Beat The Retreat

The Boston Glob is backing sloooowly away from their defense of CBS's report on the Bush National Guard dox:

In a CBS Evening News report last week, the network aired four documents that appeared to be typed by the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, Bush's commanding officer, saying that Bush's flight status had been suspended because he had failed to perform at Texas Air Guard standards and had not received a required physical exam. CBS said the documents came from Killian's "personal files."

But Killian's son and widow disputed the authenticity of the records, saying they did not know how the documents might have been obtained while asserting that Killian had never complained about Bush's performance or about pressure he might have received from superiors in the Guard.

Hodges, in his interview with the Los Angles Times, also said he could not recall Killian objecting to Bush's performance or the fact that he failed to take a physical. "I have no recollection of anything like that happening," Hodges told the newspaper. Killian died in 1984.

New questions about the authenticity of the CBS documents were also raised yesterday by the Dallas Morning News, which reported that the one in which Killian appears to complain that Colonel Walter "Buck" Staudt was "pushing to sugar coat" an evaluation of Bush is dated a year and a half after Staudt was honorably discharged.

The newspaper said it did not interview Staudt but had obtained his discharge order, which it said is dated March 1, 1972. The memo in which Killian appears to complain about pressure from Staudt is dated Aug. 18, 1973.

Read the whole story.

You will find no mention, by the way, of where the furor of fact-checking arose - the blogosphere, especially Little Green Footballs and Powerline.

But the the thin, gray, martini-swilling line is starting to crumble.

So just a quick run-down on the basic facts behind Doxgate, starting with Hugh Hewitt's excellent list from earlier today:

*Lt Col Killian didn't type;

*Lt Col Killian's family says he did not maintain such records;

*Guard regulations prohibited the maintenance of such records;

*General Bobby Hodges didn't vouch for the docs as CBS said he would;

*Colonel Buck Staudt --cited in the memos as pushing Killian to "sugarcoat" a Bush evaluation-- had retired more than a year before the meo was allegedly written;

*Bloggers have been overwhelmed with e-mails from active duty and retire dmilitary who scoff at the form of the memos;

*Typewriters with proportional spacing were rare in '72/3;

*Typewriters with superscripting capabilites were rare in '72/3;

*Typewriters with perfect centering ability were non-existent '72/3;

*Typewriters with the "kerning" function didn't exist in '72/3;

*Most experts, from Dr.Cartwright at Rice, the above-referenced Dr. Bouffard and Farrell Shiver, range from certain to almost certain in their conclusions that the docs are not legit;

*CBS doesn't have the "originals" and didn't reveal that fact until pressure mounted;

*The fake docs are easily and exactly reproduced on modern word-processing equipment, underscoring the ease with which the bad forgery could have been produced contrasted with the near impossibility of Lt Colonel Killian's producing them in 192/3;

*Lt Col Killian lacked motive to write and maintain such records;

*Despite intense media interest in the president's TANG career that extends back at least four years, someone sat on these docs until seven weeks before the 2004 election and after the RNC convention;

*CBS has a history of obtaining docs damaging to the Bush Adminsitration which in all likelihood came from Democratic partisans;

*CBS won't reveal its source;

*CBS has a history of blowing stories that involved fake documents; and

*Dan Rather has not appeared opposite a serious journalist to answer extended questions on camera, even though his reputation and the reputation of his network are being shredded and a confidant witness would demand a hearing with a Russert or a Hume.

Add to that:

• As former and serving military people have said in comments and email to this website and the Northern Alliance website, the memo observes none of the conventions of military memos
• If you're my age or older, and you ever took typing class, you remember that when typing a business letter or memo, you always put the abbreviations of the typist and dictator at the bottom of the letter. In other words, if I were typing the memo for Colonel Jerry Killian, I'd type "JK/mpb" at the bottom of the memo. Since men of Colonel Killian's rank and age very rarely typed in that era (executives typing their own memos is a product of the computer age and the ubiquity of word processing), and the family has established that Killian didn't type, there should have been initials at the bottom of the page. And those initials should make it simple to track down at least one witness to these documents' authenticity. If it's possible.

More?

Posted by Mitch at September 12, 2004 12:20 PM | TrackBack