Yet few are aware of these facts… they’ve heard the accusations of fraud and those who want to believe they’re frauds have drawn a conclusion and are unshakable.
So, the accusers have served their purpose.
Don’t you just love the high regard for truth and accuracy we have in this country??
Now excuse me while I go vomit.
I would argue that it takes more mental gymnastics to view the documents as authentic than it does to view them as fakes. The weight of the evidence is squarely on the side of forgery. None of CBS’s defenses have withstood scrutiny.
If the documents are forgeries, then I wonder how this came to pass:
Frankly, I don’t even understand why anyone continues to bring up the issue of GWB’s service. It seems by all accounts that he was a spoiled little drunken brat during that period of his life and his family pulled strings to keep him out of harm’s way and also out of the media to avoid political embarassment. The Democrats should stick to substantive issues.
Moving this from IMHO to Great Debates.
And Fox News and CNN and the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and the Guardian have Omelets on theirs. Everyone’s screwed up a big story in the last year or two.
What’s the big deal here? Even if the documents are forgeries, there’s no evidence of malice in this case. Can the same be said for Bush’s pushing of the African yellowcake forgeries?
No, his source gave illegal information, but not fraudulent information. And, there is another side to this too. CBS may still want to protect a source, for example, if the source has been reliable in the past and they have reason to believe that the source obtained these documents believing them to be authentic.
All I can say is that there are going to be a lot of people who look pretty silly if these documents do turn out to be authentic. As for me, I don’t have a horse in this race…Maybe they are real, maybe they are not. Hopefully, time will tell.
Hear, hear!
I’d be even more certain that they were frauds if the WH had acted as if they were fakes.
IIRC, not all of the docs are being questioned- some seem to be legit.
I realize that this thread is more about the behaviour of CBS than it is about the mechanics of fonts and such but if anyone’s interested in that aspect, we’ve discussed it extensively here and here.
CBS’s own experts went on TV stating they did not and would not vouch for the authenticity of the documents. They have no evidence they can show to support their claims other than their word it exists and they are keeping it hidden to protect their sources. Given the nature of the material this places CBS in the position of a 521 group. If they don’t want to substantiate their claim that’s fine, they just need to file the appropriate paperwork as a soft-money political group and present it as advertising.
That’s incorrect. All of the documents that are signed contain Killian’s signature (or at least a forgery of it) and Killian was still active. I think what you saw was someone talking about Colonel Walter Staudt who’s signature is not on any of the documents. He is, however, mentioned in the CYA memo which is dated 18 August 1973. Staudt retired in 1972. The CYA memo contains this sentence:
But there is some question about whether Staudt may still have wielded some influence even after his retirement. From
here:
Hodges has recanted. He says that he was asked to verify the documents over the phone, and furthermore that CBS misrepresented what they had, and then misrepresented his comments. Basically, what happened was CBS phoned him and said they had handwritten memos from Killian that said X, and wanted to know if that sounded plausible. Hodges said, “Well, if that’s what he wrote, then that must be what he felt”.
Since then, Hodges discovered that there were no handwritten originals, and that the documents CBS has are in dispute. Hodges is now of the opinion that the documents are forgeries.
As far as I know, CBS can not produce a single expert willing to testify that the documents are genuine. On the other hand, EVERY expert consulted by the Washington Post, ABC News, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and CNN have all said that they believe the documents are forgeries or at least questionable.
CBS’s response to this? “Expert opinion is divided, which is not unexpected”. This is a load of horse manure. Expert opinion is not divided. Even if CBS manages to cough up an expert who thinks they are real, he’ll be outnumbered about 20-1.
Furthermore, (and here’s the really damning part), CBS consulted two experts before they aired the documents, and both experts said they had grave misgivings about the documents. Said one, “If you air these on Tuesday, on Wednesday you’ll have hundreds of document examiners asking you the same questions I’m asking now.”
So CBS had reasonable doubt that the documents were forgeries, and they ran the story anyway. And they didn’t mention the doubts of their experts in the piece. This goes beyond shoddy journalism and into reckless disregard for the truth. At the very least, they should have presented the documents as ‘possibly authentic’ and mentioned that there was still dispute among experts. They did not. They are guilty. Even if the documents turn out to be real, suppressing the opinions of experts that they sought out is shoddy practice.
OTOH, the IBM Executive series, the other typewriter people mention when making that argument (but which others conveniently fail to mention when attempting to debunk it), was less expensive.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
What journalistic purpose can be served by protecting people who endangered the life of an American intelligence agent and her sources for a bit of petty revenge? You DO see there’s a difference in magnitude here, don’t you? And that it falls against the Plame sources, not the CBS sources.
The secretary has said that she used a manual Olympia typewriter until the early 70’s, when it was replaced with an IBM Selectric.
Neither of those typewriters could possibly have made that memo. Both a monospaced machines. The Selectric Composer is a completely different machine, and that office did not have one.
Also, there is a web site where someone who has a Selectric Composer tried to recreate the documents, and failed. The character spacing and line spacing were quite different.
Moreover, the secretary denies typing them herself. That still leaves the questions of who typed them, when and how they were typed, and how the mystery typist managed to reproduce the same information that was in the actual memos Knox referenced.
Has anyone tried to recreate them on an Executive?
From what I understand, the Executive can’t do it because it uses a fixed type bar and can’t do true superscript. You have to use a custom key with a little ‘th’ imprinted on it, but the character still fits in the line of the others. Some of the authentic CBS documents have that type of ‘pseudo superscript’, including ironically a document that CBS showed as an example of superscript that showed their document could be real. They didn’t even notice the difference.
Do you have a link about this, preferably with pictures?
Also, what do you think of the claim that some characters (mainly digits, IIRC) in the memos don’t look like Microsoft’s Times New Roman, and are closer to IBM’s Press Roman?
CBS Guard Documents Traced to Tex. Kinko’s
Burkett has been the subject of much speculation on the blogs as a potential source. Burkett has been attacking the guard for some time over medical costs they refused to pay, and has a definite axe to grind. In the last election he surfaced and claimed that he had seen from very incriminating documents about Bush in a cache that he was ordered to destroy. He failed to produce the documents and was generally dismissed as a fraud.
Rather worked that case then, and there is some suggestion that he has been working it ever since. So then perhaps Burkett surfaces again and tells Rather, “I found the documents.” Now they have the proof they need, and go public. Rather just refused to believe that Burkett was dishonest.
Anyway, that’s the speculation in the blogosphere. If this does get tracked back to Burkett, it’ll be very interesting.
Getting back to the OP…
I would expect that, assuming the documents are forgeries, that we are not treading any new ground here. Surely there is a journalistic precedent for that scenario and CBS should follow it.
As a journalistic layman, I can see arguements on both sides of this debate. I would wonder if the source of these docs, again assuming that they ARE forgeries, might be in physical danger if he were exposed.
We need someone with a background in journalism, like Jonathan Chance, to weigh in here.
I’m not sure that YRC (you recall correctly). Can you give us a cite explaining which of these documents are **not **suspect? If not, then you shouldn’t post otherwise.