Category: CBS

ABC News finally located retired National Guard colonel Walter Staudt and interviewed him this afternoon. Andrew Heyward will wish that Dan Rather and the CBS News crew had taken the time to do the same before running with the Killian forgeries:

The man cited in media reports as having allegedly pressured others in the Texas Air National Guard to help George W. Bush is speaking out, telling ABC News in an exclusive interview that he never sought special treatment for Bush.
Retired Col. Walter Staudt, who was brigadier general of Bush’s unit in Texas, interviewed Bush for the Guard position and retired in March 1972. He was mentioned in one of the memos allegedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian as having pressured Killian to assist Bush, though Bush supposedly was not meeting Guard standards.
“I never pressured anybody about George Bush because I had no reason to,” Staudt told ABC News in his first interview since the documents were made public.

Staudt denies ever having any contact with politicians or anyone else before swearing George Bush into the TANG. He insists that George Bush got into the National Guard the same way everyone else did. Nor was Staudt ever contacted after his retirement about Bush or his performance in the TANG; Staudt had no involvement in TANG operations at all, once retired.
So Dan Rather, Andrew Hayward, Terry McAuliffe, and a host of other Democrats want George Bush to answer the content of these forgeries — and yet they never bothered to check if the content was even accurate. All they have for sources are an eighty-six-year-old Bush-hating secretary talking about her boss’ state of mind from thirty years ago, and a serial hoaxer with a huge axe to grind against both the Guard and George Bush. Every one of their experts have backpedaled on authenticating the documents, and even one of their two sources they have left has called them fakes.
I’m Captain Ed, and this is was CBS. (Hat tip to readers Michael and Denis)

In an article sure to raise blood pressure among CBS and Viacom executives, the Houston Chronicle reports that Bill Burkett — the main suspect in the forgery scam that CBS propogated — has a long history of false accusations against George Bush:

Bill Burkett, who has emerged as a possible CBS source for disputed memos about President Bush’s Guard service, has a long history of making charges against Bush and the Texas National Guard.
But Burkett’s allegations have changed over the years, and have been dismissed as baseless by former Guard colleagues, state legislators and others.
Even Burkett has admitted some of his allegations are false.

If that last sentence isn’t bad enough, Michael Hedges provides the background on those charges which Burkett has yet to acknowledge as false:

In an article Burkett wrote for the Internet last year he compared Bush to Hitler and Napoleon as one of “the three small men” who sought to rule through tyranny. “Three small men who wanted to conquer and vanquish,” Burkett wrote. Burkett confirmed authorship of that article in the February Chronicle interview.
Some of Burkett’s friends and associates say they don’t know whether he is the CBS source. …
During Bush’s first White House run in 2000, Burkett told reporters he overheard both ends of a phone conversation between former Texas Guard commander Gen. Daniel James III and Bush’s one-time Texas chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, that he said occurred in the summer of 1997. That was similar to what he told Hunter’s committee, the lawmaker recalled.
But that claim changed earlier this year.
In February, Burkett said he witnessed documents from Bush’s records in a garbage can at a Guard base in Austin.
“My eyes fixed on the first page,” he said in an interview in February. “It had Bush, George W. Lt1. What I did next still bothers me. I browsed through the top five or six pages.” …
Texas Guard officials said no Texas Air Guard records had ever been stored at the facility Burkett named.

And what about the Killian documentation? After all, as I reported yesterday, Burkett wrote on August 25th that he had “reassembled” Bush’s Guard file. But earlier, the Chronicle notes that Burkett had looked for anything Killian had written about Bush and come up empty:

One month ago, in an essay posted on a progressive Web site, Burkett theorized that Killian would have been a likely person to know more about Bush’s service. But, he conceded, “I have found no documentation from LTC Killian’s hand or staff that indicate that this unit was involved in any complicit way to … cover for the failures of 1Lt. Bush … ” Burkett went on to say, “On the contrary, LTC Killian’s remarks are rare.”

