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The Swiss Cheese Defense: Enumerating All CBS's Memogate Problems
RatherBiased.com ^

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.

Sourcing problems
  1. The 72-year-old anchor conveniently did not mention the fact that James Moore, one of his key validative sources, is a left-wing activist and author who has written two anti-Bush books, Bush's Brain, and Bush's War for Reelection. Rather referred to him as "author Jim Moore has written two books on the subject."

  2. 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.

  3. He deliberately ignored statements from Col. Killian's wife and son who said that he hated using typewriters, hardly ever kept notes, and very much liked George W. Bush. In today's Washington Post, CBS conceded that it had not asked his wife to authenticate the letters it claims were written by her husband. Both Killian's widow and son say that the alleged memos are not characteristic of his style and do not believe they are all authentic.

  4. Rather did not mention that Ben Barnes, the Democratic lobbyist who is now saying he helped young Bush into the Texas Air National Guard (TANG), has changed his story according to his Republican daughter, Amy. She says that Barnes is making his Bush claims in preparation for his upcoming autobiography and to build up his political profile in the hopes of getting hired by a Kerry administration, all of which he allegedly told her.

  5. Also left out by Rather was the fact that one of the CBS documents dated in 1973 refers to pressure that then-Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, had supposedly been applying on Killian to make things easier for Bush. Unfortunately for CBS's case, however, Staudt had retired in 1973.

  6. CBS's own paid signature expert (the network featured no typographers or typewriter experts tonight or in Wednesday's report), Marcel Matley, directly undermined CBS's case several years earlier in an essay for the American Law Institute:

          "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."

  7. The original 60 Minutes report as well as Friday's rebuttal did not feature a single person person who was quoted as coming to Bush's defense who was not on his staff, despite the fact that it is not hard at all to find people who say they served with Bush during the period in which he is accused of being AWOL. The only person that CBS did put on camera hardly provided much support for the documents' authenticity. Rather quoted him as follows (read the rest here.

    "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."

Typographical problems
  1. 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.

  2. The split screen image CBS offered of an official Bush document with superscript ordinal suffix and one of its own documents was not very convincing to Sandra Ramsey Lines, a forensic document expert who edits the Journal of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners who told the Associated Press that she "could testify in court that, beyond a reasonable doubt, her opinion was that the memos were written on a computer." She told the AP that she was "virtually certain" the CBS memos are not genuine.

  3. Rather also neglected to mention that all of the documents which were written by Killian himself and his officers relied on simple mechanical typewriters incapable of printing in proportional fonts, let alone superscript.

  4. Despite the fact that Jerry Killian hated keeping notes, hated typing things (see above) that National Guard offices mostly use hand-me-down equipment from the full-time armed forces, and that Killian and his Guard officers have not been observed to have ever sent documents printed with proportional fonts, there is a possibility (OK really, really small) that Bush's superviser might have had access to an expensive IBM electric typewriter.

          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.

  5. Dan also appears unfamiliar with fonts and typography. At one point in the rebuttal, he refers to the font used in the CBS documents as "New Times Roman," when the real name is Times New Roman. Rather also appears to be ignorant of the fact that Times New Roman was never used in typewriters and only came into wide use in the early 1990s when Microsoft licensed the font from the Monotype Corporation in preparation for the launch of Windows 3.0.
          Even if Times New Roman had been used in proportional typewriters during the 1970s, the font then was not the same as it is today since its present form actually dates from the 1980s following some changes that Monotype made to the font.

Rhetorical Problems

  1. Rather tried to smear critics who disagreed with him: "Today on the Internet and elsewhere, including many who were partisan political operatives, concentrated on the key questions of the overall story, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."
          Since Rather failed to differentiate between who is a "partisan political operative" and who isn't, it's hard to conclude this line is nothing more than a red herring meant to scare his viewers who have not been following the ongoing story.
          Les Jones adds: "Partisan political operatives? That's funny, I don't recall cashing any checks from Karl Rove. Translation: the jury didn't believe the witness, so they ignored the witness's testimony. Therefore CBS is going to claim the jury was rigged."



