CBS stands by Bush-Guard Memos
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| Fri, 09-10-2004 - 9:05pm |
(CBS/AP) Questions have been raised about the authenticity of newly unearthed memos acquired by CBS News that say President Bush's National Guard commander believed Mr. Bush was shirking his duties.
The network is defending the authenticity of the memos, which were obtained by CBS News' "60 Minutes," saying experts who examined the memos concluded they were authentic documents produced by Mr. Bush's former commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.
In a statement, CBS News said it stands by its story.
"This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking," the statement read.
"In addition, the documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic document experts but by sources familiar with their content," the statement continued. "Contrary to some rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned."
CBS News Anchor Dan Rather says many of those raising questions about the documents have focused on something called superscript, a key that automatically types a raised "th."
Critics claim typewriters didn't have that ability in the 1970s. But some models did. In fact, other Bush military records already released by the White House itself show the same superscript – including one from 1968.
Some analysts outside CBS say they believe the typeface on these memos is New Times Roman, which they claim was not available in the 1970s.
But the owner of the company that distributes this typing style says it has been available since 1931.
Document and handwriting examiner Marcel Matley analyzed the documents for CBS News. He says he believes they are real. But he is concerned about exactly what is being examined by some of the people questioning the documents, because deterioration occurs each time a document is reproduced. And the documents being analyzed outside of CBS have been photocopied, faxed, scanned and downloaded, and are far removed from the documents CBS started with.
Matley did this interview with us prior to Wednesday's "60 Minutes" broadcast. He looked at the documents and the signatures of Col. Killian, comparing known documents with the colonel's signature on the newly discovered ones.
"We look basically at what's called significant or insignificant features to determine whether it's the same person or not," Matley said. "I have no problem identifying them. I would say based on our available handwriting evidence, yes, this is the same person."
Matley finds the signatures to be some of the most compelling evidence.
Reached Friday by satellite, Matley said, "Since it is represented that some of them are definitely his, then we can conclude they are his signatures."
Matley said he's not surprised that questions about the documents have come up.
"I knew going in that this was dynamite one way or the other. And I knew that potentially it could do far more potential damage to me professionally than benefit me," he said. "But we seek the truth. That's what we do. You're supposed to put yourself out, to seek the truth and take what comes from it."
Robert Strong was an administrative officer for the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years. He knew Jerry Killian, the man credited with writing the documents. And paper work, like these documents, was Strong's specialty. He is standing by his judgment that the documents are real.
"They are compatible with the way business was done at that time," Strong said. "They are compatible with the man I remember Jerry Killian being. I don't see anything in the documents that's discordant with what were the times, the situation or the people involved."
Killian died in 1984.
Strong says the highly charged political atmosphere of the National Guard at the time was perfectly represented in the new documents.
"It verged on outright corruption in terms of the favors that were done, the power that was traded. And it was unconscionable from a moral and ethical standpoint. It was unconscionable," Strong said.
The president's service record emerged as an issue during the 2000 race and again this winter. The Killian documents revived the issue of Mr. Bush's time in uniform after weeks in which Democratic challenger John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, has faced questions over his record as a Navy officer and an anti-war protester.
The questions about Mr. Bush's service center on how Mr. Bush got into the Guard and whether he fulfilled his duties during a period from mid-1972 to mid-1973.
What the Killian memos purport to show is that Mr. Bush defied a direct order to appear for a physical exam, that his performance as an officer was lacking in other ways and that Mr. Bush used family connections to try to quash any inquiry into his lapses.
In a separate revelation, the Boston Globe this week reported that Mr. Bush promised to sign up with a Boston-area unit when he left his Texas unit in 1973 to attend Harvard Business School. Mr. Bush never signed up with a Boston unit.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/06/politics/main641481.shtml

"I want to emphasize: I stand by my president. We are in a time of war, and I stand behind my president. There is not joy in reporting such a story, but my job as a journalist is not to be afraid, and when we come with facts, and legitimate questions supported by witnesses and documents that we believe to be authentic, to raise those questions no matter how unpleasant they are," Rather said Friday.
"They have not answered the question of did or did the president not obey or obey an order? Was he or was he not suspended for failure to meet performance standards of the Air Force? If he didn't take the physical, why didn't he take the physical?" Rather said.
"The story is true. The story is true," Rather said. "The questions raised in the story are serious and legitimate questions."
Rather denies there is any internal CBS News investigation under way -- a statement backed by the network.
Rather also said the possibility of issuing any kind of recant or apology was "not even discussed. Nor should it be."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/09/10/rather/
Dan Rather might as well submit his retirement papers, he is toast!
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Authenticity of Bush Guard Docs in Question
Friday, September 10, 2004
By Liza Porteus
WASHINGTON — Questions continued to swirl Friday around the authenticity of memos purporting to show discrepancies in President Bush's (search) 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. They seemed to show that Bush, then a pilot, violated a direct order and tried to avoid his duties.
• Bush Memos (pdf)
But many experts 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.
The documents appeared to say 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. They also show Bush required two passes to land an F-102A fighter on March 12 and April 10, 1972. His last flight as an Air National Guard (search) pilot was on April 16.
