SwiftVets.com

[openfish24]

Please be careful.

This morning I heard that there are now questions about how this was exposed so quickly.

I think you know where this is going.

Please spread the word.

Pete Bartow
USMC 75-80

[ord33]

Oh geez...I think that's ridiculous...Next thing, you'll hear Republicans forced Ben Barnes to go and say something that contradicts his sworn testimony in 1999, "exposing a known fraud"...

Plus, you dont have to be a rocket scientist to notice the fact that superscripts were on the documents, and werent readily available on typewriters in 1972. Look at how carefully people on this board have analyzed all the After-Action Reports and such. Discrepancies have been noted in these, just as well as possible ones in the CBS documents. With the amount of bloggers and other people researching stuff these days, to me its absolutely no surprise CBS could be caught so soon red handed. THe worst part in my opinion, is that CBS stated they had their own "independent experts" check the documents for their authenticity. If it is shown without a doubt these are fake documents, that makes them have even MORE explaining to do...After supposedly vouching for their authenticity.

[DaveL]

yes it is ridiculous...the question that should be asked is why CBS "couldn't" detect this obvious forgery before going public with it...or is it just that they decided that they "wouldn't" detect it!

[jataylor11]

You forget the MSM agrees with Michael Moore that Americans are the stupidest people on earth. Too stupid to look at a document allegedly written thirty years ago and not see that it was written using software invented 20 years ago.

People too stupid to use the resources available on the internet. Too stupid to understand what properly motivated individuals can accomplish.

Let them continue to misunderestimate us all.

[Steve Z]

I posted this elsewhere, but it's relevant in this topic, so here I go again:

Fox and Friends had a segment this morning where they "questioned the authenticity" of the supposed "memos to file" by Col. Jerry Killian, and Steve Doocy dared to use the F-word (forgery) on TV.

They then had a debate about the subject, with Mike Gallagher defending the Bush campaign, and Daedre Levine defending the Kerry campaign.
Betraying lots of egg on her face, Ms. Levine ventured the suggestion that the Bush campaign deliberately planted a fake document in order to discredit the Kerry campaign.

Huh? The Bush campaign would pass a fake document that makes their man look bad to a Kerry operative and hope that CBS would discover the forgery? Would the Bush people take the risk that no one would notice, and let the Kerry people bash Bush on false pretenses? She's got to be kidding!!!

The Kerry people ARE getting desperate--this forgery was incredibly clumsy! Somebody who wanted to fake a 1972-era document could have easily typed on a word-processor in evenly-spaced Courier font, which imitates old typewriters, and the forgery would have been much harder to detect. Kerry is counting on the stupidity of the electorate!

SBVT needs to educate them, QUICKLY!!!

Now we know what the F stands for: John Forgery Kerry.
_________________
The traitor will crater!

[You GottaBeKidding]

Remember the raving moonbat mantra -- it's always a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!

[poljunkie]

This investigation was driven by people at www.powerlineblog.com

They have a cashed article implying that some believe Carl Rove tricked the DNC/Kerry campaign into colluding with CBS to publish forgeries and making them all jump on the story.

This would make the DNC/Kerry campaign either corrupt or stupid. Not to mention making Rove one of the smartest men on the planet.

[You GottaBeKidding]

poljunkie,

No need for a cached story. Just truck over to the Dim equivalent of Free Republic and you'll see hundreds of posts either claiming that the documents are genuine or saying that if they are forgeries, Rove must have planted them.

I think CBS (and other MSM) just haven't "gotten it" about the power of the internet and bloggers. Even a year or so ago, it would have been a lot more difficult for thousands of people with many different areas of knowledge and expertise to work on something like this and come to a conclusion in such a short time.

I think they didn't think they'd get caught.

[poljunkie]

You got a good link to a current lib discussion? I love watching libs squirm.

