Why does USA Today have two more purported Killian memos than CBS News has revealed?
Bill Dyer - Beldar blog
Via AllahPundit and several emailers, my attention has been drawn to this odd six-page .pdf file — containing memos purportedly created by the late Col. Jerry Killian — that is posted on USA Today's website. That website also maintains this page entitled "President Bush's military records" that contains links to many other sets of .pdf scans.
In addition to the four memos on the CBS News website — dated, respectively, May 4, 1972; May 19, 1972; August 1, 1972; and August 18, 1973 — the odd USA Today .pdf file contains, at its first and fifth pages respectively, memoranda dated February 2, 1972, and June 24, 1973, that are not posted on the CBS News website and were not referenced in the "60 Minutes" broadcast last Wednesday.
(Via a trackback to AllahPundit's post, I see that Alan Brain at Command Post has also commented briefly on the two additional memos in the USA Today .pdf file, but I haven't yet seen them discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere; if my readers have, I'd appreciate them bringing other discussions to my attention via email or comments to this post.)
The text of the February 2, 1972, memo (as retyped by me in .html format) reads:
02 February 1972
SUBJECT: Flight Qualifications
Harris,
Update me as soon as possible on flight certifications. Specifically - Bath and Bush.
JERRY B. KILLIAN
The text of the June 24, 1973, memo (as also retyped by me in .html format) reads:
113th Fighter Interceptor Squadron
P. O. Box 34567
24 June 1973
Subject: Bush, George W. 1 ST Lt. 3244754FG
Sir:
1. I got a call from your staff concerning the evaluation of 1 st Lt. Bush due this month. His rater is Lt. Colonel Harris.
2. 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.
3. Advise me how we are supposed to handle this.
[/s/ handwritten signature]
JERRY B. KILLIAN
Lt. Colonel
(Note well: I've retyped the text of the memos in block quotes here simply for easy reference, and have tried to use .html formatting to make this retyped version roughly conform to what's in the USA Today .pdf file. But by all means, examine the .pdf pages rather than relying on what I've retyped here!)
The initial and most puzzling question, of course, is the obvious one: Where in the hell did these two extra memos come from, and why aren't they on the CBS News website? And as AllahPundit has pointed out, the USA Today website, here, contains .html retyped versions of the four memos that are on the CBS News website, but entirely omits to include .html retyped versions of the two memos dated February 2, 1972, and June 24, 1973, that are in its own .pdf file. I'll offer my speculations on these two questions later in this post.
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Just looked at in isolation, however, these two new memos have their own oddities, some of which AllahPundit has already noted. (The images I've inserted below to illustrate some of my observations are .bmp files cropped from a screencap of the USA Today .pdf file at 100 percent magnification, with a one-pixel black border added around each .bmp file to make obvious where each image begins and ends. Again, you should refer to the USA Today .pdf file itself for a better reproduction.)
The February 2, 1972, memo from the USA Today .pdf file has no formal inside addressee, but begins in a very colloquial fashion with "Harris," — with the name followed by a comma, rather than a colon.
The February 2, 1972, memo from the USA Today .pdf file has a typed signature, but no handwritten one. However, it has a very blurred scribble in its top left corner that might conceivably be interpreted as Col. Killian's initials — arguably similar to the scribbles in the top left corners of the memos dated May 19, 1972, and August 18, 1973. Additionally, however, the February 2, 1972, memo from the USA Today .pdf file has some sort of scribble in the center of the bottom third of the page — a scribble that is mostly illegible, but whose first letter might be a cursive letter "G."
The June 24, 1973, memo has the same centered, mock-letterhead address, that we see, for example, on the May 4, 1972, and August 1, 1972, memos from the CBS News website. But there are two obvious differences. First, the June 24, 1973, memo from the USA Today file has the superscripted "th" which does not appear in the mock-letterhead address of the May 4, 1972, and August 1, 1972, memos from the CBS News website (but which superscripted "th" does appear in the text of the May 4, 1972, and August 18, 1972, memos from the CBS News website). Second, the mock-letterhead address from the June 24, 1973, memo from the USA Today file completely omits the third line — "Houston, Texas 77034" — that appears in the mock-letterhead address in both the May 4, 1972, and August 1, 1972, memos from the CBS News website.