For someone who has had no trouble making things up before, going to Kinko’s and attempting to create Killian “documentation” is hardly a leap — it fits directly into the man’s character. Further, he had the motive and the track record of conducting smears against George Bush.
All of this, it seems, should have been readily discovered by CBS had they attempted to vet Bill Burkett as a source. Of course, Rather also could have vetted Ben Barnes, his other primary source for the preferential-treatment story, to find out that he’d delivered a half-million dollars to the Democrats over the past five years and almost $75,000 to Kerry in this cycle. His own network had run a feature on Ben Barnes and his expectations for delivering big money to Kerry, back in June of this year!
This goes beyond mere incompetence. This string of lunatics and operatives on which Rather and CBS relied demonstrates a willful refusal to practice standard journalistic verification on sourcing as well as a deliberate attempt to mislead its viewers on the background of the people behind this smear. If it wants to keep CBS News alive, Viacom has to wrest control from Andrew Heyward and his gang of idiots before they take the rest of the network with them down the drain.

Bill Burkett, the man suspected to be the source of the forged Killian memos, wrote a scathing editorial piece for Online Journal as an open letter to George Bush, explicitly calling him a “liar” several times. More to the point of the recent controversy, Burkett made a startling assertion in the body of this op-ed piece:

George W. Bush, you may be the president [sic]. But I know that you lied.
I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to “obey the orders of the officers appointed over you”. I know that you not only lied to the American people in 1994, but have lied consistently since then. Mr. Bush, not every serviceman except you is incompetent. When you failed to show up as ordered for duty, they simply recorded the truth. And the truth was, they didn’t think you were especially important enough to jeopardize their own careers to cover for your absence by fraudulently counting you as present in any piece of documentation when you clearly were not present.
Now Mr. Bush, we have finally confirmed the truth concerning your failure to complete your minimum satisfactory drill participation in 1972 and 1973.

Burkett said on August 25th of this year that he had “reassembled” Bush’s TANG file and specifically called out the years 1972 and 1973 – the same years that the Killian forgeries were purportedly written. As Bandit notes in his discovery of this hateful rant, he repeatedly talks about “orders” and being “ordered” to attend specific drills or tasks, which again the forged memos also reflected.
So we have Burkett writing this rant on August 25 — and within two weeks, the memos are faxed to CBS from a Kinko’s 21 miles away from Burkett’s home. It appears very clear that Burkett “reassembled” the memos and passed them off to CBS as genuine, and that CBS simply took his word for it despite Burkett’s history as a Bush-hater and his discredited testimony regarding document-shredding at the TANG offices in Texas.
Now that we have an admission, if not a confession, from Burkett, will CBS finally come clean about its sourcing?
UPDATE: For more — lots more — on Burkett, start with PrestoPundit and work outwards.
UPDATE and BUMP: J_Crater makes a good point in the comments. During Marian Knox’s interview with the CBS show 60 Minutes II, she asserts that the memos contained “words in there that belong to the Army, not the Air Guard. We never used those terms.”
Of course, Bill Burkett was a Lt. Colonel in the Army … not the Air Force. Could this be another reason why the memos sounded so incorrect to our Air Force sources — and why CBS left that quote out of the online version of Knox’s appearance? Are they still trying to keep people from pinpointing Bill Burkett as their main source for this story, with all the excess baggage he brings?
UPDATE AGAIN: Sylvia Moreno attempts to rehabilitate Burkett in tomorrow’s Washington Post. I’ve helpfully included Burkett’s words in italics to illustrate Moreno’s futile effort:

For half a dozen years, Bill Burkett has lived a pretty uneventful life in this tiny West Texas town. He and his wife are regulars at the Whistle Stop Cafe, ordering bacon cheeseburgers with jalapenos and fries or the pork chop special on Mondays. He “visits,” as people like to say in these parts, with other ranchers over coffee at the Callahan County Farmer’s Co-Op. And like other polite locals, he drops in on the local elected officials to introduce himself.
He is, by most accounts, a nice man who, in an overwhelmingly Republican-voting area, might be seen as somewhat eccentric for his Democratic bias.

This past February, I was again questioned nationally concerning what I had seen and heard in May and June of 1997 regarding the cleansing of the personal military records of one 1st Lt. George W. Bush. These were specific events that I reported immediately and in a later letter to several state legislators in Texas, including state Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, in June 1998, in which I submitted my firsthand eyewitness account. I was then questioned under oath by five or six Department of Defense lawyers during the first week of January 2002 and I also submitted a sworn affidavit, again repeating the same facts in my civil case of whistleblower retaliation and retribution against me by Col. William Goodwin, Col. Jackie Taliaferro and Col. Archie Meador. Also last February, I did swear, when asked by Chris Mathews on MSNBCs Hardball, the response of the White House and Bush has always been that the ‘system’ of commanders, clerks and record keepers were remiss.
[Factcheck.org, a non-partisan watchdog group that monitors political claims, completely debunks everything Burkett has ever said, under oath or not, about the file-cleansing he supposedly witnessed. Burkett has no credibility, even if he does eat at the Whistle Stop Cafe.]

