Posted on 09/14/2004 7:57:30 PM PDT by Pikamax
September 15, 2004 Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says By THE NEW YORK TIMES
OUSTON, Sept. 14 - The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed they are fakes.
But she also said they accurately reflect the thoughts of the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, and other memorandums she typed for him about Mr. Bush. "The information in them is correct," the woman, Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home in Texas. "But I doubt,'' she said, pausing, "it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."
"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about," Mrs. Knox said. "I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done." But, she said, words like "billets," which appear in the memorandums, were not standard Guard terms.
Mrs. Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Mr. Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Mr. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private file under lock and key. Asked about her politics, she said she had never voted for Mr. Bush.
Mr. Killian died in 1984; his widow and son have said that they did not find any memorandums among the private effects they cleared from his office after his death. Mr. Killian's son, Gary, who also served at the squadron and who initially thought that the signatures on the documents matched his father's, has come to believe they are fakes, and said he doubted Mrs. Knox's account, though he recalled her fondly.
"She's a sweet old lady, but she's wrong and it didn't happen,'' he said. "I always thought well of her, and I know my dad would have also, but she's a sweet old lady.''
Mrs. Knox's comments add to the mystery around the four memorandums that were reported by CBS News last Wednesday, which indicated that Mr. Bush had been suspended from flying because he failed to meet standards and report for a physical examination, and that Mr. Killian felt pressure to "sugar coat" his rating because the young Lieutenant Bush, then the son of a congressman, was "talking to someone upstairs."
Executives at CBS said Tuesday that they continued to stand by their statements that they believe the documents are authentic, despite the new questions, and concern from others inside the network, and a report on ABC News that
two more experts whom CBS News had consulted to authenticate the documents for its report said they had expressed concerns about the documents' authenticity to the network's producers.
When questions about the documents first arose last week, the anchorman Dan Rather said at least four experts had helped convince the network of their authenticity.
But the network has continually declined to provide the name of more than one of those experts. That one, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he validated only that the signature on the documents was Colonel Killian's. But, he said, he did not vouch for the documents themselves and could not rule out that the signature had been cut and pasted from onto the records from known documents of Mr. Killian.
Tuesday two more experts came forward and said they had been consulted by CBS. One, a forensic document examiner from Texas, Linda James, said in a telephone interview with The New York Times that she noticed indications that the two documents she inspected were the product of a word processor and relayed that to the producers.
"I had questioned the superscript on there," she said, referring to the raised letters that appear after the number 111 to indicate the name of the flight squadron, adding she also had some questions about what she believed were some inconsistencies in the documents' signatures. She said she was awaiting more documents and more type samples to draw a stronger conclusion but with time running out she referred the network to another expert, who officials at CBS identified as Mr. Matley.
Ms. James first made her comments last night on "World News Tonight'' on ABC. The newscast also presented a second document expert, Emily Will, who said she raised still more serious concerns about the authenticity of a document she inspected for CBS's producers.
ABC News quoted Ms. Will as saying she urged the network producers not to rely on the documents as late as the night before the report was set to air and that she had questions "as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter."
The women's accounts seemed to undercut CBS network officials' previous denials that producers had questions about the documents' authenticity just one or two days before the report was shown last Wednesday night.
Betsy West, a senior vice president of CBS News, said Tuesday the network continued to stand by its story and that Ms. Will and Ms. James were "peripheral" to its reporting. And, she said, neither woman offered conclusive opinions.
"Emily Will did not implore us to hold the story, she was not adamant in any way," Ms. West said. "She raised concern about the superscript "th," which we discussed with the other experts."
Ms. West said Ms. James similarly "raised no objections."
Officials at CBS News said on Tuesday that they would at some point in the day provide the name of a document expert who expressed confidence in the records' authenticity before the report was broadcast. But they did not do so, and Ms. West declined to say why.
Officials also did not say why they did not report doubts about the documents' authenticity in their initial report.
CBS has refused to say how it obtained the documents. But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Gov. Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush's military personnel files, had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played.
Mr. Burkett declined to return telephone calls to his home near Abilene, Tex. His lawyer, David Van Os, on Tuesday repeatedly refused to say in a telephone interview whether the officer had played a part in supplying the disputed documents to CBS. Mr. Van Os said "the real story is and should be, where was George Bush?" and that Mr. Burkett "is not the proper object of attention."
Mr. Van Os called Mr. Burkett "a man of impeccable honesty who would not permit himself to be a party to anything fake, fraudulent or phony."
Maureen Balleza reported from Houston for this article, and Kate Zernike from New York. Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting from Washington and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.
> ... she's a partisan - no need to consider any
> further anything she said (so saith the liberals) ...
I hear you. Here's my take on that from another
thread, in response to:
> She is partisan, and she is admitting the documents
> weren't typed by her.