[Kathy Kay]

[Nomorelies]

Bob Beckel on Fox this morning complained that the "forged" documents will cost Kerry a week of campaigning and, of course, that is because George Bush is behind it (duh?). He is grousing that the RNC just will not let Kerry get any traction and will not let him campaign on the real issues. Oh my. My world is spinning round and round. He complained that we don't need to be worrying about what happened 35 years ago. Well, Beckel, just who brought up the subject of Bush's TANG record on national TV (Dan Rather, Ben Barnes, your own political operatives). And, who forged the documents? Well, I bet it was one of your own. Now, when your fat is in the fire you are screaming "unfair?"
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[integritycounts]

beware anyone who is on the internet? Questions being asked
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/28276.htm CBS'S BIG BLUNDER?

By JOHN PODHORETZ
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 10, 2004 -- THE populist revolu tion against the so- called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush.
What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60 Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s.

These were "previously unseen documents . . . obtained by '60 Minutes,' " the network bragged Wednesday night on its Web site. Their author, supposedly, was Bush's squadron commander, Jerry Killian, who died 20 years ago.

They "include a memorandum from May 1972," CBS reports, "where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.' " A document dated "18 August 1973" complains that Killian is being asked to "sugar coat" Bush's record. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," the document says.

Liberals went wild with glee about the story, especially after the onslaught on John Kerry's Vietnam record by his fellow Swift-boat veterans.

Kevin Drum, the most talented of the left-wing bloggers, wrote: "This story is a perfect demonstration of the difference between the Swift-boat controversy and the National Guard controversy. Both are tales from long ago and both are related to Vietnam, but . . . in the National Guard case, practically every new piece of documentary evidence provides additional confirmation that the charges against Bush are true."

Drum simply assumed that the documents were above-board. So did The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which put the story on its front page on Thursday.



They were doubtless swayed by the fact that CBS said " '60 Minutes' consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic."

Maybe "60 Minutes" should have tried another expert or two.

CBS made the four documents available in their original form on its Web site Wednesday night.

And by yesterday morning, they were being examined with a fine tooth comb.

The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site — the 47th posting on the topic there.

Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that effect back then.

From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word.

Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing.

The documents contain such features as superscript lettering, which is done automatically by Microsoft Word, and curly quotation marks. A brief glance at a Web site called selectric.org, run by an amateur typewriter fanatic, reveals dozens of IBM electric typefaces — and none of them has curly quotation marks.

By 3 o'clock, the very careful and honest Jim Geraghty, who produces invaluable material every day on nationalreview.com's Kerry Spot, was saying flatly, "CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this."

Yeah, it had better. I thought on Wednesday that it was scandalous for "60 Minutes" to turn over a good deal of its time on Wednesday night to one Ben Barnes, a one-time Texas political powerhouse who now claims he got George W. Bush into the National Guard.

The problem is not, as some would have it, that Barnes has raised half a million dollars for Kerry. The problem is that Barnes has already lied about this on videotape, and I use the word "lied" without difficulty, where he says he pulled strings for Bush when "I was lieutenant governor of Texas."

The thing is that George W. Bush was sworn into the National Guard in May 1968. Ben Barnes didn't become lieutenant governor until 1969.

From the lies of Ben Barnes to the apparent forgeries of who-knows-who-did-it — why has "60 Minutes" exposed itself in this way?

We all know why. Its producers and others in the media think George Bush deserves to be beaten up now because of the beating administered to John Kerry in August. In some weird way, the editors and producers believe this is fairness at work.

Instead, they have unmasked themselves. Or rather, they have been unmasked by ordinary people who can see what they and their hired experts evidently could not.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com

[ord33]

NoMoreLies,

did you also see Beckel call O'Neill a liar, because "his boat had bullet holes in it" from the March 13th incident. He cant even get straight who John O'Neill is....Its pathetic.

[Tom Poole]

How cum these slime balls get to use unmerciful tactics to smear O'Neill, O'Dell, Thurlow, etc., when they have always told the truth and are above reproach in their behavior? But, we have to ***** foot around using politically correct vocabulary when dealing with questionable individuals like Rassmann, Runyan, Sanders and truly despicable individuals like Ben "Sharpstown" Barnes? Their tactics now have gone way beyond innuendo, omission, guilt by association and lies. They now have entered a very dark place encompassing crime, fraud, felony, punishment and prison. These are the guys who speak for Kerry and they have no limits. Are the gloves off yet?
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'58 Airedale HMR(L)-261 VMO-2

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