This really is turning out to be nothing (kudos to Tapper, Stelter, and CNN for this interview):
Like I said yesterday:
Personally, I’m sympathetic to the notion that he intended no ill will. First, he was doing this to honor a guy who Williams felt defended him for days when Williams was undoubtedly scared. Second, he’s not trying to claim he was some sort of brave soldier, he’s thanking all the guys who defended him. Third, Brian Williams is a civilian with no training whatsoever. He was probably all hopped up on adrenaline just being on the helicopter, let alone in the desert during a war, and then to be told that someone had been hit, etc. I can see how years later it would all run together. Hell, a simple combat landing in a plane would make many civilians think they had been hit by a nuke. I have no practical experience, but I imagine it would be just as dramatic in a helicopter.
From the transcript:
Rich Krell, who was piloting the Chinook that Williams was on, tells a slightly different story than the crew members who spoke to Stars and Stripes.
“Some of things he’s said are not true. But some of the things they’re saying against him are not true either,” said Krell, who spoke exclusively to CNN on Thursday morning.
Krell explained that, contrary to Williams’ comments in the past, there were three helicopters flying in close formation, not four.
“One of the birds broke down, so we were a flight of three,” Krell said. “We were hauling metal bridges.”
Williams was in the back of Krell’s aircraft along with three other NBC staffers. Krell referred to his Chinook as the “second bird” in the formation. The “first bird,” right in front of the “second bird,” was struck by the RPG.
Due to his seat in the back, Williams was most likely unable to witness the RPG attack, Krell said.
All three of the helicopters were hit by small arms fire, Krell said, supporting Williams’ past claims about that.
“The bridge expansions we were hauling took most of the hits,” Krell said.
The three Chinooks took evasive maneuvers. Krell’s helicopter dropped off its payload, then met up with the other two about 45 minutes later. That may explain why the other crew members told Stars and Stripes that Williams arrived in the area later.
Krell said of Williams, “Yeah, he messed up some things and said some things he shouldn’t have. I [first] heard it a few years ago. … Actually one of my flight engineers said, ‘Did you hear him say that? Wasn’t he on our bird?'”
As I noted yesterday, over time, memories fade and get mangled:
Finally, and most importantly, memories fade and get muddled. About 90% of the time when Shawn and I are reminiscing about things we did together while overseas, one of us will say to the other “I remember that happening, but don’t remember if I was there.”
“Were you there for that?”
“I think so. I mean, I remember it happening.”
“Or was that me and Geoff?”
“Again, I don’t remember. I remember it happening, but I don’t remember if I was there or there right after.”
It is what it is. Big fish and all that. That’s how memory works, that’s why eyewitness testimony is a shitty thing to use as the sole basis for a conviction, and that’s why old soldiers talk about the same stories over and over again- to retain the collective memory when the individual memory fails, to have a few laughs, and to remember what it was like being young and dumb.
Here’s CWO4 Krell:
Krell didn’t seem overly bothered by Williams’ revisionist history — he chalked it up to wartime theatrics. “After a while, with combat stories, you just go ‘Whatever,'” he said.
And note, Williams isn’t the only one whose memory faded and is inaccurate. The soldiers who accused Williams of lying also have some facts wrong- They claim he was on a chopper an hour behind them, when he was on the Chinook right behind them. What happened was he was with them when the RPG hit the shithook, but they then flew off to drop off their payload, returned to the downing an hour later, and that is why the soldiers “remember” him not being around during the RPG incident at all.
As far as I am concerned, Williams is owed an apology by some of his harshest critics. Many of whom, I might add, never left their barcalounger and got anywhere near as close to danger as Williams did. Their sole contribution to the war was slapping yellow ribbons on their cars and ranting about the Dixie Chicks.
As someone noted earlier in the other post, the best that can come from this is a heightened awareness of how memory works and how dangerous eye witness testimony can be in the court of law.
Schlemazel
You may be right John but ever since I heard Williams say he was a fan of Rush Limbaugh & made a point of listening to him every day I feel no desire to offer him any benefit of the doubt, sympathy, support or comfort. These are things Rush is incapable of so I see no point in providing them to one of his. Fuck him
Yes, I am petty and vindictive, I am tired of being a nice guy & always giving ground.
edit:
“the best that can come from this is a heightened awareness of how memory works and how dangerous eye witness testimony can be in the court of law.”
HAHAHAHAHA as if
BGinCHI
TPM had some headline that said “Media Critics Say Williams’ Apology For Mistakes In Iraq Story Not Enough.”
I would wager that the only people in the Beltway more stupid and crooked than the pols and the media types are their so-called “critics.”
We don’t have media critics in this country, we just have media who transcribe the shit the right wing says and other media who call them out on it.
SatanicPanic
can’t be bothered to care
SiubhanDuinne
I don’t like Brian Williams and you can’t make me stop not liking him.
lamh36
Personally I could give two shits about it but I will say it’s amazing how much due diligence the media will do when it’s one if their own falsely accused or mis-represented. Otheraise they misquote or misrepresent what someone says and they pair some one sentence blurb correction if that…example…all the hooplah claiming Obama was pandering ro anti-vax voters in ’08…when it was a misrepresentation at beat of what Obama actually said….
Tree With Water
No More Mister Nice Blog hit the nail on the head, I think:
“..But here’s the key point about Williams: Whatever you think of him, this was not a distortion of the news. We need an informed citizenry, and Williams may not be doing a very good job of informing the public about what it needs to know — his nightly news broadcasts are heavy on fluff — but his claim didn’t misrepresent any critical fact about the war itself. It wasn’t Lara Logan deceiving the public about Benghazi or Judy Miller defrauding the public on Iraqi WMDs. It was just about Williams himself. Condemn them all, sure — but remember that what Logan and Miller did was far worse, because they misinformed the public about critical issues. Williams just misinformed the public about Williams”.
Mandalay
Seriously? For what?
Regardless, the guy is damaged goods now with regard to his credibility. If NBC ditch him they lose, and if they keep him on they lose. A win-win situation as far as I’m concerned.
soonergrunt (mobile)
There are things that i remember clearly that none of my buddies remembers the way i remember them.
that’s the way memories work, especially of traumatic events. Ill have more o on this after dinner.
Pogonip
@SatanicPanic: Likewise. I think we need to discuss something more interesting. Pets. Recipes. Mopping. Gardening. Or the ever-reliable dog poop.
jl
@BGinCHI: Yes, I agree, I found these media critics’ discussion incredibly ignorant. But they just spout attitude and contentless pundit BS, that is their job, dammit, that is what they DO!
I dislike Williams, because he is a news lightweight and Williams is a smug BSer who says weird stuff to push his popularity. I remember Williams used to like to say, whenever he had an excuse, that he was a faithful listener of ol’ Rush Limbaugh in order to understand the common person’s point of view, to know what is really in the hearts of the American heartlanders. That was before Limbaugh revealed himself to be a patently and eager hypocritical debauched drug addled racist hatemonger and liar. I haven’t heard Williams touting his Rush cred for quite some time. I wish Williams would go away, but I now think this scandal is not much of anything.
Looks like a couple of troops’ hate Williams guts and are spreading the worst possible interpretation of his ‘mismemories’. The pilot who detailed the situation says that Williams was in the back and might not have understood exactly what happened.
One of the troops who seems to really dislike Williams (apparently because Williams was spouting pompous self-important BS even when still embedded and should have known better) claims he called him an idiot and straightened him out on what happened on the scene. But that is just a claim, as far as I can tell.
And Williams seems somewhat brighter than the likes of Wolf or Steve Pelley, but that ain’t saying much, so maybe Williams did not understand why he was called an idiot by some soldier.
Mr. Twister
@Schlemazel: +1
Violet
@lamh36:
Yep.
Kylroy
Reminds me of Sarkozy saying he was at the fall of the Berlin wall. He was actually in Berlin a week or two after the wall fell, but his memory rounded down (it had *just* happened, after all).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I thought he was a smug douchebag last week, before I heard this story and now that I hear some of these corrections. My opinion has not varied. Fuck the smug Limbaugh-loving, lazyass CW Pez dispenser.
Mandalay
@soonergrunt (mobile):
That may be true, but is beside the point, and in any case Williams is rightly held to a higher standard. The issue isn’t that he is misremembering now, which would be entirely understandable, but that he was misremembering immediately after the alleged incident when he was in a position to double check all the facts before reporting them.
And the issue isn’t whether or not he is a liar – it’s that as a reporter of events he is a mediocrity, and now has little credibility.
Violet
@Mandalay: I thought Williams did report it correctly initially and over the years the story changed.
Mandalay
@Violet:
You are correct. From his initial report of the incident in 2003:
So that certainly makes it hard to argue that Williams is a liar now; presumably he would not lie about something that had been televised to millions of people.
Splitting Image
@lamh36:
Bullseye.
JPL
@Violet: The embellishment occurred in 2013, ten years after the incident.
JPL
I’d rather talk about Bill O’Reilly making obscene phone calls. If you want to talk about someone getting a pass about his behavior, it would be him.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kylroy:
Look it all the people who were at Woodstock.
