced the war in Vietnam could not be won. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” the President of the United States said, “I’ve lost America” and conceded by announcing he wouldn’t run for reelection.

Walter Cronkite is 91, and George W. Bush is no Lyndon Johnson, but America’s news nanny, who tucked us in every evening for two decades by ending the CBS Evening News with “And that’s the way it is,” has now declared “Our Troops Must Leave Iraq.”

In a piece co-written and appearing in print, Cronkite’s voice is still being heard. In the Japan Times, on the eve of Pearl Harbor day, he concludes:

“Congress must act. Although Congress never declared war, as required by the Constitution, they did give the president the authority to invade Iraq. Congress must now withdraw that authority and cease its funding of the war.

“It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity. That is the way the Vietnam War was brought to an end. It is the way that the Iraq War will also be brought to an end. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the war will drag on, with all the suffering that implies, to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now.”

Trust is not what it used to be, and age has diminished the reach of Cronkite’s voice, but he is still trying to tell America how it is.

Cross-posted from my blog.

You Tube has the gem below of CBS anchor Katie Couric making fun of a video on You Tube that showed Dan Rather fussing with his overcoat. Couric & Co seem to be having fun and in great spirits (and she’s as likeable on the video as on camera):

And here’s the (in)famous Rather video:

When you watch this, you now realize what it meant that Rather was the (micro) Managing Editor of his newscast…

See our related post on Bob Schieffer HERE.

UPDATE: In the interest of total accuracy, the Dan Rather video above that is offered on You Tube was not created by You Tube but by comedian Harry Shearer for My Damn Channel.