Updated 11/17/08
Update Notes
"Disclaimer" Contact
Remember those memos that were used by
CBS, but which the
diligent blogosphere uncovered as fakes/forgeries? Yeah,
well....
"I
was not prepared to shoot my
eardrum out with a shotgun in order to
get
a deferment. Nor was I
willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better
myself
by learning how to
fly airplanes" -George
Bush
(1990 - Dallas Morning News)
Introduction
Questions about George W. Bush's Service in the Texas Air
National Guard:
George
Bush's military service in the
Texas Air
National Guard ("TexANG") h
as been an
object of criticism
and
suspicion since his days as governor of Texas. While there was some
media
investigation into it during the 2000
election campaign,
most notably by the Boston
Globe, it became much more of
an issue during the 2004 election campaign when John
Kerry's Vietnam service and post-Vietnam antiwar
activities came under attack by Republicans and right wingers, starting
roughly in April of that year with "questions" about when Kerry tossed
some of his medals during some long ago antiwar protests. This
escalated
into attacks from both sides about which candidate was more honorable
during the days of Vietnam. From any neutral viewpoint, it would appear
Kerry by a huge
factor had
the better resume
in war and out, including being an active public figure in the news, on
talk
shows, and even
appearing in Doonesbury.
Consequently, the attacks on Kerry's record were far more
relentless, petty, and deceptive, reaching a crescendo of sorts with a
series of ads by "The Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth," a
group of Vietnam veterans having little or no connection to
Kerry during the war (or apparently
to truth in general), but having a whole lot of
connections to the Republican party. The group is headed
by an old Vietnam-era nemesis of Kerry named John O'Neill,
whom President
Nixon once used to "get" John Kerry. The basic truth is that Kerry
did his job in Vietnam and was fully deserving
of his medals.

While there was a surge of media
investigation of Bush's Guard service towards the beginning
of the year, the spring offensive against Kerry drew attention away for
a while, but the media
investigations, most notably by the Associated
Press, resumed later on, centering on the irregular
and drawn
out release of Bush's service records.
The CBS 60 Minutes II Broadcast:
On
the evening of September 8, 2004, the day after
a
release of more of Bush's records forced by an
AP lawsuit,
CBS belatedly entered the fray with a
60
Minutes II segment on the topic. The segment, hosted by
Dan
Rather, featured an interview with former Texas House Speaker &
ex-Lt. Gov.
Ben Barnes, who
supposedly helped Bush get into the Guard to avoid
risky Vietnam duty, as
well
as what Rather described as
"a number of documents
we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file" where
"Killian" is the late Lt. Colonel Jerry B. Killian, Bush's commander at
Ellington
Air Force Base, where Bush was stationed as an
F-102 jet pilot
back in the early 70's.
A copy of the 60 Minutes segment in .MOV format (Apple Quicktime and
also playable with
VLC) can
be found
here: "
9-08-04-benbarnes-1of2.mov"
is the segment before the commercial break, and "
9-08-04-benbarnes-2of2.mov"
is the rest of it following the break. (People forget that it was only
a standard 12 1/2 minute segment and actually featured the interview
with Ben Barnes.) The memos get brought up towards the end of Part 1.
Flash versions
of the two parts can be found here
and here.
These
documents were primarily of a type called a "memorandum for record" --
an unofficial
memo that notes conversations, actions, and decisions, and which is
then filed away for later reference. The
Air
Force, which holds authority over the
Air National Guard, recommends that
commanders use them as sort
of a journal. Fuller descriptions with examples can be found
here,
in
excerpts
from one of the
Air
Force Powerpoint Writing Guides floating about on the Internet, and
in the long time Air Force writing & communication guide,
The Tongue
and Quill (aka
AFH
33-337).
Screen capture from one of the AF
writing guides.
Proportional
Printing and the Right Wing Blog Sites:
These memos were also proportionally printed, and it was this that very
quickly caused a stir in the right wing blogosphere that spread to the
mainstream media within days: it was claimed that this type of printing
was very rare then and only with very expensive typesetting equipment
-- therefore the memos had to have been forged. This post by "
Buckhead" (aka
Harry
Macdougald) in the
Free
Republic is generally acknowledged as the post that started
Rathergate:
The basic problem
with this is that all of
the tech "info"
here is
wrong, wrong,
wrong. Actually everything
you
read, saw, heard, from
whatever source
regarding the "forged" memos is probably just as messed up.

Proportional printing typewriters, especially the IBM Executive for
example, were actually pretty common prior to
the IBM Selectric becoming the office standard (supposedly because of
its reliability and easily interchangeble fonts).
The above is from the 1993 forensic book,
Scientific Examination of Questioned
Documents: Revised Edition
by the late
Ordway
Hilton
1) The forger
did not have
access to all of the information needed to
forge the memos
This is a short memo that CBS never used in its report:
While very short, it has two
important elements -- a reference to
James
Bath,
and a concern about flight qualifications/certification for both Bath
and Bush. In addition to the curious fact that Bath also got verbally
suspended from flying by Killian exactly one month after Bush was, and
for the exact same listed reason, "
Failure to accomplish annual
medical examination," Bath's name
was
redacted
from the DoD record released in 2004, but not in the same record
obtained in 2000 via FOIA by
Marty
Heldt. The real forgery killer,
though, lies with this memo showing Killian being concerned about
flight
certifications. An examination of Bush's flight records kept
here
by the DoD indeed shows a distinct and very anomalous sharp rise in
"training" flights in a
T-33, which is an old 2-seat jet used
for training pilots prior to them moving on to active military jets
like, in Bush's case, the
F102A
(See also
this):

Now if you tediously input the dates, hours and the other
pertinent info into a spreadsheet:

And then get rid of two impossible
entries, do some summing by month, note whether these
were done in F102A's, T-33
trainers, or on a simulator, and
then
create a chart, and colorize it a
wee bit, you should end up with
something that looks like this:

Normal
F102A flights
Simulator T-33 trainer
Note
the erratic activity beginning about mid-January with the break
in simulator runs, and the rash of
T-33
trainer flights beginning in February and escalating in March
, when Bush's time in the
T-33 exactly
equalled his time in the
F102A:
8.6hrs. All this odd activity
shows
that there was indeed something up
with Bush's flying status, as strongly implied by that Feb. 2, 1972
memo.
Despite the flight records
being hard to read, messy and unsorted, the
supposed forger in theory still picked up on the sharp rise of
T-33 flights
and was confident enough (yet again) to not only conclude that Bush had
flight
certification issues, but was sure enough of this to forge that short,
one line memo
stating that as a concern of Killian. If that wasn't enough, the forger
somehow also figured out that James Bath had the same issue, even
though
Bath's flight records don't appear to be publicly available anywhere.
So are we dealing with a brilliant and cocky forger here? No.
Despite Bush and his people promising
and
claiming
to release all of his military records at the beginning of the year
(2004), the record release was actually apparently stonewalled and
dragged
out for the most of the year as shown by
this,
this,
this,
and
this.
The flight records in particular
were
not released until Sept 7, 2004:
The flight records were not
released by the Pentagon until Sept. 7th, 2004
CBS
had
already obtained all the memos
from Bill Burkett on Sept. 2 and Sept. 5! Meaning that the
flight records, having been released on Sept. 7, were not available for
any would-be
forger, however improbably brilliant and resourceful, to have
deduced Bush's flight certification
issue. Since the Feb. 2nd, 1972 memo has the same print characteristics
as all the other
memos, then, well: the memos were not
forged and could not have been
forged
under any circumstances!
2) The
forger
would had to have been not only improbably brilliant, but smarter
than the entire blogosphere, as well as the mainstream media
Some pro-forgery folks have tried to explain away the content
match-up by
claiming that
the forger constructed the memos from the DoD records.
Aside from begging the question, "If the forger was this careful, why
didn't he or she also just use one of the many, many typewriters still
in use?" Some of the DoD support is just so fine, subtle and unobvious,
that it's very, VERY improbable for
any forger to have been so brilliant yet so foolishly cocky to
bother with such minutia. For instance, look at the infamous CYA memo:
Was the report backdated? Apparently
so, but it's not exactly obvious.
For starters, see
if there's something along the lines of "One of these is not
like the others" when you look at all the ratings reports, their dates,
and
when they were signed off (and if also endorsed):
Rating
period ending April 30, 1971: Harris May 26, 1971; Killian May
27, 1971; Hodges (additional endorsement) May 27, 1972
Rating
period ending April 30, 1972: Harris May 26, 1972; Killian May
26, 1972; Hodges (additional endorsement) May 26, 1972
Rating
period
ending April 30, 1973: Harris May 2, 1973; Killian May 2,
1973; No Hodges
That May 26th date for the evaluation in the other rating reports is
not arbitrary --
it's based on Bush's enlistment date of May 27, 1968, making his report
period for service and training points May 27 - May 26. If you rummage
through his DoD records,
you will see the May 26 date appear over and over again in regards to
all of Bush's reports, hence making the May 2nd date for the "Not
Observed" rating report very, very much out of place and odd -- unless
it was indeed backdated as the "forged" CYA memo said it was. In
theory, a brilliant and military savvy forger could have figured this
out, but...why include such an really unobvious reference that
very, very few would even notice?
Another very unobvious reference is in the other Killian memo
that CBS didn't use in its report, the one
dated June 24,
1973. The pertinent excerpt is:
This has two subtle points backed up
by the DoD
records: while Bush "cleared" Ellington on May 15, 1972 (as mentioned
in the "Not
Observed" rating report),
he stopped flying in April of 1972 according his flight
records; and while Bush, after a year long record of very spotty
attendence, put in a lot of time in starting in May of 1973, it was
indeed after the rating period, which ended on April 30. See the following pay credits, with
dates (Note how "31" is
sometimes listed for September, April, June, November, and February,
which is obviously incorrect and apparently some recordkeeping
artifact. These are marked with an "*".)
:
Apr
1972 ARF:
AFPRC: 4,6,10-12,15-16; Payroll 4,6,10-12,15-16,31*
May 1972 ARF:
AFPRC: 26 (15 Gratuitous Pts added for 5/27/72-5/26/73) Payroll: No pay
Jun 1972 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Jul 1972 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Aug 1972 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Sep 1972 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Oct 1972 ARF:
28-29; AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Nov 1972 ARF:
11-14; AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Dec 1972 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Jan 1973 ARF:
4-6,8-10; AFPRC: Payroll: 4-6,8-10
Feb 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll 31*
Mar 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Apr 1973 ARF:
7-8; AFPRC: Payroll: 7-8,31*
May 1973 ARF:
1-3,8-10,19-20,22-24,29-31; AFPRC: 26 (41 points + 15 gratuitous
added); Payroll: 1-3,8-10,19-20,22-24,29-31
Jun 1973 ARF:
5-7,23-24; AFPRC: Payroll: 5-7,23-24,31*
Jul 1973 ARF:
2-3,5,9-12,21-22,23-27,30; AFPRC: Payroll: 2-3,5,9-12,16-19,21-27,30
Aug 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Sep 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: 31*
Oct 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Nov 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: 31*
Dec 1973 ARF:
AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Note:
ARF = "ARF Statement of Points
Earned," AFPRC =
The "USAF Reserve Personnel Record Card"
that's filled in by hand ; and "Payroll = the Payroll
Records
This info comes primarily from Part
2 and Part
4 of the Personnel Records and the Payroll
Records. This supports the flight
records, which all by their lonesome show numerous discrepencies as
well
as the widely
reported falloff of Bush's service starting in the spring of 1972. Note: while Bush's time
in May came after the rating period ended, most of it was done before
the May 26 evaluation date. So it would appear that Killian, along with
Harris, were likely pressured to fold Bush's May time into the rating
period ending on April 30th.
Additional
notes and complications
Retired
Colonel Gerald Lechlieter wrote a
highly extensive and detailed analysis of Bush's service records for
the NY Times in 2004 (PDF
version, HTML
version). He also apparently maintains glcq.com,
a very messy but highly, HIGHLY annotated site both very critical and
analytical of Bush's Guard service (completely outside of the Killian
issue). He also has collected documents
not available anywhere else, like long lost "AFM" manuals referred
to in Bush's official records. One thing he took note of is this
May 10, 1973 computer
printout (yes, computers were indeed used frequently in those
primitive, ancient "Pong,"
HP-35, Jet Ski,
and dune
buggying on the moon days) called the Uniform Military Personnel
Record ("UMPR"). He separated out two sections of the report for
this composite image:

Lechleiter writes:
The "footer" of this document
(information that is included on the bottom of each page) indicates
that the reason this printout was done was for a "Record Review" ("PREP
FOR: RCD REVIEW). Item 17 notes, under "PROJ-REASON", "no
report for 1 year". ("NO RPT 1 YR"). This strongly suggests
that as a result of this highly irregular OER, ARPC was reacting by
doing a review of Bush’s records.
The
"OER" in this case meaning Bush's May 2, 1973
"Not Observed"
Rating Report.
At first glance, Lechleiter's point
makes sense since Bush was indeed
"Not Observed," for the May 1, 1972- April 30 1973 rating period, but
the date, May 10, is an anomaly: while this is after the rating period,
it's before the normal evalution date of May 26, so how would the
USAF/ARPC know about Bush being absent? Well, if the May 2, 1973 on the
"Not Observed" rating report wasn't actually backdated and was sent out
immediately to the USAF/ARPC, that could explain things, but what
reason for there be for Killian to have rushed out the negative
evaluation of Bush? Also, as shown by the endorsement of Bobby
Hodges, the base commander in the prior rating reports, these things,
as with apparently all such official documents, would had to have
passed through Hodges and Col Rufus G. Martin, the base personnel
officer.
The
USAF's
Air Reserve Personnel Center ("ARPC") started an inquiry/investigation
into the "missing" rating report on June 29, 1973 via an official request
for an explanation or more information regarding the "missing" rating
report. The request was signed off on July 10, 1973 by USAF Master Sgt. Daniel P. Harkness with
the comment, "This officer
should have been reassigned in May 1972 since he
no longer is training in his AFSC ("Air Force Service Category") or
with his unit of assignment."
If Lechleiter's supposition that the
May 10 computer printout "strongly
suggests" that the "ARPC was
reacting by doing a review of
Bush’s records" then why such a long delay until the June
29 inquiry? Googling "Uniform Military Personnel Record"
doesn't bring up much besides repeat of Lechleiter's point, but
the military links that do come up indicate that UMPR's are
really just report cards.
Indeed the May 10 UMPR appears
to be just mostly a summary of
Bush's service to date, including referring to "74Apr30" as the
"Proj-OER-Date" and "73May01" as when "OT-SUPVSN-BEGINS" -- meaning
that it seems to be only noting when Bush's then current rating period
begins and ends.
Lechleiter actually has a footnote to his
point about the UMPR that states: "It
is not absolutely certain that this document originated with ARPC;
however, the circumstances strongly suggest that it is as described."
Now, I have already noted above how
in the Killian
note
dated June 24,
1973, Killian wrote, "Neither Lt. Colonel
Harris or I
feel we can rate 1 st Lt. Bush since he was not training with 111
F.I.S. since April, 1972. His recent activity is outside the
rating
period." But note that he also wrote, "I got a call from your staff concerning
the evaluation of 1 st Lt. Bush due this month. His rater is Lt.
Colonel Harris." and he ended the memo with "Advise me how we are supposed to handle
this."
The
June 24 date would fit in with the June 29 date of the USAF/ARPC
inquiry. Actually the second digit for the day on the inquiry date
itself is obscured -- you can only make out that it's June 2x, with the
x looking to be maybe another "2". How do we know it suppose to be 29?
It's referenced in another
file dated several months later on Novemer 13, 1973 (as I keep
mentioning, if there is a forger here, he or she is pretty darn smart).
Also Killian as Bush's commanding officer, would be the primary contact
person regarding Bush's missing rating report, and as such, he would also have been expected
to be the one most responsible
for dealing with the USAF inquiry. And if you take away the Killian
memos, all you would have left is his "Not Observed" report,
which would be very insufficient paperwork considering that the USAF
inquiry wasn't closed (or finally stonewalled, to put it more
accurately) until months later on November 12,
1973.
3) The
supposed
forger was a lot smarter than even the Washington Post
The
Washington Post published articles here and here
comparing the Killian memos to official records, and made a complete
botch of it due to it not doing its homework and only succeeded in
adding to the widespread confusion over military document
formats (not to mention the state of common office technology in the
ancient early 70's). If you check pages 157-182 (by PDF page count) of
the long
time USAF Tongue
and Quill writing/communication guide, you will see how the format
for memos is suppose to be different
from official records, including
how the signature block is generally on the right for memos and on the
left for more official records. Also
memos for file/records are not "official" records and hence are not
archived unless they were classified -- there isn't a single memo in
Bush's files maintained by the DoD. And as far as proportional
printing goes, MOST of the military/state memos found on the Internet
from the 70's and even earlier are proportionally printed, as this
excerpt from a declassified 1959
"Killian" memo shows:
Compare
this to one of the CBS Killian memos:
Which perhaps should be compared in turn
to this high quality personal letter done in memo style:
From HistoryForSale.com.
Cleaned up and copied from this.
By
the standards of this Washington Post comparison, all these memos/letters would be
suspicious because: their formats also don't resemble an "officially
released Killian memo": they are proportionally printed; the date
format
is
not standard, and the signature block is on the "wrong" side. It
appears most of the declassified memos found on the Internet (like
these guys: Dated Oct. 4, 1971,
Dated Nov. 30. 1971,
Dated Feb.17 1972)
would
be suspicious for the same reasons.
Note:
for more document samples, click here
Also look closely at this little section of the Ayers letter:

Look closely at the "ly" in Sincerely, the "RO" in ROSS, the "AY"
in AYERS, and the "Ad" in Adjutant. Why?
They appear very much to be kerned! And
look again at that Post comparison
to see what it said about kerning.
The Post's "analysis" of the
superscripting is just as bad. This is how the memo
superscripting compares to Word recreations:
Note how none of the st's are
superscripted
. While most can be
explained away by an inexplicable gap preceding them, as the Post
mentioned, there are 2 st's with no such gaps and they still
aren't superscripted. The
results for the "th" superscripting are obviously very mixed: 3 are
superscripted; 2 are unsuperscripted with a preceding gap; and 2 are
unsuperscripted even without the gap. The
first group of non-superscripts came from the Aug.1st, 1972 memo.
Some pro-forgery people have tried to explain this away by saying that
the forger simply had had trouble getting Word not to autosuperscript.
That's one of the more idiotic explanations -- we're only talking about
6 memos in total, with none being very long. If Word was being used to
create the forged documents, once you figure out how to stop the
superscripting, it's quick and utterly trivial to print them all out
-- that's one of the reasons for using a word processor like Word in
the first place!
Also, for some strange reason, the only document in Bush's records to
have very clear but very non-modern looking superscripting never got a
mention
in the Post nor evidently anywhere else: this is an excerpt from the
Pentagon-supplied "Military
Biography" (also note how Alabama, where Bush supposedly spent
about a year at, never gets a mention, nor in this harder to read "Chronological
Listing of Service"):
While not proportionally printed, when was the last time you saw
printing and superscripts looking like this?
Some more proportionally
printed documents:

A proportionally printed Air National
Guard document
from 1969 from Mary Mape's book "Truth and Duty"
Actually most of the documents Mapes found appear to be proportionally
printed (which is apparently something
she and her people missed). Her book site,
truthandduty.com
appears to be gone now, but a copies of those
documents (in PDF format)
can be found
here.

