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Weird political story: released Bush Guard memos likely forgeries
So, I saw the news articles about the release of memos from (and one presumably from) George W. Bush's commander in the Texas National Guard in 1972 that suggest that he did in fact disobey an order to get a physical and had somebody pushing for lenient treatment for him and to "sugar coat" (according to one memo) reports about him.
One of those stories had a link to a PDF of four of the memos, dated 1972 and 1973. Here's one such link. When I first looked at those memos, I thought it was very strange that the memos were in a proportional font. There was a typewriter in moderately common use then that could do proportional spacing, the IBM Executive, but I don't remember its typeface looking like these memos (although it's a bit hard to tell with the poor reproduction). Also, one of the memos had a centered header, which was extremely hard to do on an IBM Executive. They were hard to use; they would have been somewhat high-end things to find in a random National Guard office (outside of a publications group or something like that, where you could use them to produce professional-looking documents without having to have something typeset). So my first thought was "this thing doesn't look like it dates from 1972."
A post on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow's blog, pointed out the same thing, and also called my attention to the fact that the fourth memo has "18th", with a small superscript th. That was not produced on a typewriter in 1973! But recent versions of Microsoft Word will helpfully do that for you if you just type "18th". In fact, in some of the other memos, "th" is separated from a preceding number by a space, which looks very strange, but would make sense if somebody who didn't know Word very well were trying to get it to stop doing that.
The short of it is that it looks like they were very amateurish forgeries.
The memos were evidently released by 60 Minutes. I read one allusion to them being released by the White House as well.
Here's some more information:
So the question is, who forged these memos and why? They look unflattering to Bush, so it seems unlikely that the Bush campaign or pro-Bush groups planted them. I personally think the Kerry campaign is above that sort of thing, but even if they weren't, I think they would have done a better job (even bearing in mind that stuff like this needs to be done by a very small group of people). It's not like typewriters are hard to come by. So, an independent anti-Bush group maybe? Or should we put our tinfoil hats on and assume the forgery was supposed to be discovered, or that the memos were supposed to distract from something else? (I suppose one much less sinister possibility is that somebody retyped the original memos, but then why would 60 Minutes try to pass them off as photocopies of the originals, and why would some of them have Killian's signature? Did any of you see the actual 60 Minutes piece?)
Anyway, I detect weirdness ahead.
One of those stories had a link to a PDF of four of the memos, dated 1972 and 1973. Here's one such link. When I first looked at those memos, I thought it was very strange that the memos were in a proportional font. There was a typewriter in moderately common use then that could do proportional spacing, the IBM Executive, but I don't remember its typeface looking like these memos (although it's a bit hard to tell with the poor reproduction). Also, one of the memos had a centered header, which was extremely hard to do on an IBM Executive. They were hard to use; they would have been somewhat high-end things to find in a random National Guard office (outside of a publications group or something like that, where you could use them to produce professional-looking documents without having to have something typeset). So my first thought was "this thing doesn't look like it dates from 1972."
A post on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow's blog, pointed out the same thing, and also called my attention to the fact that the fourth memo has "18th", with a small superscript th. That was not produced on a typewriter in 1973! But recent versions of Microsoft Word will helpfully do that for you if you just type "18th". In fact, in some of the other memos, "th" is separated from a preceding number by a space, which looks very strange, but would make sense if somebody who didn't know Word very well were trying to get it to stop doing that.
The short of it is that it looks like they were very amateurish forgeries.
The memos were evidently released by 60 Minutes. I read one allusion to them being released by the White House as well.
Here's some more information:
- The Sixty-First Minute on Powerlineblog.
- An image of Bush's memo requesting discharge to attend Harvard Business School, with an addition by Lt. Col. Killian recommending approval. (I think that was done on a Selectric with a Prestige Elite type ball.)
- A Little Green Footballs thread that suggests the memo from 1972 was typed into a current version of Microsoft Word with all default settings.
- An article on a forgery expert's examination of the purported memos. (This one is pretty convincing.)
So the question is, who forged these memos and why? They look unflattering to Bush, so it seems unlikely that the Bush campaign or pro-Bush groups planted them. I personally think the Kerry campaign is above that sort of thing, but even if they weren't, I think they would have done a better job (even bearing in mind that stuff like this needs to be done by a very small group of people). It's not like typewriters are hard to come by. So, an independent anti-Bush group maybe? Or should we put our tinfoil hats on and assume the forgery was supposed to be discovered, or that the memos were supposed to distract from something else? (I suppose one much less sinister possibility is that somebody retyped the original memos, but then why would 60 Minutes try to pass them off as photocopies of the originals, and why would some of them have Killian's signature? Did any of you see the actual 60 Minutes piece?)
Anyway, I detect weirdness ahead.
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The memos really only help the Bush camp. Either they're real and the story is old news that the press keeps harping on and the American people don't care about, anyway, or they're fakes and somebody's trying to frame the President. If it appears to the public that Kerry's fighting dirty, they'll let the President retaliate.
Who really cares about the President's military record? I mean, we knew he was a coke-sniffing drunk and hypocritical fundy when we went to vote last time. Is that such a mild infraction that going AWOL somehow makes him more unpalatable?
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This fits in with another theory I have long held, which is that every night Bush, Cheney and Rove meet in the oval office, light a candle, join hands, and summon the spirit of Lee Atwater. After all, this goes beyond mere power lust and veniality, and lack of morals. This requires true twistedness, a quality Atwater possessed in abundance.
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But assuming they’re forgeries, they’re not safe for the Kerry camp, either. They’re probably a net negative for Bush, but it’s a big gamble when one of your main talking points is that Bush misled the nation (and more so when you don’t know exactly when they’re going to come out).
