Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says

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."

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.

Doubts raised on Bush accuser
Key witness disputes charge by Guard retiree that files were purged
By Michael Rezendes, [Boston] Globe Staff, 2/13/2004
For at least six years, a retired Texas National Guard officer has maintained that President Bush's record as a member of the Guard was purged of potentially embarrassing material at the behest of high-ranking Bush aides laying the groundwork for Bush's 2000 run for the presidency.
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, who has been pressing his charges in the national news media this week, says he even heard one high-ranking officer issue a 1997 order to sanitize the Bush file, and later saw another officer poring over the records and discovered that some had been discarded.
But a key witness to some of the events described by Burkett has told the Globe that the central elements of his story are false.
George O. Conn, a former chief warrant officer with the Guard and a friend of Burkett's, is the person whom Burkett says led [Burkett] to the room where the Bush records were being vetted. But Conn says he never saw anyone combing through the Bush file or discarding records.
"I have no recall of that," Conn said. "I have no recall of that whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada."
Conn's recollection also undercuts another of Burkett's central allegations: that he overheard Bush's onetime chief of staff, Joe M. Allbaugh, telling a Texas Guard general to make sure there were no embarrassments in the Bush record.
Burkett says he told Conn, over dinner that same night, what he had overheard. But Conn says that, although Burkett told him he worried that the Bush record would be sanitized, he never mentioned overhearing the conversation between Allbaugh and General Daniel James III.
...
Earlier this week, Burkett told the Globe that, in the telephone conversation between Allbaugh and James, Allbaugh said the Bush file had to be sanitized because two of Bush's aides were planning to review the records in preparation for Bush's 1999 autobiography, "A Charge to Keep." Burkett said that he overheard the conversation, conducted over James's speaker phone, while standing outside the open door of James's office, and that he was so troubled he told Conn about it that evening.
But Conn, now a civilian government employee working with the US Army in Germany, said Burkett never told him of the conversation. And Allbaugh, a Washington consultant and lobbyist, said, "I would never be so stupid as do something like that."
Allbaugh said he discussed Bush's file with Guard officials but only because Bush wanted to review it, and had never seen it.
Burkett, in his Globe interview and in Moore's book, titled "Bush's War for Re-election," said that a week to 10 days after he overheard the conversation between Allbaugh and James, Conn brought him to an office at the Camp Mabry military history museum, where Conn introduced Burkett to Scribner. Burkett says that at the moment they met Scribner, the officer was busy scrubbing the Bush file.
According to Burke, Conn asked Scribner what he was doing and Scribner replied that he was looking through Bush's records. Burkett said Conn and Scribner then briefly left him alone, and that he saw some pages of Bush's military records in a trash can near Scribner's desk.
Conn contradicts most of Burkett's rendition. He said that he remembers introducing Burkett to Scribner at the museum but that Scribner never said he was going over the Bush file. "If he had said he was going through George W. Bush's records I would have dropped my teeth. Wow," Conn said. "I would definitely have remembered that. I don't recall that at all."
Burkett also says that, before the encounter with Scribner, he was standing with a group of Guard officers, and heard a ranking officer order Scribner to review the Bush file and remove any documents that might be embarrassing to the then-governor.
But Scribner told the Globe yesterday that no such thing occurred. "It didn't happen. I wasn't even there," Scribner said.
...

Then today's (Sept. 14, 2004) story about Marion Carr Knox, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian's secretary:

Former secretary says she didn't type memos [excerpt]:
The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones,” she said.
She said that the culture of the time was that men didn’t type office-related documents, and she expressed doubt that Lt. Col. Killian would have typed the memos. She said she would typically type his memos from his handwritten notes, which she would then destroy.
Mrs. Knox, who left the Guard before Lt. Col. Killian died, said she was not sure of the disposition of his personal files when he died while still serving at Ellington. But, she said, it would have been logical that a master sergeant who worked in the squadron headquarters would have destroyed any such nonofficial documents after Lt. Col. Killian’s death.
That man, reached Tuesday, declined to comment. “I don’t know anything about the matter,” he said.
She also said the memos may have been constructed from memory by someone who had seen Lt. Col. Killian’s private file but were not transcriptions because the language and terminology did not match what he would have used.
For instance, she said, the use of the words “billets” and a reference to the “administrative officer” of Mr. Bush’s squadron reflect Army terminology rather than the Air National Guard. Some news reports attribute the CBS reports to a former Army National Guard officer who has a longstanding dispute with the Guard and has previously maintained that the president’s record was sanitized.
Mrs. Knox also cited stylistic differences in the form of the notes, such as the signature on the right side of the document, rather than the left, where she would have put it.

"That man, reached Tuesday ..." is presumably Warrant Officer Conn, from the earlier story, in which he said, "I have no recall of that whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada."

"Army terminology rather than the Air National Guard" presumably indicates Lt. Col. Burkett, who was not in the Air National Guard, but in the Army National Guard. So, while Ms. Carr is not quite a Bush fan, she accurately describes enough of the fine points, to make Burkett the prime holder of the original documents.

The Army should investigate Lt. Col. Burkett who probably committed a felony by swiping the files that he found in the trash, in that room. It is a very serious offense, for which he should be activated under the jurisdiction of the current Texas Army National Guard.

CBS is an accessory, and the Kerry Campaign.

Documents and memos typed at that time, included carbon copies on a kind of almost-tissue paper. Wadded up, these tissue copies took up little space, unlike 15lb and 20lb copier stuff that most folks use these days.

Sometimes, people typed memos on the tissue-like paper, saving "the office stock" for the official record. It was a time when officers still kept diaries and closely held portfolios of their in-server struggles and trails and successes; which documents several once understood, were their personal diary and not for public consumption.

That's another reason why the penalties for taking items from the trash, can be quite severe, other than for obvious security reasons.

CBS cannot give him up, because he'll sue them for violating his confidence; and they'll lose their "informed source" trust bank.

He won't give CBS up, because they are what stand between him and a courts martial.

(take care)

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