A paragraph from a draft press release for the
Redactron
Redactor word
processor, circa August, 1973
Courtesy of the Charles
Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

The same paragraph in Arial 12pt Bold, 1.5 line spacing, circa April,
2007. But Arial didn't even
exist until about 1982 so how can this be? Arial is a
rip-off of an
earlier font called
Helvetica,
and
Microsoft chose
Arial over it. Not a bad match considering that the original font
is unknown, the system
that created it is unknown, and the recreation was done with an eyeball
match using a common Windows
font on a system over 3 decades newer. This should be enough to show
how much utter BS and confused
nonsense there was about early 70's era office tech and
what people could or could not do back then.
Lastly,
another not so little thing the
collective free press paid
little or no mind at all to: on Thursday, Sept. 24th, just 2 days after
CBS
announced it created a (supposedly) independent panel to "probe"
the story, more
documents are belatedly
released by the Department of
Defense without any good explanation for their delay (they were
actually forced
to do so). In this
collection, you will find some rather funkily formatted documents,
including this little gem.
Here's a
very interesting excerpt from that document:

Notice
anything funny about it aside from it being a little bit warped?
It's proportionally printed! And it's
the only one like that in all of Bush's records -- but for some
strange, never explained reason, it was very quietly released only
after CBS had backed away from the memos and appointed an investigative
panel. And nobody
in the mainsteam press, and very few bloggers, took note, despite
proportional printing having been the biggest factor in the forgery
charges, nevermind the
very, very odd timing of it, especially considering how all of Bush's
records
were
suppose to have been released long before then.
4) You actually can't recreate the memos with a
modern word processor
On Sept. 9, 2004, the owner of the right wing web site
Little
Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, claimed that he "
opened Microsoft Word, set the font to
Microsoft’s Times New Roman,
tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date '18 August 1973,'
then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal
records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. And my
Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as
'authentic.'" His
overlay
of the memo with his recreation,
especially the
animated
version, was taken by many as proof positive that the memos were
forged. There are a few problems with this:
It's not an exact match:
Click
here for an
enlargement of Johnson's animation. Note how the characters shift both
in position and shape. And given the reproduction quality of standard
copier and fax equipment in 2004 and years before that, you would very
unlikely not have that type of degradation even with multiple, multiple
passes. Compare that to
this
overlay of a
1966
Selectric Composer sample, pulled from an
archived
PDF document using a "Press Roman" typeface, with that of Windows
Times
New Roman. I took a crack at doing an animated overlay of the same
memo
here -- not too shabby,
but still not nearly an exact match
Where are the
recreations of the other memos?
If it was that easy, where are they? If you peruse the Little Green
Football's "
CBS
Killian Document Index," you see a number of recreations of the
August 18, "CYA" 1972 memo, and lots of
chatter, but what about the other memos? -- there are only 6 in total
(USA Today had
two
more than CBS) Well, there is something called
"Another
Document Experiment: 19 May 1972," but clicking on that only shows
a type-up Word recreation being only verbally compared to the original
memo, and no overlay. So what happens if you do an overlay? Well, you
might get something like
this
-- it doesn't work at all.
What happens when you try?
Well, with a nice touch of color, and a special
treat or
two, you get:
A
Festival of
Animation.
The superscript
issue:
Most of this was already covered in the
Summary,
but try this for sh*ts and grins: bring up Microsoft Word and type --
do NOT just copy and paste -- in the following: 187th 111th 1st 147th
9921st
Note what happens to the th's and st's:

The above represents the default behavior of Word -- it will
automatically superscript instances of "th" and "st" when they
immediately follow a number.
Now look again at that second
group of
super/non-superscripting samples, which are from the
May 4th, 1972 memo:

It's obviously mixed. Now try typing this in Word and see how
convenient
it is to skip superscripting on the first "111th" and the "1st," but
then have it on for the last "111th". A bit awkward, eh? And does it
make any sense?
It would -- only if
superscripting was a manual
operation and if,
say, the printwheel only had a small
"th" character" and not a small "st", as was the case with
Marian
Knox's Olympia typewriter, as it well may have been the
case
of a daisywheel printer, since there wre only a couple of extra
spokes at best for such characters.
But the importent thing to note is that
this
inconsistency in the
superscripting is not a characteristic of any modern word processing
system.
Recreation
attempts by
others:
This is Dr. David Hailey's result of
trying to overlay a Word recreation over a high quality copy of one of
the memos
with a letterhead he got from Mary Mapes. You may find his complete
report
here.
Thomas Phinney the typographer, who thinks the memos are forgeries,
also
tried his hand at recreating
the same
memo. This is a close-up of a key section in his result:
Note the misalignment of the numbers on first line and the chracters
from the "147 th" bit on, especially compared
to the "AFM 35-13" section below it -- mere warping or distortion from
a bad fax/copier machine cannot explain
this mismatch. This type of vertical misalignment can mean
only one thing --
the font in the
memos is
fundamentally different from
modern Time Roman (Mac)/Times New
Roman (Windows)
5)
Wouldn't Bush know if they were real or not? So what did he have to say
about all this?
Two words:
diddly and
squat.
He and his people have so far avoided any direct comments whatsoever
about the veracity, or lack thereof, of the Killian memos, which, well,
is the classic behavior of a
guilty man.
Diddly:
Check out the "answer" then
White
House Communications Director
Dan Bartlett
gave to
"Stephen
from Colorado Springs" when asked
about the CYA memo during an "Ask the White House" Q&A session on
Sept. 21st, 2004:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20040921.html
*********
Stephen, from Colorado Springs, CO
writes:
"
Dan, Why is it that the president or
you will not declare that the
documents (CYA Memos) are false and untrue? Certainly if the documents
are fakes, then the information in them is false as well."
"Let's hear you and Mr. Bush say they
are false and untrue accusations
and we can settle all this mess."
Dan Bartlett:
"
We don't have the technical
expertise to determine if they were fake
or not. Remember, these supposedly came from the personal files of man
who died more than 20 years ago. Thankfully, a lot of expert bloggers
and other news organizations did get to the bottom this growing
scandal."
*********
"Expert
bloggers"!!??
Squat:
A couple of months later, on Tuesday, December 7, 2004, former U.S.
Attorney General Dick
Thornburgh, who co-headed the supposely CBS
independent review panel, sent an
e-mail to Dan Bartlett: "As I
mentioned on the phone, we are in the homestretch of our
assignment and would find it very helpful if we could secure written
responses from the President to the following questions so that we can
tie up a couple of loose ends," wrote Thornburgh.
The questions were:
- Was there a waiting list to become a pilot of the Texas Air
National Guard at the time you entered?
- Do you recall Colonel Killian being dissatisfied in any way about
your National Guard service in 1972 and 1973?
- Were you ever ordered to take a physical in May 1972 or at any
other time?
- Did Colonel Killian say in May 1972 that you could do Equivalent
Training for three months or transfer?
- Do you recall being suspended from flight status on or about
August 1, 1972? If so, how was that suspension communicated to you?
- Why were you suspended from flight status? Was there a reason
other than not taking a physical?
- Describe your communications with Colonel Killian about a
transfer to Alabama in 1972.
- Did Colonel Killian or anyone else ever inform you that Colonel
Killian was being pressured in any way about your status by a superior
officer?
Not the worst questions to ask, eh? So what was the response? The next
day, Bartlett replied with: "
I must
say, I was somewhat
surprised by the questions," he wrote. "
I guess we viewed your work as
more focused on what CBS did/did not do regarding their reporting, not
the substance of their charges. The answers to your questions can be
easily found in the public records so we would prefer to keep him out
of participating in your report."
"The answers to
your questions can be
easily found in the public records"!!?? In other words: "
F*ck off!"
Of course CBS would end up
dumping
Rather and a few years later
hiring
Barlett, a
deliberate,
stonewalling liar. Figures....
The
Bottom Line
The CBS (and USA Today) Killian memos
were not forged. Period. The claims
regarding 70's office technology were always
utterly factless and
nonsensical and easily disprovable with a trip to a good library. The
claims regarding supposed issues with formats were also just a stupid
and clueless. The contents fully match up in excruciating detail with official
records and what was already know from other sources. One key bit
of info contained in the memos is supported only by records that were
not available until after CBS had obtained the memos. The central
character in all this, George Bush, who had well more than info and
documents to jog his memory about that important time in his life,
could have very easily have settled all this, but kept a guilty silence
instead. The role of the right wing/conservative media was that of
utter maliciousness. The role of the mainstream corporate media
was that of lazy, incompetent
reporting, and irresponsibly specious
and spectacularly poor fact checking. The role of the public was to be
utterly confused and mislead by it all.
A) What was the state of office
technology at the time?
Every research-challenged blog and media comment made about
the sort of office equipment that was around in the early 70's was
laughably off. For example, from the
Business Machines Executive Newsletter, issues March and May,
1972 (this info courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute), in 1971
IBM's revenues from its MT/ST-MC/ST word processors exceeded
typewriter
sales, with about 3600 units being shipped monthly about that time, and
these were $7000-$9500 machines. The latest IBM model.at that time was
the "MC/ET" ("Mag Card/Executive"), which utilized 9-unit proportional
spacing producing 6 difference letter widths, and offered automatic
centering and supposedly a bunch of other features as well. This unit
came out in April, 1972 and sold so well that there was a 14 week
waiting period on it and that it hurt the sales of the older Mag
models.
Judging from features lists of mostly long
forgotten word processing systems (obscure Redactron sold its 10,000th
word processor by 1975)
like those listed in this daisywheel ribbon cross-reference, proportional
printing was a highly desired feature back then. Read these
comments
by a lawyer describing some of his experiences with some early word
processing systems. Also note that there were two common forms of data
storage in use back then, magnetic tape cartridges and (later) cards.
While developed by IBM, other systems used the same media for
interchangeability. So a document created in the late 60's on an IBM
system and saved to a cartridge, could be then be brought up years
later on, say, a Redactron model like this. A good overview of IBM's word processing
developments is here, and a good overview of the entire early word
processing market is here.

