BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Saturday, September 11, 2004
WE STILL DON'T KNOW. The
bloggers triumphed, but not in the way they imagine. By yesterday
afternoon, it was clear that the wildest claims put forth by the
conservative bloggers were wrong. The liberal Daily
Kos did a great job of
proving this yesterday.
Contrary to Power
Line, Little
Green Footballs, and
others, the Killian documents could have been produced on a
good IBM typewriter in 1972 and '73. Rather than exposing CBS News
for falling into a forgery trap, the bloggers succeeded only in
muddying what had seemed to be some pretty clear waters. Yes, you
can't help but be struck by how easily LGF was able to reproduce one
of the Killian memos using Microsoft Word. Yes, it seems as though
the Killian documents could have been forged. But proof? Not
even close. For that, we will have to turn elsewhere.
Not that Bush supporters are
waiting. Driving home yesterday, I heard a caller to Howie Carr, on
WRKO Radio (AM 680), claim that he had sold IBM Selectrics for, oh,
700 years or something, and those machines never had the
capabilities that have come under question in the Killian memos: the
Times New Roman typeface; proportional spacing; a superscripted "th."
Well, maybe not on the models he sold, but he'd already been
proven wrong. But so what? By the time I got past the Saugus Iron
Works, Carr was pronouncing the whole thing to be a Kerry
"dirty-tricks operation." Evidence not required,
apparently.
Anyway, here are a few recent
developments.
- Francie Latour and Michael
Rezendes report
on the controversy in today's Boston Globe. Their most
striking piece of new information is that Philip Bouffard, a forgery
expert who questioned the Killian documents' authenticity in
yesterday's
New York Times, has
now changed his mind. Latour and Rezendes write:
Philip D. Bouffard, a
forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten
samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents
in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in
a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe
yesterday that after further study, he now believes the
documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer
typewriter available at the time.
...
In the Times interview, Bouffard
had also questioned whether the military would have used the
Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a
document indicating that as early as April 1969 - three years
before the dates of the CBS memos - the Air Force had completed
service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for
purchasing the typewriters.
As for the raised "th" that
appears in the Bush memos - to refer, for example, to units such
as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron - Bouffard said that
custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were
available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered
such custom balls from IBM.
"You can't just say that this
is definitively the mark of a computer," Bouffard
said.
- On the other hand, Bouffard
doesn't sound quite so ready to back down in this
New York Times follow-up,
by Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernicke:
Dr. Philip Bouffard, a
forensic document specialist in Georgia who has compiled of
database of more than 3,000 old fonts, said people who bought the
I.B.M. Selectric Composer model could specially order keys with
the superscripts in question. Dr. Bouffard said that font did bear
many similarities to the one on the CBS documents, but not
enough to dispel questions he had about their
authenticity.
Huh? Why so different from what he
told the Globe? Inquiring minds want to know.
- No mainstream news organization
went as far in questioning the authenticity of the Killian memos as
the Washington Post did yesterday. The Post consulted
several experts, including Bouffard. Today, though, the Post
fails to return to the scene, instead running this
Howard Kurtz piece focusing
mainly on Dan Rather's defense, with plenty of quotes from all sides.
Kurtz does, though, reference a pretty important story published
elsewhere.
- That would be this
article, by Pete Slover, in
today's Dallas Morning News. Slover's lead:
The man named in a
disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugarcoat" President Bush's
military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a
half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service
record shows.
An order obtained by the
Dallas Morning News shows that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt
was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972. CBS News reported this
week that a memo in which Staudt was described as interfering with
officers' negative evaluations of Bush's service was dated Aug.
18, 1973.
Oof. How damaging is this to CBS's
defense? Slover writes farther down: "A CBS staffer stood by the
story, suggesting that Staudt could have continued to exert
influence over Guard officials." On a Lame-o-Tude Meter of 1 to
10, that comes in at about an 11. Slover adds that Staudt - who by
the grace of God is, unlike Jerry Killian, among the living - has
refused to comment. I assume a horde of reporters is now camped
outside Staudt's home in New Braunfels, Texas.
- The press is filled with accounts
reporting that Killian's wife and son don't believe he could possibly
have written such memos. I don't care. We need proof. Either he did
or he didn't.
To me, the most interesting aspect
of this story is not how hesitant the mainstream media were to follow
the lead of the bloggers, as the bloggers themselves claim, but,
rather, how quickly the mainstream dove into this swamp.
The biggest question in my mind is
how so-called experts like Bouffard could be so misguided in their
initial statements. It seems to me that the very definition of being
an expert in such matters is to know the history of typewriters,
fonts, stuff like that. Bouffard obviously didn't know something he
should have known: that Killian's memos could have been produced on a
typewriter available at that time. Whether Killian did, or whether it's
likely, is another matter, but that's not what Bouffard said. I think
Bouffard and his ilk did far more to launch this story into the
mainstream than, say, Little Green Footballs.
What we're going to have now are
questions upon questions upon questions. The Dallas Morning
News story obviously raises questions that need to be answered.
There will be a feverish rush to discover whether the Kerry campaign
had any involvement. Prediction: Look for some stories in the next
few days that will later prove to be dead wrong.
And the larger issues in this
campaign continue to be ignored.
posted at 9:27 AM |
3 comments
|
link
3 Comments:
"Yes, you can't help but be struck by how easily LGF was able to reproduce one of the Killian memos using Microsoft Word." That the document in question was so easily reproduced in Microsoft Word is a stupid observation. Do any of you people actually use Word? In an intermediate user's hands, **ANY** basically formatted document could be reproduced in minutes. Perhaps even by a beginner with a passing knowledge of typefaces, especially one so common. So a forger could have easily made it. So could a person trying falsely to suggest a forgery. Geez....
Actually, MS Word does not do a good job of forging the CBS memos. Many of the characters are off. The serifs in the 'l's are wrong. (el). The th superscript is inconsistent. (With MS Word, it is not inconsistent, it happens automatically).
There is zero evidence of forgery. Bizarrely, the accusers seek to place the burden of proof on people saying the documents are authentic. I can accept that for CBS, to some extent, but really, once CBS produces an expert, I want to see something more than a blogger somewhere who produces a very similar, but not identical, document using MS Word. All you have to say about the MS Word document is "Times New Roman is 60 years old, stop acting so surprised!"
Time to apply the same standards of evidence to the assertion that the documents are fake.
While you don't have to believe them to be real without further evidence, lack of such evidence does not prove them to be fake.
Time Magazine quotes an IBM Selectric expert as saying that such documents could have been produced on '70's era Selectrics. I recall using plain paper copiers in '72.
I've not seen definitive evidence that they are fake. What is it?
Furthermore, if they are fake, it is just as likely that a Republican operative (such as Karl Rove) perpetrated the hoax.
1. Everyone will assume that Dems did it, so they escape not only blame, but even wide spread suspicion. And it demonstrates the "corruption" of the Dems, motivating the Rep's base.
2. If they are fake and Selectrics could not have produced them, it was such a poor job that it appears to be intentional. This casts further doubt on Bush's weakness (his shirking of guard duty).
3. Such as scenario is consistent with Karl Rove's MO. They've already leaked the CIA NOC agent's name. This is no worse. The administration has a history of proactively dealing with these "problems."
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