It’s really puzzling. I almost wonder if it was some unscrupulous person at CBS trying to pad the story, but I’ve heard that the White House released copies of the memos, too.
Well, probably more will come to light tomorrow, when we see what
CREEP’sthe Bush campaign’s reply is.no subject
Ain't nothing wrong with conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats. They're often more amusing than reality. I can't help looking at the Weekly World News occasionally. After all, the mainstream press was too squeamish to point out the real connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda (that Saddam and Osama were lovers).
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Remember a few years ago when someone (can't remember who) got raked over the coals for giving 60 Minutes "Top Secret" information. It turned out, he gave them declassified information. The only thing that said top secret was the page 60 Minutes created for visual effect to splash behind their announcer when he was talking about the story.
Could the memo have been a handwritten note that never go typed until 60 minutes needed to have it legible for viewing? Who knows, but it's possible and way more simple than complex conspiracies.
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The notion that they were created just as props is consistent with the very small amount of effort put into making them look authentic.
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For instance, to quote The Wichita Eagle,The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugar coat" 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. (http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/special_packages/election2004/9633814.htm) Read the whole thing -- it's enlightening.
Instapundit, et al, have plenty more.
My guess is that it was cooked up by this "Texans for Truth" 527. If it was in fact cooked up by the Kerry campaign, then they should be out of business before long.
Whatever happens, it's fun watching Dan Rather and The Boston Globe walk the plank for Kerry.
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One can hope that this story will put to rest once and for all the idea that leftward bias in the mainstream media is a "myth", but I suspect that that idea will die even harder than Dan Rather's career.
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Responding to your other comment, I read some quotes (predating the forgery allegations) in which he said that he had not specifically confirmed the authenticity of the memos that CBS News showed him (since he hadn’t seen them in the ’70s), but had said that they were consistent with what he remembered Killian saying at the time. That’s not inconsistent with him being very upset when he discovered that the memos that were presented to him as photocopies were actually not (being either deceptive transcripts or complete fabricatons).
So the memos presented by CBS certainly do not prove that their content is consistent with reality, but nothing you’ve mentioned proves that their content is inconsistent with reality, either. I.e., the fact that these memos are not authentic says nothing about whether strings were pulled for Bush or not. (Of course, the memos being false means that they aren’t evidence for strings being pulled, either.)
The weird thing about these memos is that CBS is still standing behind them when anybody who actually lived through the ’70s (including Dan Rather) ought to be able to tell just by looking at them that they can’t possibly be authentic.
From your other reply:The plural of anecdote is not data; the singular less so. If (as I suspect) this was a fabrication for effect on the part of CBS (either a bogus copy of actual memos or completely falsified memos), then it will whittle away at CBS’ or 60 Minutes II’s reputation for reliable journalism, and hopefully it will end the careers of the particular people who made the decision to forge the memos (at least if the memos were made up out of whole cloth, rather than being transcribed). If it’s part of a pattern of CBS or 60 Minutes II attacking Republicans and not Democrats (which I don’t know, since I haven’t seen broadcast television in many years, except for election night 2000 and a little the morning of 9/11), then of course it will hurt CBS’ or 60 Minutes II’s reputation for objectivity.
However, whenever Rush Limbaugh said “I am not making this up”, you could be sure that what was about to follow bore no relation to the truth except by accident. That means Rush Limbaugh was biased to the right, it doesn’t mean the mainstream media as a whole were. (For that matter, it meant that Rush Limbaugh was an untrustworthy and unreliable source for factual information, but it didn’t even mean anything about other conservative commentators, never mind the media as a whole. There are conservatives who get their facts right. George Will, for instance.)
Personally, I find the idea that the mainstream U.S. news media as a whole is biased to the left – well, “implausible” is the kindest way I can put it. It would take something on the order of Granma in newspaper boxes on every street corner to counterbalance Fox News and AM radio.
Whoops.
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I want to go to your event tonight. Unfortunately, thanks to electrical problems in my apartment, I lack internet access. I have very limited time on a library computer right now and more later. Can you e-mail me a phone number I can reach you at to figure out travel and stuff? slarsen42 @ gmail.com. I need to disappear very soon but can check it again later (hopefully.)
Thanks.
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(Anonymous) 2004-09-11 02:26 pm (UTC)(link)probably real. The attributes that are supposedly "fake" appear throughout
Bush's NG records, so if these memos are fake, so is his entire NG record.
See the link below, and please pass this on to your friend:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603
Roxanne
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Yes, I read that dailykos story before I originally posted (although there’s a bit of new stuff now). And yes, it was possible to proportionally typeset documents in 1972 and 1973. There was even equipment like the IBM Executive and the Selectric Composer, that straddled the line between high-end office equipment and low-end typesetting equipment. But even if we accept the implausible notion that a Texas Air National Guard commander (or his secretary, more likely) would have one of those at his disposal and would consider the arduous manual process of centering lines on one of them a worthwhile use of time, that doesn’t explain the fact that the spacing is identical to the spacing you get out of the box with a current version of Microsoft Word. Even those (pretty uncommon) proportional-spacing typewriters that used Times Roman would not have produced identical spacing to a document created with a modern word processor.
If we were to send a memo produced with Word in 2004 back in time to 1973, it would certainly not be beyond the technology of 1973 to produce a very close copy of it. But it’s implausible that Killian just happened to produce something that looked like a laser-printed Microsoft Word document with equipment lying around the Texas ANG base. It’s not quite monkeys composing Hamlet, but it’s very close.