"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") has 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

---

Quick Index

Main summary
  1) The forger did not have access to all of the information needed to forge the memos
  2) The forger would had to have been not only improbably brilliant, but smarter than the entire blogosphere, as well as the mainstream media
  3) The supposed forger was a lot smarter than even the Washington Post
  4) You actually can't recreate the memos with a modern word processor
           4a) What happens when you try?
  5) Wouldn't Bush know if they were real or not? So what did he have to say about all this?
            Details, schmetails:
            A) What was the state of office technology at the time?
            B) How well can older devices recreate the memos?
            C) What do the official DoD records show?
            D) A Brief History of the CBS Memos
            E) Summary of  Bush's Guard Service
            F) Bush's point records for his last 2 years of service
            G) Bush's Air Guard service timeline
            H) Fun with Fonts
            I) What devices could print proportionally, superscript, etc, at the time of the memos?
            J) The IBM Executive Typewriter
            K) Diablo Daisywheel Printer
            L) How would Killian have access to a daisywheel printer?
           M) Why would Killian use a law firm?
           N) What about all those other issues with terminology and such that were also pointed out?
           O) Other thoughts
        

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Summary of why the Killian memos can't be forgeries

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

BUT, as you can see from this excerpt from the (inane and incompetent) Thornbough/Boccardi Panel Report:

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:

 Killian writes, "I'll backdate, but won't rate. Harris agrees." -- this refers to the
 May 1, 1972 - April 30, 1973 "Not Observed" Rating Report.

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)

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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:

1. Was there a waiting list to become a pilot of the Texas Air National Guard at the time you entered?
2. Do you recall Colonel Killian being dissatisfied in any way about your National Guard service in 1972 and 1973?
3. Were you ever ordered to take a physical in May 1972 or at any other time?
4. Did Colonel Killian say in May 1972 that you could do Equivalent Training for three months or transfer?
5. Do you recall being suspended from flight status on or about August 1, 1972? If so, how was that suspension communicated to you?
6. Why were you suspended from flight status? Was there a reason other than not taking a physical?
7. Describe your communications with Colonel Killian about a transfer to Alabama in 1972.
8. 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....

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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.

 

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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

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

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:

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)

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.

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.

Click to enlarge.

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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!

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.

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

He thinks this Model "C"  looks closest to the
 model he had (it came out in 1959):

This is a Diablo Systems daisywheel printer/terminal

Vydec Model 1800 Word Processor at the Rhode Island Computer Museum

Bush's being sworn in by Walter Staudt in a staged photo op

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.

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.

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