Graphic Difference in Documents

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Graphic Difference in Documents
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Mon, 09-20-2004 - 8:45am
The Washington Post has revealed a comparison of the REAL Killian memos & the FAKE ones used by Dan Rather on CBS:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/graphics/cbsdocs_091804.html

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Mon, 09-20-2004 - 8:57am
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/politics/campaign/20guard.html?ei=5006&en=42f1be2f0a0efa9d&ex=1096344000&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&position=

CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say

By JIM RUTENBERG



After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night.

The report relied in large part on four memorandums purported to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos, dated from the early 1970's, said that Colonel Killian was under pressure to "sugar coat'' the record of the young Lieutenant Bush and that the officer had disobeyed a direct order to take a physical.

Mr. Rather and others at the network are said to still believe that the sentiment in the memos accurately reflected Mr. Killian's feelings but that the documents' authenticity was now in grave doubt.

The developments last night marked a dramatic turn for CBS News, which for a week stood steadfastly by its Sept. 8 report as various document experts asserted that the typeface of the memos could have been produced only by a modern-day word processor, not Vietnam War-era typewriters.

The seemingly unflappable confidence of Mr. Rather and top news division officials in the documents allayed fears within the network and created doubt among some in the news media at large that those specialists were correct. CBS News officials had said they had reason to be certain that the documents indeed had come from the personal file of Colonel Killian.

Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said last week, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents.''

But officials decided yesterday that they would most likely have to declare that they had been misled about the records' origin after Mr. Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with a man who was said to have helped the news division obtain the memos, a former Guard officer named Bill Burkett.

Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material.

It was unclear last night if Mr. Burkett had told Mr. Rather that he had been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one who did the misleading.

In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Burkett declined to answer any questions about the documents.

Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail.

In an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told her this but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face questions from documents experts.

In the coming days CBS News officials plan to focus on how the network moved ahead with the report when there were warning signs that the memorandums were not genuine.

Ms. Will is one of two documents experts consulted by the network who said they raised doubts about the material before the segment was broadcast. Another expert, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he had vouched only for Colonel Killian's signatures on the records and not the authenticity of the records themselves. Mr. Matley said he could not rule out that the signatures had been cut and pasted from official records pertaining to Colonel Killian.

In examining where the network had gone wrong, officials at CBS News turning their attention to Ms. Mapes, one of their most respected producers, who was riding particularly high this year after breaking news about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal for the network.

In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said that he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report.

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility.''

He added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.''

Ms. Mapes has not responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Howard also said in the interview that the White House did not dispute the veracity of the documents when it was presented to them on the morning of the report. That reaction, he said, was "the icing on the cake'' of the other reporting the network was conducting on the documents. White House officials have said they saw no reason to challenge documents being presented by a credible news organization.

Several people familiar with the situation said they were girding for a particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the network announce its new doubts.

One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?''


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Mon, 09-20-2004 - 9:14am
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/guests/s_252409.html

Dan Rather: The final days

By Pat Buchanan

Saturday, September 18, 2004

"I gave them a sword, and they ran it right through me," said Richard Nixon. Thirty years later, Nixon nemesis Dan Rather might say the same of the blunders that are about to bring an inglorious end to his long career.

What -- other than blind bias against George Bush rooted in animus or ideology, or an obduracy bred of arrogance and hubris -- can explain Rather's near-suicidal behavior since his "60 Minutes II" segment aired Sept. 8?

In that piece, Rather revealed four newly discovered memos from the "personal file" of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush's squadron commander in the National Guard. The memos seemed proof that Killian thought Bush a shirker whose defiance of orders was being protected by higher-ups such as Col. "Buck" Stoudt.

Rather thought he had a story that could bring down a president. Instead, he has ravaged the reputation of CBS News and made of himself a cartoon caricature of liberal bias. How could Rather have been so stubborn and blind?

At least two experts consulted by CBS warned against going with the story, saying there were "problems" with the memos. Within hours of the airing of the piece, the Web had exploded with bloggers saying the Times New Roman font and "superscript" letters appeared to have come from a word processor.

By the next night, the story of the forged memos was all over the country. Killian's widow and son declared them fakes. Ben Barnes, who told Rather he used his influence to get Bush into the Guard, was being called a liar by his own daughter.

But smoke alarms at CBS were not working. On Sept. 10, a defiant Rather went on air to denounce his critics as partisans and assert that CBS stood by its story.

Over the weekend, the Dallas Morning News reported that Stoudt had been out of the Guard for 18 months when he was supposed to be pressuring Killian. Rather's hole card, the testimony of Gen. Bobby Hodges, then head of the Guard, that the memos were consistent with what Killian believed, turned out to be a deuce. Hodges claims he was misled by CBS into thinking the memos were handwritten. Shown copies, he dismissed them as computer-generated frauds.

