Posted on 09/10/2004 10:08:54 PM PDT by RatherBiased.com
September 10, 2004, XX:YY:ZZ EDT
Dan Rather's defense of himself tonight, while probably impressive to shallow observers was far from convincing. Here's a list of things he ignored, did not properly address, or concealed from viewers. Feel free to send us your suggestions to this live fisking. For the transcript, click here.
Not coincidentally, Rather also did not mention that one of its main validators, retired Maj. General Bobby Hodges is accusing 60 Minutes staff of lying to him in order to get him to say the supposed Killian memos were authentic. ABC News has the story:
"Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Guard, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were 'handwritten' and after CBS read him excerpts he said, 'well if he wrote them that's what he felt.'
"Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been 'computer-generated' and are a 'fraud.'"
The Washington Post reported earlier today that CBS considered Hodges its "trump card":
"A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."
"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."
The official said the network regarded Hodges's comments as "the trump card" on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.
Looks like jokers are no longer wild.
"Do not passively accept a copy as the sole basis of a case. Every copy, intentionally or unintentionally, is in some way false to the original. In fact, modern copiers and computer printers are so good that they permit easy fabrication of quality forgeries."
In his defense tonight, Rather admitted that "the documents CBS started with were also photocopies."
"Well, they are compatible with the way business was done at that time. They are compatible with the man that I remember, Jerry Killian, being. I don't see anything in the documents that are discordant with what were the times, what were the situation and what were the people that were involved."
Reached by the AP today, Strong was even more lukewarm toward the documents' authenticity. His former colleague, Retired Col. Maurice Udell called them fakes: "That's not true. I was there. I knew Jerry Killian. I went to Vietnam with Jerry Killian in 1968."
Although he tried to minimize the typographical concerns raised by many critics, Rather nonetheless tried to defend himself in this area. He failed, however. On the superscript issue, which Rather tried to explain away by throwing out the red herring that "Critics claim typewriters didn't have that ability in the 70s. But some models did."
The problem with this statement is that Rather fails to list any such typewriters which might have the capability or how a measely Air National Guard office would be able to afford such expensive machines. Simply showing a photocopy of a letter in Bush's official file which originated from the Army's national office is no proof at all.
Assuming Killian somehow had access to an IBM Selectric Composer (or similar model), Blogger Jeff Harrell wondered what one of the CBS memos would look like if typed in one of the re-famous devices. His results are yet more evidence that the CBS docs are forgeries.
As one who grew up with "who" and "whom," I react sharply to the latter-day error of substituting "that." Thus I was struck by phrasing in the "memo" of August 1, 1972, "... qualified Vietnam pilots that have rotated...."I don't believe anyone would have written this in 1972. It would have been, "...pilots who have rotated...."
Maybe not in 1972, but how about these lines from Shakespeare?
HAMLET: My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen.
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!
Hamlet, Act I, Scene iv, lines 81-5.
Good to cross paths with you, old friend.
Cheers back atcha!
They don't even look the same to ME....notice the 1's have FLAT bottoms on the old document!
And if you notice in the copy of the older document, CBS has "doctored" up the "th."
So who exactly is CBS left with? The handwriting guy and Robert Strong, who, by the way, called the entire TANG "corrupt?"
Move over, baseball, mom and apple pie. Hoax letters are about to turn into the new national pastime.
You mean "Obviously Hoax Letters" LOL
From the comments page of http://wizbangblog.com/archives/003629.php:
Author: Timmer
Web Site: http://digitalwarfighter.com
Comment:
Old AF Admin Wheenie with 20 years in service here. One thing I haven't heard a lot about, only a little, is the format of some of the documents. They're just wrong. The headers are wrong. The signature blocks are wrong. They're just WRONG.
There's no such thing as a Memo for file. There's a Memorandum for Record, but no Memo for file. NO SUCH THING.
Addressing an official document with
MEMORANDUM FOR:
didn't occur until the 1990s. The AF didn't move their signature blocks over to the right of the documents until the same time, before then they were anchored four clear lines down the left margin.
An official signature block looks like this.
JOHN S. SUPERTROOP, Rank, USAF
Duty Title
Three line signature blocks are reserved for flag officers (Generals) and Colonels sitting in a General's billet. But they look like
JOHN S. SUPERTROOP
General, USAF
Duty Title
Now civilians may scoff and say so what? Who cares about admin details like that? Ummmmm, the military does...quite a bit too much actually. I've seen inspection teams tear entire careers apart over the admin details being mucked up.
There isn't an admin guy in any branch of the service who wouldn't have taken one look at these documents and waved the bullshit flag. You could show those documents to any airman coming fresh out of school down at Keesler and they'd have a blast tearing them apart.
Those documents aren't just fakes...they're really really bad fakes. And all it would have taken was someone with some sense of how these things are done. The more I look at them...the more I get the feeling that someone sort of scanned through http://www.e-publishing.af.mil/pubfiles/af/33/afman33-326/afman33-326.pdf AFM 33-326 and shoved all this together. Before that we had AFR 10-1 and it had the formats I mentioned above.
Remember though, before anyone goes, "Hey, that looks right." We didn't use that manual until 1996 and it's been updated since then.
Bottom line, wrong fonts, wrong headers, wrong formats. It's bullshit, you can't hide from it.
Actually Times Roman has been around for a long time.
Times New Roman hasn't.
There's another thread here about its orgins. I believe it was the 80's.
To bad the guy didn't sign his name to it so it could be used as a source.
http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/articles/times.htm
Both have been around since 1931 since TNR is just a different name for Times's Roman (aka Times Roman)
But in the late 1980s, Monotype, the creator and owner of the rights to the font, slightly revised TNR to its present form. The current Times New Roman is not the same one that existed before the revision.
I suspect that the use of 'that' as a substitute in a relative clause for a personal pronoun modified by the clause was acceptable in Elizabethan England. I ran a search for 'he that' in the King James Bible and got 611 hits. For example: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." (Matthew 11:15, Mark 4:9, Luke 8:8)
Funny!!!!
Thanks, my error.
Fox News Channel reported this evening that like each NG member, Bush had until his birthday, in late July, to take his physical, and a 3 month window in which to do so. The May letter ordering him to take a physical is just a couple of weeks into the 12 week window, and so there was no reason that one of his superiors would order him to take a physical when he still had 10 weeks left to take it.
Excellent! I have concluded that the "Nixon" signature is authentic, so that Cambodia story must be true!
BTW, as a former Air Force officer I can tell you that no one ever referred to an Officer Effectiveness Report as an OERT. They are called OER's or simply, ER's.
I'll take my portion without ketchup, please...
OETR stands for Officer Education Transcript Repository, according to AFI36-2305, so Bush must have been overseeing one of those, and Killian refused to sugar coat his rating of it. No doubt some of the paperwork he was doing in Alabama. He couldn't have been refering to Bush's OER, since he had completed that in May of 1973, and would not have to do another, since Bush had cleared the base on May 15, 1972. /sarc
You are very observant. Good catch. FReepers are good at what they do.
I agree. Which, of course, is a far cry from standard English in 1972, much less military usage.
Styles come and go, and in the instance, I am quite confident of my ear. There has been a marked usage change in recent years (it always annoys me). For want of any better theory, I suspect the uneducated teachers in the public school system started teaching "that" because they themselves couldn't figure out when to use "who," and when "whom."
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