1971 Word Processor -- the Redactron Redactor. 10,000 of these
were sold by mid-1975 according to this
Business Week
article
Documents created and stored on this system could also be read into a
phototypesetter machine made by Graphic Systems Inc.of Lowell, MA.
(This info courtesy of the Charles
Babbage Institute)
In case you're wondering how many companies could afford these
$8,000+ machines, bear in mind that Xerox couldn't make enough of its
model 914 copier, which cost $29,500 in 1960
-- an awful lot of money, even more so considering what a dollar was
worth then. The trick was in leasing -- the 914 copier was leased for
$95/month plus 5 cents/copy. Word processors were apparently also
leased, as were usually IBM typewriters. These were not disposable
devices -- they were expected to be in service for a good many years
(look at how many Selectrics are still around for filling out forms.)
While casual Internet searching, including even with Google, gets
only sketchy info on what common office technology was like way back
then, very thorough searching and trips to a good library clearly
indicate that people were certainly not just using typewriters at that
point. Actually the word processing
market took off during the 1960's! IBM essentially created the
market beginning with the MT/ST (Magnetic
Tape/Selectric Typewriter) in 1964, and a host of other venders,
mostly startup companies, began entering the market starting around
1969 with companies like Redactron
and Diablo
Systems (see "David S. Lee"). In 1971, word processors using
video screens were introduced, spearheaded by the Lexitron Videotype.

From IBM
Word Processing Developments (those "I/O Selectrics" were replaced
by OEM daisywheel printers.)
The now long, LONG obsolete
IBM Executive
typewriter for one had been around for decades
prior to 1972 and that
could proportionally print, be
bought with different fonts, and had interchangeable typebars for
special characters. Super/subscripting was also easy enough it: you
just roll the platen a half line -- a "click" -- in either direction.
But that didn't stop the mainstream press from focussing on whether the
memos could have been created with an IBM Selectric typewriter --
apparently they were under the impression that prior to PC's and Mac's,
the only office equipment that existed in those ancient days were
Selectric typewriters.
Not quite.
Computer-driven proportional
printing prior to the introduction of laser printers in the mid-80's
were done primarily by
first I/O Selectrics, then daisywheels, with
"NLQ" dot matrix printers
being added later. These had to deal with restrictive limitations based
on horizontal resolution, typically to 1/72" for an I/O Selectric and
1/60"-1/120" for a daisywheel. This relatively horizontal resolution
meant there were compromises in rendering proportional typefaces
compared to what modern inkjet and lasers can do. Which in turn means
that if memos were indeed created on some old system using an old Times
or Times-like print element, you would expect to get
EXACTLY the
results that were demonstrated above when you try to overlay all
the memos with a
modern recreation done in Times Roman/New Roman -- some not so bad,
some awful. Even with modern computers, you can get some "drifting"
when translating between between one font rendering system to another
-- take a look at the differences between the relative lines endings in
the left and right columns
here.

The left image is from
Word
Processing in the Modern Office, Paula B. Cecil, Menlo Park, CA,
Cummings Pub. Co 1976
The right image is from
Word
Processing, Arnold
Rosen & Rosmary Fielden, Engelwood Cliff, N.J. Prentiss Hall, 1977
Daisywheel
printers began being used at about the time of the memos, first by
Diablo Systems and then a
little later by Qume (both companies founded by
David
S. Lee). Details about the different models and their capabilities
are hard to come by even with extensive library and archive research.
Part of this problem lies in how both Diablo, especially and Qume were
OEM suppliers who would customize the printers to their corporate
customers, and these corporate customers, often dedicated word
processor
manufacturers, would use their own model numbers on the printers. The
best references so far have been the unobvious: ribbon suppliers. The
remaining ones evidently maintain an extensive crossreference of
printer model types and you can figure out which of the early word
processors used which general daisywheel family model at least by
which ribbon they used. For instance look at this
Swiss
ribbon reference for a particular Diablo HyType/Qume ribbon. It's
an astonishing list of long, long forgotten word processor models, most
of which I cannot find a single reference for beside other ribbon
supply sites. Googling individual models gets some 1972-1973 dates for
some of them at least, like the
CPT
4200, the
AES
90, and the AB Dick Magna 1 (from a
CBI reference), but you only the
impression that things like
the
Vydec
1000 and the Videotype 1000 were around at that time, but without
any hard dates.
How big was the word processing market
in the early 70's? Pretty big:
From
Word Processing, Arnold
Rosen & Rosmary Fielden, Engelwood Cliff, N.J. Prentiss Hall, 1977
Some Business Week articles
from 1975 and 1977
show that by the mid-70's, the word
processing market had actually peaked in terms of the smaller,
innovative companies that formed at the beginning of the decade, with
most of those being gobbled up by the likes of Xerox and Burroughs.
This post
has these comments by a lawyer who used
some of the early word processors, including this rather telling
excerpt: Burroughs bought out Redactor corporation (or at least its
computer line from them), and sold a dedicated word processor with a
large full letter size screen (portrait, not landscape) with dual
floppy disk drives (RAM on a disc instead of linear on tape - HUGE
time-saving improvement), for about $13,000. They gave me and another
attorney a $3,000 discount if we would turn in a Redactor I so they could literally junk it at the
city dump - they did not want to service them even for a $500 per
year service contract. My buddy had one, and so we purchased a Redactor II (R-2) (which we promptly renamed R2-D2, of
StarWars fame) for a mere $10,000. It used a Qume daisy wheel printer
which had blinding speed that blew away the IBM Selectric, and we could
attach different wheels for different fonts and sizes ranging from 10
pica to 12 elite to 15 fine print (great for attorneys
),
Courier, Letter Gothic, and even "proportional spacing" Times (OMG!)
print. It was almost like owning a print shop and having a
sophisticated type composer machine. We could do anything...except graphics.
Excerpt from
Interfacing
Microcomputers to the Real World by Murray Sargent, described
here.
The office technology of
the 70's was not so primitive....
From
Word
Processing in the Modern Office, Paula B. Cecil, Menlo Park, CA,
Cummings Pub. Co 1976
The NBI OASys 3000 "Information Processor" from the late 70's --
check out
its specs
B) How well can older devices
recreate the memos?
Typographers like Thomas
Phinney have focused on character spacing and the relative position
of line endings to each other to support the forgery claim (while
ignoring all other factors.) This begs the question: "Is there anything
unique about the Times Roman (Mac)/Times New Romans (Windows) spacing
shown in the memos?" Prior to laser printers, Diablo daisywheel
printers and their compatibles were *the* standard for letter quality
printing for over a decade. Xerox, which bought Diablo Systems in 1972,
also had a
big hand in developing Postscript. What are the odds that the
native proportional spacing mode on a Diablo-type printer would match
up in some way with that shown in the memos?
A functioning Diablo-compatible daisywheel printer would be handy to
test this out, but I don't happen to have one. PC Magazine, though, use to have an
annual Printer issue where they tested a large range of printer and
included print samples. I happened to have gotten my hand on the Nov
10, 1987 issue, which was one of the last issues with daisywheel
printers. This is one of the Diablo-compatible printers with a nice
proportional print sample:
Note how there is "Pica" printing right
above the proportional printed line -- Pica is fixed at 10
characters/inch, hence making a handy ruler in reference to the
proportional spacing shown below it. Windows "Courier" font at 12 point
is spaced identically to Pica. So in theory, I could type up that right
side print sample in Courier and then try to locate some proportional
fonts that matches up best with that shown in the Brother sample, and
then, oh, recreate one of the memos in those fonts and see what happens:
Hmmm.... In case you're wondering: that "CG Times" font stands for
"CompuGraphic Times," a generic Times font that came with the first HP
LaserJet printers back in 1984. Now let's see how the above
compares to the CYA memo:
Well, looky that -- the CG Times Bold
doesn't seem too far off the mark,
does it? Not too shabby for a guess from an old magazine sample, and
certainly good enough to indicate that, yes, a Diablo daisywheel or
compatible just using its default proportional print mode (the
character spacing could also be individually mapped) may well have been
used to create the memos. Curiously, when I was tuning the fonts for
the best matchup, even though the CG Times ended up being a near dead
match to the CYA memo, it was the most coarse. It might be using 9-unit spacing -- the
typographers out there should be raising an eyebrow....

Just in case anybody wants to do an overlay experiment, use this
line-adjusted copy
(Created in WordPerfect 10, CG Times Bold 12pt, Line Spacing 1.07)
C)
What do the official DoD records show?
Even if you take the memos out of the picture, the
DoD records,
particularly
Part
2 and
Part
4 of the Personnel Records, the
Payroll
Records, as well as the
Flight
Records,
all by their lonesome show numerous discrepencies as documented by some
news
media investigations, including the
widely
reported falloff of Bush's service starting in the spring of 1972.
Martin
Heldt and
Gerald
Lechliter made sterling individual efforts obtaining and analyzing
the official records to a degree that shamed almost all of the
mainstream media.
Format
Memos are not official documents, hence are not archived. Their
recommended format is different from that of official records: if you
check pages 157-182 (by PDF page count) of this version of the The Tongue and Quill,
you will see how the format for memos is different from official
records, including how the signature block is generally on the right
for memos and on the left for more official records. This one little
format issue tripped up not only almost all of the news media, but that
(supposedly) CBS
independent review panel.as well. This Washington Post article
for example comparing one of the Killian memos to an official letter is
just a
notable sample of the widespread confusion over military document
formats. Elementary
research that very few bothered to do. The basic format of the Killian
memos, including the position of the
signature block, are in keeping with ALL other such military/government
memorandums for record (or "file") found on the Internet,
Discrepencies in the
Flight Records
The Flight
Records have two evidently bogus entries at the very
end of Bush's last military flights, which ended in 1972: "8/25" and
"5/27". Not only are these completely out of sequence from the ones
before them, but Bush had "cleared" Ellington for Alabama on 5/15
according to the "Not Observed" rating
report and he was suspended
from
flying on August 1, 1972. See: Last Bush Flights. This discrepency was also noted,
among many others, in an analysis of Bush's flight records, by the AP, which
got the records
via
FOIA.
Missing
Documents
There should have been specific forms and records following up on
Bush's flight suspension, but every single one is missing. These are
Air Force requirements and not so much Guard. The AFM 35-13 cited in
Bush's suspension very clearly states, All rated officers on flying
status must accomplish a medical examination annually or biannually
(flight surgeons) as prescribed by AFM 160-1. Failure to accomplish a
required medical examination disqualifies the officer for flying duty
and he will be suspended effective the first day of the month following
his birthmonth, citing this paragraph as authority. (1) The local
commander who has authority to convene a Flying Evaluation Board or
forward through command channels a detailed report of the circumstances
which resulted in the officer's failure to accomplish a medical
examination, along with a recommendation that the suspension be
removed. (2) The individual's major command will forward the report
along with the command recommendation to USAFMPC/DPMAJD, Randolph AFB
TX 78148, for final determination. See: AFM 35-13 and this AFM 35-13 Excerpt:

Note: I got the AFM 35-13
info from http://www.glcq.com/regs.
Note also that an extensive
analysis of Bush's records can be found here.
Also there are literally no DoD records at all regarding Alabama from
when Bush was suppose to be there doing "equivalent duty" with the
187th
Tactical Recon Group. This Sept. 15, 1972 record
shows that Bush was suppose to put in 2 full days on Oct 7-8, 1972 and
then again two more on Nov 4-5, but these dates don't show up in the
points or the payroll records, indicating Bush also didn't show up. So
where is the paperwork regarding this and all other 187th matters? The
DoD records indicate that forms and reports get CC'd (or "Cy'd") quite
a bit and to different locations, so it's extremely, extremely unlikely
that they and all their copies could would have been coincidently lost
while other DoD docs for that period are readily found. Indeed it
appears that the next time after that Sept. 15, 1972 that "Alabama"
even gets mentioned in any official DoD doc is in the backdated "Not Observed" rating report in 1973.
D) A
brief history of the CBS memos:
Wednesday,
September 8: the day of the 60 Minutes II report (well,
actually,
the 12½ minute segment)
Prior to the airing, CBS provided copies of the
memos to the White House and interviewed White House Communications
Director Dan Bartlett regarding the issue. Bartlett doesn't deny
anything in the memos, but claims the issue is no more than
"partisan politics." The White House e-mails copies of the four memos
in the 60 Minutes report to reporters and editors across the
country. These are the same memo copies they got from CBS the day
before.
USA Today also gets copies of the memos, but directly from the source
that 60 Minutes used:
former National
Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill
Burkett.
The following day, the 60 Minutes
story gets
decent news coverage across the country. Charges that the memos CBS
used were forged start to spread through the Internet. The
forgery
charges start to appear in the mainstream press the day after. Experts
of all dubious stripes were brought out to comment on the memos. Most
if not all of the "analyses" were, well, pretty damn stupid, and
indicated little or no research into the type of office equipment that
was available back in the early 70's. (You would have thought that
before computers, there was only this thing called a "Selectric"...)
Regardless of this, CBS's
credibility started coming under serious attack from both
Internet and
mainstream
sources.
Wednesday, September 15: a week later, Rather interviews
Killian's former secretary, Marian
Carr Knox. She tells him that she
did not type the memos and believes they are forgeries, but that "the
information in those is correct." This doesn't exactly help CBS's case.
Monday,
September 20: CBS, in
the face of all the criticisms and attacks, backs down. They reveal
that Burkett was their source and that he admits to deliberately
misleading CBS about where he got the documents from. Rather
apologizes
with an "I'm sorry."
Thursday,
September 24:
More documents are belated
released by the Department of
Defense without any good explanation for their delay. In this
collection is this little gem the only
proportionally printed document in all of Bush's official records. (For the
fuzzy-eyed, I've created a rulered version here.)
This is
actually a document that should have
been released back in February of 2004 along with the bulk
of Bush's records. It somehow instead ended up being held all the way
through the attacks on CBS, most of which centered on the proportional
spacing issue. And when it finally does appear, it's just 4 days after
CBS had given up on the memos. Draw your own conclusions.
By the way, it looks to my now fairly expert eye that it was composed
on an IBM Executive typewriter.
Tuesday,
November 23: Dan
Rather announces that he will step down as anchor and managing
editor of the CBS Evening News in March, 24 years after his first
broadcast in that position. Most news coverage of this has been more or
less balanced, touching upon highlights of his lengthy career, but the
memos "controversy" always gets the most prominent mention. Of
course, there were also plenty of moronic "fake memos" comments from
the
usual sources like Fox News
(John Gibson) and places like this.
I personally feel that he always meant well, which makes him a better
person than at least 98% of his right wing critics, but aside from
that, I'm still not very happy with him and CBS in general, to put it
mildly, over their
total mishandling of the Killian memos -- that essentially took Bush's
Guard service off the table as an election issue, and in an election so
close.....
E) A
summary of Bush's Air Guard service:
In May, 1968, over 300 American soldiers were being killed on
average
each week in Vietnam. Yale soon-to-be-graduate George W. Bush was only
twelve days away from losing his student draft deferment when on May
27, he enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard ("TANG") for a 6 year
stint. At the time Bush graduated from Yale, his father, Bush Sr. was a
Texas Congressman, which very likely was a teensy bit of a factor in
how Bush Jr. managed to make it to the top of a waiting list of 500
trying to get into the Texas Guard despite poor
scores on his pilot aptitude test -- Bush had only scored in the
25th percentile, the lowest possible passing grade.
In 1999, Ben Barnes -- who was speaker of the Texas House of
Representatives in 1968 -- testified
under oath in an unrelated lawsuit that he had put in a good word
for Bush with Guard officials at the request of a Bush family friend,
Sidney Adger.
Adger had two sons in a very special unit of TANG, the 147th
Fighter Group, a "Champagne
Unit" that also included the son of
former Gov. John Connally, both sons of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Bobby
Sakowaitz (a wealthy Houston department store owner), the grandson of
H.L. Hunt, and supposedly at least seven members of the Dallas
Cowboys football team. And it was this unit that Bush Jr. ended up
joining.
Regardless of the reasons or what strings were pulled, Bush Jr.
in, by all accounts at least acceptably performed his duty
duringhis first
few years of Guard service. He completed pilot training in June 1970
and was rated to fly an F-102,
an interceptor jet. There is a widely quoted and widely disputed George Magazine
article from October, 2000 that presents a pretty benign view of
Bush's Guard performance and service. But other
evidence suggests
otherwise, that Bush had trouble with the F-102 and was put back on
flying a T-33, a
training jet.
It's Bush's service record starting from about mid-1972, the beginning
of his
5th year of service, that's much more dubious and sketchy, and where
the bulk of the controversies lie (so to speak), including the CBS
memos. The military paper trail rather inconveniently (or conveniently,
depending on your viewpoint) falls off from about this point.

Click to enlarge.
The Air National Guard
had a point system based on
duty time, and there
was a minimum of 50 points that all Guardsmen had to accumulate per
year to meet minimum requirements. During Bush's first two years, he
did very well: 253 points for his 1st year and then 340 for his
2nd.
His points fell off a bit during his 3rd and 4th years: 137 and then
112. For his 5th year, 1972-73, beginning on the anniversary on his
enlistment in May, he only got 56 points,
just 6 over the minimum, but this
includes an automatic 15 "gratuitous" points just for being a Guardsman.
He
apparently only accumulated the bare minimul 50 points for his 6th and
last
year of service, 1973-74. (It's been reported elsewhere
that it was another 56 points, but a copy of an official record I
have below indicates only 50.)
F) Bush's
point records for his last 2 years of service:

Points collected by Bush for his
5th year of service. He needs to accumulate a minimal
of 50. The above totals to
only 41, but that doesn't include the 15 he gets automatically
just for being in the Guard so the actual total is 56.

Points collected by Bush for his
6th and last year of service. Since Bush left
his Guard service early, he was not entitled to 15 gratuitous points
for his
last year -- just
5. This means his true total is actually only 40
points --
10 less than the minimal! This is reflected in Bush's "ARF Retirement
Credit
Summary" prepared Jan. 30, 1974.
This is the pertinent excerpt:

Do the math: 19+16 =
35 35 + 5 = 40!
G) Bush's Air Guard
Service Timeline
The following
are the highlights of Bush's last 2 years of service, including where
(and how
well) the CBS memos (in
red) fit
in. Also USA Today had 2 additional
Killian memos I've included
those in green.
February 2, 1972: A brief
note from Killian asking Harris for an update about the flight
qualifications of Bush and some other guy named Bath..
May-November, 1972:
Bush
in Alabama worked on the Senate campaign
of family friend Winton Blount.
May 4, 1972: Killian orders
Bush to report to
Ellington AFB no later than May 14th for his annual physical.
May
19, 1972: Killian notes a phone
discussion he had with Bush.
Bush wanted to "get out of coming to drill from now through
November" and to get a transfer to Alabama in order to work on a
political campaign. "The issue of the medical test is discussed."
May 24, 1972: Bush applies for
equivalent training at 9921st Air Reserve
Squadron at Alabama's Maxwell Air Force Base, and this is approved by
Lt. Col. Reese H. Bricken,
commander of the 9921st, a
couple of days later.
Summer 1972: Bush attends GOP
convention in Miami with his father.
(FYI -- the Watergate
break-in occurs June 17)
July 31, 1972: the Air
Reserve
Personnel Center in Denver, the final approval authority,
rejects Bush's reassignment request
to the 9921st, stating that as
"an obligated Reservist" he could only be "assigned to a specific Ready
Reserve Position."
August
1, 1972: Killian orders Bush
suspended for failing to taking the
required physical.
"1. On this date I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended from flight
status due to failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards and failure
to meet annual physical examination (flight) as ordered."
2. I conveyed my verbal orders to commander; 147th Ftr Intrcp Gp with
request for orders for suspension and convening of a flight review
board IAW AFM 35-13."
August 1, 1972: Bush
is verbally suspended from flying status for failing
to take his
annual physical.
September 5, 1972: Bush again requests a
temporary transfer to Alabama to "perform equivalent duty," this
time to serve September,
October, and November with Montgomery, Alabama's 187th Tactical Recon
Group. This is also the date that his suspension
becomes official.
September 15, 1972: Bush's transfer request is approved by Capt. Kenneth K. Lott. Bush is
ordered to report to Lt. Col. William
Turnipseed at Alabama's 187th Tactical Recon Group. His "Unit
Assembly Schedule" is set for Oct. 7-8 and Nov. 4-5, and at 7:30am -
4:00pm for each of the days.
October 7-8, November 4-5, 1972:
Bush is supposed to report for
duty in Alabama, but
doesn't show up. The only record tying Bush to the 187th is a
dental exam in January, 1973. Records
released by the White House show Bush's late1972 duty was
performed not on the days ordered, but on Oct. 28-29 &
Nov. 11-14. One possible mitigating
factor for October is that Bush's grandfather, though, former
Sen. Prescott Bush, dies
of cancer, October 8th and Bush serves as a pallbearer at the
funeral in Greenwich, Connecticut.
November, 1972: Winton Blount
loses his bid for the Senate, and Bush
moves back to Houston, but
apparently not to Guard duty (see the following May 2nd entry.) The Winton
Blount campaign is mentioned in Bush's transfer
request from earlier in May to be reassigned to the 9921st.
January 6, 1973: Bush has a dental exam at the Donnelly Air National
Guard base in Alabama. This is apparently the only official record,
aside from nondescriptive points records, showing Bush to be on base in
Alabama at any time.
May 2, 1973: The annual rating
(evaluation) report for Bush, covering his
5th year (May 1, 1972 - April 30, 1973),
states that he could not be rated because "he has not been observed
during the period of the report." This report was signed by Lieutenant Colonels William Harris and
Jerry Killian.

June 24, 1973: Killian
reponds to a request from the 111th for an evaluation of Bush. His
response is virtually exactly
the same as the
authenticated May 2nd document above, that neither he nor Lt. Colonel
Harris can rate Bush since he was not with the 111th since April, 1972.
(aka "not observed").
June 29, 1973: An official request is
made by Master Sgt. Daniel P. Harkness
for an explanation or more information regarding the missing rating
report. "This officer should have been reassigned in May 1972 since he
no longer is training in his AFSC ("Air Force Service Category") or
with his unit of assignment."
August 18, 1973: Killian's now infamous "CYA" memo basically complains about the pressure
to cover for Bush's absence during his rating period. "Bush
wasn't here during rating period and I don't have any feedback from
187th in Alabama. I will not rate. Austin is not happy today either."
September 5, 1973: Bush again requests a discharge from TANG and a
reassignment to the air reserves (ARPC)
in order to attend the Harvard Business School.
Note:
it's unclear when Bush moved to Cambridge, MA to start his Harvard
classes. Most sources have it vaguely as September, 1973, but classes
for the MBA Program actually begin before the end of August, with
orientation a week before that. So
it's likely that Bush was living in Cambridge by August, 1973.
October 1, 1973: Bush is officially discharged from TANG and
becomes a reservist, almost 8 months before his contracted separation
date of May 26, 1974.
November 12, 1973: Harkness's
request was evidently denied by Major
Rufus G. Martin, and with not much of an explanation:

November 8, 1974: Bush sends in
his resignation letter from
reserve duty, a copy of which only very recently mysteriously
appeared.
November 21, 1974: Bush
receives his full discharge from all
military obligations.
Important Note:
Even though Bush was evidently reassigned to the Alabama 187th,
official records about his service there are very noticeably lacking,
to the point that it doesn't get a mention at all both in his official "Chronological Listing of Service" and in
this undated, but Pentagon-supplied "Military
Biography." This is an excerpt from the Biography:
Where's Alabama?
Also take note of the
superscripting, which you might remember as being one of the supposed
issues that stirred the forgery charges. The Service Chronology also
has a superscripted "th," but you really have to look for it.
As
you can see
from the above, ALL of the supposedly discredited memos fit
perfectly, in both date and content, with all other information,
including the documents released by the White House. |
|
H) Fun
with
Fonts
A quick close scrutiny of the "CYA" memo by anyone with any sort
of extensive knowledge of computer printers, old and new, would have
thrown an awful lot of doubt on the Word Times New Roman "theory" to
say the least.
Here is the CYA memo in full:

This is the section of the CBS CYA memo that caught my eye immediately
and was the primary reason why I was so instantly dismissive of
the Word Times New Roman claim:

Note: how the "S" drops slightly below line; how uneven "Hodges" is;
the height and shape of "t"; and how funky the "ss" is in "pressured"
Now see which, if any, of the following matches up best with it:




Only one of these fonts is actually
Word Times New Roman. The less slow will be able to figure out
what is what pretty
quickly, but not through the print samples. One is Garamond, one is
Goudy, and one was created with WordPerfect for DOS.
Times New Roman
is an old newspaper font created in 1932 and Garamond is even much older.
Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and other word
processors are themselves merely replicating these and other
established fonts.
Now, some people have noted that the poor quality of the memos made
font identification a little problematic, but that hasn't stopped some
supposed typography
experts from proclaiming firmly that the CYA memo was
morally, ethic'lly, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely,
undeniably and reliably created with Word Times New Roman.
Hmmm...not so fast there, Munchkinheads.
If you look at the CYA memo, you will notice that there are three
instances
of "Harris" nicely spaced apart. What if we took all three out and
compared them to each other and to a Word-created one:

Hmmm... Those three CYA Harris's are surprisingly consistent: a blocky
"H", a left leaning "a", a distorted "rr", an "i" with pigeon feet, and
a pretty loopy "s". They don't really seem to match up so well to the
Word version on close inspection, do they?
Actually, I personally think the "a" sort of looks more like this one:

Which I just happened to have noticed here.
If you want to do your own forensic analysis, use any old good photo
editor/paint progam to pull out and enlarge individual letters for
comparison. The trick is to look for consistent differences, as with
those Harris samples. It just takes only one letter to be consistently
different from Sample A to Sample B, however subtle, in order to pretty
much eliminate a font correspondence.
But if you still want to believe that the Word version is sort of close
enough,
remember that font descriptions are very, very precise. Times New
Roman and Times Roman, for instance, are trademarked
names for specific fonts with
an accompanying description of how each character should look, as well
as its spacing and kerning (an extra adjustment of spacing between
certain pairs of letters to make them look more balanced.) There's no
such thing as "Sort of Times New Roman" -- there's virtually no printed
character that doesn't belong to a distinct font family. The Goudy,
Garamond and WordPerfect samples from the previous comparisons also
imply that they too sort of,
kind of, look like they could have created the CYA memo.
A good introduction to fonts can be found here:
http://graphicdesign.sfcc.spokane.cc.wa.us/tutorials/process/type_basics/type_families.htm
There are some animated overlays of a Word CYA memo on the original
floating around the Internet. The idea was to show how near identical
the two versions are, but if you focus on how individual characters
shift and change, it actually helps with identifying the differences
between whatever the CYA font is and Word Times New Roman. I have a
good one here.
The font stuff is kind of tricky, I admit. Most serif fonts used in
business tend to look much alike, but Times New Roman is Times New
Roman....
Dr. David Hailey initially did a preliminary but fairly comprehensive analysis of memo fonts
and came to the
conclusion that the memos had to have been typewritten based on
telltale signs of mechanical artifacts. He did a cute experiment where
he created a character-by-character replication of on of the
memos using typewriter characters:

Close, but not quite there.... He needed to investigate further to see
if there existed devices at the time that could both replicate the
appearance of the characters and
do so proportionally. I should mention that Hailey was attacked for his
analysis by morons like these. Hailey has updated his
report and it is much more thorough and interesting. Go here.
Also I should give a mention to a guy who went the extra mile to
run a Word CYA copy through a fax and copier a few times to simulate
the
aging process in the CYA original. It's not bad at first glance:

But, again, the details are in the
details. Looked how it's warped: unlike the real CYA memo, there isn't
unevenness in individual letters -- here they are warped in groups of
letters, especially if you look hard at the
Harris's in this case. Actually, if you duplicate the Harris
comparison, you end up with this:

Even though the "H's" indicate clearly that there much more fax/copier
distortion in this case, there is a much better match-up to their clean
Word sibling at the bottom -- the "i's" match up very well, the "a's"
are straighter, the "rr's" much less distorted, and the "s's" have the
odd flattening. A nice try, but it ends up hurting the Word argument
much more than it helps, again if you look at the details. All these
characted by character comparisons make all such pro-Word arguments
flounder a bit.
I)
What devices
could print
proportionally, superscript, etc., at the time of the memos?
Such an basic question in all of this, but one that has provoked the
most bizarre "answers." When all these alleged experts came out of the
woodwork and started talking about Selectrics versus Word, alarm bells
should have gone off. There were many, many brands and models of
typewriters then, and a good many of those with special features,
so....where was the discussion and research into them? It
says a lot about the quality of research that was done when it was
Killian's former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, who broke the news that
it was actually easy to superscript because her old Olympia typewriter
at least had a simple key to do a superscripted "th".
A 1972 forensics book called Scientific
Examination of Questioned Documents by Ordway Hilton and Steven
Strauss has a very interesting section on proportionally printing
typewriters: it included not
only different font samples from the IBM Executive, but from
proportionally printing typewriters from other companies. Be sure to
check out pages 48, 49, and 50
My own research quickly brought in two likely suspects: the IBM
Executive typewriter and the Diablo daisywheel printer. Further
research at libraries showed that people in the 70's had actually far
more choices for word processing systems than we have today!
Unfortunately, although those early systems apparently were pretty
common at one point (one long forgotten company, Redactron, sold its 10,000th word processor by 1975),
they've been discarded and obsolete for so many years now that memories
of them are foggy and records hard to find. This mini-history gives
some sense of the true state of affairs back then:

From
Word Processing, Arnold
Rosen & Rosmary Fielden, Engelwood Cliff, N.J. Prentiss Hall, 1977
An issue of
Business Week magazine from
February 19, 1972 (see
this and
this) indicates that at the time of
the introduction of daisywheel printers, IBM had been selling between
20,000 and 40,000 OEM Selectric printer mechanisms to other companies
for use in the systems needing high quality printing
J) The IBM
Executive Typewriter
I actually have a friend who not only use to have an old IBM Executive,
but still had a copy of a manual he created on it.
He thinks this Model "C" looks
closest to the
model he had (it came out in 1959):
This is his description of it:
The "AutoTest 704" manual I provided
was typed with an IBM Executive electric typewriter, which I believe
used the "IBM 12-point boldface No. 1 - proportional spacing"
font. I think it was a model C (see picture below). It was
a proportional-spacing conventional (not Selectric) typewriter commonly
used for publications work. It had interchangeable type bars (the
striker levers with the keys) which contained various characters, such
as, for example, a superscript or subscript "2", copyright or trademark
symbols, etc. I remember there were a few levers -- two to
four on each end of the basket -- that could be quickly snapped out and
replaced with special characters. I recall having a "rack" of
type bars with special characters on them.
All the equations and superscripts in
the sample I sent were typed directly on the typewriter (e.g. nothing
was cut-and-pasted into place). Because the type was 12 point,
the original was typed on oversize paper (larger than 8.5" x 11") and
reduced. I'm not sure of the reduction of the samples I provided,
but I think it was between 80% and 90%.
And these are some samples from his "AutoTest 704" manual:



Some full page samples are here, here, and here.
Now look at these two samples. The
first is from Word, the other is from the Executive sample above:


And then look at this excerpt from
the CYA memo:

Look very carefully at the "m",
"r" and "u's" and compare them to those in "Shutter time." It's those
little details...
So, Selectric, Schlectric -- basically
the much more conventional
looking IBM Executive could proportionally print, super and subscript,
it came with a variety of interchangeable type bars, and the shape and
style of its characters are more in line with the memos than MS Word
Times New Roman is.
But...
I did an experiment where I tried to duplicate a section of the manual
in Word:

The top is from the Executive, the bottom is the Word copy. While both
are proportionally spaced, Word does it more tightly. It is possible
that a different typeface might have made a difference, and if it was a
Model D (which came out in 1967) instead of a "C", but I don't think
so. You really need a device with true microspacing, like, say,
something like this:
K)
Diablo Daisywheel Printer
This is a
Diablo Systems daisywheel printer/terminal
Diablo formed as a company in 1969 and began
shipping its daisywheel
printers in 1972. It's founder, David Lee,
sold the company to Xerox, also in 1972, and he ended founding another
daisywheel printer company called Qume in 1973. Diablos and Qumes used
the same interchangeable daisywheel type element and there were
hundreds of type styles available, not including custom ones. I came
across a couple some Xerox printwheel sample sheets, including this:
Another descriptive sheet of printwheel fonts is here.
Pitch, proportional spacing, kerning, etc, was all done under computer
control. Before laser printers came, daisywheel printers (and later
one, NEC
Spinwriters using a thimble-shaped print element) were "the" way to go
for LQ (letter quality) printing. They were initially connected
to large computer centers and dedicated
word processors, and then later were very commonly used throughout the
early CP/M and DOS
computer days. The once popular WordStar word
processing program fully supported Diablo and Qume printers, which
allowed complete control over document appearance.
An entire technical manual, "Interfacing
Microcomputers to the Real World" was typeset with a Diablo 1345A
"HyType II" that was bought in 1978. The
Boston Public Library had a
copy so I popped in to take a look and copy a few pages.
This is a sample. Click
here for more complete scans.
L) How
would Killian have access to a daisywheel printer?
Short answer: a law firm or a judge advocate's office.
While daisywheels were quickly adopted by computing centers, they were
also very popular with law firms, typically combined with a dedicated
word processor, a large bulky computer that did nothing except word
processing. In the early 70's, brands like Vydec, Lexitron and Linolex
got things rolling. Later on WangWriters and IBM Displaywriters became
very popular.
If Killian did indeed use a lawfirm to type up and presumably file away
some memos, this might well explain where the memos came from and why
nobody is talking.
M) Why would
Killian use a law firm?
Bush's dad was a big shot: a highly decorated pilot
during World War II and a congressman at the beginning of Bush's Guard
service. In 1971, Bush Sr. became US Ambassador to the UN, and in 1973
he became the chairman of the Republican National Committee. So when
Bush Jr. starting screwing up, there was pressure placed on on Killian
and Harris to cut him some slack. The best-fit scenario is that Killian
went to seek legal
counsel in regards to what to do about this pressure he and Harris were
facing in regards to filling out Bush's rating report covering May 1,
1972
to April 30, 1973. That was the period where Bush was "Not observed" in Alabama. The official DoD records
indicate this completely outside of the infamous CYA
memo
on the matter. If you
are a responsible Air National Guard officer with a no-show pilot under
your command who's also the son of some big shot with big connections
and you're being pressured to basically fib on an official
evaluation report, what would you do? Get advice maybe? If so, from
whom? So the idea that Killian would seek legal advice under those
circumstance is hardly a stretch. It's as simple as that.
Fundamentally, any explanation for the memos, supporting
whether they are forgeries or real, has to be complete. That means that
you just can't say, "They were forged" because evidence A, B and C
supports this, while ignoring or not logically explaining away evidence
D, E and F that doesn't support this. You have to accommodate A-F and
beyond in terms of all evidence regardless if you're pro-forgery or
anti-forgery. In my case, I'm absolutely sure the forgery claims are
nonsensical, but I still have to be complete. So what if there was
readily available office equipment back in 1973 or 1972, how would the
memos end up being created on equipment like that? It's already been
demonstrated that
people's memory of the office tech in those is too hazy and fuzzy to be
helpful. It looks as though the early WP systems by the likes of
Redactron and AB Dick used the Diablo daisywheel printer models with
the integrated terminal keyboards, which would make them look exactly
like typewriters -- it's likely nobody at the time had a clue about the
difference unless he or she had to know. Still, you would think someone
like pool secretary like Knox would remember stuff like that.
Law
firms, though, were already big users of the more expensive and more
primitive IBM Mag-Card and Mag-Tape word processors by the late 60's,
so they would be, and apparently were, very quick and early adopters of
the more advance non-IBM WP systems when they came out.
The law firm would explain two things: how Killian would have access
to one of the new WP systems; and where would those memos be kept all
of this time when his on-base stuff was trashed decades ago. That of
course leads to the next question: why would Killian seek legal counsel
in regards to Bush? Well, even if you don't factor in the memos at all,
the DoD docs by themselves clearly indicate that there was a big issue
with Bush's OETR rating period ending April 30, 1973: there was Killian
and Harris's "Not Observed" report dated May 2nd, 1973, an inquiry by
the Air Force on June 29, 1973 with very specific requests for forms to
filled out to explain this, and then a big gap before the next DoD docs
on the matter, which came out in Nov 12-15, none of which technically
satisfied the AF requests, and which were apparently suppose to involve
the "Senior Rater," which was Killian, and apparently some info about
Alabama, where Bush has been transferred to, but which wasn't even
mentioned.
So there was obviously some funky stuff going on then involving Bush
not satisfying some sort of duty, and then when you finally add in the
August 18, 1973 "CYA" memo, you then go, "Ahh, OK, that explains the
screwy DoD stuff." Bush had shirked his duty and his immediate
superiors, including of course Killian and Harris, were getting
pressured to go easy on him to the point of being essentially asked to
falsify a rating report. It costs the Air Force a bunch of money and a
lot of time and resources to train a combat pilot, so apparently they
kind of take things like OETR's rather seriously and would probably
frown on made-up stuff. While Bush was in the "Guard" of sorts, the Air
Force evidently was the final authority on pilots like him. So the
business with the missing rating report was not a trivial matter, so
neither would be falsify the information in one.
Also, while the the rating period ended at the end of April, he had
until at
least May 26 to actually fill out the report. And by May 26, Bush had
apparently put in some serious make-up time. Now, you can see how this
might put Killian in an awkward position:
while the the rating period ended at the end of April, he had until at
least May 26 to actually fill out the report, and by May 26, Bush had
apparently put in some serious make-up time. So what do you do if
you're in Killian's position? Evidently for Killian himself, it was
simple: all that May activity was nice, but it was still a month too
late -- too bad. But apparently some others disagreed with that
decision. Rufus Martin on May 26 gave Bush 56 ARF points (41+15), which
is just over the minimal of 50, even though that's iffy legally -- you
need to put in a full duty year to get 15 gratuitous points. For
instance Bush only got 5 gratuitous points for the May 27, 1973 - May
26 1974 period because he left for Harvard in the fall of 1973. I bet
the specific pressure put on Killian and Harris was to fold Bush's May
activity into the rating report, but that would have been, well,
wrong..
So what do you do if
you're in Killian's position? Evidently for Killian himself, it was
simple: all that May activity was nice, but it was still a month too
late -- too bad. But apparently some others disagreed with that
decision. Rufus Martin on May 26 gave Bush 56 ARF points (41+15), which
is just over the minimal of 50, even though that's iffy legally -- you
need to put in a full duty year to get 15 gratuitous points. For
instance Bush only got 5 gratuitous points for the May 27, 1973 - May
26 1974 period because he left for Harvard in the fall of 1973. There
was likely specific pressure put on Killian and Harris was to fold
Bush's May
activity into the rating report, but that would have been, well, wrong.
OK, so now we have a pretty damn good incentive for Killian to get
some advice on what to do. And most if not all lawyers would have asked
Killian to bring along as much documentation as he could regarding the
situation. Voila! By just using what the normal behavior and procedures
would be for someone in Killian's circumstances, we've assembled all
the memos at a place that would not only likely have had an up to date
word processor, but would have filed away or transcribed copies of the
memos to boot, hence also explaining where they would have been all
this time, as well as the potential liability for whoever it was that
took or copied those files. And all of a sudden, without any tortured
bits of logic and ignored evidence, you have a complete explanation. If
you try something similar with the pro-forgery hypothesis, you will
very quickly have to resort to tortured logic and extremely unlikely
circumstances to even begin to make any similar headway for a truly
"complete" explanation that accounts for the contents issue, the
superscript and letterhead discrepencies, and so on.
So conceivably all the memos Killian brought with him would be
cleaned up or transcribed for clarity, or perhaps stored on a magnetic
cartridge or tape as draft for future "ass-protection". Bear in mind
that the AF guide
for such memos indicate that they function as journals of meetings and
decisions that could be very useful down the road if there are any
questions about why certain orders were given and decisions made. So
transcribing a memo for clarity or
record keeping would be completetely OK since it's not an "official"
record.
What this all means is that *all* of the memos could have been
transcribed on the same day in 1973. Obviously this would be very hard
to prove, except for one thing: all impact printing devices like
typewriters and daisywheel printers tend to have unique wear and strike characteristics
especially after they've been used for any length of time. So if one
was to have very clean, hi rez copies of the memos, and if there are
certain characters that show the same strike and wear throughout all
the memos, well....go check page 8 of Hailey's 2nd report: Hailey excerpt.
The thing with daisywheel printers is that since they were designed for
heavy duty printing, they would evidently wear out their printwheels
pretty quickly, but since the printwheels were so easy to replace, it
was not big of a deal. If the memos had been printed out a year or do
apart, there was a good chance the printwheel would have been changed
in the meantime, which would have changed the wear characteristics. But
if they were all printed within an hour or even a day or so of each
other, then they would have the same characteristics.
N) What about all those other issues
with terminology and such that were also pointed out?
Two words: boneheaded crap. Did anyone claiming a forgery come up with
military memos from around that time to back up any of their charges?
No. It's important to remember that
no real evidence was ever actually presented that fully backed up any
of the main contentions of the forgery claim. As demonstrated
above, the proportional spacing issue was based on utter ignorance of
common early office technology, especially at the time of the memos.
Buckhead the blithering
idiot based his knowledge of office tech history from working in "an office environment from 1980
forward" and his expertise comes from having "typed thousands of pages on IBM
Selectrics, and a few hundred
on various mechanical and electric typewriters of the
conventional
variety" and having "changed
the type ball and pitch on Selectrics many,
many times." And all the other supposed issues with
terminology and such come from either very, very vague recollections,
again with no real evidence to back it up, or from apparently
deliberate disinformational
BS that would very quickly
spread throughout the right wing/conservative mediasphere.
All of this confused nonsense might have had some amusement value if it
wasn't for the fact that it contributed to the re-election of a really
bad President.
O) Other
thoughts
All this detective work is intriguing, but it's not really a job an
Internet troll should be doing. It's unfortunate that Bush's commanders
at the time, William Harris and Jerry Killian, aren't around to answer
some obvious questions about Bush's guard duty that Bush himself has
overtly avoided. However Bobby Hodges and Rufus Martin are still
around, though, and they should have been grilled much more than they
have been so far over Bush's Air National Guard history. Bush Sr. was
already a big shot at the time and then only several years later ran
for President during the Republican primaries before becoming
Vice-President to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Of course Bush Jr. became
Governor of Texas in 1995 and the US President in 2000. So it's
extremely unlikely that Martin and Hodges would have forgotten about
Bush when he was a junior officer at their base, especially the time he
was suspended from flying, which was apparently not so common a thing
judging from the DoD records.
Indeed, Hodges and Martin are on record evidently fibbing to the
grossly incompetent Thornburgh-Boccardi report panel when they both
told the panel that Bush's flight suspension recorded by the DoD as the
"Verbal orders of the Comdr on 1 Aug 72" (see Suspension Notice)
was a reference to Hodges, although Hodges says he couldn't
specifically remember issuing the verbal order "over 30 years ago." See
CBS Panel Report, page 154
This is very much explicit BS since other DoD records clearly show
that Killian was the Squadron Commander and therefore Bush's direct
superior and the one who would have issued such a verbal order in the
chain of command, and that Hodges simply signed off on the order over a
month later on Sept, 5, 1972. See Hodges's Suspension Sign-off
Another apparent discrepency shows up when you look at another
pilot who was Bush's friend at the time and future business partner,
James Bath, the only other pilot suspended in Aeronautical Orders Number 87
but whose name is redacted (his entry follows Bush's). His suspension
is identical to Bush's aside from the date, Sept 1, 1972 -- exactly a
month after Bush's. But the date on the order is the 29th, not quite a
30 day grace period -- odd considering that it took almost twice the
time
for Bush's verbal suspension to become official. Hmmm....
Therefore it's my very strong feeling, logically enough, that if we
can't get Bush to come clear, then if either Hodges or
Martin were to be put under oath and asked about the memos and Bush's
real military history, there would be little need for all this tedious
detective work into early 1970's tech and all this painfully detailed
assembly of supporting DoD evidence.
But all this research is what CBS News, as well as the Boston Globe,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, should have done. They had the
resources and probably at least a few earnest, bright interns do
a
little bit of
research before blindly and timidly accepting the laughably inadequate
analyses being done by highly dubious bloggers, experts, and
people
and
organizations in general looking to discredit both the story and Dan
Rather, as well as throw doubt on all the other much less suspect
evidence to Bush's Guard duty or lack thereof.
We've also have become seduced into thinking that you can find anything
on
Google if you look hard
enough, but Google can only index information
that people have made an effort to put on the Web in some form. If
you're talking about a technology
that was obsolete before there was
even a Web, things can get very sketchy.
Not only did I rummage about an actual library for more info, I even
went further to pick through the archives at the Charles Babbage Institute.
But I'm not feeling particularly pleased with myself about what all my
research and sampling has uncovered -- it was really, REALLY time
consuming and I have other things I much rather focus on. And it wasn't
my job -- it was CBS's. And the Boston Globe's, and ABC's, and the New
York
Times',
and CNN's, and basically any "news" organization that prides itself as
being responsible
journalists who do their homework and try to keep its
viewers or readers as well-informed on facts as much as possible.
The true lapse in the memos mess was how our much ballyhooed free
press failed so miserably. Instead of concentrating some resources into
digging deeper to
reconcile the central "mystery" of how the contents could be true but
not the documents themselves, they all took instead the tabloid route
to report only on the specious he said/she said aspects of a wholly
contrived controversy, or else simply relayed some of the bogus
analyses of the memos without really looking at what they were relaying.
And when the
Pentagon quietly released more of Bush's records on Sept. 24th,
apparently nobody in the press paid much heed, even though one of the
documents was proportionally spaced --
the central reason for the origin of all those forgery charges leveled
against
the CBS memos.
Bush himself has been acting exactly like a thoroughly guilty man who
got off on a technicality or through some ethnically dubious wheeling
and dealing. He's been mostly standing back and letting others,
including his wife, spin things with the basic mantra going something
like "He was honorably
discharged, end of story."
There have been direct answers whatsoever in regards to how very
sketchy his Guard service evidently was during his last two years of
service. And even basic questions about the authenticity of the CBS
memos have also also been deflected.
It wasn’t CBS’s failure to sufficiently authenticate the memos that was
the cause of the dark day for journalism – it was the totally
spineless, confused and researched-challenged behavior
of both CBS and the more responsible media that allowed rumors,
outright
lies and conspiracy
theories to completely overwhelm whatever
facts there were, as well as basically allow the bad guys to win the
day. If a right wing newsperson like Bill O’Reilly says something
that’s not quite true – even if it’s a whopper – liberals and leftists
in general will likely only roll their eyes. (“Well, what do you expect
– he’s Bill O’Reilly”) but liberal-leaning newspeople like Dan Rather
(and "leaning" is the right word when you compare his mostly dry
rhetoric over the years to any conservative newsman, leaning, falling,
or otherwise), regardless of how seldom they make mistakes, get
crucified when a mistake is made. “Rathergate”
indeed.
The memos and the consequent firestorm illustrates how very difficult
it is for the average person to be well informed on anything these
days. Instead of being authoritative and making good use of their much
greater resources, the mainstream media ended up being no more than
faces in an increasingly large crowd of information
peddlers –
dubious and
otherwise
But the big issue isn't about the
poor service of the press, or even really about Bush's Guard service
from over 30
years ago. He wasn't exactly the only rich boy from a very influential
family who was able to escape being sent to Vietnam via National Guard
service, and who was later able to get away with slacking off as the
Vietnam
War wound down. It was this whole recent business with the CBS Killian
memos that really speaks volumes about Bush's true moral character. He,
far better than anyone else, knows what he did and didn't do while
he was in the Guard, and yet he chose to stay silent on the key
issues throughout the entire turmoil over the memos, letting others to
confuse, deny, and outright lie in his behalf.
Regardless of what he did or didn't do back then, if he was an
honorable man now, he would have stood up and owed up to his past
actions instead of letting others get into trouble over them.
And just
what was up
with the withholding that proportionally spaced document?
And I think
that's it, except to say that no smart, well informed and
ethical person voted for Bush in 2004.
-BC