Which means that her pride is stronger than her
partisanship.
Had the forgeries been up to her personal standards
for work product, I wonder if she would have
disclaimed them.
In any case, although we can doubt her gossip, I
see nothing to suggest that she's lying about not
being the author.
______________
The gossip is at odds with statements from other
people there at the time. The lady was spouting
DNC catch-phrases. The point of the interview
was to validate or impeach the memos, and instead
of just saying "fake artifacts but true content",
but she took the opportunity to indulge in some
gratuitous Bush-bashing.
Those needless remarks bashed her own credibility
in my book. And that the AP and NYT excised those
remarks means that they know it.
And I do think that Ms. Knox's real contribution to all this is that she flat out calls the documents fakes!!
The Times deliberately left out her DNC-talking-points-type comments about Bush, in an effort to make her look more credible.
Typist says.
Oh boy!
There probably were a number of politically connected guard members, even some pilots, but probably none were Republicans, much less the son of a Congressman. Sons of Congressmen don't need pull in the military. They are pull. They don't call people "upstairs", people "upstairs" call them. I can see where 43 caused a lot of talk but no sane officer would have expressed anything negative about him, much less put it in writing.
Chair of the RNC, Ambassador to China, Director of the CIA, VP. Improbable that any negative documents would exist in any officer's desk.
OR, she was supposed to come out at a strategic time and vouch for the content of the NG documents after their introduction on CBS. However, they were exposed as fakes very quickly. So now you are seeing a half-assed attempt at salvaging her story. Hence, fake but accurate.
Consider this theory in the context of what was supposed to be a running bombardment of the President going on now that was squelched.
Regards
That's if you believe he did do so. I think he made the whole thing up to bash Bush.
Nah, I think the original DMN article was much better, because it left those comments in. The gist of that story was that even a rabid Bush-basher like that woman admits the docs are fake. Without the comments, it makes her negative comments about Bush's service look more reasonable.
IF she hates Bush and was privy to this info 30 years ago, why has she never before told anyone about it?
Where are the "originals" of which she speaks?
I got mine!
And my guess is that she is the source of the content of the forgeries. And she may have a good idea of who the source of the forgeries is.
I just heard a snippet of one of Rather's recent reports and I heard his voice break. He would be a good candidate for voice stress analysis. It would probably peg the meter.
That's what I meant the source of the allegations that are contained in the forgeries. I doubt that she had anything to do with the actual forgery.
Like Sen Loyd Bentson's son, who was also in the 147th. Both he and Bush are on the same Federal Recognition orders as 2nd Lt's.
Like Sen Loyd Bentson's son, who was also in the 147th. Both he and Bush are on the same Federal Recognition orders as 2nd Lt's.
I think she was combining gossip, in her words "yak-yak", (which they also didn't quote), with the thoughts and feelings of Killian. Of course Killian may very well have written some memo's for the record, documenting his advice to Bush about his upcoming flight medical. We know that he had approved a transfer to an air reserve squadron, which did not require any active duty time each year, a position for which he was not *then* eligible. Later the rules changed at least enough for him to be released early. Instead a "training attachment" in a non flying status, was arranged with an Albama guard unit. The physical would normally have been conducted at about the time all this was in work, and Bush was already physcially in Alabama.
I personally do not approve of what Bush did, but it was legal under the rules. I think he should have just communted back to Texas once or twice a month for drills, and taken that physical. But under the rules then in existence, what he did was allowed. Just as Kerry was allowed to come home after only 4 months, under the rules, if the 3 purple hearts had all been legitimate, whereas we know the first was not. He had gone through channels (ie. his CO) and been refused, so he just waited until the CO and doctor were no longer around and submitted the paperwork to a distant higher command when those folks weren't around to stop him or the paperwork.
I'd say her comments remove some of the mystery. They show that the documents are complete and utter fakes.
The remarks by Ms. James and Ms. Will indicate that CBS had good reason to know or at least suspect that the documents were fake, but they went ahead and presented them without any indication of these doubts by the experts they had consulted. That shows that not only are the documents fakes, CBS willfully colluded with the forger by presenting them as authentic when they had reason to know better.
The Boss's may not discuss such thing with the secretaries, but believe me, the secretries know it all. At least they think they do, and they are usually correct.
I think you are correct in that much. However I doubt that she was involved before the fact. If she had been she'd have made sure the documents were properly formated and did not contain any blatent anachronisms. She might indeed have missed that pre-existing retirement, but she'd not have missed the formating nor the use of Army terms rather than Air Force/Air Guard ones. She'd have gotten the signature block correct as well.
The basic story, false of course, has been floating around since W first ran for governor. It didn't require this old lady's help to come up with the outline of the fakes.
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