Tag: Dan Rather

According to the Washington Post, the handwriting expert Dan Rather claimed had analyzed the documents and “says he believes they are real” now claims that he never authenticated any of the documents for 60 Minutes II. According to the Post,

The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush’s former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer’s signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

“There’s no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them,” Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are “copies” that are “far removed” from the originals.

The Washington Post also points out a number of stylistic problems with the memos, including several raised by retired Col. Bobby Hodges whom CBS originally said had also authenticated the documents. According to The Post,

Stylistic differences. To outsiders, how an officer wrote his name and rank or referred to his military unit may seem arcane and unimportant. Within the military, however, such details are regulated by rules and tradition, and can be of great significance. The CBS memos contain several stylistic examples at odds with standard Guard procedures, as reflected in authenticated documents.

In memos previously released by the Pentagon or the White House, Killian signed his rank “Lt Col” or “Lt Colonel, TexANG,” in a single line after his name without periods. In the CBS memos, the “Lt Colonel” is on the next line, sometimes with a period but without the customary reference to TexANG, for Texas Air National Guard.

An ex-Guard commander, retired Col. Bobby W. Hodges, whom CBS originally cited as a key source in authenticating its documents, pointed to discrepancies in military abbreviations as evidence that the CBS memos are forgeries. The Guard, he said, never used the abbreviation “grp” for “group” or “OETR” for an officer evaluation review, as in the CBS documents. The correct terminology, he said, is “gp” and “OER.”

The case for CBS gets worse and worse. The longer CBS waits before starting an internal investigation parallel with an external independent look at the documents the more its credibility is going to be harmed if the documents ultimately prove to be fakes.

Source:

Expert Cited by CBS Says He Didn’t Authenticate Papers. Michael Dobbs and Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, September 14, 2004.

RealClearPolitics.Com notes that Dan Rather seems to want to shift the burden of proof on authenticating the apparently fake Texas Air National Guard documents,

“Document analysis isnÂ’t a pure science. ItÂ’s not fingerprints or DNA. ItÂ’s a very crude art. You have one expert testifying one thing and one another… Unless someone shows us definitive proof that the documents are not authentic, then we donÂ’t see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill.” – Dan Rather, quoted by Broadcasting & Cable (9/12/04)

Sorry, Dan. The burden of proof is on CBS to demonstrate that the documents are authentic, not on critics to prove that they aren’t authentic.

This is especially so since there is absolutely no traceable provenance to the documents that CBS has been willing to reveal. Don’t air photocopied documents that look suspicously like they were created on modern computers and whom came from an anonymous source and then complain that it’s up to other people to prove that they’re not authentic.

But it certainly does give a lot of insight into how mainstream media view their obligations to truth and accuracy.

CBS continues to maintain the documents it showed on Wednesday about Bush’s military service are authentic. But they still have yet to give any evidence of why we should accept it as authentic. The best they have is this,

At this time, however, CBS News states with absolute certainty that the ability to produce the “th” superscript mentioned in reports about the documents did exist on typewriters as early as 1968, and in fact is in President Bush’s official military records released by the White House.

Yawn. The problem is that all of the superscripted “th” combinations that people have been pointing out in authentic records are in monotype fonts and they are not true superscripts. Rather than extending above the tops of the characters as the superscripted “th” seen in the apparently forged documents, these “th” combos are 3/4 of the font size tall and simply leave a bit of white space between the bottom of the superscript and the line to give the appearance of being raised. They don’t extend above the tops of the normal characters and aren’t in proportionally spaced fonts, much less in Times Roman.

Apparently Dan Rather is going to address the forgery claims on tonight’s CBS News broadcast.