Bush Texas Air National Guard Memos are Forgeries

[sunmaster14]

I am glad that you are so certain that you would give your life or die in agony due to your conviction- it must mean that you are really, really, really convinced. That itself isn't really a great way, alone to decide fact from fantasy, but it is good to know. I do appreciate the resembles you note to Microsoft 2003, which you did bring in as evidence- you have made me curious-do you have a link so that I can look at the actual documents?

In fact, I tend to agree that from what we know the documents may well be forgeries, although my understanding is that a number of document experts at the time thought the available copies were too poor to make any accurate judgements. But I am not willing to commit to quite your level. I am not an expert on documents and the typography resources available at the time, and look forward to if the movie addresses this question or not.

I do find it interesting that you are willing to speculate on most other issues, but are absolutely certain on this one. And your use of "liberal" as if we are all one kind (I personally think I am to the left of liberal); I enjoy the the feelings of comradery and solidarity it engenders.

The wiki article is pretty good, and it contains the GIF that Charles Johnson (now a left-wing nutjob) did the very next day. I think this is the most definite analysis that has been done. It's a fascinating exposition.

ETA: Links to the PDFs of the actual memos are near the bottom of the wiki page. Also, note that Staudt apparently retired in March, 1972.

 

[Giordano]

The wiki article is pretty good, and it contains the GIF that Charles Johnson (now a left-wing nutjob) did the very next day. I think this is the most definite analysis that has been done. It's a fascinating exposition.

ETA: Links to the PDFs of the actual memos are near the bottom of the wiki page. Also, note that Staudt apparently retired in March, 1972.

Thanks! Very interesting- the document copies are terrible.

Just one question- my quick examination seemed to indicate that the non-superscripted nd, th, etc. were in one document whereas the superscripts were in the two others; was this true, and if so, could these represent different typewriters/typists? What do you see and know?

 

[sunmaster14]

Thanks! Very interesting- the document copies are terrible.

Yes, it is probably the case that whoever made them (Bill Burkett most likely) ran them through a copying machine for many generations to hide their provenance and perhaps to make them look old. Of course, it would have been necessary to provide copies rather than originals, since the paper and the ink in the originals might give away the fact that the originals weren't actually 30+ years old.

Just one question- my quick examination seemed to indicate that the non-superscripted nd, th, etc. were in one document whereas the superscripts were in the two others; was this true, and if so, could these represent different typewriters/typists? What do you see and know?

Yes, I think that non-superscripted ligatures with spaces are all in the August 1, 1972 document. There are other instances of the "st" in "1st" not being superscripted, without a space, but that appears in at least two documents. Could be different typists, but that sort of runs afoul of Occam's Razor. The typewriters were all printers driven by MS Word 2003, so I'm not sure what you mean by different typewriters. I am not a Word afficionado, but I vaguely remember that one way of getting around the automatic superscripting is to hit Ctrl-Z after it happens, since that undoes the last command (which is actually the program itself superscripting automatically). You could of course also just highlight the superscript and turn it back into normal text manually. If you add a space after the number, that prevents automatic superscripting, except that if you go to delete the space, superscripting happens again. It must be extremely frustrating for a novice. Honestly, I don't know how Microsoft ever became so successful. Their software designers had terrible intuition about what people want. Anyhoo, I think whoever typed the memos must have accidentally gotten the "1st" to work right, and then perhaps copied and pasted it into other places.

 

[SezMe]

Pretty funny that the liberal narrative has gone from "fake but accurate" to "unproven but accurate.

Shades of logger only spelled correctly.

 

[Meadmaker]

Thanks! Very interesting- the document copies are terrible.

Just one question- my quick examination seemed to indicate that the non-superscripted nd, th, etc. were in one document whereas the superscripts were in the two others; was this true, and if so, could these represent different typewriters/typists? What do you see and know?

The thing that makes me pretty darned certain that they are fake is that they were provided anonymously (no problems there, yet), but that the source was eventually found. (Still no problems) Then, they asked the source to produce the originals. And what did the source say? He burned them.