“He’s very bright; he’s not a hayseed,” said Royse Kerr, chairman of the Taylor County Democratic Club, which last spring invited Burkett to speak to the members about the “state of politics in America.”

And your command profile, Mr. Bush, is that the grunts are like beetles and snails to you. You talk a good line, but they are always at fault for your problems. It was that way when you flew at the 111th. … Your command profile, sir, is that you are a liar. … This is all bad enough, but to continuously lie to the American people for years is outrageous. One can easily see how this “slick Willie” act of falsity could potentially carry over into policy, such as weapons of mass destruction, an attack on Iraq, the price of a prescription drug program, your close insider working relationship with Ken Lay at Enron, or Vice President [sic] Cheney’s personal relationships and dealings with Halliburton.

Haigler said Burkett had received several death threats since his name surfaced as a possible source for “60 Minutes.” “There’s just a lot of crazies out here, but Bill Burkett is not one of them. And if the issue is whether Bill Burkett concocted a bunch of records, that makes me want to throw up,” Haigler said.

I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to “obey the orders of the officers appointed over you”.
How did he “reassemble” files he claimed were destroyed in Texas, while they actually were in Colorado? Haigler and Burkett want us to believe that Burkett saw the files being destroyed in Texas when they were in Colorado in 1997, but that somehow they survived this destruction that occurred before Burkett’s eyes and magically reconstructed themselves into Burkett’s hands last month.
Perhaps he pulled them out of John Kerry’s magic hat.
Can you believe that CBS based their entire story on the lunatic ravings of Bill Burkett? Unfortunately, having seen how they work, I can.

UPDATE, 6:15 ET:
UPDATE, 6:30 ET:
UPDATE, 6:40 ET: Okay, CBS didn’t release this on their own website, but Drudge got it instead, from CBS News division President Andrew Heyward:

We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that’s what we are doing.

As Instapundit and Kerryspot have both noted, Heyward not only misspelled “corroborated” (and they sat on this for six-and-a-half hours?), but they pronounce the memos “accurate” and not “authentic”.
The message: We presented America with fraudulent materials, for which Dan Rather personally vouched. Having spent the past four days desperately seeking anyone to back us up, we’ve now given up, but you should still believe us when we tell you that these forgeries accurately support our smear on George Bush. The search for better forgeries will continue.
If it took Heyward six extra hours to come up with this, Viacom needs to find someone who has a clue and a dictionary to run its news division.
Here’s a question: if CBS really has all of this “coroborating” evidence on hand, why not show it? Why was Dan Rather out chatting up Marian Knox this afternoon if their story was as well-sourced as Heyward claims? If the memos are “accurate”, why does one of them describe pressure being applied on Killian and Hodges by a general who had retired 18 months before the date of the memo? How did the memos get created if all Knox had in the TANG office was a manual Olympia and a standard Selectric, neither of which could do the proportional spacing and kerning evident in the memos?
Who gave the memos to CBS News?
Until Heyward and CBS News answers these questions, they haven’t “coroborated” anything. They’re also no longer a news organization; they’re the Nixon White House, defending the 18-minute gap on the tapes. They’re toast.

Fox News reported that CBS would be making a statement today at noon ET regarding the forgery fiasco that Dan Rather brought upon the Tiffany Network. If this is their response to the demands for accountability coming from new media and old, then CBS has more problems than just Dan Rather. CBS continues to insist that the memos are genuine, laughably both relying on and disputing the same statement by the octogenarian former secretary of Jerry Killian to authenticate the documents:

CBS News continued to defend the legitimacy of its recent story about President Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard, even as two experts it hired to examine records CBS used told ABC they could not vouch for their veracity.
Meanwhile, a former secretary in the guard said Tuesday she believed the documents in question were fake, although they accurately reflected the thoughts of one of Mr. Bush’s commanders.

