Two Awards...

...were handed out this week. One for courage in exposing the criminals behind the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the other to Dan Rather and Mary Mapes.

May, 2005, New York, the Waldorf Astoria, a simple luncheon. As the Washington Post notes, The Peabody Awards ceremony doesn't have anything close to the red-carpet glitz and name recognition of the Emmys, but it has enormous cachet among those in the news business.

It will have to do, I suppose. Perhaps it was enough cachet for Mary Mapes - we can only guess. We can only wonder what she was thinking as she watched Dan Rather accept the Peabody award for their work on the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal.

In one of his first public appearances since leaving the network's anchor chair in March, Rather and Mary Mapes received the Peabody Award at a luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown Manhattan.

Rather took pains to acknowledge Mapes and former CBS News senior vp Betsy West (who also attended the ceremony), among others.

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"They did most of the work, bore the heaviest burdens and took most of the criticism," Rather said of Mapes and the other producers who did the front-line reporting on the Abu Ghraib story. "It took guts, and they had them."

Wednesday, 28 April, 2004. Did William Lawson watch 60 Minutes that night? If he did it's likely the retired Master Sergeant would have been familiar with the content. Just over two weeks prior the Army had decided to Court Martial his nephew Ivan "Chip" Frederick Jr. for his role in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. That decision seems to have been the point of no return for Lawson.

"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case."

One year later, watching Dan Rather being handed the Peabody must have brought the image of being handed those pictures to Mary Mape's mind. With images in hand all that remained was to build a story around them. And what an ambitious story it was. A night of abusing and humiliating common criminals to celebrate a fellow soldier's birthday became a conspiracy sanctioned at the highest levels. And Mapes having a stack of photos handed to her became something else altogether. "We ended up chasing it," she claimed, "chasing it halfway around the world and back again. Trying not just to chase the rumors of it, but---but to find out... the reality of it."

Rather said, "It took guts, and they had them."

Rather received extended applause after telling the crowd, "Never give up, never back up, never give in while pursuing the dream of integrity filled journalism that matters."

May 16, 2005, Sgt Joseph M. Darby - a real hero - was handed his John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award by Ted and Caroline Kennedy. Last year, at the time he earned his honor, he was a Specialist. It was Darby who discovered the abuse photos from his fellow guards at Abu Ghraib last January - and turned them over to his chain of command.

The news that Darby tipped off Army investigators to abuses in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison didn't come as a shock to those who know the 24-year-old soldier.

"He wasn't one that went along with his peers," said Robert Ewing, Darby's history teacher and football coach at North Star High in Boswell. The military policeman "didn't worry about what people thought."

"It doesn't surprise me a bit," his brother Larry Darby told the CBS News Early Show. "He knows right from wrong."

Darby "didn't realize that he had done anything that was super special," said sister-in-law Maxine Carroll. "The way he looks at it, he was just doing his job."

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Darby worked evenings after school. He attended North Star High, then left to study forestry at Somerset County Vocational and Technical High School.

After he married his wife, Bernadette, the couple moved to Virginia, where he worked as an auto mechanic before enlisting. Debbie and Larry Darby told The Early Show that Darby served in Bosnia before heading to Iraq.

Reffner described Darby as polite and respectful. He said the family had little money when he was growing up. "He didn't have much at all," Reffner said. "But he was brought up properly. He was brought up to know right from wrong."

"He didn't fit in with the whole crowd because he didn't have a lot of material things, fancy clothes or a car," said Reffner, 50. Darby's stepfather, who died several years ago, was a former Marine, neighbors say, who taught old-school manners to his son. He was "respectful, brought up the proper way," Reffner said.

Most evenings, Darby would cut through Reffner's back yard to visit Christina Vaillancourt, whose family lived on Short Street. The pair attended North Star High: Darby, a full-faced sophomore with shaggy, bowl-cut brown hair, beams out from the pages of the 1995 Polaris, the school's yearbook. He was a tackle for the North Star Cougars and was active in the Future Farmers of America chapter at Somerset County Vocational and Technical High School, which he attended part-time.

When they first met, "he was very sweet and kind of shy," Vaillancourt said. She recalled a benefit dance Darby organized to raise money for the family of a friend whose father died of a heart attack.

Rather gets the last word:

Rather also said that he wasn't sure about the fate of "60 Minutes Wednesday," saying he was a reporter on the show and wasn't privy to the high-level deliberations about its fate. "Wednesday" has been plagued by low ratings in the 8 p.m. time period opposite one of the season's runaway hits, ABC's "Lost."

Update: 60 Minutes II is no more.

"Courage".