So, his story is that he kept these memos for 30 years, including the entire campaign for GWB's first term, and almost all of the time GWB was in office for his first term, and then most of the campaign for his second term, even after the story of Bush's guard service had been a big campaign issue in February. Then, he faxed a copy to CBS. Then he burned the originals.

Uhh....what? Really?

So, is the story they told accurate, even though the memos were fake? Well, it is exactly the same story that was told before the memos surfaced. An awful lot of people who were present during that time were interviewed, and they confirmed the basic story of the memos (i.e. that Bush was a lackluster National Guardsman, especially during his Alabama time). There are some details that the memos would supply, but the details are pretty ho hum. These were not bombshell memos. I think Rather's great sin is not in thinking that these memos were genuine, it was in thinking that these memos were important.

 

[Giordano]

Yes, it is probably the case that whoever made them (Bill Burkett most likely) ran them through a copying machine for many generations to hide their provenance and perhaps to make them look old. Of course, it would have been necessary to provide copies rather than originals, since the paper and the ink in the originals might give away the fact that the originals weren't actually 30+ years old.



Yes, I think that non-superscripted ligatures with spaces are all in the August 1, 1972 document. There are other instances of the "st" in "1st" not being superscripted, without a space, but that appears in at least two documents. Could be different typists, but that sort of runs afoul of Occam's Razor. The typewriters were all printers driven by MS Word 2003, so I'm not sure what you mean by different typewriters. I am not a Word afficionado, but I vaguely remember that one way of getting around the automatic superscripting is to hit Ctrl-Z after it happens, since that undoes the last command (which is actually the program itself superscripting automatically). You could of course also just highlight the superscript and turn it back into normal text manually. If you add a space after the number, that prevents automatic superscripting, except that if you go to delete the space, superscripting happens again. It must be extremely frustrating for a novice. Honestly, I don't know how Microsoft ever became so successful. Their software designers had terrible intuition about what people want. Anyhoo, I think whoever typed the memos must have accidentally gotten the "1st" to work right, and then perhaps copied and pasted it into other places.

Thanks for the info again. I really do not want to speculate beyond the evidence as to motives or if two typewriters were used or not. I don't see this as Occam's Razor in that many offices have multiple typewriters and/or typists, and the different styles of using a number plus an immediate superscript versus number plus a space plus an on-line ligature made be think of the possibilities of two styles of typewriter/user. If both superscript and space-plus-on-line ligatures happened in the same document I would see that, as would you, as even further suggesting that the document was made in WORD 2003. But if the differences were in different documents from different dates I find the concept possible that two different people created the different documents on different date styles.

But don't think that I am arguing this is what occurred- obviously I don't know. I am only thinking about if a "smoking gun" exists as to forgery, if the evidence as a whole indicates forgery, if the evidence as a whole admits the possibility of forgery, or if the evidence absolutely denies forgery. I don't see a smoking gun yet either way, and remain somewhere between the middle two possibilities. You state pretty confidently that a computer printer was used- could you please give me a run down on the evidence for this potential smoking gun?

 

[Giordano]

The thing that makes me pretty darned certain that they are fake is that they were provided anonymously (no problems there, yet), but that the source was eventually found. (Still no problems) Then, they asked the source to produce the originals. And what did the source say? He burned them.

So, his story is that he kept these memos for 30 years, including the entire campaign for GWB's first term, and almost all of the time GWB was in office for his first term, and then most of the campaign for his second term, even after the story of Bush's guard service had been a big campaign issue in February. Then, he faxed a copy to CBS. Then he burned the originals.

Uhh....what? Really?

So, is the story they told accurate, even though the memos were fake? Well, it is exactly the same story that was told before the memos surfaced. An awful lot of people who were present during that time were interviewed, and they confirmed the basic story of the memos (i.e. that Bush was a lackluster National Guardsman, especially during his Alabama time). There are some details that the memos would supply, but the details are pretty ho hum. These were not bombshell memos. I think Rather's great sin is not in thinking that these memos were genuine, it was in thinking that these memos were important.

