and burned the original documents. Investigations by CBS, CNN and the Washington Post failed to turn up evidence of "Lucy Ramirez" being an actual person.Jonathan V. Last, "Whitewash", The Weekly Standard, January 10, 2005. On September 21, CBS News addressed the contact with the Kerry campaign in its statement, saying "it is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be associated with any political agenda." The next day the network announced it was forming an independent review panel to perform an internal investigation. Review panel established Soon after, CBS established a review panel "to help determine what errors occurred in the preparation of the report and what actions need to be taken". Dick Thornburgh, a Republican former governor of Pennsylvania and United States Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, and Louis Boccardi, retired president and chief executive officer and former executive editor of the Associated Press, made up the two-person review board. CBS also hired a private investigator, a former FBI agent named Erik T. Rigler, to gather further information about the story. Findings On January 5, 2005, the Report of the Independent Review Panel on the September 8, 2004, 60 Minutes Wednesday Segment "For the Record" Concerning President Bush's Air National Guard Service was released. The purpose of the panel was to examine the process by which the September 8 Segment was prepared and broadcast, to examine the circumstances surrounding the subsequent public statements and news reports by CBS News defending the segment, and to make any recommendations it deemed appropriate. Among the Panel's conclusions were the following: The most serious defects in the reporting and production of the September 8 Segment were: The failure to obtain clear authentication of any of the Killian documents from any document examiner; The false statement in the September 8 Segment that an expert had authenticated the Killian documents when all he had done was authenticate one signature from one document used in the Segment; The failure of 60 Minutes Wednesday management to scrutinize the publicly available, and at times controversial, background of the source of the documents, retired Texas Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett; The failure to find and interview the individual who was understood at the outset to be Lieutenant Colonel Burkett's source of the Killian documents, and thus to establish the chain of custody; The failure to establish a basis for