Killian Office Memo Not Similar to CBS

Avatar for independentgrrrl
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Registered: 03-26-2003
Killian Office Memo Not Similar to CBS
99
Sat, 09-11-2004 - 11:16am
CBS memo: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf

An analysis done on CBS memo: http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf

Memo from military (click 'enlarge' icon): http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/doc25.gif

And some funny comments: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1212833/posts

I want to see how the Sunday morning lib shows will spin this. What I want to know is how the DNC planned to get away with these forgeries knowing that ALL sources are easily verifiable on the internet?



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iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Mon, 09-13-2004 - 10:33pm
How in the world would his daughter know what happened then? It seems everyone is lying when the dirt is flying at Bush. Conspiracies and lies and forgeries. Interesting. It is the only defense possible I guess to defend despicable behavior.
Donna
Donna
Avatar for independentgrrrl
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Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 09-13-2004 - 10:41pm
CBS Producer Who Obtained Questionable Guard Documents Identified

By Jeff Gannon

Talon News

September 13, 2004

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Mary Mapes, a Dallas-based producer for CBS, has been identified by Talon News sources as the person who obtained the documents that suggest President George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard obligations 30 years ago. The documents, which have been judged to be forgeries by many news services and forensics experts, are at the center of a scandal that threatens the credibility of the network.

Late Friday, CBS spokesperson Kelli Edwards confirmed to Talon News that it was Mapes that obtained the documents (view documents here), but refused to comment on the questions surrounding their authenticity. Mapes did not respond to Talon News requests for comment.

During Friday's network news broadcast, anchor Dan Rather defended the four pages he claims were written by Bush's superior officer at the Texas Air Guard, Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian. Rather talked with handwriting expert Marcel Matley who said that on the basis of his analysis of the signatures, he is pronouncing the documents to be authentic. Not all of the pages carry Killian's signature.

Two others were interviewed for the segment. Robert Strong, an administrative officer for the Texas Air Guard during the Vietnam era, who vouched for the documents.

Author James Moore, a Bush antagonist, said, "They are absolutely consistent with the records as I know it."

Rather dismissed his critics, saying, "Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people -- including many who are partisan political operatives -- concentrated not on the key questions the overall story raised but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."

But glaring omissions marred Rather piece. On Friday, Killian's son Gary told nationally syndicated talk-show host Sean Hannity that Mary Mapes had contacted him before CBS ran the story. He said that he warned her that the documents might be forgeries.

Following the broadcast, Talon News asked Edwards why Killian's son and wife weren't mentioned during the broadcast.

She said, "I'm not going to debate every aspect of the story. We stand by the piece."

Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, told ABC Radio News, "The wording in these documents is very suspect to me. ... I just can't believe these are his words."

Connell said that her late husband would be "turning over in his grave to know that a document such as this would be used against a fellow Guardsman," and she is "sick" and "angry" that his name is "being battled back and forth on television."

Connell said that her late husband was a fan of the young Bush.

She stated, "I know for a fact that this young man ... was an excellent aviator, an excellent person to be in the Guard, and he was very happy to have him become a member of the 111th."

Rufus Martin, the personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time told CNN, "They looked to me like forgeries. ... I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."

Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor, told ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. He said that CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "Well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

Hodges believes the documents are frauds.

Doubts were being openly debated on rival networks. ABC News reported that they contacted more than a half dozen document experts who said they had doubts about the memos' authenticity.

Bill Flynn, one of country's top authorities on document authentication, told ABC, "These documents do not appear to have been the result of technology that was available in 1972 and 1973."

He continued, "The cumulative evidence that's available ... indicates that these documents were produced on a computer, not a typewriter."

CNN contacted independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines who said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines is a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. She pointed to a superscript -- a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" -- as evidence indicating forgery.

After reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Arizona, Line said, "I'm virtually certain these were computer generated."

One expert counts at least 50 points that suggest the documents are forgeries.

The White House is remaining neutral on the documents' authenticity.

Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Friday, "We don't know whether the documents were fabricated or are authentic. The media has talked to independent experts who have raised questions about the documents."