Valid Questions or 'Character Assassination'?
Bush's Guard service became a focus of Democratic criticism this week. Democrats and some like-minded groups, such as Texans for Truth, say Bush shirked his National Guard duties, a claim Bush denies.
On Friday, Sen. Tom Harkin (search), D-Iowa, told FOX News that despite the chance that some of the documents may be fake, there was other proof that Bush got special privileges to get into the Guard, didn't take his physical and didn't fulfill all his duty requirements.
"So when George Bush, in the Oval Office earlier this year, said 'I did my duty,' I'm sorry, we now know he didn't do his duty," said Harkin, who told reporters Thursday that Bush "lied to the American people."
Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke released a statement calling such statements "character assassination."
"The Democrat playbook is wide open," Dyke said. "Faced with the reality that John Kerry's (search) record is too far out of the American mainstream and without an agenda on which to base his campaign, extreme partisans like Tom Harkin, Al Gore and James Carville are attempting to fill the vacuum of positive policies with character assassination. Bad news for the Democrats because the American people know the difference between a legitimate policy discussion and personal attacks."
Republican critics and various outside groups, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have accused Democratic presidential nominee Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, of fabricating the incidents that led to his five medals.
Also Thursday, prisoners of war who endured torture, isolation and interrogation at the hands of their North Vietnamese captors raised Cain over anti-war statements Kerry made after returning from service.
Some former POWs who appear in a documentary film released Thursday say Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony alleging widespread and militarily-condoned war crimes made their time in prison worse. They claim that prison guards used Kerry's testimony to demand confessions of war crimes and as justification for brutalizing them.
"The words he used were devastating, because as a war prisoner, we were being called war criminals, he was giving them at home what we were being tortured to say," said former POW Jim Warner.
Experts Question Bush Docs
Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word. Lines, a document expert with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (search), pointed to a superscript — a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" — as evidence indicating forgery.
"I'm virtually certain these were computer-generated," Lines said. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software.
CBS on Friday defended the authenticity of the Guard memos, which were supposedly produced by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian (search), who died in 1984.
"The documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic document experts but sources familiar with their content," CBS News said.
The network's statement said typewriters were available in the early 1970s which were capable of printing superscripts. CBS pointed to other Texas Air National Guard documents released by the White House that include an example of a "th" superscript.
But one of Killian's fellow officers, an independent document examiner and Killian's own son doubted the veracity of the memos.
In an interview with FOX News, Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said he is "very dubious" about the genuineness of the documents.
He said his father was "not in the habit of keeping secret files," didn't have a home office, didn't work after leaving his office and didn't have available to him at work the kind of typewriter that was apparently used to compose the documents.
Gary Killian said the sentiments in the documents didn't reflect his father's "true feelings" about Bush, and that if his father had actually written the papers, he would have signed them using his full name, not just "CYA," which is on the documents.
He also said his father would have typed such a document himself, "hated" typing and was a "very poor" typist. "He did not type memos to himself," Gary Killian added, saying it was "too much effort" and "very dangerous … not a good practice."
The personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time also said he believes the documents are fake.
"They looked to me like forgeries," said Rufus Martin. "I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."
Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records to The Washington Post as "a farce," saying she was with her husband until the day he died in 1984 and that 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 journalists who did not, she said, ask her to authenticate the records.
CBS said it has "complete confidence" in its reporting and will continue to pursue the story.
"For the record, CBS News stands by the thoroughness and accuracy of the "60 Minutes" report this Wednesday on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard," CBS said. "This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking."
Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday the White House, which distributed the memos after obtaining them from CBS, was not trying to verify their authenticity. "We don't know if the documents are fabricated or authentic," McClellan told reporters traveling with the president to West Virginia.
McClellan suggested the memos surfaced as part of "an orchestrated effort by Democrats and the Kerry campaign to tear down the president."
Bush String-Pulling Questioned
Adding even more fuel to the military records fire were accusations by a woman claiming to be Amy Barnes, daughter of former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes (search).
The woman said Thursday that Ben Barnes had fabricated claims that he used his influence to pull strings and get Bush into the Texas Air National Guard 36 years ago.
In a phone call to WBAP's Mark Davis radio show in Dallas, Texas, the so-called Amy Barnes said the former lieutenant governor was an "opportunist" who had lied about Bush's Guard record.
"I love my father very much, but he's doing this for purely political reasons," the woman said. "He is a big Kerry fund-raiser, and he is writing a book also. And is what he's leading the book off with ... He denied this to me in 2000 that he did get Bush out . Now he's saying he did."
The radio station confirmed that Barnes does have a daughter named Amy, but it was not confirmed that the woman on the air was in fact her.
"Mr. Barnes has told a lot of different stories about that particular time -- it's a period of time in which his credibility was also impacted in a very negative way," Texas Gov. Rick Perry told FOX News, noting that Barnes left office amid his own controversies and wasn't even lieutenant governor when Bush joined the Guard.
"Using Ben Barnes as an individual may be inherently dangerous for the Kerry campaign. He may be fine for raising money for him, but from the standpoint of telling a story that has any credibility to it, he may be the wrong one," Perry added.