And I feel the need to quote again from Henry V:
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words […]
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This is not excusing Brian Williams, but an acknowledgement that memory is easily embellished.
raven
My unit in Korea had two soldiers wounded when we were out sweeping the hills looking for North Korean “Infiltrators”. A squad pinned them down in a rice paddy and killed three of them. Two of the guys ran down the hill and one turned a NK over. The Korean had a frag with the pin pulled tucked under him and it went off wounding both GI’s. Over the years I came to think this happened in Jan, 68 when the Blue House Raid occurred and we were out looking for them. When I posted questions on a unit website a guy came back and explained I had the incident right but it had actually happened in the summer of 67 when I’d been with the unit for a few months. Of course that was 40+ years ago.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: I know exactly where I was during Woodstock!
Violet
@Mandalay: @JPL: Yeah, I think over the years the actual events got fuzzy and details merged here or there. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, really. Although when you’re in the position Brian Williams is in and you are telling a dramatic story about being shot at during a war, and it’s something you can verify by looking at your own reporting from the actual time period in question, it seems like the smart thing to do would be to go back and review your notes to make sure you’ve got the details correct. Or not tell it at all.
Mike in NC
It seems many of the Village Idiots are fans of Rush Limbaugh and they’ll circle the wagons to protect one of their own. Williams isn’t a journalist, he’s a media personality. Made several appearances on “30 Rock”, for example.
raven
@Mike in NC: He has a GED.
Mike E
@raven:
Looking for the shitter?
raven
@Mike E: Behind it burning one!
jl
@Violet: Can’t find the TPM post now, but as I said above, one of the troops, who admits he dislikes Williams intensely, says that Williams was either confused or lying about the incident and pompously BSing about it shortly after it occurred while he was still embedded in Iraq. Trooper says he forcefully called Williams an idiot and explained what had happened to his face then and there. One would think that experience would solidify the reality of what happened in anyone’s mind, let alone for a supposed journalist.
So, maybe Williams can slide by on this one. But you are right, I think Williams is either a crummy reporter, or a BSer who says shit because he thinks he will benefit, or both. I’m not sure whether Williams is a conscious liar or not.
I don’t think doing entertainment from time to time makes Williams a crummy journalist. Even people like Murrow did that kind of thing. Being a crummy reporter and journalist and serial BSer makes Williams a crummy reporter and journalist.
Another TPM post documents that Willaims’ confusion dates back to at least 2007.
Hey, Bri-boy, ace honest journalist, you still listen to the dug-addled hate monger Rush to get your mind on the pulse of the real America? If not, when did you stop listening, you sad sack BSer?
Bob
Brain Williams has created a farcical tale, and has been caught. Many of you appear to be buying the idea that one can confuse actually being shot at with hearing a story about being shot at. Madness.
Bobby B.
Support NBC so Exxon can keep giving us “Meet the Press” and Rachel Maddow’s Best New Thing In the World. Who’s going to be on this Sunday, Lindsay Graham and Pat Robertson?
raven
Investigate LBJ’s Silver Star.
Mike E
@raven: My brother’s bride made it to Yazgur’s farm, and when she mentions it I have to ask if she ever found the privy…gets me the look every time.
raven
@Mike E: She was stardust. . .
Gin & Tonic
Wilt Chamberlain used to tell stories about all the people he’d met who claimed to have been at his 100-point game. Many more than could fit in the Hershey Arena, that’s for sure.
I worked with a guy who swore on a stack of Bibles that he’d been up in the arm of the Statue of Liberty. It was permanently closed in 1914, but that didn’t dissuade him.
Memory is funny.
Misterpuff
@Mandalay: This.
Professionalism.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Wonder if he kept track of other folks he “met”, know what I mean?
Gin & Tonic
@raven: He did have an active social life, indeed.
If you appreciate him (and I do) or are just interested in the history of the hoops, this is a good book.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
I expect you were on the other side of the Pacific, yes? Either Korea or Nam.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Did you see the 30 on 30 WILT CHAMBERLAIN: BORSCHT BELT BELLHOP? I’ll check the book, I loves the hoop.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: The southernmost then.
David Koch
Why should anyone care about Brian Williams when he does care about you?
Gin & Tonic
@raven: No, haven’t seen the film. Can I get those individually?
raven
@Gin & Tonic: I can’t find it. iTunes has a bunch of them but not that one.The one about Big East Basketball is really good too and it’s there.