The updated CBS report covers most of the new evidence and testimony unearthed in the past few days, including a fairly in-depth analysis of what its experts told ABC News. In disputing Emily Will and Linda James, CBS now says that they only had a peripheral role, echoing a statement given to ABC News yesterday. It also notes that Marcel Matley, the handwriting analyst that they claim authenticated all four memos, has backed away from his earlier statements and now acknowledges he only saw one document.
In fact, the only new piece to the CBS update is their inclusion of Marian Carr Knox, Killian’s former secretary, who has said that she believes the documents CBS used are forgeries, but that their content matches her 30-year-old recollection of Killian’s state of mind:

Killian’s former secretary, 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox, also questioned the documents in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
“These are not real,” Knox said in a story posted Tuesday on the newspaper’s Web site. “They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him.”
Knox told the newspaper she did not recall typing the memos, but that they echoed Killian’s views on Mr. Bush. She said he retained memos for a personal “cover his back” file he kept in a locked drawer of his desk, but she was not sure what happened to them when he died in 1984.

CBS added this statement today in response to Knox’s appearance:

CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said CBS did not believe Knox was a documents expert and that the network believes the documents are genuine.
“It is notable that she confirms the content of the documents, which was the primary focus of our story in the first place,” Genelius said.

So in one statement, CBS embraces Knox — who professes to hate George Bush and called him “unfit for office” in an earlier interview, which CBS neglects to mention — for confirming the content of the memos at the same time it rejects her testimony about the memos themselves because she is not a “documents expert.” Is CBS claiming, then, that she’s lying about not typing the memos herself? She said in her earlier interview that she did the necessary typing for Jerry Killian, which makes sense given the Killian family’s insistence that Killian didn’t type out notes. If she’s lying about that, then why should we believe her testimony regarding Killian’s state of mind?
Now, according to the CBS report itself, the entire story rests on authentication from Ben Barnes and Marian Knox, since all of their other named experts have bailed. Barnes is a major contributor to the Democratic Party, one of the top moneymen for Kerry’s campaign, a fact that CBS still fails to include in its reports. The equally partisan Knox has flat-out called the documents fraudulent and only offers hearsay recollections about the thoughts of a man from thirty years ago, long dead now and whose family insists felt exactly the opposite about George Bush.
And CBS still has no explanation for all of the content issues, such as incorrect dates for the due date on Bush’s exam or how a general who had long since retired could possibly pressure anyone to upgrade the evaluation of a reserve lieutenant, or why he would care.
These people need help.

Drudge links to a Sioux City (IA) Journal interview with Bob Schieffer, host of the CBS show Face the Nation and their longtime Washington correspondent. Schieffer distances himself from both Rather and his network by acknowledging that CBS has to either prove the memos are genuine or withdraw their story:

CBS News’ Bob Schieffer said Tuesday he hopes the network does more reporting to definitively prove the authenticity of memos 60 Minutes II received about President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard.
“I think we have to find some way to show our viewers they are not forgeries,” Schieffer, CBS’ chief Washington correspondent and host of the network’s “Face the Nation,” said at a news conference in Sioux City. “I don’t know how we’re going to do that without violating the confidentiality of sources.”

I believe this is the first attributed source within the Tiffany Network to acknowledge on the record that CBS has any kind of a problem with the Killian memos. Schieffer isn’t just any source, either. He’s a long-term on-air reporter with CBS and claims to be in daily contact with Dan Rather during this fiasco.
He also told the Journal that Rather really believes these to be genuine, a somewhat laughable contention after the revelations on ABC last night about disregarding their own experts’ opinions that the memos were fakes. Maybe that’s what Rather’s telling Schieffer; it’s certainly the party line at CBS, and it’s what they’re still feeding the public. Obviously, Schieffer isn’t completely sold on their veracity, even if he’s still sold on Rather’s.
He also dismissed the idea that the memos came from Republican operatives looking to destroy Dan Rather, but acknowledged that the CBS reticence about the sourcing could indicate that the memos came from Bush opponents:

Though Schieffer discounted suggestions that Rather received fraudulent documents, he acknowledged the source could have been a Bush opponent.
“People ask me, ‘Do I think somebody was trying to set up Dan Rather?’ I say, “No that’s completely out of the question,” said Schieffer, who addressed the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner/meeting Tuesday night. “Would somebody do this in an effort to smear George Bush? That may be so. We’re in the middle of a political campaign, and this would not be the first campaign where somebody on one side slipped something to a reporter because he feels it would hurt the guy on the other side.”

