I'm just incredulous over the firestorm in the blogosphere and talk radio about the apparent forgeries that CBS attributed to the late Lt Col Killian in their 60 Minutes hit piece yesterday. I looked at the PDF versions available on the CBS site, and yes, they do look fishy. Since when would a military unit have a regular Post Office box number? I'm not that worked up that it's not on letterhead, since carbon copies (literally made with carbon paper) didn't carry the letterhead. I would expect some smudging if it were a carbon copy, though.
However, as others have noted, there are lots of irregularities in format (where in the world are the serial numbers for the correspondence????), typefaces (looks like Times New Roman to many), paper size (it's not 8" x 10.5", which used to be government standard as an "economy" measure), proportional letter spacing and kerning (vs a straight 10-pitch or 12-pitch type "monospace"), curly apostrophes (a feature of type-set type in the 70's, not typewriters), the validity of the signature, etc. ABC has picked up the story, as has the Weekly Standard, WorldNetDaily, and the Washington Post.
Hugh Hewitt says the story behind the story is: who is behind the forgery???
See Power Line, Power Line: September 2004 Archives
See Captain's Quarters, first post
See The Kerry Spot on National Review Online MELTDOWN ROUNDUP [09/11 11:57 AM]
See Little Green Footballs lgf, first post
See Let's Fly Under the Bridge, first post Lots of experiments with MS Word to duplicate memos.
See Betsy's Page, summary
See SwiftVets.com :: View topic - TANG Memo on Bush
Just amazing...
I'll update with actual hyperlinks tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm going to check out Nightline which is supposed to be covering this.
Update (12:50 pm 9/11/04): Links are in, with key starting points noted as well. The original PDF files that CBS posted are at
- BushGuardmay4.pdf (application/pdf Object)
- BushGuardmay19.pdf (application/pdf Object)
- BushGuardaugust1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
- BushGuardaugust18.pdf (application/pdf Object)
[Handy little blogging trick: cut and paste links from my browser's history list]
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