The Killian Documents - We've Got Mail

Highlights from my e-mail on the CBS News / 60 Minutes controversy and the forgery question hanging over the Killian documents:

- "Did a CBS exec really say that, in verifying these documents, CBS went "several extra miles"? It looks now like Dan Rather is going the Last Mile."

- "Has anyone spotted Bias author Bernie Goldberg? I bet he's giggling like a guy hooked up to nitrous oxide."

- "The luckiest "Big Media" guy in America this morning is Nick Kristof. On any other day, his "compelling witness" joke of a column would have been pummelled, but with Rather and Hewitt on the menu, he was just a table scrap."

Good point about Kristof. Briefly, in a Wednesday column, he endorsed Bob Mintz as a "compelling witness" against Bush in the Alabama AWOL controversy. By Thursday, Bob Mintz had been debunked by CBS News (the closing paragraphs), and various omissions and distortions in the Kristof column were on the table.

Well, luckily for Kristof the feeding frenzy devoured Rather. But if folks are still hungry...

UPDATE: I'm rather green.

Comments

[TexasToast]

Nothing is proven yet. Celebrating a bit early???

[TM]

Maybe. But once the "questions have been raised" meme takes hold like this, I don't think CBS will ever "prove" that these docs are not fake. Their inability to address the rather obvious issues raised on Day 1 makes them appear ridiculous.

Now, I am baffled that people at ABC or the Weekly Standard can get half a dozen experts to look at a website .pdf file and opine on this stuff, but they did. And the questons they raise seem like questions that the CBS experts should have raised, and answered, before they aired this.

But since CBS is not presenting their side, we are left thinking that maybe they didn't do their homework.

And if they come out now, and say "we knew that", about the typesets or whatever, well, why did they wait so long? Why couldn't they convince Ted Kopel last night that CBS was fine, and ABC had nothing?

For that matter, how could CBS report that people close to Killian say this describes his mindset, without having talked to the widow or the son?

[AH]

While Kerry was in Cambodia in 1971 he sent me an email talking about how proud he was to be serving alongside of so many murderers and rapists.

He used a blueberry with wireless internet to send it. I think it was built into his 8mm camera.

[John Weidner]

Goldberg was on San Francisco's KSFO Morning Show this morning. My wife heard him and reports he was delightfully sarcastic.

[Jos Bleau]

I don't see the fuss. My admittedly inexpert viewing shows all the suspect memos to have been kerned.

As the wikipedia points out

"Kerning is implicitly part of digital type design..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

Forget about superscripts or proportional type, kerning is ALWAYS the product of digital processes.

Anyone else notice this besides me?

[Tim Lambert]

Goldberg? That phony?

[Appalled Moderate]

Toast:

Hate to admit it, but these memos look faked. When Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall even say that it appears CBS has some 'splainin to do, it's probably game, set and match.

Personally, I think it's been a huge mistake for the Demos to make such a big deal of this National Guard business. I have yet to see the evidence that your average swing voter would take this into account in the voting booth. Now there's a good chance that the "you've gone too far" dynmaic (see Wellstone funeral, Clinton impeachment) is going to hurt them.

This said, I will note the tragic irony that this story's quick inflation, and its swift blow up may prevent the same dynamic from whacking the Bushies over the Swift Boat allegtions. If Kerry is going to be blessed with this kind of luck, it might have been better that he were blessed with it last February...

[CERDIP]

According to Byron York at NRO CBS says there will be no investigation, and that they are sticking to their story, and stand behind the documents.

This tells me that the source for the docs is probably pretty directly connected to Dan Rather. An investigation would be too embarrassing, even if the docs *were* legit.

[Mike D in SC]

CBS went "several extra miles"? It looks now like Dan Rather is going the Last Mile."

... and Dan Blather's career is walking the Green Mile.

[Blind Pig]

I'm not an expert on fonts or typewriters. However, I have been using Microsoft Word for about 9 years.

It's already been noted that in one of the documents that the forger left a space between some numbers and letters so that Word would not automatically superscript the text. For example "147 th". (The feature that does the automatic superscript is called "Autoformat As You Type".

However, in the document "Suspension of Flight status", the forger used another technique to have Word not Autoformat. When the forger typed in "111th" and "1st" (which do not have the spaces) instead of using the number "1", they used a lower case "L". Word would not recognize that as something to be Autoformatted. And in the Times New Roman font, the number "1" and a lower case "L" look almost identical.

Too bad the forger did not know how to turn off the "Autoformat As You Type" feature. For more on this, see my blog: http://blindpig.blogs.com/outside_the_perimeter/2004/09/how_to_trick_mi.html.

[Paul Zrimsek]

This is extremely annoying. Just when we had a nice tidy narrative worked out with John "Secret plan for Peace With Honor" Kerry as the new Nixon, along comes this killjoy Rather to start stonewalling and invoking executive privilege.

[J_Crater]

So Bernie Goldberg's take on this sounds like ..
CBS treated the "Killian documents" much the same way the CIA (and every other intelligence agency) treated Iraq's WMDs
.. it must be true, even if it isn't.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

I'm hoping that, except for the honor, he'd Rather in Philadelphia:

http://flyunderthebridge.blogspot.com/2004/09/dan-you-da-manbig-time.html