Keith G
Guess this has been lesson # one thousand billion that humans ain’t perfect. Williams seems like an okay guy. I have no reason to doubt that this was just unintentional misremembering. If there is something really wrong about him, it will find a way to become known. Until then, I just am not going to find the energy to care.
phein39
If you haven’t heard this before, please file it away where you can retrieve it as needed. I first heard it in ’76 from a vet combat engineer (I was an Arctic Paratrooper at the time, he was my CO):
Q: What’s the difference between a war story and a fairy tale?
A: A fairy tale starts “Once upon a time . . .”, and a war story starts with “Now this ain’t no shit . . .”
raven
@phein39: So you had those mickey mouse boots with the valve on the side?
phein39
@raven:
Charlie Airborne, 4th/23rd Infantry.
My feet still ache from the VB boots we ran in when it got cold (in Ft. Rich terms, below 0 F).
I humped every inch of Ft. Greeley in VBs and more, and although my feet didn’t freeze, they didn’t like the size 9s that my size 9-and-1/2 feet had to fit into.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven: Crazy times.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
Same with all the folks who were at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to see Hank Aaron smash Babe Ruth’s HR record.
Yeah, right.
Lorrie Lencina
Kudos to the author for being able to cut to the chase to the most important aspect of this story, which is how our memories can easily get “confused” and embellish on memories. and then to point out what a good example this is of why “eye witness testimony” can often be wrong. and excellent article cited. I would wager, that because of the complexity with which our minds and memories work, no one, not even Brian Williams, knows for 100% sure whether this was an intentional lie or a memory that unintentionally embellished on a story years after it happened. I also appreciate the logic of the idea that if Williams were going to intentionally lie, then why would he report the story accurately first and then “lie” about it years later. I also am pleased to see that so many know how to put a story like this into perspective…as opposed to those who say this incident means no one can believe anything Williams has ever said. And the wonderfully a propos quote from Henry V. Thank you so much for that and for all your thoughtful comments.
raven
@phein39: We stopped in Alaska in a blizzard for fuel on the way to Korea. I’d never heard of any of that cold weather shit till I got there but was pretty glad to have it when we were in the field.
eta, I may have never heard them called VB boots until now but, then again, it was 45 years ago and we KNOW about memory. I do have a pair on my porch right now, good for negotiating the mud we’ve had.
raven
@phein39: Fun finding info on Charlie Airborne 4/23. Do you know there is a Facebook page for the unit with a bunch of pictures?
phein39
@raven: I did not know that.
I’m a DAC now (Department of the Army Civilian, for the uninitiated), and I’ve included some photos from jumps into Comanche DZ or into the Snowfields in our annual Veteran’s Day commemorations.
Can you post a a link to the Facebook page? I’ve avoided Facebook for years (“Get off my lawn, you punks!”), but for this, I’ll make an exception.
phein39
@efgoldman:
Wow. I went and looked at the page. They’ve been moved up to Wainright now (Fairbanks), along with the Charlie 1/60th, to form an Airborne battalion.
I’m not a TOE guru, and let’s face it, an Arctic invasion by Russia isn’t really a threat these days, but to quote Fat FreddyScat, sheee-it, can’t cold weather troops be dedicated to cold weather threats?
Guess not, in this brave new deployment world.
phein39
@raven:
“Boots, Vapor Barrier:” We used to sell the excess boots, or whatever we could DX, to pipeline workers. Here’s how fucked up that was: A pair of VB boots would fetch @ $85 in 1977, while an ounce of really good weed went for $35.
You have to remember, in the mid-70’s, Ft. Rich/Elmendorf was still the hub for drugs coming out of southeast Asia. I grew up on Lee St., just off Boniface and Northern Lights, and the drugs/military nexus was taken for granted.
‘Course, my name and slogan are still on the Alyeska pipeline coming through central Alaska, and all those lovely buds are long smoked away.
Gin & Tonic
@phein39: I wasn’t in the military, but always liked the noun, adjective, adjective labeling. I had a blanket years ago labeled “Blanket, bed, wool, O.D.”
phein39
We yearn for a nomenclature that will be meaningful and precise, but we never come close. I’ve worked with environmental, safety and occupational health folks for decades (see these gray hairs?) to identify activities and tasks and link them to regulatory requirements, and, well, we’re still way the F*** out here. All the environmental/safey costing models depend upon a realistic assessment, and I’ve never seen one [says the career compliance assessor].
Violet
@efgoldman: Are you talking about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s record? That game? That game was in 1974. ESPN was launched in 1979, so they couldn’t have broken in to show it.
Mutaman
“he intended no ill will”
This is an interesting criteria that I’ve never seen applied before. Its ok to lie as long as we intend no ill will?
Tree With Water
Spocko over at Hullabaloo has a take on the Williams story that I had not considered, and I’m surprised I hadn’t. He makes good sense.