He pointed out that CBS has not disclosed the source of the documents.

Newsweek is suggesting that Mapes received the documents from Bill Burkett, who it describes as a disgruntled former Guard officer. The magazine reports that Mapes flew to Texas to interview him.

If the documents are proven to be forgeries, the scandal would go to the highest level of CBS news. Talon News sources say that Jim Murphy, Executive Producer of the CBS Evening News, approves virtually every word that goes on the air. "60 Minutes II" Executive Producer Jeffrey Fager would also be on the endangered list, since his show originated the document story.

But more likely it would be Mapes who would take the fall along with Janet Leissner, the Washington Bureau Chief for CBS News. Leissner orchestrated the interview with White House communications director Dan Bartlett during which he was confronted with the suspect documents. Dan Rather was originally scheduled to do the interview, but White House correspondent John Roberts was substituted at the last minute for an unknown reason.

Mapes is no stranger to controversy as she also obtained the photographs of inmate abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The source of the photographs as well as the documents now in question has never been revealed.

In 1999 Mapes was threatened with imprisonment if she failed to turn over the transcript of an interview that Dan Rather conducted with the third defendant being tried for murder in the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas. CBS ultimately complied with the court's demand for the information.

Copyright © 2004 Talon News -- All rights reserved.

http://www.talonnews.com/news/2004/september/0913_mapes_documents.shtml

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Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 09-13-2004 - 10:46pm
Expert Cited by CBS Says He Didn't Authenticate Papers

By Michael Dobbs and Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, September 14, 2004; Page A08

The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

"There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals.



Matley's comments came amid growing evidence challenging the authenticity of the documents aired Wednesday on CBS's "60 Minutes." The program was part of an investigation asserting that Bush benefited from political favoritism in getting out of commitments to the Texas Air National Guard. On last night's "CBS Evening News," Rather said again that the network "believes the documents are authentic."

A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush's National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.

The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS's Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word.

"I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake," said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font.

Newcomer drew an analogy with an art expert trying to determine whether a painting of unknown provenance was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. "If I was looking for a Da Vinci, I would look for characteristic brush strokes," he said. "If I found something that was painted with a modern synthetic brush, I would know that I have a forgery."

Meanwhile, Laura Bush became the first person from the White House to say the documents are likely forgeries. "You know they are probably altered," she told Radio Iowa in Des Moines yesterday. "And they probably are forgeries, and I think that's terrible, really."

Citing confidentiality issues, CBS News has declined to reveal the source of the disputed documents -- which have been in the network's possession for more than a month -- or to explain how they came to light after more than three decades. Yesterday, USA Today said that it had independently obtained copies of the documents "from a person with knowledge of Texas Air National Guard operations" who declined to be named "for fear of retaliation."

It was unclear whether the same person supplied the documents to both media outlets. USA Today said it had obtained its copies of the CBS documents Wednesday night "soon after" the "60 Minutes" broadcast, as well as another two purported Killian memos that had not been made public.

A detailed examination of the CBS documents beside authenticated Killian memos and other documents generated by Bush's 147th Fighter Interceptor Group suggests at least three areas of difference that are difficult to reconcile:

• Word-processing techniques. Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted "th" in expressions such as "147th Group" and or "111th Fighter Intercept Squadron."

In a CBS News broadcast Friday night rebutting allegations that the documents had been forged, Rather displayed an authenticated Bush document from 1968 that included a small "th" next to the numbers "111" as proof that Guard typewriters were capable of producing superscripts. In fact, say Newcomer and other experts, the document aired by CBS News does not contain a superscript, because the top of the "th" character is at the same level as the rest of the type. Superscripts rise above the level of the type.

