Very compelling evidence is emerging that the documents presented by CBS News on "60 Minutes" purporting to be from Bush's former Air National Guard Squadron Commander, Col. Jerry Killian (now deceased) are forgeries. The memos, which CBS claims have been vetted by a handwriting analyst, are characterized as follows:
In a memo from Aug. 18, 1973, Col. Killian says Col. Buck Staudt, the man in charge of the Texas Air National Guard, is putting on pressure to "sugar coat" the evaluation of Lt. Bush. Staudt, a longtime supporter of the Bush family, would not do an interview for this broadcast.
The memo continues, with Killian saying, "I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job."
Since Killian is no longer alive, he is not in a position to verify the authenticity of the documents obtained by CBS, but it increasingly looks that they were not produced in 1972. At the heart of the issue is the observation that the memos use a proportionally-spaced font that would not have been available on the 1972 typewriters on when they were purportedly written. Even though IBM Selectric typewriters of the era were capable of changing fonts, the characters were "monospaced" (that is, letters like "i" and "w" took up the same width). The font used in the document looks to be Times New Roman, typical of a contemporary computer running Microsoft word. Power Line is providing ongoing updates and Charles Johnson even manages to recreate the identical document on his Mac without altering any of Word's default settings. And Allah points to a forensic analysis arranged by INDC Journal that appears to show that the font used had characteristics that are not matched by any font of that era.
If this turns out to be the case, this will shred the credibility of CBS and other mainstream media outlets. It is particularly galling, considering the "Bush rally boos Clinton" story run by AP that turned out to be completely false. John Hinderaker of Power Line was also critical in debunking that one as well, providing links to audio of the actual moment in the rally when Bush announced that Clinton was going into the hospital for heart surgery - the crowd did not boo, but actually cheered when Bush wished Clinton a speedy recovery.
It's sad that large media organizations with multi-million dollar budgets are being outresearched and fact-checked by bloggers armed only with Google and a healthy skepticism about what they read. Quoth Roger L. Simon: "Shame, shame on CBS!"
UPDATE: Everything I Know is Wrong has the whole story on Bush's National Guard Service, including the six years no one seems interested in and Bush doesn't mention.
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