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AWESOME JOB!!!! Great thanks are due to you and everyone else who helped here! :D

It's not every day that "the common man" (Teresa Heinz-Kerry's words for us little people ;) can cause a national firestorm that is likely to have repercussions in the political and journalism worlds for YEARS to come!

This election was already beginning to tip in Bush's favor. In exposing the lengths to which the Democrats are willing to go to win an election, and the willingness of their allies in the liberal media to sacrifice the truth in order to support these efforts, you may have dropped the election solidly into Bush's lap! Our nation and our children are in your debt.

A few observations and questions of my own...

It should be easy to cross check Mr. Killian's signature on these questionable documents against the known-to-be-genuine documents concerning the President's stint in the National Guard that have already been released by the Pentagon. After seeing how simplistically these potential forgeries seem to have been created, I think it's likely that an image of his signature may have been lifted from an authentic document and pasted/inserted into these documents. Any handwriting expert would agree that signatures are always similar, but no one can sign their name in EXACTLY the same way any two times. If an exact match can be found between any signature on the questionable and any authentic documents, it would prove that the signature was lifted from a genuine document and placed into a forgery. I'd do the comparison myself, but I don't have access to pdf copies of the documents released by the Pentagon.

It isn't a sufficient answer for Mr. Matley -- or CBS -- to say that other document specialists may not have good enough copies to work with. The clear _implication_ is that other experts are seeing things that are not in the original, or vice versa. This is too important to be left to mere implications; the truth must be known. For example, some have mentioned the presence of curly apostrophes, rather than the 70's era straight apostrophes. Is it CBS's and Mr. Matley's specific claim that the apostrophes on the original are not curly, but only appear to be so in the copies that are available? If so, they should state that specifically. Or far better yet, release accurate digital images of these documents so that others can examine them properly. It's not that hard guys. This is the computer age!

I've already heard that this or that model of 1972-era typewriter could do superscript or variable-width spacing. Again, that is not good enough. Since it isn't plausible that more than one typewriter was used to write these documents, I'd like to know specifically which ONE model could create ALL of the Word-type anomalies that are seen in these documents! Which model typewriter can type variable width letters in Palatino (or whichever it is believed to be) font, has smaller, superscripted 'th' key(s), uses curly apostrophes, etc? In light of the evidence against these documents, the burden is on CBS to present a typewriter model that the National Guard used in the early 70's that is capable of creating these documents, and if they cannot do so, the story should be withdrawn with an apology to the American public.

Isn't it the obligation of a news medium to demonstrate the utter veracity of a 'news' story that smears someone, rather than the responsibility of someone else to prove it false? Do journalism schools teach that stories are 'ready for air' once a reporter can demonstrate that he has found the truth, or only after he is convinced that no one can prove him wrong? This is a real difference, and I'll wager it's the former. In saying that they will stick by their story unless and until someone else proves it wrong, CBS is avoiding it's journalistic responsibility in this matter.

P.S. I joined this site just to say thanks to you all, but I think I'll stick around now. ; )