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.
This is a replay of the kind old couple who happened to have a radio that picked up cell phones and happened to have a tape recorder when they picked up Newt's conversation.
This kind, old lady is a DNC plant.
The original plan has come unraveled
. I would like to see the production date on the DNC ad using the CBS memos. Perhaps the RNC already knows that and that is why they haven't backed away from today's "linking".
I noticed that.
They need to grill her on her party affiliations and donations just as aggressively as they have grilled the anti-Kerry people like swiftvets!
"Is it really likely that she would remember one man from another given her age?"
Don't paint too broad a brush on the age factor. While camping in July we met and became aquainted with a retired Armstrong Cork engineer and his wife. He was exactly 86 years old, wheeled his class A motorhome around like a pro and was sharp as a tack.
He had worked on the insulation for missiles and space rockets. He grasp of current and past events was fantastic. (the give away was his colorful description of what should be done to Kerry, the presumed dem boy to be at the time)
My guess is that this woman is the source for the original allegations that were made at least three years ago, maybe more.
Of course, more research is needed....
Nice try. They are trying to authenticate the content of the documents even though the documents themselves are not authentic. Could this be any more transparent?
This is just a guess but I am thinking that Dan would have rolled her out by now.
An item here had the lin to Kerry's FBI files. Maybe someone could fwd them to CBS with a note that they really need a lot of sugar coating. CBS can handle that for sure. Funny they've never mentioned his files or his traitorship.
I suspect that Zellenn is defending the lady's age bracket. Could Zellenn be in that age range? Previously, she's commented on her "late husband".
Let's face it, Danny boy got caught with his pants down and it's a Rather unpleasant picture they are all trying to cover up.
I actually voted for the 87 billion....before I voted against it.
I'm sure you did.
Major influx lately with all the publicity.
Now I'll just go grab my special troll-proof bunny slippers.
Well, for what it is worth ($0.01), here is my theory:
Who knew about these memos? Only Killian and his secretary, Marian Carr Knox. She claims she has accurate memory of what they contained, contacts someone in the Democrat Party, and then she and a young Democrat operative set out to "reconstruct" the memos. She remembers enough to get a lot of things right, but slips on some details, like the fact of Staudt's retirement 18 months before he was "exerting pressure". The young operative is too young to realize, and Knox is too old to realize, that typing these documents on Microsoft Word is going to be a dead give-away. Then the young operative starts shopping the story around, complete with "documents". Dan Rather thinks he hits paydirt because he believes he got the documents from Killian's secretary, the only person besides Killian who could know about them. That's why he stuck with the story. What I don't know is whether Rather knew the documents were "reconstructed" and went ahead anyway, or just held on to belief in their authenticity because he wanted the story to be true.
As far as the "sweet little old lady" theory goes, I know some 86 year old ladies who are sweet as honey and others who are nasty as vipers. I think we have a viper here, who is mixing fact and hangar gossip and dislike of Bush and an 86 year old's memory from 30 years ago to come up with recollections of memos that are part fact and part fiction.
No, you see, they are BASED on real documents...lol.
If they were accurate there would have been no need to forge the fakes! DUH! Do they really think people are this dumb? Oh, I forgot, she's a die-on-the-vine Kerry supporter ROFLMAO
Yes, I agree on the age thing, though I think it's the exception not the rule to meet someone as you describe.
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