Authenticity of Bush Guard Docs in Question
Liza Porteous, Fox News
Questions continued to swirl Friday around the authenticity of memos purporting to show discrepancies in President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service over 30 years ago.
Documents aired by CBS’ “60 Minutes” Wednesday night were described as having been written by Bush’s commanding officer during his Guard days. Taken together, they seemed to show that Bush, then a pilot, violated a direct order and tried to avoid his duties.
But since the documents surfaced, many experts who have studied them say the memos’ typeface, formatting, paragraph spacing and other attributes indicate that they were written on a modern-day personal computer, possibly using the Microsoft Word word-processing program — not on a 1970s typewriter.
The documents were purportedly written in 1972 and 1973.
See also here
The blogosphere is abuzz with what this means for CBS’ credibility—if not for Big Media as an institution—but I suspect BM has a few more licks left in ‘em. Unless CBS itself does publicly acknowledge they got punk’d, I just don’t see any other BM’s reporting on this. ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN only compete to be the first with the standard BM BS, but there’s a certain tendency to close ranks on matters that reflect on BM as a whole.
So I honestly don’t expect this to break out past Fox News unless CBS lets it.
UPDATE: Even The Washington Times is only raising the question in the sixteenth graf of this story about the latest eruption of the “Bush AWOL” zit.
‘NOthER UPDATE: Well, whaddaya know? The Al Jazeera Confabulation is even reporting on it.
In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian’s widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records as “a farce,” saying she was with her husband until the day he died in 1984 and he did not “keep files.” She said her husband considered Bush “an excellent pilot.”
“I don’t think there were any documents. He was not a paper person,” she said, adding that she was “livid” at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly before Wednesday night’s broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.
Maybe this will get legs in some major newspapers—but I still think the broadcast networks will stay as far away from it as possible as long as CBS’ last word is that they believe the documents in question are real. And I’ll be surprised if I find anything about this in NYT or WaPo. Tickled half to death, but surprised.
‘NOthER OthER UPDATE: Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-hahahahahaha!!! Stop it! Stop it! (Gotta love that BugMeNot, by the way.)
Wow. Okay, now I’m going to check the broadcast networks’ websites, and CNN. My cynicism tank is starting to run dry and I’m obviously not getting the mileage I’m used to.
YET ANOthER UPDATE: Son of a bitch. ABC’s in. MSNBC is citing WaPo but they’ve got it. So’s CNN.
Do I dare check out CBS News?
Bush Guard Memos Questioned
CBS/AP
Questions are being raised about the authenticity of newly unearthed memos that say President Bush’s National Guard commander believed Mr. Bush was shirking his duties.
The memos, which were obtained by CBS News’ 60 Minutes, say Mr. Bush ignored a direct order from a superior officer and lost his status as a Guard pilot because he failed to meet military performance standards and undergo a required physical exam.
The network defended the autheniticity of the memos, saying its experts who examined the memos concluded they were authentic documents produced by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.
But Killian’s son, one of Killian’s fellow officers and an independent document examiner questioned the memos.
Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said he doubted his father would have written an unsigned memo which said there was pressure to “sugar coat” Mr. Bush’s performance review.
“It just wouldn’t happen,” he said. “No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that.”
The personnel chief in Killian’s unit at the time also said he believes the documents are fake.
“They looked to me like forgeries,” Rufus Martin told the Associated Press. “I don’t think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years.” Killian died in 1984.
Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript — a smaller, raised “th” in “111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron” — as evidence indicating forgery.
Ain’t that a wonderment? The question of what will happen as a result of all this remains open. I don’t expect Dan Rather to ever admit he let himself be hoaxed because of his complete lack of objectivity when it comes to George W. Bush. I don’t expect CBS to do anything to him. Some lower-level behind-the-scenes scapegoat will be sacrificed instead, for failing to get Dan in a hammerlock and forcing him to submit the documents to a real expert for authentication. And probably there will be dark mutterings of a deliberate attempt to damage CBS’ credibility or some such tripe.
UPDATES OUT thE EFFING WAZOO: Apparently Spectator.org has a report alleging that the Kerryistas knew about these fakes before CBS got hold of them, but the site comes back Service unavailable. InstaPundit and others are now pointing here for a cached version. Just in case that, too, goes down, I’m going to post it here in its entirety—but below the fold. DailyRecycler.com shows emphasis in its version that I can’t verify in the original so long as Spectator.org is down, but I’ll include it here.
Anatomy of a Forgery
The Prowler
More than six weeks ago, an opposition research staffer for the Democratic National Committee received documents purportedly written by President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian.
The oppo researcher claimed the source was “a retired military officer.” According to a DNC staffer, the documents were seen by both senior staff members at the DNC, as well as the Kerry campaign.
“More than a couple people heard about the papers,” says the DNC staffer. “I’ve heard that they ended up with the Kerry campaign, for them to decide to how to proceed, and presumably they were handed over to 60 Minutes, which used them the other night. But I know this much. When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity.”
The concerns arose from the sourcing. “It wasn’t clear that our source for the documents would have had access to them. Our person couldn’t confirm from what file, from what original source they came from.”
The documents that CBS News used were not documents from any of Bush’s personnel files from his time in the National Guard. Rather, CBS News stated that they were documents uncovered in the personnel files of Killian. That would explain why the White House or the Pentagon had never before released or even seen them.
According to a Kerry campaign source, there was little gossip about the supposedly hot documents inside the office of the campaign on McPherson Square. “Those documents were not something anyone was talking about or trying to generate buzz on,” says the staffer. “It wasn’t like there were small groups of people talking about this as a bombshell. I think people here weren’t sure what to make of it, because provenance of these documents was uncertain.”
A CBS producer, who initially tipped off The Prowler about the 60 Minutes story, says that despite seeking professional assurances that the documents were legitimate, there was uncertainty even among the group of producers and researchers working on the story.
“The problem was we had one set of documents from Bush’s file that had Killian calling Bush ‘an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot.’ And someone who Killian said ‘performed in an outstanding manner.’ Then you have these new documents and the tone and content are so different.”
The CBS producer said that some alarms bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story. “This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn’t show it,” says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.
Now, the producer says, there is growing concern inside the building on 57th Street that they may have been suckered by the Kerry campaign. “There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps, figuring we’d do the heavy lifting on the story. That maybe they had doubts about these documents but hoped we’d get more information,” says the producer. “If that’s the case, then we’re bigger fools than we already appear to be judging by all the chatter about how these documents could be forgeries.”
ABC News’ political unit held a conference call at 7:00 p.m. Thursday evening to discuss the memo and its potential ramifications should the documents turn out to be a forgery. That meeting took place around the time that the deceased Killian’s son made public statements questioning the documents’ authenticity.
According to one ABC News employee, some reporters believe that the Kerry campaign as well as the DNC were parties in duping CBS, but a smaller segment believe that both the DNC and the Kerry campaign were duped by Karl Rove, who would have engineered the flap to embarrass the opposition.
In other news, PowerLine sees Chris Lehane’s fingerprints all over this, as does ComCom.
ONE LAST UPDATE: I added the superscripting to play along with the joke that’s been going around, and which even appeared on Drudge’s site. What the hey.
‘NOthER “LAST UPDATE”: Spectator.org is back up. The Prowler piece is here. Thanks to Deb for the heads up.