The June 24, 1973, memo from the USA Today .pdf file appears to have a comma after "24 June" and before "1973" ... the blob there is hard to make out, but the spacing between "June" and "1973" is greater than the spacing between "24" and "June" — and that makes me think it's probably a comma rather than a photocopying artifact. Differences among the various date formats within the four CBS News memos have already been widely commented upon. (Note that there's no comma between "February" and "1972" in the February 2, 1972, memo from the USA Today .pdf file; this is an inconsistency even between the two additional memos from the USA Today .pdf file on their own.)
The June 24, 1973, memo from the USA Today .pdf file appears to use a small-caps font for the "ST" after the numeral "1" in its subject line. (The small-caps font is especially obvious on the "T" when compared to the regular, lower-case "t" in the "Lt." immediately after it.) The text of this memo uses regular lower-case letters for the "st" — and I don't believe that any of the other memos use a small-caps font anywhere! Of course, small-caps fonts are easy to do in Microsoft Word (and relatively easy to do in .html, as I've done here). But creating the equivalent look with a 1972-era typewriter would presumably require more of the same sort of implausible stunts (for instance, switching out a typeball element) that have been postulated for the superscripted "th" entries.
The June 24, 1973, memo from the USA Today .pdf file again has no formal inside addressee, but is informally addressed to "Sir:" — this time with a colon, rather than a comma.
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But there are other peculiarities in the .pdf file from the USA Today website besides its inclusion of the two memos that aren't on the CBS News website. Specifically, there are significant differences between the versions of the four memos from the CBS News website and those same four memos as contained in the USA Today .pdf file:
For example, as AllahPundit has noted, with respect to the May 4, 1972, memo, Bush's street address is visible in the USA Today version, but blacked out (probably by a Magic Marker) in the CBS version.
As AllahPundit has also noted, with respect to the May 19, 1972, memo, portions of the text are underlined in the CBS News version, but the USA Today version is clean.
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Returning to my earlier question — where did USA Today get either (a) the six-page .pdf file that's on its website, or (b) the documents which someone scanned to create that six-page .pdf file?
USA Today's website links page entitled "President Bush's military records" first contains a number of links to documents released by the White House in February 2004. As its explanation for the link to its six-page .pdf file, the page was apparently updated to add this paragraph (hyperlink in original):
In September, documents emerged showing a National Guard commander criticizing Bush in memos. The commander, who died in 1984, concluded that Bush was failing to meet standards for fighter pilots, but the commander felt pressure from superiors to "sugar coat" his judgments. The authenticity of the documents has been questioned.
See the memos.
This paragraph thus does not state where or from whom USA Today obtained either that .pdf file or, perhaps, the six pages that have been scanned into it. The filename and path of the USA Today .pdf file, however — "http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-09-09bushdocs.pdf" — is in a significantly different format from the .pdf filenames and paths of the February records. The date reference incorporated into the .pdf filename — "2004-09-09" — could equally well suggest that USA Today uploaded the .pdf file onto its servers, and created the hyperlink to it, on Thursday, September 9, 2004 (the day after the "60 Minutes" broadcast), and/or that the .pdf file itself was created on that date. And whoever scanned the documents to create this six-page .pdf file, it's entirely possible that it was originally created with a different filename, and obviously without the eventual path that became part of its URL on the USA Today website; and it's entirely possible and not unlikely that the .pdf file was renamed after it was originally created.
The two obvious — and obviously speculative — possibilities are that (1) CBS News gave either the six-page .pdf file or the documents scanned to create it to USA Today, or (2) CBS News' own source gave either the six-page .pdf file or the documents scanned to create it to USA Today. (These pretty obviously did not come from the White House, which on Thursday redistributed copies of the four memos that CBS News had earlier faxed to it; on those copies, the CBS News fax header is clearly apparent at the top of each page.)