Schieffer is obviously torn between loyalty to his employer and friend on one hand, and objective reality on the other. The memos are obvious forgeries, with numerous typographical, style, and content errors. CBS’ insistence on their authenticity only makes everyone involved look either stupid or venal, and the ‘stupid’ option rapidly dissipated after the ABC report last night. The only way for CBS to clear itself of this disaster is for people like Schieffer to assert themselves and to insist that the network start behaving like a news organization again rather than the Nixon White House. This interview may be the start of that process.

ABC Evening News continues to chase down its competitor, CBS, on the Killian forgeries. Tonight, they broadcast an expose that alleges that CBS ignored the advice of several document experts who tried to warn them that the Killian memos were faked:

ABC’s Brian Ross interviewed the two experts who CBS hired to validate the National Guard documents and reports they ignored concerns they raised prior to the CBS News broadcast. “I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply,” Emily Will told Ross. “I did not authenticate anything and I don’t want it to be misunderstood that I did,” Linda James told Ross. Ross reports 2 experts told ABC News today that even the most advanced typewriter available in 1972 could not have produced the documents.

Up to now, we assumed that CBS ran with the forgeries not out of malice as much as avarice and ignorance. Now that view may turn out to have been too charitable. Far from failing to properly vet the documents, CBS knowingly moved forward with these forgeries, only stopping long enough to shop for a couple of supporting opinions from people who turned out to be unqualified to authenticate them.
This goes far beyond journalistic malpractice and could go as far as libel (or slander). Dan Rather and CBS knowingly broadcast a story they knew to be based on documents that could not be authenticated and were most likely forgeries, advice they received from their own experts.
Instead of attempting to verify the documents with the family, CBS ran to broadcast the material, knowing that it would smear a candidate for President. Verification would have been fairly easy; CBS knew where the family lived and had tracked down one of Killian’s superior officers. CBS could have held the story for a few more days while they brought the documents to these witnesses for further verification. Rather than follow normal journalistic practice, they misled General Hodges by telling him the memos were handwritten and never bothered to ask the Killian family at all.
Why?
Dan Rather has had a longstanding beef with the Bush family, going back to at least the 1988 interview in which the elder George Bush gave Rather an on-camera tongue-lashing. His political affiliations have been no secret either, appearing at a Democratic fundraiser with his daughter, who has been active in the Texas state party. It’s likely that Rather had a much lower threshold for evidence when it came to the Bush family; certainly, he seems to have a lower threshold for Republicans in general.
This is why Rather can base his entire story on a man who has raised a half-million dollars for the Democrats, almost a fifth of it this year on Kerry’s behalf, and a handful of memos that he knows to be true whether they’re forgeries or not. He knows it because George Bush is a Republican, and Rather is a partisan hack.
Now, some of you may read the above and say, “Gee, Captain, that’s just a bit harsh. How can you say all that?” (Some of you may be getting the rope to hang ’em, too.) I say that because there is no other explanation. Had Rather just been snookered — as I said earlier, it happens to everyone — Rather would have reacted intelligently and rationally, inviting more research and updating his readers on the progress.
Instead, Rather has acted like a cornered animal; he insisted that he didn’t need to prove anything to his critics, who were “political partisans”. CBS went out looking for more experts to support them and came up with a couple more, who have since wilted under the scrutiny that the media and the blogosphere has accorded this story. Rather and CBS then tried to pass the entire burden of proof onto his audience, saying that the mere possibility that a typesetting machine existed was good enough — ignoring several content errors that have also pegged the Killian memos as fakes. Now he’s stonewalling, hoping it blows over.
Does an innocent man react thusly? No. He deliberately published the memos, arrogantly believing that the Tiffany Network and the great Dan Rather would never be challenged. His unchecked hubris has brought him low, and now we must ask ourselves this question: how often has he held his audience in such low esteem? What other questionably-sourced stories has he and CBS fed us over the years and decades?
If CBS wants to rescue any measure of its credibility, it needs to jettison Rather and anyone else in the decision-making chain that allowed their own experts to be ignored, putting a fraudulent smear campaign on CBS broadcast stations intended to deliberately skew a presidential election. Lacking this response, the only rational choice America has is to tune out CBS. Not just Dan Rather, not just 60 Minutes, not just prime time, but every single television show on CBS.
It’s not just the partisanship — it’s the serial dishonesty that has to be excised from the mainstream media. The only way that will happen is if they feel the damage in their pocketbooks. (Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt)
UPDATE: The Elder at Fraters Libertas posted a list of CBS sponsors, complete with e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. Let’s get busy.
UPDATE II: ABC has posted an update of its broadcast story on its web page, and it’s much worse than I ever thought:

Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.
“I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter,” she said.
Will says she sent the CBS producer an e-mail message about her concerns and strongly urged the network the night before the broadcast not to use the documents.

