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Reprinted from NewsMax.com Saturday, Sept. 18, 2004 9:10 p.m. EDTForged Doc 'Source': I Contacted Kerry Campaign AUSTIN - A retired Texas National Guard official mentioned as a possible source for disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Guard said he passed along information to a former senator working with John Kerry's campaign. Also Saturday, a White House official said Bush has reviewed disputed documents that purport to show he refused orders to take a physical examination in 1972 and did not recall having seen them previously. The long-running story on Bush's Texas Air National Guard service took an unusual...

I have made a discovery this evening related to the 04 May 1972 memo that deserves scrutiny, not previously discussed (as far as I've seen). Having been a professional office machine diagnostic specialist (ok, copier tech, for you dittoheads that will inevitably deluge my mailbox with hate mail) for the last 15 years, an expert in diagnosis, and being well experienced in the capabilities of copies vs. originals, I build my argument as follows: 1. Multiple generation photocopies 'will' result in distortion of the text, both in resolution, and in size, making an overlay impossible to match without significant 'fussing'....

Teddy Bart on his daily radio show, "Teddy Bart's Roundtable" may have given us a clue about who knew about the documents nearly a month ago. It appears that Bob Tuke, who was a guest on the show on August 11th knew that something was about to happen with regard to President Bush's alleged failure to show up for a physical examination. Teddy referenced the episode on September 9th when he said, "listeners to the Roundtable will note that something was going to come because Bob Tuke, who is a Nashville attorney and significant in the Kerry campaign in Tennessee,...

Senate Discussing Nat'l Guard Memos C-SPAN2 Now!

WASHINGTON — A key source who was named to back up CBS News' claims about the authenticity of documents used in a report on President Bush's (search) Air National Guard service has recanted his support, saying the network got the information wrong. Retired Major Gen. Bobby Hodges (search), a key source behind a "60 Minutes" story that claims Bush shirked his guard duty, said that now that he has seen the memos, he does not believe they are authentic. Hodges told FOX News that CBS did not call him until two days before the piece aired on the network last...

Regardless of who wins the election, the campaign of 2004 has already made history. For the first time, a cable news channel -- Fox -- attracted more viewers than a broadcast network when they were competing head to head, covering the Republican National Convention. Was this a watershed for a new partisan journalism in America? I think the real meaning is something else. What happened this summer, and particularly last week, is likely to be recalled as the end of the era of network news. At the very least, mark this as the moment when the networks abdicated their authority...

Note: Newsweek is reporting that the source for the CBS allegations against Bush is Bob Burkett, someone with a grudge against the National Guard and Bush. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5974040/site/newsweek/ Six months ago, the Boston Globe reported major "issues" with another Burkett story that was posted on FR at the link noted. Link to original boston.com (Globe) article is here: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/02/13/doubts_raised_on_bush_accuser?mode=PF First few paras: ++++++++ 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...

A former National Guard commander who CBS News said had helped convince it of the authenticity of documents raising new questions about President Bush's military service said Saturday that he did not believe they were genuine. The commander, Bobby Hodges, said in a telephone interview that network producers had never shown him the documents but had only read them to him over the phone days before they were featured Wednesday in a 60 Minutes broadcast. After seeing the documents Friday, Hodges said, he concluded that they were falsified. Hodges, a former general who spoke to several news organizations this weekend,...

<p>For a couple of days now we've been talking about whether the CBS memos could have been produced using the technology available in 1972 and 1973. We've talked about two typewriters mainly, both widely used at that time: the IBM Executive series and the IBM Selectric series.</p>

According to Powerline Blog, this was reported on FOX News: KELLY WRIGHT: Tony, here's the latest that we're finding out on this story. At least three Pentagon sources believe the documents about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard are fakes. CBS as you mentioned is standing by its story...

Frank Jones says he's angry about newly revealed memos that indicate President Bush got preferential treatment in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam war, but he's not surprised by favoritism in the Guard. Jones, a Republican from Troy, N.Y., served in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971 before doing 16 years in the Guard himself. As the presidential election nears, Jones says controversy over both candidates' military records and the mounting death toll in Iraq are important issues. "I'm really in neither camp at this point," he said. "However, I do see a direct correlation to Vietnam. The body count...

Talked back and forth with a typewriter collector named Chuck who lives in Redlands, CA. He happened to have a working IBM Selectric Composer Typewriter circa 1972! Here is the scoop I got from him.... IBM had a Roman font element, he said it was called "Aldine Roman." The element I guess is what we been calling a golf ball on here! He said it is very similar to MS New Roman, in fact ALMOST identical. BUT, he said the IBM element Roman font had a observable difference in the capital C. He says he does not see a IBM...

Whenever the topic has turned to the Selectric Composer, it has been dismissed out-of-hand as being far too expensive an item to find in an office on an Air National Guard base: The machine sold for anywhere from $3,600 to $4,400, and fonts were extra and not cheap. Furthermore, the Composer was widely agreed to be far too complicated and slow a machine to use for typing up memoranda, especially ones that were destined to go into a file and not even be distributed. But the nagging question remained: Could an IBM Selectric Composer have been used to produce these...

Someone else mentioned a website that is dedicated tot the IBM Selectric Composer. The link above will take you to that website. Besides being around four times more expensive to purchase than a regular IBM Selectric the website had a bit of information about the IBM Selectric Composer that hasn't been mentioned in anything I've seen so far. It seems you have to type everything twice perfectly when you use the Composer. Here is that section from the ibmcomposer.org website: click here "The first IBM Composer was the IBM "Selectric" Composer announced in 1966. It was a hybrid "Selectric" typewriter...

When I first heard back from Gerry, I felt a little bad for having bothered him. He'd been fielding calls and letters all day, he told me, including an inquiry from CNN. But he was a trouper, willing — enthusiastic even — to help out. I asked Gerry, in a fit of hubris, if he wouldn't mind trying to reproduce a sample from one of the CBS memos on his Selectric Composer. Just over an hour later, he emailed me back a sample, typed up on his Composer using the 11-point Press Roman type ball and scanned into his computer....

As a retired Air Force officer, I humbly suggest that the Killian family release the following statement to the press: Based on overwhelming forensic evidence, significant internal discrepancies, and our intimate knowledge of the husband and father we knew as Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, we hereby declare the documents presented on CBS 60 minutes II to be forgeries. Moreover, any documents of this nature that may exist are not official Air National Guard records, but are the personal records of LtCol Killian and rightfully belong with his family. We did not and would never authorize any documents of this nature...

"In another challenge to CBS, Killian's boss, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, told ABC News that he regards the documents as a computer "fraud," never saw them in the 1970s and didn't validate them for CBS. A senior CBS official had claimed to the Washington Post that Hodges had validated the documents. During his national news broadcast, Rather claimed "partisan political operatives" are challenging the memos but omitted the fact that Killian's widow and son dispute them...” The NewYorkPost has a news story that reveals CBS anchor Dan Rather may have caught in their own fraudulent claims. At issue:...

few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.'' Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into...

snipped... Saturday, Sept. 11, 2004 10:04 a.m. EDT ' Ms. Mapes explained that "60 Minutes" had already conducted the interview, but was unlikely to include Roome's account in their report, telling Killian Jr.: "We think he is pretty pro-Bush..." snipped

The tide has turned, and the people now have the power over the propagandists: Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos...