Posted on 09/13/2004 8:31:00 PM PDT by ambrose
September 14, 2004THE MILITARY RECORDCBS Offers New Experts to Support Guard MemosBy JIM RUTENBERG and KATE ZERNIKEhen the CBS News anchor Dan Rather defended himself on camera and in interviews last Friday against questions being raised about documents he had used to bolster a report on President Bush's National Guard service, he and network executives considered the case closed. Mr. Rather himself said emphatically: "CBS News stands by, and I stand by, the thoroughness and accuracy of this report, period. Our story is true." Yet there he was again, on "The CBS Evening News" last night, presenting even more experts to attest to the authenticity of several documents purportedly dating back to the early 1970's suggesting that Mr. Bush received favorable treatment in the Guard. While Mr. Rather's initial "60 Minutes" report was considered a journalistic coup, coming in the peak of an election year and in the twilight of Mr. Rather's career, the network has found itself under unrelenting pressure from within and without to prove that the documents were genuine amid charges that they could only have been produced by modern-day word processors. The controversy over the documents has been propelled by a volatile mix of fierce election-year rancor, daily disclosures pointing to potential weaknesses in CBS's report and the network's steadfast refusal to explain how it got the documents. Even inside CBS News there was deepening concern. Some of Mr. Rather's colleagues said in interviews that they were becoming increasingly anxious for him to silence the critics by proving the documents' validity and as new questions about their origin arose. Most declined to be quoted by name. CBS said the documents came from the personal files of one of Mr. Bush's Guard commanders, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. The memos indicated that Mr. Bush had failed to take a physical against orders and that Colonel Killian was being pressured to "sugarcoat" his performance rating because Mr. Bush, whose father was then a Texas congressman, was "talking to somebody upstairs." USA Today, which had presented the documents as legitimate on Thursday, featured an article yesterday with some experts surmising they were forgeries. "We're just busy now trying to determine the authenticity, or not," said the newspaper's executive editor, John Hillkirk. One of the experts CBS News said initially helped convince it that the documents were genuine, a handwriting expert named Marcel B. Matley, said in an interview yesterday that he believed the signature in the documents to be that of Colonel Killian. Asked if the signature could have been lifted from an official document by Colonel Killian and pasted onto forgeries, Mr. Matley said: "Sure. But we can't draw a conclusion from a possibility." Several CBS correspondents said in interviews that such developments were making them increasingly nervous. One network correspondent said, "I've talked to colleagues who would love to see more of a defense." This person described the state of the staff as "deep concern, I'd say not panic - we all want it to be right." This person, echoing others, said that Mr. Rather's resoluteness in addressing the charges on the air was allaying some of the concern. "Dan really put himself on the line and I can't imagine him knowingly defending something he knew not to be the case." A longtime correspondent said flatly, "I'm distressed." Mike Wallace, the longtime "60 Minutes" correspondent, said after hearing about new challenges to the validity of the documents on Sunday, "I'm confused by some of what I've heard today." But of his colleagues working on the report, he said: "You're dealing with genuine professionals. The last thing in the world that any of these people would want is to phony something." Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president, said in an interview on Sunday that he was not concerned about the validity of the documents or the report CBS News presented. "I'm firmly convinced that the memos are authentic and the stories are accurate," he said. Addressing staff concerns, Mr. Heyward said, "The story was thoroughly vetted as all pieces of '60 Minutes' are, and the more they know about the process, the more reassured they will be that we used every appropriate journalistic standard and safeguard in reporting the story." A spokeswoman said yesterday he had not changed his position. Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said the burden was on CBS to prove its report was accurate beyond standard lines like "We stand by our story." "I think they should be able to provide credible information about how these memos came into their possession," Mr. Jones said. "And if they cannot provide the name of the source, then they need to make as much transparency as possible." But CBS News officials have made it clear that they will go only so far. They have repeatedly said they do not believe their source for the documents would go public. One important question raised inside and outside CBS is whether it knows where the documents, which it admits are not originals but copies, came from in the first place and how many hands they passed through. Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents." She would not elaborate. Last night, CBS did not present any of the other experts who originally helped it authenticate the documents, beyond mentioning Mr. Matley, who was interviewed on the Friday broadcast. Instead it featured computer and typewriter specialists who had called or posted defenses of CBS on Internet blogs. Richard Katz, a computer software expert in Los Angeles who was featured on the "Evening News" segment, said in an interview that he had called his local affiliate, KCBS, after looking at the memos on the CBS Web site after the initial broadcast, when some experts were saying that the memos looked as if they had been composed using the Times New Roman font in Microsoft Word. Comparing the CBS memos with a replication produced on Microsoft Word, he noticed a slight variation in the boldness of the letters, as there is on many typewritten documents. "It doesn't look like you can do this very easily," he said. "If you use something like Photoshop you could come close to faking it, but why not just go out and buy a Selectric for $75?" Bill Glennon, a technology consultant and I.B.M. typewriter specialist who had posted his thoughts on the memos on a blog and was quoted over the weekend in publications including The New York Times, said CBS called him Monday morning. The producer asked him to come in and look at the memorandums and say whether he thought that an I.B.M. typewriter could have produced the documents. He said he was initially leery of talking. "Because quite honestly there's some people out there, they're scary," he said. "You don't agree with them, you offer opinions that don't jibe with theirs and you get a target on your back." Mr. Glennon was in charge of service for 1,000 contracts for I.B.M. typewriters for 15 years, starting in late 1972, around the time the memorandums were produced. He spent 15 minutes with the CBS documents, he said, and believes that they could have been created using the kind of typewriters he worked with at I.B.M.
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Wow....These folks need to put on their jammies because EVEN I can see it....or maybe it's just my magic slippers ;-)
Comparing the CBS memos with a replication produced on Microsoft Word, he noticed a slight variation in the boldness of the letters, as there is on many typewritten documents. "It doesn't look like you can do this very easily," he said. "If you use something like Photoshop you could come close to faking it, but why not just go out and buy a Selectric for $75?"
LOL, poor Nixon, headless and now Dan is wearing his body!!
Yeh it's called Arkanicide.
Notice that they don't say what kind of technology he's a consultant for.
Comparing the CBS memos with a replication produced on Microsoft Word, he noticed a slight variation in the boldness of the letters, as there is on many typewritten documents. "It doesn't look like you can do this very easily,"
Sure you can, just copy the thing about 20 times, and FAX it. We know it was faxed, and that alone can account for a lot of the variation in boldness. Only if the same letters consistently have the same boldness variation relative to other letters would one suspect a typewriter made them. I just checked one of the "memos", the one dates Aug 1, '72. I compared the lowercase "r" which appears in a couple of spots to be lighter than the surrounding letters. However looking at other instances of the "r", it is as dark or darker than the other letters, IOW it doesn't look the same everywhere on the page, even when it's in the same part of the word. So five minutes with one memo puts that theory to rest.
Mr. Glennon was in charge of service for 1,000 contracts for I.B.M. typewriters for 15 years, starting in late 1972, around the time the memorandums were produced. He spent 15 minutes with the CBS documents, he said, and believes that they could have been created using the kind of typewriters he worked with at I.B.M.
WOW! Looks like they are going for intimidating the experts...
"One important question raised inside and outside CBS is whether it knows where the documents, which it admits are not originals but copies"
ALL CBS EVER HAD WERE COPIES!!!!!!!!!
You can't authenticate copies, when it's so easy with today's copying technology to photocopy a signature and paste it onto anything.
What part of Stault retired One Year before the date of the memo DO THESE PEOPLE NOT UNDERSTAND??
Zing.....
. . it continues to be more interesting to me what they *CBiaS* have not said about all this.
these folks (sic heyward) are comming off oddly semi-detached from the controversy and appear to be operating in limp wristed coverup mode
"I examined these documents and they are authentic. And there are no American soldiers in Iraq."
Hmmmmm. They'll have a few more experts, named 'This Straw' and 'That Straw' respectively.
Richard Katz, go out and buy yourself a $75 selectric and collect your $30k+. You won't because you can't and you know it. Liar.
Somewhere Nixon is laughing his ass off and cussing up a blue streak.
