News Articles Internet Articles (2015)
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One day after holding a press conference and calling President George W. Bush a liar for claiming he had served honorably in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam era, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe was forced to hold a second news conference in which he said that Democrats "unequivocally" did not leak forged memos to CBS. Now who's lying? In fact, not only did McAuliffe assert that the smear campaign did not originate with anyone in the Democratic Party (meaning the DNC or the Kerry Campaign), he then blamed the counterfeiting of false documents on Karl Rove, the Bush campaign strategist. Why? Because, he claimed, Rove wanted to make Kerry look bad. McAuliffe doesn't realize Kerry doesn't need any help in that area. Everytime Hanoi John opens his mouth, he makes himself look bad. But Kerry doesn't look quite as bad as McAuliffe, who refused to apologize to the President of the United States for calling him a liar. Blaming Rove for "the invisible man's" attempt to drive Bush's poll numbers down is really stupidand only a far left liberal or a far right extremist would believe it. Come to think of it, that's pretty much what the global Muslim community did right after 9-11 when it was revealed that Islamic extremists skyjacked the planes that took down the World Trade Center and left a gaping hole in the Pentagon a year ago today. They blamed the Jews, claiming it was a Zionist plot between the Mossad and Bush to allow him to wage his own Jihad against peace-loving Islamists so he could steal their oil. Also calling Bush a liar was 4-term Senator Tom Harkin [D-IO] who has his own problems with truth. In 1979 when Harkin launched his first run for Congress he claimed that he flew air combat patrols in Vietnam during his stint in the U.S. Navy. No one bothered to give Harkin an "honesty check" until 1991 when Harkin launched a bid for the White House against draft dodger Bill Clinton. The Clinton machine did not have to dig deep to discover Harkins had lied about his own service record. He never flew combat missions anywhere. Harkin was a pilot, and he served in Vietnam. But the only missions Harkin flew were mail runs. Yet, the liberal media continues to give people like Harkin a podium from which to point fingers at others. Finallybefore focusing
on the forged documents that the Kerry Campaign anticipated using
to smear Bush after Dan Rather exposed him as a draft- In February, the Kerry
Campaign announced it had just returned a $2,000 campaign contribution
from Chun Jae-yong, son of Chun Dooh-hwan, the former
president of the Republic of South Korea. Kerry's campaign did
not say he was returning the money because it is illegal for a Korean On May 21, 1998 the Washington
Post reported that Clinton-Gore fund-raiser, Johnny Chung,
43, who plea-bargained a light sentence, delivered a $50,000 contribution
to the White House and gave it to Margaret A. Williams, Hillary
Clinton's chief of staff. Williams accepted the check and passed
it along to the DNC, which deposited it. Aside from the fact that
candidates cannot accept contributions from foreign governments, federal
law prohibits federal employees from accepting political contributions
on government property. It is a crime punishable with "hard time."