Jake Nelson
Fun fact! Most memories only survive being recalled 1-5 times. After that, you’re remembering the last time you remembered, not the original. Every copy of a copy of a memory is lower quality and retains less of the original, while adding interpolation from the times you remembered it before. Some interesting experiments showed that if you ask someone to remember something, then give them the right kind of electric shock (ECT, basically hard-rebooting the brain) while they’re remembering, after 1-5 times, the memory gets erased (because it doesn’t get re-saved after being pulled).
I have great semantic memory (I *know* what happened to me in the past, but the same way as if I read about it happening), but terrible episodic memory. (used to be great, but around age 14, I had a series of “long” dreams- subjectively 5-40 years each, very immersive, like another life. After the first night of them, I woke up with amnesia. It faded over the course of a couple hours, but I lost most of my childhood memories overnight, and I’ve retained a lot less since.) Because of that, and an incident involving medication for chronic sleep problems that gave me false memories (I was supposed to go to summer school. Instead, I turned around and went right back home and went to bed. I dreamed I went to school, though, and in the evening talked about what happened in class as if it happened. One day, my mom came home early and woke me up and asked why I was there, and suddenly I had both sets of memories, which was freaky as hell. Stopped taking that med immediately.) I never trust my memory, at all, or even my perception of what’s going on at the time. (I also make a point of learning and trying new things all the time. After the summer school thing, I realized all the stuff in the false memories was clearly taken from things I already knew, zero new information, people, or situations.)
Basically, memories can never be trusted, even a little. We all alter them, constantly, and recall them differently from how it happened. The drift gets worse over time. I think we’ve all had that thing where we adamantly say it was X and another person says Y and we’re both ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN and get angry the other person denies our ABSOLUTE FACT… probably both remember it wrong, despite that feeling.
TriassicSands
Memories are certainly imperfect. I tend to agree that this is much ado about very little and not worth any more coverage, however, I do find it difficult to understand how Williams could “misremember” which helicopter he was on — the one that got hit by the RPG or one of the others. It’s hard to believe that he could get that mixed up in his mind, unless he’s suffering from some form of dementia.
People embellish stories all the time and I suppose after you’ve told an inflated tale enough times, it may begin to feel like what really happened. Even so, I still can’t imagine coming to believe I was in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG, when I wasn’t.
AxelFoley
@lamh36:
This. Fuck all this caping for Brian Williams. Personally have nothing against him, but fuck making excuses for his lying about being shot down. He’s part of the media that got us into Iraq, blindly following Bush.
raven
@phein39: Here’s that FB link, I hope you looked back
D58826
Tom Brokaw wants Williams fired. Well I’ll go along with that when NBC stops booking serial liars like the Chaneys, Rummy, Bill Kristol, etc for their Sunday morning gabfest.
It does seem like a tempest in a teapot but it does raise an interesting point. Give the ability to retrieve information on the internet and the internet truth vigilantes, a public figure has to be purer than snow or they are potential victims of this type of electronic lynching.
myiq2xu
Krell has deleted his Twitter account.
D58826
@myiq2xu: A Another case of of someone saying something that the internet vigilantes don’t like and he gets swamped with hate mail.??????
Glenn
Krell has now told Stelter he no longer stands by his story.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/06/media/stelter-iraq-pilots/index.html
ChiJD Doug
Interesting and nuanced take by Tyndall Report
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5764/
Dennis
One can easily confuse details of traumatic events, but it is hard to imagine this level of confusion. It’s like saying “once the car I was riding in crashed into a telephone pole…..oh, sorry I got that confused, it was the car in front of me that hit the telephone pole.”
mere mortal
Good on John Cole to get this right, using context and the nature of memory to gauge the situation correctly.
Fuck off to some commenters on this thread to judge the entire thing first by clan. Too many comments remind me of so many James Bakers “Fuck the Jews; they didn’t vote for us anyway.” or D.A. Nifong in the Duke Lacrosse hoax.
Hewing to clan makes you stupid. Mr. Cole tried hard to be stupid, but only managed it until 2005 or so. Deciding your thoughts on whether Brian Williams is a liar or has a war-muddled memory because of Rush Limbaugh is frighteningly dumb.
gaderson
Stupid CNN autoplay, and you have to let the ad play or click on the ad/link to get it to stop—move to ‘behind the fold’ please. (on OS X 10.10.2, Safari Version 8.0.3 (10600.3.18)).
brantl
Can you turn off the video in this damn thing? You get it when you open the page.
Death Panel Truck
So he forgot. Give the guy a break, jeez. We all forget stuff. I forgot that I didn’t actually help raise the flag on Iwo Jima.