That's what this should be. Unfortunately, there are too many people determined to go down with the Kerry/Rather Swift Boat to allow it to be.

Also reader Mike Puckett points out that the reward for the ability to reproduce these documents with equipment available in that era (let alone likely to be found in a National Guard office and usable by an officer) is now up to over seventeen thousand dollars. Come on, "Hunter", it's easy money, right?

I saw that "offer" some time ago, but it doesn't seem to be a very serious one. They don't appear to have defined the rules very carefully, for one thing.

If I had an offer, it would work something like this - money in bank account, run through an independent legal agency. The test would be that a person would, in person, demonstrate that they could create documents with all the features in these memos (typeface/font, character and word spacing, text positioning, line spacing, etc.) with a typewriter and conventional typing accessories available at the time. They would have 15 minutes to complete each memo. Custom hardware or other extraordinary measures (such as manually respacing each line) would NOT be allowed. The results would be determined by an independent document expert.

But CBS says they are certain the documents could have been produced then. So they must have already done the test. Right? Right?

This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Bart wants to go to Kamp Krusty, and crudely changes his report card "D"s to "A"s. Homer takes one look and says, "You don't think much of me, do you boy?"

The people who are still insisting that these incompetent frauds are real don't think much of us, either. I doubt they ever have, but now we do have another bit of proof.

One Bill Glennon, tyewriter repairman, says there were IBM machines capable of producing the spacing, and a customized key — the likes of which he says were not unusual — could have created the superscript th.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12572_TIME_Goes_to_the_Mattresses#comments

Sheesh.

For me, it's not so much the "th" superscript as it is the line breaks and the text-centering. Just how likely is it that someone typing a memo umpteen years ago would do the exact same line breaks that Word defaults to? Also, remembering how tedious centering was on a monospace typewriter, has anyone addressed how centering would work on these proportional typewriters?

You don't think much of us, do you, Al?

The spacing
the font
the reduced font superscript
the pseudo-kerning
the line spacing
the centered proportional type (with and without superscripts)
the word wrap

Occam's razor shaves mighty close. Don't get a rash, now.

Al: Wonderful. Let him demo it. What is so hard to understand about that concept? At this point "expert opinion" for something like this is only useful as a starting point for a test.

Incidentally, the whole "th" thing is a strawman argument.

I just watched the Monday night (Sept 13) edition of "CBS Evening News." They addressed the issue again.

It is interesting to watch how their coverage of this evolves. On Friday and Saturday they took a very hard-line stance, refusing to concede anything. On both days they started their coverage by repeating the 4-5 questions they felt are raised by the documents, which all have to deal with Bush shirking his military service duties. Clearly, whoever has dug in his heels on this issue (Dan Rather? Some other producer?) feels that those are the most important issues and the question of the documents' authenticity is a secondary distraction. In addition, Rather made multiple statements for several days that implied that most of the questioning of the documents is partisan. Obviously, that is what he believes and he is not willing to even acknowledge that they COULD have made a mistake.

Today their tone changed noticeably. First, they did NOT start with the list of the 4-5 questions raised by the documents. In addition, right from the start Rather admitted that not all of the questions are being raised by partisan sources. They then quickly cut to a Democrat criticizing Bush on this issue, which was a rather bizarre choice, because one would have expected them to cut to one of these non-partisan critics.

Then they reaffirmed that they had properly investigated the documents, mentioned the USA Today documents, and then added some additional information on how they had done their research. For instance, they said that some things mentioned in the documents are consistent with the known timeline about Bush's Guard service. However, this really proves little, because someone wishing to forge documents would have done research on that, right? They would have looked for specific dates and names to use in their documents.

They then quoted two "experts," one a typographical expert who asserted that everything seen in the documents could have been done at that time. The second was a Richard Katz, who was said to be a "software engineer" who said that some things in the documents CANNOT be done with Microsoft Word.

(I got the creeping feeling that neither of these guys are actually experts on this specific subject. This makes me wonder why CBS still refuses to hire 2-3 more document authenticators to look at the documents. Why go only halfway with their investigation?)

Finally, they ended by rereading the list of 4-5 questions they say are raised by the documents. This was essentially the same list that they led the Friday and Saturday broadcasts with. However, this time they said that they had formally submitted these questions to the White House for their response.

My suspicion is that there are currently major arguments raging within the CBS newsroom. There are probably two distinct camps--one group, consisting of Rather and the producer and probably a few other old-timers at 60 Minutes--refuses to believe that they did anything wrong. They are resisting any second-guessing of their work, and are insisting that all the attacks are partisan and unfair. They have probably fought having any stories on this at all on the Evening News. When they lost the basic argument, then they insisted on specific wording that refuses to acknowledge certain issues. (For instance, they still do not mention that Staudt, who is mentioned in one of the memos, was retired for 18 months when the memo was written. Nor do they acknowledge on the air that Hodges, one of their important document verifiers, has now recanted his story.)

But there is probably another camp at CBS. That group is probably seriously concerned that 60 Minutes screwed up big time. They probably remember the CNN/Time Tailwind mess and are concerned that they have been duped by a forger. They probably want an internal investigation, but they keep getting shouted down by the old-timers and the big guns at 60 Minutes.

I do not know any of this as a fact. But this is how these things ALWAYS happen. Big egos get in the way and refuse to admit error. And they dig themselves a deeper and deeper hole.

What is necessary is for an investigative reporter, like Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, to talk to sources at CBS News and find out what is really going on there. Unfortunately, Kurtz does not really take this "scandal" seriously. Even though he broke the Jayson Blair NY Times story, Kurtz seems to feel that this issue, involving possibly forged documents and 60 Minutes, is simply part of the partisan media war, rather than a real story.

But eventually somebody at CBS will start leaking and the story will get really damaging for them.

Wow.

Wow.

Take a look at this article from the Washington Post - it all but says the memos are fakes.

A few quotes:

"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.

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.

About their latest "expert":

... But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices.

There's a lot more. Devastating.

And here is a Col. Earl Lively (scroll down), director of operations back then that says, no, they didn't have fancy typewriters and he was (surprise) misquoted by the Boston Globe in comments he made about Bush.

This is great ...

I thought the most interesting part of the Post article was the comment from the CBS rep where they now concede that the documents cannot be authenticated. But if the documents are "inconclusive," then why did CBS put them on television?

""Asked about Matley's comments, CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said: "In the
end, the gist is that it's inconclusive. People are coming down on both
sides, which is to be expected when you're dealing with copies of
documents.""