Posted on 09/09/2004 5:58:04 PM PDT by 11th_VA
Washington, DC, Sep. 9 (UPI) -- The Cybercast News Service reported Thursday documents casting doubt on the U.S. president's national guard service might be fakes.
CNS, an Internet-based news organization affiliated with a conservative media watchdog group, said the 32-year-old documents used by CBS to cast "a negative light on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, may have been forged using a current word processing program."
The news organization said three independent typography tests indicated "they were suspicious of the documents" because they used a modern Microsoft Word font feature that was not available in 1972 or 1973.
The documents were featured Wednesday on "60 Minutes II" and allegedly came from the personal files of former Bush squadron Cmdr. Jerry B. Killian, now dead.
CBS will not say how it obtained them. John Collins, the chief technology officer of Bitstream, Inc., cited the use of a superscript "th" in one document as a reason to be suspicious. "That would not be possible on a typewriter or even a word processor at that time," Collins said. "It is a very surprising thing to see a letter with that date (May 4, 1972) on it.
There's no question that that is surprising. Does that force you to conclude that it's a fake? No. But it certainly raises the eyebrows."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Drudge is reporting that CBS is meeting to decide how to handle this. The report indicates their handling it may include an on-air retraction by Dan Rather.
You're right, that the possibility that they had retyped the originals is pretty low. Especially as a retype wouldn't have a signature on it.
I agree that CBS needs to prove authenticity (and based on the evidence to date, I believe they will fail). BUT,I know that I personally copied work documents (my pearl harbor file) and kept them at home when I worked at Vandenberg in the 80's. So that idea in an of itself is not suspicious. As you mention there is plenty of other evidence which does not support the conclusion that the documents are authentic. There is a difference between evidence and PROOF. Without access to the originals, with detailed analysis and a clear understanding of their provenance it is just not possible to prove this one way or another. That said, CBS will probably never eat crow on this one. Maybe that is even better since Dan Rather will NEVER recover his credibility. If this episode retires him, it will be worth it.
Another way of looking at this is that it is VERY fortunate that the party behind this was so GROSSLY incompetent at forgery that they did this without using period typewriters (at the very least, though document aging and typeset fading are other issues), and that CBS was so eager to run the story that they missed something painfully obvious.
It will discredit all future documents they trot out against bush, making matters much easier than if a competent forgerer had done this job.
Exactly! Nice work.
But facts mean nothing to the left. The accusation and forgeries are there and that's enough for them to make it the truth.
Look at pargraph #3 and lines two and three. I counted appox. 105 characters (even a double space after a period) on line two while line three had closer to 112 characters.
The entire format, wording and verbage(including lack of verbage in some cases) are not that of an Air Force commander. The memos also refer to a General and a Colonel by their last name only. Lt Col's don't make references in any correspondence that may be viewed at any time by their superiors by using their last names only. Even if the person being referred to is a Private, official correspondence dictates that you associate rank with the name. Whoever wrote this had a minimal amount of knowledge about military writing.
One more thing, in 1972, military writing dictated that you reflect the date as 1 Aug 72, not 01 Aug 1972. The forger was not very good.
I'm not ex-military so maybe one of the military guys can answer this, but who ever heard of a fighter wing operating out of a PO Box?
It's not real uncommon to have a PO box address for a military organization. Letter carriers don't deliver mail on military installations. Barracks dwellers have PO boxes as well.
If the .PDF file was of a perfectly clean document, especially if it were in text form (rather than a scanned graphic), one could probably successfully make the argument that the .PDF was intended to be illustrative of content only, and that using a modern recreation would improve legibility, file size, and download times. But these documents had been deliberately manipulated to "look" old. I see no plausible justification for that.
I'll give you 2 more from: memo for record/Suspension of Flight status-
"147th" and "9921st" have been edited to: "147 th" and "9921 st" to avoid automatic MS Word superscript.
BTW...
Have you seen the ABC news online article? It has most of your observations, plus a couple more...
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Politics/Vote2004/bush_documents_040909-1.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1211618/posts
I can't speak to USAF, but I was in the Army in early '80s in a Signal unit in Germany. We had typewriters...Selectrics...I used to get beat up about typos all the time. Also, the Company I was in did not have letterhead, so memos were typed on bond paper. Battalion and above had letterhead but not at Company level. Now anybody can do their own unit's letterhead. The capability has existed since the mid-to-late '80s.
When I was in the Corps we all used APO and not PO BOX. So that is a red flag too.
In truth, that is probably the reality. They don't care. They're slinging as much mud as they can and trying anything to make Bush look at least as bad as Kerry. Never have I witnessed such a fight as this between the two parties, being helped by the media. It's just unbelievable, isn't it?
Actually, I did. In 1972. On a typewriter.
The current zip code for Houston PO boxes starts with 732, not 730 - The first two digits of the box number are the last two digits of the zip code, so the current-day ZIP+4 for PO Box 34567 is 73234-4567.
It'll be interesting to see if anyone can dig up historical Post Office zip code assignment records to compare.
Another interesting point is that the current ZIP+4 code for 5000 Longmont, Houston, is 77056-2419, not 77027.
Interesting but not conclusive. I leave the details on this one to the technical experts. The evidence so far is VERY damning - I guess that the probability is greater than 99% that the documents are fake. BUT, evidence is NOT proof. Without expert analysis of the originals and a clear understanding of their provenance, I don't think we can say "proof." Extraordinarily strong suspicions, yes, but proof no.
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