SwiftVets.com

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Another great article by WSJ

http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110005611

I'd Rather Be Blogging
CBS stonewalls as "guys in pajamas" uncover a fraud.

Monday, September 13, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who oversaw "60 Minutes," debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service.

Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

He will regret that snide disparagement of the bloggers, many of whom are skilled lawyers or have backgrounds in military intelligence or typeface design. A growing number of design and document experts say they are certain or almost certain the memos on which CBS relied are forgeries.

Mr. Klein didn't directly address the mounting objections to CBS's story. He fell back on what high school debaters call the appeal to authority, implying that the reputation of "60 Minutes" should be enough to dissolve doubts without the network sharing its methods with other journalists and experts. He told Fox's Tony Snow that the "60 Minutes" team is "the most careful news organization, certainly on television." He said that Mary Mapes, the producer of the story, was "a crack journalist" who had broken the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story.

But leaning on reputations does nothing to dispel the doubts raised by bloggers, experts and relatives and associates of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, the memos' putative author. Gary Killian, Col. Killian's son, says CBS apparently didn't call several people he suggested they contact who would have contradicted the CBS story. Bobby Hodges, a former Texas Air National Guard general whom "60 Minutes" claimed had authenticated the memos, says that when he was read them over the phone he assumed they were handwritten and wasn't told that CBS didn't have the originals. He now says he doesn't believe the memos are genuine.
Hugh Hewitt, the unofficial historian of the blogging movement, says that "bloggers have been overwhelmed with e-mails from active-duty and retired military who scoff at the form of the memos." They point out the man cited in the memo as pressuring Mr. Killian to "sugar coat" the Bush military record had left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written. In addition, typewriters with perfect centering ability were nonexistent in 1972 and 1973, and National Guard regulations barred the maintenance of such records. Mr. Killian's widow adds that her late husband kept no personal files from his Guard duty, notes that CBS won't reveal its source, and says the memos are bogus. Earl Lively, director of operations for the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s, told the Washington Times that the memos are "forged as hell."

CBS's fallback defense is that its story was only partly based on the documents and points to its on-camera interview with former Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, who claimed that he pulled strings to gain a place for Mr. Bush in the National Guard. But Mr. Barnes is clearly unreliable. The New York Times reported last February that an unnamed former Texas official--later revealed to be Mr. Barnes--was telling reporters he had interceded on behalf of Mr. Bush but that his story "was subject to change, and there were no documents to support his claims."

Indeed, Mr. Barnes's own daughter says her father's story can't be trusted. Amy Barnes Stites called a talk radio show Thursday to report that her father had told her a different version in 2000, when Mr. Bush first ran for president. "I love my father very much, but he's doing this for purely political reasons," she said. "He is a big Kerry fund-raiser and he is writing a book also. And the [Bush story] is what he's leading the book off with. . . . denied this to me in 2000 that he did get Bush out (of Vietnam). Now he's saying he did." When hostess Monica Crowley asked Ms. Stites if she believed her father had lied in his interview on "60 Minutes," she replied "Yes, I do. I absolutely do."

"60 Minutes" may have a sterling reputation in journalism, but it has been burned before by forged documents. In 1997 it broadcast a report alleging that U.S. Customs Service inspectors looked the other way as drugs crossed the Mexican border at San Diego. The story's prize exhibit was a memo from Rudy Comacho, head of the San Diego customs office, ordering that vehicles belonging to one trucking company should be given special leniency in crossing the border. The memo was given to "60 Minutes" by Mike Horner, a former customs inspector who had left the service five years earlier. When asked by CBS for additional proof, he sent another copy with an official stamp on it.
CBS did not interview Mr. Camacho for its story. "It was horrible for him," says Bill Anthony, at the time head of public affairs for the Customs Service. "For 18 months, internal affairs and the Secret Service had him under a cloud while they established that Horner had forged the document out of bitterness over how he'd been treated." In 2000, Mr. Horner admitted he forged the memo "for media exposure" and was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison. "Mr. Camacho's reputation was tarnished significantly," Judge Judith Keep noted.

Mr. Camacho sued CBS and eventually settled for an undisclosed sum. In 1999 Leslie Stahl read an apology on the air: "We have concluded we were deceived, and ultimately, so were you, the viewers."

If it turns out that the Killian memos are indeed forgeries, the Internet will have played an invaluable role in exposing the fraud much faster than the 18 months Mr. Camacho had to twist in the wind. Free Republic, a Web bulletin board, raised early warning signals about the memos within hours of last Wednesday's "60 Minutes" broadcast. Powerlineblog.com, a site run by three lawyers, reposted those comments, which were amplified by indcjournal.com. Then design expert Charles Johnson, who blogs at littlegreenfootballs.com, retyped one of the memos using Microsoft Word and showed them to be a perfect typographic match.
A defensive Dan Rather went on the air Friday to complain of what he called a "counterattack" from "partisan political operatives." In reality, traditional journalism now has a new set of watchdogs in the "blogosphere." In the words of blogger Mickey Kaus, they can trade information and publicize it "fast enough to have real-world consequences." Sure, blogs can be transmission belts for errors, vicious gossip and last-minute disinformation efforts. But they can also correct themselves almost instantaneously--in sharp contrast with CBS's stonewalling.

[Hammer2]

Pajama Clad Warriors for Truth!

I like it!
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"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
"An armed society is a polite society" - Thomas Jefferson
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it won't be needed until someone tries to take it away." -- Thomas Jefferson

[debinNC]

[quote="Hammer2"]Pajama Clad Warriors for Truth!

