TheJerk
Re: "Rather Flawed"
Rather Flawed
"LAST WEDNESDAY, CBS News's 60 Minutes II aired a report that strongly challenged
George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. It's a story that has been explored
dozens of times in the past five years. Two things in the 60 Minutes II story made
it fresh--or, in newsroom parlance, gave it a peg. Ben Barnes, who served as attorney
general in Texas at the time of Bush's service, claimed that he had been pressured
to help Bush avoid going to Vietnam. But there were problems with Barnes's story,
not least that he had previously, and rather specifically, denied the account he gave
on 60 MinutesII. (Republicans questioned Barnes's motive, too, pointing out that
he is a lifelong Democrat who has raised significant money for John Kerry's presidential campaign.)
The second news peg was more important. 60 Minutes II had obtained "new documents"
from the "personal files" of the late Jerry Killian, Bush's commanding officer.
That the documents were unearthed some 32 years after the activities they describe
must have greatly excited the CBS producers who worked on the story.
According to an Associated Press story, the Killian memos "say Mr. Bush ignored a
direct order from a superior officer and lost his status as a Guard pilot because he
failed to meet military performance standards and undergo a required physical exam."
If accurate, then, the memos would provide documentary evidence to support the
long-circling rumors that Bush received preferential treatment to get out of serving in Vietnam.
But almost immediately, the authenticity of
the typed memos was questioned.
Although CBS claimed to have had them reviewed by document experts, numerous forensic
document examiners interviewed last Thursday by THE WEEKLY STANDARD and several
other media outlets concluded that the documents were likely forgeries.
"These sure look like forgeries," said 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. "I would
say it looks very likely that these documents could not have existed" in the
early 1970s, he says, when they were allegedly written.
Several other experts agreed. "They look mighty suspicious," said 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
the history of typewriters, said that while he is not an expert on typesetting,
the documents "look like typical word-processed documents." He adds: "I'm a
Kerry supporter myself, but I won't let that cloud my objective judgment: I'm
99 percent sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."
Philip Bouffard, another document expert who plans to vote for Kerry, reviewed
the documents at the request of Bill Ardolino, a weblogger who runs INDC Journal.
Says Bouffard: "It is remotely possible there is some typewriter that has the
capability to do all this . . . but it is more likely these documents were generated
in the common Times New Roman font and printed out on a computer printer that did
not exist at the time they were supposedly created."
Make It So,
Yousef |