If you recall, the White House snuffed it off saying that Williams did not technically "accept" the checkshe merely agreed
to pass it along The Democrats who rushed front and center to denounce the President and accuse him of lying should not be casting stones since it could bring their own glass houses down around their ears. On Wednesday, 60-Minutes
II produced documents thatif truewould have been very
damning to the President. Dan Rather presented what he insisted
was concrete "evidence" that President Bush (like Bill
Clinton) had personally asked One of the four documents purports that a Bush family friend, Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt pressured a subordinate to favorably alter fitness reports on Lt. Bush. However Staudt left the Air National Guard on March 1, 1972. Staudt's suposed pressuring of one of his subordinates to "sugar coat" Bush's fitness report was dated August 18, 197318 months after Staudt retired. Another military officer whom Rather said would substantiate that the documents were genuine was Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, who was Killian's immediate supervisor. Hodges, however, told the Los Angeles Times he thought the memos were fake. Rather further
insists that CBS diligently verified the authenticity of documents
upon which they were basing their allegations, and that each document "...was thoroughly vetted by independent experts and we are convinced
of their authenticity." Apparently it does not take much to convince CBS that development in both word processors and computers that were not available in 1972 and 1973 when the documents presented by CBS were supposedly written. (While IBM did have an electric typewriter in 1973 that did proportional spacing, (a) it was not in general use, and (b) it was not in use by the military at all.) Furthermore, the IBM electric typewriter did not allow superscript lettering (line 2, above with the reference to the 111th FLS.) Flynn also noticed that the proportional spacing was done both across and up-and-down the page. That required a computer. A second forensics expert, Phil Bouffard noted the CBS documents appeared to be done in Times Roman, widely used by word processing programs, but not common on typewriters. In Bouffard's view, whomever produced the documents did so using Microsoft Wordwhich, of course, was not even invented in 1972. Adding
further insult to CBS' credibility, Eugene Hussey, a certified
forensic document expert and former Secret Service Agent, was hired by
the Washington Times to examine the two signatures purported to
be that of Lt. Col. Killian on Friday. Until now, the press scrutiny
has been on the text of the documents and not the signatures. Every publicly identified
forensic document examiner (until CBS was forced to reveal the
identity of their "experts") has agreed the documents are forgeries.
Nevertheless, Dan Rather who broke the story, insisted that experts
had verified the authenticity of the documents. He poophahed the findings
of the three certified forensic experts, saying that skeptics of the documents
are "partisan politicians." The Washington Post might
not like that characterization since they were the first to examine them
and label them as frauds. Forced to produce the "experts" who
carefully examined the documents, The other two forensic documents examiners, Linda James and Emily Will both had problems with the memos and advised CBS that they felt uncomfortable with them. James told CBS that she thought the documents had been produced on a computer. Will told CBS she had several problems with the documents, particularly the superscript. CBS said they had also consulted two other forensic experts but declined to name them. When Dan Rather was forced to defend his admonition that the Bush memos were genuine,
he brought a type font specialist onto his "rebuttal" program
who stated on the air that the type font known as Times Roman has
been What prompted the Washington Times to hire an expert was their noticing that the two signatures in the samples supplied by CBS were visibly different from samples they secured from the Department of Defense. Killian's actual signature is very cryptic and almost child-like compared to the signatures purported to be Killian's by CBS. In addition, the CBS documents use the acronym NLT for "not later than" which military officials don't use. The memo also use the acronym AFM for "Air Force Manual." While that acronym is used, it would never have been cited by anyone in the military as the regulatory authority for a mandatory flight physical. Further, in their investigation, a Washington Times computer expert retyped one of the CBS memos in Microsoft Word on a computer, and superimposed his document over the CBS document. They were a perfect match, character by character. The expert noted that even if a circa 1972 typewriter contained keys in Times Roman, they could not match perfectly with computer generated text simply because line spacing was not available 30 years ago. One further bit of evidence that suggests the memos are forgeries is that the memo dealing with Bush's physical demands that Bush have his flight physical by the end of May, 1972. In point of fact, since Bush was born in July, his annual physical would not have been due until July, 1972, not May. CBS, which still insists the documents they presented are legitimate 1972 era memos, refuses to say how they obtained the memos, or who provided them other than to admit they did not come from anyone in the military nor did they come from the Killian family. That leaves only political operatives. And given the choice between political operatives for the Bush people and the Kerry peopleand the fact that all of the Kerry operatives were armed with information about the memos before anyone theoretically had seen them, my money is on the Kerry people, the DNC, or one of the anti-Bush 527s whose agendas are correlated through the Kerry campaign with providing CBS the ingredients for the mudcake that was used to smear the President. And, of course, since Dan Rather has a well known bias against the Bush family dating back to the first Gulf War when Rather warned that the elder Bush would come to regret his decision to keep the news media in the blind, it is easy to see why he was the talking head who was given the forged documents. Someone may have suspected he would not try very hard to discredit them. |
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