Obviously a member: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/index.html

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

[azpatriot]

Yeah the pajama warriors have also discovered CBS's true colors


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Proud to be an American! and member of the PAJAMAHADEEN
FedEx Kinko's: When it absolutely, positively has to be forged overnight

[vickie]

That guy in pajamas could have been a clerk in TANG 70-74. He could have sold the IBM selectric and composer for 30 years from 1970-2000. He could have jsut been a geek saying, "Hey, thats a proportional font... looks like times roman in word... Let's type it out here..."

You got an "expert". In less that 2 hours your fancy "echo chamber" "expert" was toast. How pathetic was that. He was wrong on the type, wrong on the signature and wrong on the commander.

The next day there were complete flash demonstations and roll over gif's of the fraud.

Four days later, Safire calls it a fraud, but the rest of the MSM is still saying that some questions have been raised. They are quaking in their boots because they know that they are DAN RATHER. Discrediting him discredits them.

I'm sure Dan is having that same kind of moment that Bill had when he heard that "Monica had the dress."

Dan came out and said, "Whatley said it. I believe it. We are soooo much more important than you -so shut up!"

Now maybe it is time to review some of the past validations. Whatley verified Vince Foster's suicide note. Let;s put that puppy out there and play with it.

KCBS discredited Genifer Flower's tape where Clinton told her that if she said that they were not having an affair that there was no way anybody could prove it. KCBS presented it to Dem operative Pellicano who declared it "unreliable". He was paid by Hiliary.

Damn I wish we could do our own documentaries...
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Vote early. Vote often. The Democrate way...

[Skypilot]

Is this Blogger on to something?

http://wizbangblog.com/archives/003652.php

On The Trail Of The Forger
I'd planned on sitting on this information until tomorrow to do more research, but developments are moving fast, so I think it's time to shine some light on one of the most likely suspects behind the CBS memo forgery.

Marty Heldt (or someone known to him)

Why? Three recent developments.

Development #1

The previous article at Wizbang notes that USA Today independently obtained copies of the memo's that CBS had six weeks ago. Interestingly enough they had six memos (as opposed to CBS's four), and it's the first of those that is the first plank in identifying the forger. The first of the new memos is shown below:


View Full Size Image

Notice that this memo attempts to lay the groundwork for subsequent memos. In making the case for forgery it presents difficulties because the other name (Bath) is redacted in the version of Administrative Order 87 the White House released [View image].

A forger relying on the records released by the White House wouldn't know Bath's name making it unlikely that they would have been able to recreate this document. There is one man, an Iowa farmer named Marty Heldt bent advancing the theory that George W. Bush's was a deserter who was in possession of an unredacted version of Administrative Order 87 (All the way back in August 2000), as received in response to a FOIA request [View image]. Notice that James Bath's name is NOT redacted in the FOIA copy (paragraphs 6 and 7).

Development #2

In January 2004, former Democratic political consultant Brooks Gregory identified Marty Heldt as peddling a bogus set of documents that Gregory had easily proved were forgeries. The original thread is here, but the relevant paragraph is shown below:

When all of this crap began back in 1999, I was a political consultant for several Democratic candidates, as well as later being a senior consultant for Janet Reno in her run for Governor. I bought the document package from Marty Heldt and we subjected them to the most thorough investigation one could imagine. Why? Because if there was anything there, we damn sure wanted to use it. But guess what? Only two of those documents proved to be authentic and they were not even related to the charge being levelled. Many of them are so blatant in their alterations it is almost funny. Several purport to be signed by real live military personnel, yet they don't even know the proper format for a military date.
I'm attempting to get the same set of memos the Gregory claims to have received from Heldt, but circumstantially the trail of evidence leads directly to one person who fits the shadowy description of "unimpeachable." From the time-lines it is possible that Heldt was selling a set of documents before he had received his FOIA requested documents.

Another person who was in contact with Marty about the authenticity of his documents in 2000 has this to say about the CBS documents:

The memos are forgeries. The story is bogus. The memo were done on a modern word processor or computer, and not on 1970's era typewriter.

I have the same evidence I used to discredit Marty Heldt in 2000. It is almost comical some of the obvious alterations and these documents came from the exact same place.

Just one little item. The address PO Box 34567, is a bit dubious, and that's what tipped me off back then. I talked to Marty Heldt about that. His answer was that this was Killians home address. So, I decided to check. This address was, at the time shown on the document, unassigned. Further, the address was a po box at the main post office in Houston, Texas. The zip code was for a small town in Texas, Genoa, Texas that did NOT have po boxes.

From, there, I went on to prove the document titled "Chronological" had been altered, and done by someone that had no idea what a military date format looked like.

That took me about 3 days after which, Marty stopped communicating with me. I think I know who dummied up all of these documents but I can't prove it. But I just have this feeling that if the culprit is ever found out, he will come from a small town outside of Boston, Mass. And I'm not talking about John Kerry either.


Development #3

Who do Salon and David Brock's Media Matters trot out as their rebuttal witness against the forgery charges? None other than "independent researcher" Marty Heldt.

Conclusion

It's a circumstantial case at this point, but Heldt (or someone known to him) is looking pretty good. There's more information on the way on this story, but new tips and leads are always welcome.

Update: The PO box argument, as presented in the quoted text, is not conclusive. It's been shot down here, and here. It's only presented in the context of this article to give an accurate account of the comments found.

Update 2: Heldt is certainly not the only suspect. Bill Burkett, a former Texas Air National Guard member and the person who claims to have witnessed shredding of Bush's Guard records is also high on the list. Tim Blair, Ace of Spades, and JustOneMinute all have more on the Burkett angle.

Interestingly Heldt and Burkett, were they to have worked together, would have had the insider knowledge; background in the minutia of the official documents; and the technical skills necessary to have made a pretty convincing set of memos.
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