For twenty-five years, Mary Mapes has been an award-winning television news producer and reporter-the last fifteen of them for CBS News, primarily for The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and 60 Minutes II.-
In 2004, her last year at CBS, in addition to the George W. Bush National Guard story, she broke the stories of the existence of Strom Thurmond's unacknowledged bi-racial daughter, Essie Mae Washington, and the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, for which she won a Peabody Award in 2005.
from Truth and Duty:
In order to conclude that the documents are forged or utterly unreliable, two questions must be answered: 1) how could anyone have forged such pristinely accurate information; and 2) why would anyone have taken such great pains to forge the truth?