THE "New" CBS BUSH DOCUMENTS: Let's do some investigating

www.freerepublic.com | September 9, 2004

[Howlin]

These are the NEW documents "discovered" by CBS with conjunction with their Ben Barnes expose/confessional tonight regarding George Bush's National Guard service.

They've gotten some interesting comments on the Live Thread, so I thought I'd give them their own thread so you people out there with the knowledge can dissect them for their accuracy/truth/existence.

[El Gato]

Anybody seriously think THEY'RE gonna play paperwork cover-your-ass games with undated memo's to unspecified people

Yes, I believe they would. ANG leadership positions are filled by full timers that (mostly) stay at the same base for decades. They are in fact as well as in effect, uniformed civilian bureaucrats. They are fighter pilots too of course, but the interpersonal dynamics are those of civilian bureaucrats.

[nonkultur]

Pete Yost of AP is claiming the White House released the memos.

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2004/09/09/national/a01090904_07.txt

Is the another Bush crowd boos and Bush did nothing about it?

[Mo1]

Well that part that gets me is, who in the military hangs on to this kind of stuff, much less be able to actualy find it 30 some odd years later? come on the guys got out in 1973

He hasn't hung onto these for 30 years ... Killian died in 1984

[El Gato]

heck they usually get heaved once a year or at least when the guy or his commander leaves

Remember this is the Guard, most folks stay around for a long, long time. Still, they don't keep minutia from private and mostly unofficial files for multiple decades.

[fuzzy122]

It's gonna start gettin' rough Freepers, so if you can help PLEASE click the boat:

Stay Strong,
Fuzzy122

[AndrewC]

But, if (I assume that it is) the bottom signature is the true one, this is INDEED A FORGERY (assuming that no clerk signed it for the Colonel).

This is the tie breaker.

From the application for discharge.

Look at the "K" and the "ian"

[Southack]

Look carefully at the discrepancy in spacing between the "NDU" of MEMORANDUM from the forgery to the listed Times New Roman Font below in that post.

The forgery has tight spacing. The actual font shows a skip in spacing between the "D" and the "U" (you knew that I had to throw DU in here, right?!).

3 Full Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

[WestVirginiaRebel]

This is going to blow up BIG in CBS's face and demolish whatever credibility they had left. I can't believe they thought they would actually be able to get away with this.

[Diddley]

Look at the "K" and the "ian"

You are so right. There are many differences: thickness of letters, slant, "sharpness" of letters, relative clearness of letters, and so on.

[Diddley]

Plus the relative heights of the letters, and the "i" dots.

[Oblongata]

ping

[Howlin]

That's not true.

If the White House has released them, why wouldn't everybody have them?

[nonkultur]

Exactly! I swear AP is not even trying to have a semblance of truth anymore.

[TankerKC]

I mentioned earlier that the format for the letter wasn't the type that I have seen since I joined the USAF in 1981. You can see in the sample letter above that the signature block used to be left justified. Also, the old memos didn't have "MEMORANDUM" at the top in all caps. The USAF changed to the new style memo format around 1992- 1995 (to the best of my recollection). We changed to match other services, so there is a possibility that the “MEMORANDUM” style was used in ’72 in the TXANG. FWIW

[TankerKC]

Look at post 205. It has the “old” style with the left justified signature blocks and no “MEMORANDUM” at the top…just like my old personal files. So why was Lt Col Kilian using a format that the USAF didn’t adopt until the 90s?

Of course, I’m just a logistics weenie..maybe we have a Freeper with some USAF admin experience.

[igoramus987]

Compare any of "Bush's" memos to John Kerry's Transfer To Standby Reserve document, dated 14 August 1972 (Page 2).
http://www.johnkerry.com/pdf/jkmilservice/Transfer_To_Standby_Reserve.pdf

John Kerry's document is dated 14 August 1972 (same time period), and has a fixed width Courier font.

[Leisler]

For decades Gunga Dan has been claiming he's a Marine. Supposedly he was known to physically throw his weight around the fey limpwrists of CBS.

In two tries he never made it through boot camp. Loser/liar.

[Howlin]

Look at this:

A spokeswoman for "60 Minutes," Kelli Edwards, declined to say exactly how the new documents were obtained other than that CBS News understood they had been taken from Killian's "personal office file." In addition to the order to Bush to report for a physical, the documents include various memos from Killian describing his conversations with Bush and other National Guard officers about Bush's attempts to secure a transfer to Alabama. Killian died in 1984.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6693-2004Sep8?language=printer

And this:

The new documents surfaced as the Bush administration released for the first time the president's personal flight logs, which have been the focus of repeated archival searches and Freedom of Information Act requests dating to the 2000 presidential campaign. The logs show that Bush stopped flying in April 1972 after accumulating more than 570 hours of flight time between 1969 and 1972, much of it on an F-102 interceptor jet.

White House officials have said there was no reason for Bush to take the annual physical required of fighter pilots because there were no suitable planes for him to fly in Alabama, where he applied for "substitute training" to replace his required service with the Texas National Guard.

[RatherBiased.com]

The reason to think that these documents were written (or forged, it remains to be established) on a typewriter using a ribbon. Work from a computer printer would not show a difference in weight or heaviness of different letters, which these documents do.

Actually, dot-matrix and daisy wheel printers can have variations in character weights given that each letter is manually smashed onto the page through an ink and hammer method, just as a typewriter does.

[Technical Editor]

I think those documents are not forgeries, because I recognize that typeface. They are not the type of document that would be even worth forging, in my opinion.

Didn't I read here tonight somewhere that what the documents state was standard operating procedure for people who didn't want to fly anymore?

This looks like nothing at all to me, except desperation on the part of that shameful man, John Kerry.