She sent it by e-mail, meaning that she documented the transmission — and CBS didn’t even blink its eye.

A second document examiner hired by CBS News, Linda James of Plano, Texas, also told ABC News she had concerns about the documents and could not authenticate them.
“I did not authenticate anything and I don’t want it to be misunderstood that I did,” James said. “And that’s why I have come forth to talk about it because I don’t want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents.”

CBS’s response? The two women played a “peripheral role”, deferring to another expert who reviewed all four documents — presumably the one CBS stuck in front of the camera, Marcel Matley. However, Matley is a handwriting analyst, and by Matley’s own admission, he only reviewed one document. Why would true document analysts ‘defer’ to a handwriting analyst for document authentication? Answer: they wouldn’t. CBS did all the deferring, and it wasn’t to Marcel Matley. It was to Dan Rather.
CBS owes all of us an explanation of where they got those forgeries. Somehow, I think it will lead back to either the DNC or one of the main 527s supporting them. That’s why CBS has circled the wagons around the sorry and pathetic figure of Dan Rather.
When will Viacom stockholders finally insist on grown-up supervision at Black Rock?
UPDATE III: Jaws are dropping all over the blogosphere on this one, including Patterico, Instapundit, and Power Line (whose jaw drops cost you at least $800 per billing hour).
I know we all have argued that the media has an intrinsic leftist bias. I don’t think any of us expected to see a major broadcaster with a penchant for deliberately hoaxing its audience in order to promote its left-wing agenda and candidate.

Michael Dobbs and Howard Kurtz continue the Washington Post’s tough look at the Killian forgeries promoted by CBS and Dan Rather as “authentic”, even as late as today, as both their typography and their content clearly show them to be fraudulent. Now their expert witness has recanted his support, leaving Rather twisting in the wind:

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.

That makes two “experts” cited by CBS and Rather who have backpedaled furiously in the face of the meltdown. Retired General Bobby Hodges didn’t just backpedal, he said that CBS misled him about the memos in the first place. Matley, who has no love for George Bush, originally defended the documents, and then backed up to the position that he had only authenticated the signature on one memo. Now he’s backing all the way to Square One, admitting that authentication would be impossible without the originals.
Nor do Dobbs and Kurtz stop with the CBS “experts”, willing and unwilling, jumping off the ship. The Post devastates another recent addition to CBS’ “expert” staff:

In its broadcast last night, CBS News produced a new expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant. He said that IBM electric typewriters in use in 1972 could produce superscripts and proportional spacing similar to those used in the disputed documents. Any argument to the contrary is “an out-and-out lie,” Glennon said in a telephone interview. But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos’ authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network’s offices.
Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font, disputed Glennon’s statement to CBS. He said “fairly extensive testing” had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths.

You know that CBS is drowning when it relies on an “expert” with no credentials as a document analyst who refuses to authenticate the memos because he only saw them on line. Dobbs and Kurtz demonstrate proper journalistic technique by asking someone with professional background in the field to review the data, and they get a much different answer:

A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush’s National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.
The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS’s Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word.
“I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake,” said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font.

All of which led CBS to do some backpedaling of its own:

CBS executives have pointed to Matley as their lead expert on whether the memos are genuine, and included him in a “CBS Evening News” defense of the story Friday. Matley said he spent five to eight hours examining the memos. “I knew I could not prove them authentic just from my expertise,” he said. “I can’t say either way from my expertise, the narrow, narrow little field of my expertise.”
In looking at the photocopies, he said, “I really felt we could not definitively say which font this is.” But, he said, “I didn’t see anything that would definitively tell me these are not authentic.”
Asked about Matley’s comments, CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said: “In the end, the gist is that it’s inconclusive. People are coming down on both sides, which is to be expected when you’re dealing with copies of documents.”

They have moved from issuing absolute affirmations of the documents to declaring the evidence “inconclusive” within the past 48 hours. The walls are crumbling at the siege of CBS, and within two or three days, we may see a white flag and the public offering of Dan Rather’s behind as a peace offering. After all the intellectually dishonest posturing, nothing less will do.