Does It Even Matter?
Voters and war veterans may not be so much concerned about the particulars of Kerry's Vietnam heroism or Bush's Guard pilot logs as they are about the bigger picture, according to some observers.
"They're not concerned about whether George W. Bush made every drill or not," Ret. Marine Col. Oliver North, host of FOX News' "War Stories," told FOX News on Friday. "I think they are going to be concerned if they find out these documents are forgeries, because it's going to be a pattern of deception that has plagued John Kerry since Vietnam."
Harkin said it wasn't so much the devil in the details that counted, but what those details said about Bush's character and other issues.
"I think in any presidential race, character counts, and George Bush has staked a lot on his character," Harkin told FOX News.
If it's true that Bush lied about his Guard service, Harkin said the next question would be "'Will he mislead us also about Iraq, how we got into Iraq?' ... This counts because it's not something that happened 30 years ago. ... It's something that happened this year."
Bush loyalists labeled the Guard-service issue as nothing more than pure desperation from the Kerry camp.
"We do know that George Bush has the respect and support of the people of America," Sen. George Allen, R-Va., told FOX News. "This is desperation. It is very pitiful that they're coming up with these things ... and it shows just how pitiful the desperation is.
"The reality is, who in the future if best to lead this country? And I think you're seeing from polls the American people see greater comfort in George Bush than they do in Senator Kerry."
The White House has argued that recent polls showing Kerry slipping slightly among America's electorate is the reason for the recent Democratic criticism over Bush's record.
GOP strategist Rich Galen said it's the Kerry camp that's keeping the focus on things that happened decades ago, to avoid talking about today's issues, but Democratic strategist Bob Beckel said the Bush-Cheney campaign is the one focusing on the past.
Both agreed these issues are delaying debate on real issues.
"It's going to take another week now away from what Kerry absolutely has to do, which is to get the debate going on domestic issues ... it's in the Bush campaign's interest to keep this thing focused in the 1960s and 1970s," Beckel said. "I have no doubt Bush dodged his responsibilities, but so what? People want to hear about the future, but this is going to take another week and we only have eight weeks left."
FOX News' Major Garrett and James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,131997,00.html
They don't care about the truth, they just want to squash President Bush.
Add CBS to the long list of media we no longer trust--The New York Times, The Boston Globe, CNN...
I thought this article was especially good...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/598wfpet.asp
The Hoaxing of CBS
Why were they so easily duped?
by Richard Starr
09/10/2004 12:00:00 PM
A NUMBER OF EXPERTS have now weighed in on the inauthenticity of the documents CBS breathlessly revealed on 60 Minutes earlier this week--documents purportedly typed by the deceased commander of George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 and 1973, but actually produced on a personal computer using Microsoft Word. I predict--and here I'm going out on a limb 10-feet wide and only an inch off the ground--that it's only a matter of time before CBS admits it was deceived. If there's any honor and professional pride left in the CBS newsroom, they will then expose the party or parties who deceived them.
Why did the premier news show in what was once reputed to be the premier television newsroom fall for such transparent fakes? Anyone old enough to have used a typewriter can look at them for a few minutes and figure out that they weren't typed on a typewriter in the early 1970s. A poster on FreeRepublic.com whose screen name is "Buckhead" was, to my knowledge, the first to do so at midnight Wednesday, shortly after CBS's scoop had aired. "Every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman," this person wrote. "In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. . . . I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old."
Indeed, some have speculated that a generation gap may
have contributed to the blunder, since only those of us over 40 can remember what it was like to try to type, say, "187th" with the "th" raised above the baseline. You had to turn the platen by hand. (Do you remember what a platen is?) And you couldn't have gotten a smaller "th" without changing the little type ball. Would you have gone to such trouble in typing a memo for your own files?
But the more important reason CBS was duped is that they wanted to believe the story. And the memos neatly fit the anti-Bush narrative that they believed to be true: Namely, Bush was a slacker at the end of his tour of duty and his superiors covered for him because they were under political pressure to do so.
Here's a revealing anecdote reported by Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen in this morning's Washington Post:
A senior CBS official . . . named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said that a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone, and that Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."
"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."
Obviously, you can't authenticate a document by reading it to someone over the phone. (CBS claims to have had other "experts" examine the documents but has been unwilling to name them.) What this reporting should have suggested to CBS is that whoever forged the documents was someone who knew what CBS's sources would be saying--someone well informed on the anti-Bush scuttlebutt about his National Guard service. The "documents" neatly reflect the reigning anti-Bush theories of the events of 1972 and 1973 and perfectly buttress the anti-Bush narrative because they were produced by someone who was obsessing over that narrative and understood that reporters would need "documentation" to advance the story.
Just as obviously, the journalists who went into overdrive for the National Guard story when the phony memos were released, with few exceptions, want to see Kerry win and Bush lose. This makes them suckers for a good anti-Bush story. It's conventional to call this media bias and be shocked by it. But really it's just human nature. That's why we have to be especially skeptical of the stories we fall in love with. And that's why CBS screwed up.
Richard Starr is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
It's a little early to make that statement. Let's just see where the chips fall.