Then, in researching the rumors of prisoner abuse for Mapes, Charles posted a notice on SFTT’s online bulletin board asking any soldiers with information to come forward. Charles’s notice was answered by a former Air Force master sergeant named Bill Lawson, who quickly hit it off with Charles (“We’re both career military, we’re both hillbillies, and we kind of clicked,” Charles says). Lawson’s nephew, the now somewhat infamous Staff Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick II, was being charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Lawson believed that his nephew was being railroaded for following orders from his superiors at a prison run amok. Lawson, who had already heard there were photos, told his story to Charles, who then brought it to Mapes, and, separately, to Hersh. Within days, both Hersh and Mapes had tracked down the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

In retrospect, it seems hard to believe that Lawson would have retailed a story that involved photos of his nephew sitting atop an Iraqi prisoner tied to a stretcher, because ultimately, of course, it was the pictures themselves that became the story, with Frederick and his fellow enlisted men caught on-camera as the main characters. Hackworth, who has often written about the maltreatment of the enlisted man at the hands of what he calls the military’s “perfumed princes,” believes that Frederick got a stiffer sentence than he would have without media attention. But all the people involved with the story at the start—Lawson, Charles, Mapes—believed that this was a story not just of a few American soldiers who abused their position, but of soldiers who were themselves mistreated by the military.

The future is murkier than ever, with Moonves’s blithe utterances concealing the fact that there is no plan for CBS News.

Two weeks after the Abu Ghraib story, CBS aired another story about prisoner abuse in Iraq, this time at a large holding facility in Iraq called Camp Bucca. This one, too, fell into the same narrative: Several enlisted soldiers were charged with abuses while higher-ups escaped—according to the soldiers, precisely because they had tried to bring the awful conditions at the camp to the attention of higher-ups. “I’m convinced,” Charles says of one, “the charges were trumped up to shut her up.” CBS aired interviews with the soldiers, as well as a home video showing the appalling conditions at the camp, in which the soldier, her face hidden, callously tells the camera, “We’ve already had two prisoners die [of sand-viper bites], but who cares? That’s two less for me to worry about.” In this case, the soldiers who appeared on CBS may well have been saved from prison by going to the media.

It’s in the context of these stories—Abu Ghraib a huge success, Camp Bucca a moderate one—that the bigger narrative that CBS was telling about the military developed. Conservative pundits have argued that nothing but a fanatical drive to bring down the president could have led Mapes and others at CBS to fall so wholeheartedly for the “holy grail” that purported to prove that Bush was a Vietnam-era shirker. But the really great seduction of the documents might well be that they lay out in explicit detail—the kind of explicit detail that is (not by accident) hardly ever laid out in real documents—exactly the kind of story that Mapes and her military sources believed was emblematic of the way the military really worked, whether in 1972 or today. Again, as with Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, Mapes turned to Roger Charles, and later to his mentor Colonel Hackworth. Again, it seemed the same old story of privilege. One document in particular, a personal memo for his own files ostensibly written by Colonel Killian and titled “CYA” (for “cover your ass”), is especially compelling if you are inclined to think of the military as an apparatus whose levers are constantly being pulled by the well connected. “[General] Staudt has obviously pressured [General] Hodges more about Bush,” the memo explains. “I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job.” It is not only the perfect evidence of Bush’s malingering—it is also the perfect evidence of privilege at work, fitting ideally with the big narrative of Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, a small window into a world of senior officers looking out for the well connected.