Ratherbiased.com has an instant transcript of Dan Rather’s latest evasion of the charges that he used forgeries in a crude attempt to smear George Bush. After noting, finally, that not all of the critics of the documents are “political partisans”, Rather latches onto a very arcane defense in order to establish their authenticity:

Rather: Richard katz, a software designer found other indications in the documents. He noticed the lower case l is used in documents instead of the actual numeral one. That would be difficult to reproduce on the computer today.
If you were doing this a week ago or a month ago on a normal laser jet printer, it wouldn’t work. The font wouldn’t be available to you.

Really? I could also note that the Selectric had a number 1 as well as the lower-case l, unlike some other typewriters of the time. If you think that authenticates the documents, then consider the non-typographical issues in them:
1. CBS says the documents came from Killian’s personal files, which Killian’s family says he never kept.
2. CBS “authenticated” these documents with retired General Bobby Hodges by telephone, who now says he was misled and the documents are probably forged.
3. One of the documents — the “CYA” memo — references improper influence by a general who had retired 18 months before the memo’s date.
4. None of the memos use standard format for the Air Force or Air National Guard at the time.
5. Colonel Killian didn’t like to type, and would be unlikely to have typed any personal notes, to file or anywhere else, again according to his family and to the personnel director (Rufus Martin) with whom he worked during Bush’s TANG period.
There are so many holes in these documents that trying to plug them with a 1 or an l is laughable. Rather continues to fiddle while CBS burns. (And do you see any difference between the two here? I’m not using any exotic font for my blog!)

Dan Rather interviewed former Texas legislator and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes in order to establish that Barnes used undue influence to get George Bush into the Texas Air National Guard. Rather didn’t mention the fact that Barnes has been a major contributor to the Democrats and to the Kerry campaign; over the past five years, he has generated almost a half-million dollars for the DNC and John Kerry, as I reported earlier. Rather treated Barnes as a reluctant witness instead of the partisan he is.
However, CBS News did not always treat Barnes with such kid gloves. New Jersey blogger Just Dan notes that as late as June, CBS looked at Barnes more critically as a potential beneficiary of a John Kerry victory:

The Kerry campaign has begun tracking major fundraisers using a Trustee Leader Board, CBS News has learned. While keeping tabs on fundraisers is nothing new, the twist is that the Kerry campaign is tracking donations to the Democratic National Committee, not to the campaign itself. …
[S]everal donors, who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity, said that the money was being carefully tracked by the Kerry campaign, most likely for recognition should Kerry win the presidency. In a sign of the campaign’s involvement, last week’s Leader Board memo was sent around by the Kerry campaign itself.

CBS knew that Kerry campaigners had already taken a large interest in keeping track of the big-money contributors, and Beth Lester specifically mentions Barnes:

As of last week, according to information received by CBS News, 20 donors have given and/or raised more than $250,000, enough to earn them the designation of Trustee. Of those, eight have actually raised more than $500K. Those half-millions include Texas lobbyist Ben Barnes, Wall Street financier Stan Shuman, Iranian American PAC Board of Trustees member Hassan Nemazee and Texas lawyer Mark Iola. Eventually, says a source inside the process, the over-$500K raisers will have a special name designation but no moniker has been chosen yet. …
Although the Kerry campaign’s tracking is perfectly legal, Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics notes that tracking donors is a sign that “campaigns, political parties and donors do all understand that this is a system of giving and getting rewards for giving.” And, Noble continues, “Kerry, like Bush, plans to acknowledge these people if he wins the election. And that could be in the form of government appointments, ambassordorships, favorable hearings on administration policies.”
The possible impropriety between major donors and major appointments is not lost on anyone. After CBS News obtained a copy of the memo, several donors were alerted by the DNC and members of the Kerry campaign. Some of those donors then asked to have their names removed from the list and to remain anonymous to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in the future, said one donor whose name remains on the list.

Whatever else CBS says or doesn’t say about Ben Barnes, they cannot claim ignorance about his status as a major contributor to Kerry and the DNC. Dan Rather needs to explain why an issue which CBS felt was important news regarding Barnes’ expectations from his heavy contributions did not warrant exploration in the context of his accusations against Kerry’s opponent. CBS viewers deserved to have that context presented to them in order to properly weigh Barnes’ accusations.