"So has ANYONE tried recreated the memo using a Selectric yet?!?!"
No takers for reward as of this time I am aware of:
"http://defeatjohnjohn.com/pageone.htm
The $37,900 Question
In the past few days, more than 50,000 unique visitors have stumbled upon this website, due to the national attention surrounding the infamous Killian memos. Most of these visitors came after my initial offering of a $10,000 cashiers check to the first person who could exactly (and reasonably) reproduce the memos on technology available in 1972. While there has been some good debate as to the nature of what constitutes "reasonable", the general consensus seems to be this: the only "typewriter" which could create documents that look like the Killian memos is the IBM Selectric Composer typesetting machine, and that machine has been deemed inadequate to have created the memos by the nation's leading authorities on the Selectric line. At this time, after careful analysis of all available evidence, the belief that the CBS memos were created in 1972 cannot be rationally supported with any degree of intellectual honesty.
Amazingly, my email was flooded with not only people trying to claim the prize, but individuals who so strongly shared my belief that the documents were forgeries that they too, pledged significant amounts of money to the challenge. As of now, including my initial $10,000, the amount pledged stands at $37,900.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1214299/posts
The $37,900 Question - CBiaS reward on the rise
Defeat JohnJohn ^ | 12 Sep 2004 | John K, Addis"
He (Glennon) spent 15 minutes with the CBS documents, he said, and believes that they could have been created using the kind of typewriters he worked with at I.B.M.
So CBS has one expert who's saying that you can't a conclusion from a possibility and another expert who's saying you should draw a conclusion from a possibility.
Rather's head must be spinning like Linda Blair's.
I think they mean a "coup-de-grace"
...Don't you have three children named Evelyn, Patti, and Andy, Mr. Heyward?!
Total for this search: $83,000
Contributor |
Occupation |
Date |
Amount |
Recipient |
HEYWARD, ANDREW |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT |
10/12/2000 |
$1,000 |
Clinton, Hillary Rodham |
HEYWARD, ANDY |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT/CEO |
5/6/2004 |
$2,000 |
Emanuel, Rahm |
HEYWARD, ANDY |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT/PRESIDENT |
5/14/2001 |
$1,000 |
Berman, Howard L |
HEYWARD, ANDY |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT |
3/31/2002 |
$1,000 |
Strickland, Tom |
HEYWARD, ANDY |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT |
9/19/2000 |
$20,000 |
DNC Services Corp |
HEYWARD, ANDY |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT |
3/31/2002 |
$1,000 |
Strickland, Tom |
HEYWARD, ANDY |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT |
9/19/2000 |
$5,000 |
DNC/Non-Federal Individual |
HEYWARD, ANDY MR |
DIC ENTERTAINMENT/CEO |
3/27/2003 |
$10,000 |
Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
6/23/2003 |
$2,000 |
Lantos, Tom |
|
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
N/A/HOMEMAKER |
3/31/2004 |
$5,000 |
Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
EVELYN HEYWARD/TV PRODUCER |
5/14/2001 |
$1,000 |
Berman, Howard L |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER |
3/31/2002 |
$1,000 |
Strickland, Tom |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
TV PRODUCER |
11/18/1999 |
$1,000 |
Berman, Howard L |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
6/23/2003 |
$2,000 |
Lantos, Tom |
|
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
EVELYN HEYWARD/TV PRODUCER |
2/11/2004 |
$2,000 |
Berman, Howard L |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER |
3/31/2002 |
$1,000 |
Strickland, Tom |
HEYWARD, EVELYN |
TV PRODUCER |
9/30/2000 |
$1,000 |
Clinton, Hillary Rodham |
HEYWARD, EVELYN MS |
HOMEMAKER |
5/26/2004 |
$25,000 |
DNC Services Corp |
HEYWARD, PATTI |
10/11/2000 |
$1,000 |
Clinton, Hillary Rodham |
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.....Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents." She would not elaborate.....
"chain of custody" ... hmmmmmmmmmm ... how many links are in the chain?????????? Why won't CBS elaborte???
Kerry campaign??? Dan's daughter?? What could be so damaging as CBS trying to stonewall??
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