TOPICS: Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: cbs; killian; rathergate
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To: T'wit
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.

21 posted on 09/10/2004 11:02:08 PM PDT by Wallaby
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To: Wallaby
Shakespeare was called a "bard," wasn't he? Bards have poetic licenses.

Cheers back atcha!

22 posted on 09/10/2004 11:09:48 PM PDT by T'wit (Believing in socialism is like believing your car will run on water if you just keep trying.)
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To: T'wit
OMG!!! Kerry WAS telling the truth about Christmas in Cambodia!!!!! HOLY CRAP!


23 posted on 09/10/2004 11:12:43 PM PDT by Chad Fairbanks (Kerry's Campaign fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.)
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To: Redcoat LI

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."

The So-Called "th" document

24 posted on 09/10/2004 11:14:04 PM PDT by Howlin (What's the Font Spacing, Kenneth?)
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To: DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet

So who exactly is CBS left with? The handwriting guy and Robert Strong, who, by the way, called the entire TANG "corrupt?"


25 posted on 09/10/2004 11:15:14 PM PDT by Howlin (What's the Font Spacing, Kenneth?)
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To: Chad Fairbanks

Move over, baseball, mom and apple pie. Hoax letters are about to turn into the new national pastime.


26 posted on 09/10/2004 11:18:38 PM PDT by T'wit (Believing in socialism is like believing your car will run on water if you just keep trying.)
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To: T'wit

You mean "Obviously Hoax Letters" LOL


27 posted on 09/10/2004 11:19:25 PM PDT by Chad Fairbanks (Dan Rather fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.)
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To: RatherBiased.com

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.


28 posted on 09/10/2004 11:20:36 PM PDT by Dont Mention the War (we use the ¡°ml maximize¡± command in Stata to obtain estimates of each aj , bj, and cm.)
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To: Polybius

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.


29 posted on 09/10/2004 11:31:04 PM PDT by DB (©)
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To: Dont Mention the War

To bad the guy didn't sign his name to it so it could be used as a source.


30 posted on 09/10/2004 11:32:29 PM PDT by RatherBiased.com
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To: DB

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.


31 posted on 09/10/2004 11:35:04 PM PDT by RatherBiased.com
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To: T'wit

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)


32 posted on 09/10/2004 11:35:57 PM PDT by Wallaby
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To: flashbunny

Funny!!!!


33 posted on 09/10/2004 11:36:32 PM PDT by dennisw (Allah FUBAR!)
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To: RatherBiased.com

Thanks, my error.


34 posted on 09/10/2004 11:37:03 PM PDT by DB (©)
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To: RatherBiased.com

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.


35 posted on 09/10/2004 11:40:44 PM PDT by Diddle E. Squat ( "History? I love history! So sequential...")
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To: Chad Fairbanks

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.


36 posted on 09/10/2004 11:46:35 PM PDT by rashley (Rashley)
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To: RatherBiased.com
Please join us this evening as we carve up roast anchorman in a live fisking

I'll take my portion without ketchup, please...

37 posted on 09/11/2004 12:01:43 AM PDT by lainde (Heads up...We're coming and we've got tongue blades!!)
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To: rashley

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


38 posted on 09/11/2004 12:28:34 AM PDT by Excuse_Me (Bush has shown that he can fight terrorism. Kerry has only shown that he can fight Vietnam vets.)
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To: T'wit
"...pilots who have rotated...."

You are very observant. Good catch. FReepers are good at what they do.

39 posted on 09/11/2004 2:21:13 AM PDT by Diddley (Hey Kerry: The swiftees are comin' for ya')
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To: Wallaby
>> 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 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."

40 posted on 09/11/2004 6:06:30 AM PDT by T'wit (Believing in socialism is like believing your car will run on water if you just keep trying.)
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