• Factual problems. A CBS document purportedly from Killian ordering Bush to report for his annual physical, dated May 4, 1972, gives Bush's address as "5000 Longmont #8, Houston." This address was used for many years by Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. National Guard documents suggest that the younger Bush stopped using that address in 1970 when he moved into an apartment, and did not use it again until late 1973 or 1974, when he moved to Cambridge, Mass., to attend Harvard Business School.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18982-2004Sep13.html

For page two, click below:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18982-2004Sep13_2.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Mon, 09-13-2004 - 11:10pm

Because a few years ago when this came up, she asked him, and he told her that he absolutely had nothing to do with getting Bush into the ANG. He changed his story after donating MILLIONS to Kerry & deciding to write

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-06-2004
Mon, 09-13-2004 - 11:15pm
Whether or not he's lying, I don't know. But I thought he said he did it when he was Speaker of the House, before he was Lt. Governor?
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Tue, 09-14-2004 - 12:02am
I don't know about the timeline but I do know that people lie about things they are ashamed of. He has obviously had a change of heart. Why would you choose to believe his daughter instead of him. If you saw the TV show this man seemed very credible and ashamed of what he had done to me. And there are others who support it too. It seems when there are things you don't like to hear about Bush you call "lies," "forgeries," "discredited" and the like. But anytime anyone sleazyy thing is said about Kerry by anyone, no matter what their obvious agenda is, you defend it to the end. Amazing.
Donna
Donna
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-20-2003
Tue, 09-14-2004 - 12:26am
Is this what passes as legitimate journalism?

How much credibility are we supposed to place in an unsigned article?

Who is "the prowler"?

As well, it's chock full of direct quotes from unnamed sources.

>>according to CBS News sources<<

>>says the CBS producer<<

>>says the CBS News producer.<<

>>some Kerry campaign insiders<<

>>According to several Kerry and DNC sources<<

In addition this mysterious "prowler" posted this unsigned & unsourced article on a right wing site.

An unabashedly right wing site.

This adds nothing of any substance to this discussion.
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-20-2003
Tue, 09-14-2004 - 12:40am
>> By the way, the timeline is off. He says he did this while Lt. Governor, but he didn't hold that position until about a year & half after Bush had enlisted. <<

According to the transcript on the CBS website, in the interview with Dan Rather aired on 60 Minutes, Ben Barnes said he helped get George W Bush into the TANG at the time he was speaker of the Texas House.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/08/60II/main642060.shtml
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-13-2003
Tue, 09-14-2004 - 9:07am
Barnes is EMPLOYED by Kerry. That's about as partisan as you can get, but you give credence to THAT while refusing to read "partisan" posts that disagree with what you know to be "true" without question.

Poor, poor, Rather-heads. It just keeps getting worse:

***********************************


September 14, 2004, 6:49 a.m.

Goodbye to All That

Jonah Goldberg

Dan Rather goes the way of the dinosaurs.

I love the CBS News forged-document story. To paraphrase the abominable snowman from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, I want to hug it and squeeze it and name it George. Okay, I don't want to name it George, but you get my drift. If this story were hot fudge, I would smear it all over my body and then roll around in nougat.

Before I go on, please take a minute to finish your dry heaves of disgust as you purge that image from your minds.

Anyway, to yank you viciously from one metaphorical frame of mind to another, the PowerLine blog may be the Gavrilo Princip of the New Media Age. Or maybe it was that poster at Free Republic.

A quick refresher in world history. Prior to World War I, the world was a huge ball of molten slag and gaseous muck. But that's not important right now. Immediately prior to World War I, the world was divvied up into huge power blocs, basically known as empires. The rulers, bureaucrats, aristocrats, intellectuals, and guys in funny wigs running these empires refused to accept that their way of life was unsustainable, that the curtain was closing on their chapter under the sun ("Jonah Goldberg doesn't merely mix metaphors, he snaps their spines!" — self-blurb). A relatively unknown loser (no offense to the PowerLine guys, Freep, et al.) shot Arch Duke Ferdinand and the whole house of cards came down. Some empires were obliged to help their allies. Others were just greedy, seeing opportunities in others' weakness. The point — which doesn't warrant extremely close inspection — is that the giants seemed extremely powerful right until they fell over. Moreover, what caused them to fall over was their desire to prove that they were as strong as they used to be, that they were still the Engines of History, Masters of their Fates, and the Inspiration of Needlessly Ornate Furniture.

