Tag: CBS

From Dan Rather’s defense of the Killian documents last night,

Document and handwriting examiner marcel matley analyzed the documents for CBS news.

He says he believes they are real…but is concerned about exactly what is being examined by some of the people questioning the documents….

Because detioration occurs each time a document is reproduced…..

And the documents being analyzed outside of cbs have

Been photocopied, faxed, scanned and downloaded…. And are far removed from the documents cbs started with.

But then the New York Times reports,

Mr. Matley said the documents the network sent him were so deteriorated from copying that it was impossible to identify the typeface.

So apparently CBS is concerned about people trying to authenticate poorly copied and deteriorated documents only when it’s someone other than their expert.

And an odd puzzle remains. If this document came from Killian’s personal file, as CBS claims, how did it end up being copied repeatedly to get into such an advanced stage of deterioriation?

Last night the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes debated former CBS producer Jonathan Klein about whether or not the CBS documents are fake. Here’s a partial transcript,

KLEIN: Yes, I mean, I have a lot of faith in the producer of this segment only because I worked with her for a long time. And she is absolutely peerless, I’d say, in the profession. She is a crack journalist. And in this case, she’s the same producer who broke the Abu Ghraib story.

And at the time, there was a big flurry of, you know, a lot of attempts to discredit that story. And it turned out to be even bigger than the story they originally broke.

But in this case, she’s worked on this story for four years. I mean, this is a multiple Emmy winning producer…

SNOW: But if you’ve worked on this for four years, you’re thinking, you know, I’ve got something here. And if you worked for four years, you’re going to want to make it work. Again, in talking to Gary Killian — one of the things he said in this conversation with her is I’ve got the names of some people who can directly contradict this, who have worked with my father. They were his superiors. They knew the president. And she said I don’t know, you know, I’ve got to find out if they’re Bush supporters. Again, is that the kind of question you’d really ask when you’re doing something like this?

KLEIN: Oh, it speaks to the care that they take to validate sources of all kinds. They’re not going to just throw somebody on the air just because they say something. It’s a real integral part of the “60 Minutes” process. They are probably the most careful news organization, certainly on television.

SNOW: No…

KLEIN: When it comes to the vetting sources.

SNOW: …but they put Ben Barnes on the air. And he’s working for John Kerry.

KLEIN: But they disclose things. You know, they disclose stuff like that. And they vet people’s veracity. And they have multiple checks and balances in the process to make sure that not too much slips by.

Now they’re human. They could make mistakes, but it’s not going to be by forgetting to call the sources that the…

SNOW: Because the point on CBS — “60 Minutes” got burned by a forged document case in the late 1990’s and ended up having to pay some money for it. It was the border patrol.

KLEIN: Well, their track record over 35 years is just about pristine. They have the best record of just about anybody.

Of course, this morning one of the sources cited by CBS — Retired Maj. General Hodges — is claiming that CBS misled him about the new documents and adds that he thinks they are fakes,

Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian’s supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were “handwritten” and after CBS read him excerpts he said, “well if he wrote them that’s what he felt.”

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70’s and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been “computer generated” and are a “fraud”.

Not surprisingly, the only thing Klein offered were ad hominems like this,

KLEIN: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and these loggers have no checks and balances and couldn’t — I agree. It’s an important moment because you couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing…

I’ll take someone sitting in his living room just writing over producers who deceive the people they’re turning to for verification anyday.

It’s also interesting that according to Killian’s son, CBS interviewed both him and his mother prior on Friday, but of course chose not to include any portion of that interview in their coverage of the controversy over the documents.

There doesn’t seem to be much wiggle room anymore — the CBS documents are clearly out-and-out frauds. Washington Post has a story noting that there are a number of features to the documents that just weren’t possible with 1970s typewriters,

William Flynn, a forensic document specialist with 35 years of experience in police crime labs and private practice, said the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. Documents generated by the kind of typewriters that were widely used in 1972 space letters evenly across the page, so that an “i” uses as much space as an “m.” In the CBS documents, by contrast, each letter uses a different amount of space.

While IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government. In addition, Flynn said, the CBS documents appear to use proportional spacing both across and down the page, a relatively recent innovation. Other anomalies in the documents include the use of the superscripted letters “th” in phrases such as 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, Bush’s unit.

“It would be nearly impossible for all this technology to have existed at that time,” said Flynn, who runs a document-authentication company in Phoenix.

Killian’s widow — who is very upset about the way her husband’s memory was used here — puts the final nail in the coffin. The most damaging memo was not an official document, but rather was supposedly written up for Killian’s own files. The only problem was that, according to Killian’s widow, he did not type. People tend to forget that in the pre-computing days people in authority such as managers or Lt. Colonels tended to dictate or write in long-hand and had other people type for them.

According to the Drudge Report, CBS News has already started an internal investigation into the matter.

ABC speculates on the effect it may have on the presidential campaign if the documents are proven fake,

The White House is declining to comment on the veracity of the documents. Many Democrats are worried that if they are found to be forgeries, it will be a setback for Sen. John Kerry’s campaign to defeat Bush in November.

What happened here is CBS thought it was going to stick it to Bush good on the Vietnam issue. Instead it has just handed him an enormous gift. Rather than having to answer questions about his National Guard service, Bush is going to be able to reframe the issue as one of a liberal press so out to get him that it will even run obviously forged documents to impugn him.

Already the left wing conspiracy theories have started that Karl Rove planted the documents to make CBS look like idiots. Right, and he probably delivered them in Black Helicopters.

One thing that CBS does need to do once they admit that the documents are fake is to come clean about how they received them. Clearly it looks like someone likely forged documents in order to use CBS to influence the election. CBS’ viewers and the rest of us deserve to know who was behind this.

Powerline comes close to sealing the deal on whether or not at least one of the memos is a fake by finding an apparently glaring textual error. In the August 18, 1973 memo, Jerry Killian describes being under pressure to give George W. Bush special treatment, writing,

Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job.

Only problem is that according to the Los Angeles Times, Staudt retired in 1972.