Yet on Monday, Rather, his memos a national joke, his experts and witnesses defecting and recanting, went on air to assert again the memos were authentic and the president must address the Guard issues. "With respect, answer the questions," Rather thundered at Bush. "The longer we go without a denial of such things -- this story is true."

This was ludicrous. Can anyone believe CBS would have clung this long to so patently falsified an attack on John Kerry? Worse, CBS appears to have been complicit in a criminal conspiracy to use forged U.S. government documents to bring down a president. CBS must have suspected it was using counterfeit documents.

CBS has to take Rather off the air for the duration of this campaign if it is to even begin to restore its reputation and credibility. For where President Bush is concerned, Dan Rather has no credibility left.

An investigation must be conducted into who tried to affect an election using forgeries of federal documents. And Rather and CBS executives and producers must testify against the hatchers of this rotten plot or they, too, must stand trial as accomplices.

In a way, this is a tragedy. A flaw in a man's character, magnified by his position of pre-eminence, brings about his downfall and ruin. In Rather's case, it was pride and a blind hatred of the right that led him to commit a journalistic atrocity that will end up killing not the president's re-election, but his own reputation and career.

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Mon, 09-20-2004 - 9:18am
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/sf20040920.shtml

A war that won't go away

Suzanne Fields


September 20, 2004


Who could have predicted that the presidential election of '04 would turn on what happened in a war we fought 40 years ago? The two aging boomers who are the focus of the debate we all thought had been stuffed down the nation's memory hole are two of the oddest fellows to deliver the issue into the 21st century.

Partisans are eager only to reprise the clichés that polarized those days of rage. Neither of the candidates appear to have bought the pop culture mantra of those days of yore: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

George Bush admits to being young and irresponsible in that time when a lot of us were young and irresponsible, and cheerfully concedes that his participation in the Air National Guard, good and honorable though it was, is not the stuff of heroism.

Like many other boomers who (like Al Gore, for example) wangled positions behind desks or on bases far from the sound of the guns, he escaped hellish duty. But he did duty. (Many National Guardsmen were, in fact, called to Vietnam; there has never been a suggestion that the young Bush would have avoided Vietnam if he had been ordered to go there.)

John Kerry took another route. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve. He casts aspersions on George Bush's National Guard service and Dick Cheney's student deferments. However, it's not necessarily clear where, or if, he would have enlisted had he had been granted the student deferment he sought to study in Paris.

The London Daily Telegraph dug up an interview with young Kerry in the Harvard Crimson in 1970: "When (Kerry) approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy."

This fact - and the Kerry campaign has not denied it - would be of little consequence if the candidate were not so smug about "reporting for duty." This actually humanizes the man, showing him to have had the urges in his senior year in college that have compelled young men in all our wars to find the best duty available.

Once he chose to make Vietnam heroics the central focus of his campaign, he eliminated this option to show that honest side of himself. If he preferred nibbling croissants in a sidewalk café on the Champs-Elysees to supping on nuoc nam from a sidewalk cart on the rue Catinat in Saigon, we could understand. Who wouldn't? But like so much else in Kerry's biography, this fact is erased from his past because he thinks it doesn't work for him.

John Kerry and George Bush treat their pasts in very different ways. Kerry tries to wish inconvenient parts away, like having his first marriage of 18 years annulled. If he emphasizes the medals he won on the Mekong, he thinks we'll forget how he either threw away, or pretended to throw away, those very medals.

He was young when he testified to Congress that the men he left behind were war criminals, raping and pillaging and cutting off ears of peasants. He was so caught up in the fervor of '60s protest that he couldn't make inconvenient distinctions. Why not accept responsibility now for some of his most irresponsible statements? Why can't he just say that the man wised up when he was no longer a boy?

He doesn't because there's a methodical calculation behind the flip-flops. Ron Rosenbaum, who was two years behind Kerry at Yale, describes in the New York Observer the draft culture on campus in those days. "When Mr. Kerry was there, local draft boards still had the option (but not the requirement) to extend undergraduate deferments from the draft to those who pursued graduate study. The clued-in people, many of them well-connected preppies, knew that if your draft board wasn't going to give you a deferment the savvy thing was to try to get an officer's commission in the Reserves or the Guard."

George W. did that. So did John Kerry. Each knew that an officer's duty would be smoother than a grunt's. We're fighting a different kind of war today. A different worldview requires different strategies, different tactics. All our soldiers and Marines in Iraq are volunteers. The enemy makes himself into a human bomb and hides in "holy" places. The brotherhood of man promised by the Age of Aquarius never arrived.

The Vietnam War, like the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the two world wars, is over. (Grenada, too.) We've got problems, so let's face them. Any survivor of the '60s could tell you that you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.