I'm inclined to think that the first possibility is more likely, simply because I cannot imagine that if USA Today had independent contact with CBS News' source, it would have failed to say so or to have done some sort of independent reporting on this controversy. Indeed, USA Today has been among the mainstream media outlets questioning the documents' authenticity, and surely it could and would have added to that debate whatever it knew of CBS News' source. Even if it chose not to reveal the identity of the source, USA Today could at least — like CBS News has done — have told us that it believes the source to be reliable.
If USA Today got the six pages, or the six-page .pdf file, from CBS News, however, then that raises the troubling question of why CBS News didn't use the two additional memos in its "60 Minutes" report or post those two pages on its website. An exercise of judgment as to what was "newsworthy," perhaps? If so, simple professionalism would have dictated that CBS News disclose, at a minimum, that it had received more documents from its source than it had chosen to present to the public.
And this in turn raises two other questions:
First, although to my untrained eye the two new memos appear to be in the same general font/typeface as the documents that CBS News did release, they contain obvious quirks that might quickly lead one to wonder about their authenticity — the absence of the "Houston, Texas 77034" line from the memo dated June 24, 1973, for instance, or the small-cap font/typeface used in "1 ST Lt." in that memo. So did CBS News "deep six" these documents from its "60 Minutes" broadcast and its website in an intentional effort to prevent questions about the remaining four memos' authenticity?
Second, what other documents, if any, does CBS News have from its source that it's chosen not to reveal — and why?
As for why USA Today didn't include the two memos from its own .pdf file in the retyped .html version on its website, I can again only speculate. Perhaps whoever did the .html version was working from the CBS News website rather than from USA Today's own .pdf file. Or perhaps that person made an editorial judgment that only the four memos featured by CBS News were "important" in some sense. Maybe USA Today simply didn't snap to what it had. Conspiracy theorists might posit that USA Today didn't want to point the two additional memos out because it was trying to take it easy on CBS News, or that it was actively complicit in CBS News cover-up; but I tend to discount those ideas simply because if they were true, why would USA Today post its own .pdf file at all?
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Of course, the very existence of the two additional memos — plus the fact that the USA Today versions of the memos common both to its and the CBS News website are "cleaner" than the CBS News versions (without the underlining and Magic Marker redaction) — pretty clearly indicates that USA Today didn't just copy and then aggregate into one file the .pdf versions that CBS News had on its own website.
The Magic Marker redaction, presumably done by CBS News, is arguably defensible on grounds of protecting Bush's privacy — although that address has been disclosed in other publicly available documents and Bush hasn't lived there in over 30 years. The underlining, however, is simply sleazy — obviously done to emphasize particular lines that someone at CBS News thought were important, and just as obviously (from their absence in the USA Today versions) not done contemporaneously by, for example, Col. Killian himself.
It's possible — and one hopes true — that CBS News has more pristine versions of whatever it received from its source somewhere in its files, and just uploaded to its website some reporter's "working copy." Anyone at my law firm who submitted that sort of "working copy" as a court exhibit, however — without making it very obvious that the underlining was not part of the original (or "closest to original") version that we had and that the underlining had been added by our office — would promptly be fired, and I'd consider it a serious ethical violation of my duty of candor to the tribunal.
CBS News has — hypocritically — faulted their blogosphere and mainstream media critics for doubting the authenticity of these documents based on examinations of the versions posted in .pdf-scanned format on CBS News' own website. Of course, the inability of anyone else to examine whatever the best (closest-to-original) versions of the documents is entirely the fault of CBS News, which hasn't made them available to anyone else.
But now we find that the versions CBS News posted on its website have been altered and contaminated as well. This shows a shocking lack of understanding, and/or appreciation of the importance, of the entire concept of "chain of custody" and maintenance of documentary evidence in a pristine format.
In my profession, the sloppiness that CBS News has shown would almost certainly result in these documents being excluded from evidence in any court proceeding — and it might very well put the proponent's law license at risk! Whatever else one may say about this entire shoddy episode, no one can plausibly claim that CBS News has handled itself — or these documents — in anything remotely resembling a professional manner.
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