Bobert:

Can you offer any evidence that the documents that Dan Rather presented were forged???

It was shown by several different people that the different size fonts Like the tiny elevated th after 187th) couldn't have been produced by the typewriters of the day without changing type balls which would have messed up the vertical alignment. Even if they could have done that, the horizonal spacing could not have been done on typewriters of the day. There were no Laser printers at that time, maybe dot matrix which is easily recognized.

It was done on a laser printer with a word processor with kerning. Someone should demand a Senate investigation tho prove if it is legit or forged and who forged it but Valerie Plamegate is more important because it might damage the president and National Guardgate would only damage Democrats.

        

9/9/2004: Bush Guard Documents: Forged

I 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."

The spacing is not just similar—it is identical in every respect. Notice that the date lines up perfectly, all the line breaks are in the same places, all letters line up with the same letters above and below, and the kerning is exactly the same. And I did not change a single thing from Word's defaults; margins, type size, tab stops, etc. are all using the default settings. The one difference (the "th" in "187th" is slightly lower) is probably due to a slight difference between the Mac and PC versions of the Times New Roman font, or it could be an artifact of whatever process was used to artificially "age" the document. (Update: I printed the document and the "th" matches perfectly in the printed version. It's a difference between screen and printer fonts.)

There is absolutely no way that this document was typed on any machine that was available in 1973.



Kerry Supporter: 99% Sure it's a hoax

The experts are weighing in, and it doesn't look good for the documents. The Weekly Standard's Steve Hays did a little more research and discussed the documents with several forensic examiners. Here's what they have to say:

    And according to several forensic document experts contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD say the Killian memos appear to be forgeries. Although it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty the authenticity of documents without a careful examination of the originals, several irregularities in the Killian memos suggest that CBS may have been the victim of a hoax.

    "These sure look like forgeries," says William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation's top analyst of computer-generated documents. Flynn looked at copies of the documents posted on the CBS News website (here, here, here, and here). Flynn says, "I would say it looks very likely that these documents could not
have existed" in the early 1970s, when they were allegedly written.

    Several other experts agree. "They look mighty suspicious," says a veteran forensic document expert who asked not to be quoted by name. Richard Polt, a Xavier University philosophy professor who operates a website dedicated to typewriters, says that while he is not an expert on typesetting, the documents "look like typical word-processed documents."

And later:

    So can we say with absolute certainty that the documents were forged? Not yet. Xavier University's Polt, in an email, offers two possible scenarios. "Either these are later transcriptions of earlier documents (which may have been handwritten or typed on a typewriter), or they are crude and amazingly foolish forgeries. I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but I won't let that cloud my objective judgment: I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."


CBS admits memo fraud:


CBS News acknowledged for the first time yesterday that retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a disgruntled former guardsman, was its source for the four memos, and the network accused him of victimizing it by lying to producer Mary Mapes.
On the newscast, Mr. Rather introduced a brief clip of a testy interview he conducted with the retired lieutenant colonel in Texas this weekend.
In the interview, Col. Burkett admits that he lied to CBS when he said the documents had come from a former guardsman.
"I simply threw out a name that was basically I guess to take a little pressure off for a moment" as the CBS producer pressed for the name of the source, Col. Burkett told Mr. Rather.
Col. Burkett later provided a second name as the source, but CBS says it has been unable to verify the source's connection to the Guard.
On Sept. 10, when Mr. Rather was asked whether an internal probe was needed, he said it was "not even discussed, nor should it be." Yesterday, CBS said a soon-to-be-named panel would conduct an "independent review" to "help determine what actions need to be taken."
Col. Burkett has waged a long campaign to discredit Mr. Bush's military service. A CBS statement last week said it got the memos from "unimpeachable sources."
Col. Burkett, who has connections to Texas Democrats, has retracted some of his past accusations. Witnesses have failed to support his other accusations.
Journalistic ethics require reporters to conceal the identities of confidential sources, unless the source deliberately provides wrong information or agrees to be named.
Republicans, who last week called for an investigation into whether Mr. Rather was trying to influence the presidential election with fake documents, kept up the pressure yesterday.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said the CBS investigation should probe whether the documents came out of a Burkett-Democratic Party conspiracy. The Democratic National Committee has begun broadcasting an ad, "Fortunate Son," that attacks Mr. Bush's Guard duty.
The Associated Press reported during the weekend that Col. Burkett communicated with Kerry advisers before CBS aired the memos.
"CBS has now answered questions about the authenticity of the documents but questions remain surrounding who created the documents, who provided them to CBS, and if Senator Kerry's supporters, party committee or campaign played any role," Mr. Gillespie said.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who has suggested that White House political adviser Karl Rove floated the fake memos, responded by unleashing another attack on Mr. Bush.
"We know that George Bush was a fortunate son, a child of privilege, who refuses to admit that he used his connections to avoid fulfilling his requirements," Mr. McAuliffe said. "But what we still don't know is why Bush didn't fulfill his duty to his country or why he has continued to lie to the American people about it."
CBS News President Andrew Heyward, in a personal statement, said the four memos should never have been used.
"Based on what we know," Mr. Heyward said, "CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."
Mr. Rather, who conservatives say is consistently biased against Republicans, also offered an apology. He said:
"Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers."
"If I knew then what I know now," he said, "I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.
"But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism."
"Memogate," as some have dubbed it, will surely rank high in the pantheon of journalistic scandals, up there with Janet Cooke's bogus Pulitzer-Prize-winning story at The Washington Post, and fictitious reporting by Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today.
All three newspapers did internal probes and admitted mistakes.
Mr. Rather disclosed the four memos on prime time Sept. 8 as a major exclusive. But within hours, bloggers and document analysts crowded the Internet with accusations that the memos were created by computer software not available in the early 1970s.
In the following days, recognized forensic document experts were nearly unanimous in telling the press that the memos were forged because they likely were typed on Microsoft Word software.
In addition, the signature of Col. Killian, who died in 1984 of a heart attack, did not appear to match known samples of his memos.
Attention then shifted to how CBS News veterans such as Mr. Rather could have aired such suspect papers and who could have provided them.
Suspicion centered on Col. Burkett, who has called Mr. Bush "Hitler." He has told stories — still unproven — of attempts inside the Guard to cleanse Mr. Bush's records of supposedly incriminating documents in the late 1990s when he worked at state headquarters.
In one account, Col. Burkett said he saw Mr. Bush's personnel file in a trash can near a museum on the grounds of Guard headquarters in Austin. But the friend he named to corroborate the story said he had no memory of such an incident.
Col. Burkett also retracted an accusation that the Guard retaliated against him for criticizing Mr. Bush's Guard service.
The CBS independent investigation likely will examine why "60 Minutes" relied on a critic such as Col. Burkett for the documents, and apparently ignored some of its own hired document experts, who expressed doubts before the broadcast.
His lawyer, David Van Os, released a statement last week attacking the Bush White House and reporters for focusing on whether the memos were legitimate.
The CBS statement yesterday cast the network as being victimized by Col. Burkett.
Col. Burkett "also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source," the statement said.
"Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point," the network said.
CBS also was feeling political pressure. Thirty-nine Republican members of Congress sent a letter to Mr. Heyward calling for an investigation.
Mr. Bush weighed in during the weekend.
"There are a lot of questions about the documents and they need to be answered," Mr. Bush said in New Hampshire. "I think what needs to happen is people need to take a look at the documents, how they were created, and let the truth come out."
Press reports on Mr. Bush's National Guard service have surfaced nearly every time he runs for office.
The Yale graduate enlisted in the Texas Guard in May 1968 and successfully completed flight training in the demanding F-102 interceptor. In 1972, he sought to leave flight status and move to Alabama to work on a senatorial campaign. He received an honorable discharge in 1973 and enrolled in Harvard Business School.
Democrats say Mr. Bush was "AWOL" by missing drills during that 1972-73 span. The White House says he arranged with Col. Killian to go off flight status and made up missed drills to earn enough credits for an honorable discharge.
The CBS memos further inflamed the Democratic accusations. According to the documents, Col. Killian ordered Mr. Bush to take a flight physical and Mr. Bush refused. A memo also discussed pressure from higher-ups to "sugarcoat" his performance evaluations.
As the "60 Minutes" documents crumbled under the weight of evidence, Mr. Rather changed course. He subsequently interviewed a former Guard secretary, 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox. An admitted Bush critic who calls him "unfit" to be president, Mrs. Knox said she believed the memos are fake, but contended that some of their contents were true.
But Mr. Bush's flying mates and Col. Killian's son, rebutted that accusation. They said pilots were never ordered to get physicals and that Mr. Bush was well respected by fellow pilots.