Something similar is going on with the Media Empires of today. Powerline or the blogosphere generally — which would be the "Black Hand" in this analogy — spotted the now-obvious fraudulent nature of these documents immediately. The charge is the journalistic equivalent of an assassin's bullet for Dan Rather. Had he refused to go to war in defense of these documents, he might have survived. Instead he's determined to go the way of the Hapsburgs and his career is over.

Oh sure, he'll probably ride out this election and retire in the next couple years with crates full of gold watches, plaques, awards, and attaboys from the establishment media. But the inevitable fact is that he will be drawn into a war he cannot win. The very best he can do is defend the slender possibility that these documents could be real. At this point it seems impossible that he can prove they are real. Indeed, Rather has already largely conceded all this. His defenses are all about how you can't prove the documents are false, as if the burden of proof for a journalistic icon is for other people to prove what he says is wrong rather than for him to prove it is right.

And, for Rather, this kind of draw is a loss. This could drag on for days or weeks or months. But even if it's days, the bleeding will be fatal. Already, the man looks like a sad buffoon, in denial that the quicksand is already up to his chest. His flailing about "partisan operatives" being behind the backlash makes him sound like the Norma Desmond of Big Journalism. Someone tell me when ABC News and the Washington Post become arms of the RNC, because I would love to see that memo. But before I believed it, I'd study the size of the "th"s a bit more closely than Dan did.

Remember when Joe Gillis told Norma Desmond: "You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big."

She responded, I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Dan Rather has flipped this around. The news is still big, but Rather has gotten very, very small.

The folks at Powerline compare the willingness of Dan Rather to chase a partisan hit job into the land of fiction to the revolution of suicide bombing. The sudden willingness, indeed eagerness, of terrorists to die with their victims changed the whole paradigm of national security. Similarly, Rather was willing to destroy himself in pursuit of a partisan attack. It's an okay analogy, but it misses a crucial point. Dan Rather didn't think he was going to blow himself up. He believed he was invulnerable. He was the equivalent of some powdered-wigged fool who believed that Austria would come out on the other side of a short battle with its reputation enhanced. Instead, it revealed that CBS News is really the Sick Man of Big Media. I have no desire to go trolling around inside Dan Rather's brain. We all know from Star Trek that a mind-meld with such an alien psyche could leave me permanently damaged. But it's clear that Dan Rather doesn't understand what's going on any more than those poor last dinosaurs understood why the tasty green fronds became so hard to find when it got cloudy. As an icon of the old world of big media, his self-inflicted extinction will surely be recognized as the end of not merely Dan Rather, but the age of Dan Rathers.

I don't have any better idea about what's coming next than the folks in 1914 did. I don't think blogs have the ability to replace CBS News any more than Gavrilo Princip and the Black Hand could replace the Hapsburgs. Blogs are great but they can't do the heavy lifting of investigative journalism. But it seems obvious to me that we are officially at the Goodbye To All That moment of old media.

Anyway, let me make one directly partisan point while I'm at it. Dan Rather considers it outrageous and offensive that anyone would question the judgment that led to this situation. He defends what appear to be very shoddy methods (reading letters over the phone to sources, asking sources not to talk to the press, etc.), as if only a "partisan" or a fool would question them.

Well, if you agree with Rather, maybe you should give just a smidgen more slack to George W. Bush about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush's sources were more solid by several orders of magnitude than Rather's, and yet it is "obvious" to so many that Bush lied while Rather deserves the benefit of the doubt. George W. Bush had the head of the CIA, the intelligence agencies of all our allies, the Clinton administration, the United Nations, and most of the establishment media generally backing his understanding of the threat from Iraq. Dan Rather had a couple shoddy Xeroxes — not all of which were examined thoroughly or at all. He interviewed a partisan — Ben Barnes — a huge backer of Kerry whose story has changed several times. But because many who hate Bush believe he lied, they are willing to believe any lies that confirm what they already know to be true.

You might say the same to me, since I'm one of those people who've seen Dan Rather as a joke for a very long time. Fair enough. The difference is that I have better evidence on my side.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2004
Tue, 09-14-2004 - 9:12am
Interesting note..... CBS has yet to be able to produce a typewriter from 1973 that was able to produce the memos in the fashion we have seen them.

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