I certainly agree with you that the idea of keeping a copy but not the original is odd indeed. And I agree that this is not a bombshell even if true. Perhaps I am curious mainly in terms of what makes Sunmaster so very strongly convinced. It may be worth a lot of effort to prove that a painting is not an unknown Van Gogh, but not worth as much effort to prove that it is not an unknown Herman Sublujooski.

 

[Bob001]

.....
So, is the story they told accurate, even though the memos were fake? Well, it is exactly the same story that was told before the memos surfaced. An awful lot of people who were present during that time were interviewed, and they confirmed the basic story of the memos (i.e. that Bush was a lackluster National Guardsman, especially during his Alabama time). There are some details that the memos would supply, but the details are pretty ho hum. These were not bombshell memos. I think Rather's great sin is not in thinking that these memos were genuine, it was in thinking that these memos were important.

It seems that Bush's shenanigans (basically not fulfilling his duty as required, even after being called out for it) were widely reported even before he was elected president. Rather's mistake was thinking he had found a smoking gun when he didn't need a gun at all.

Again, this can’t be stressed enough: the controversial memos that Rather and Mapes relied on were just part of a much larger mosaic. Take them away, and the larger mosaic still remains, with all of its other damning details.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/17/geo...the_undeniable_service_gaps_he_got_away_with/

 

[sloinker]

Pretty funny that the liberal narrative has gone from "fake but accurate" to "unproven but accurate." The memos were proven to be fraudulent at the 99.999% confidence level. It is preposterous to believe that one can just open up MS Word 2003 with the default settings and start typing and get an exact match to something produced by a typewriter in the 1970s that didn't even exist. Even if advanced typewriters of the age could reproduce one or two elements of the type (e.g. proportional spacing, line-centering, pseudo-kerning, superscripting), although not exactly, none could do it all without a considerable amount of futzing around by a professional. And it wouldn't have matched the memos as closely as MS Word 2003 did with the default settings. There is even an instance of a non-superscripted ligature which indicates MS Word 2003, since if you put a space after the number, Word won't superscript the "th" or the "nd" or the "st" for you. This happened. If all of that wasn't enough, the memos use Army lingo in places where Air National Guard lingo would be expected, and one memo refers to a superior officer as active when he had been retired for over a year already as of the date of the memo.

The memos are fake. I would stake my life on it. I would gladly offer to die in excruciating agony if they were somehow proven to be real. Anybody who claims that they are simply unsubstantiated and could be real is either completely ignorant, or lying. If you want to claim "fake but accurate," go ahead. If you want to claim that Rather and Mapes were duped, willfully or not, and this turned out to be an unintended benefit to George Bush, go ahead. But this "unproven but accurate" claim is absolute *********.

The same superscript font was used on his honorable discharge as in the disputed memos. So you're saying dubya, the shirking pussy that he is, had less than an honorable discharge?

 

[sunmaster14]

The same superscript font was used on his honorable discharge as in the disputed memos. So you're saying dubya, the shirking pussy that he is, had less than an honorable discharge?

Do you have a link to an image of the document? The only image (scroll down) I can find contains no superscripts.

 

[sloinker]

Do you have a link to an image of the document? The only image (scroll down) I can find contains no superscripts.

Quoting the article I linked to. I have no images.

 

[sunmaster14]

Quoting the article I linked to. I have no images.

That was not referring to his discharge document. It was referring to a document, which I can no longer find on the internet, but is referenced in this analysis. You can see the image of the superscripted "th" in "111th" for yourself. It clearly looks nothing like the superscripts in the Killian memos. The claim that the authentic document is similar to any of the memos at issue is also debunked in Thornburg-Boccardi report here.

Also, if you would like to do some further reading about Bush's national guard service, you can find an extensive analysis here. I found this excerpt interesting:

The controversy over President Bush's military record has been heating up since Michael Moore called President Bush a "deserter," (see our earlier article ).

Democrats Make "AWOL" Allegation a Campaign Issue

Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe repeatedly accused the President of being “AWOL” in nationally televised interviews.

...

Immediately after Bush's appearance John Kerry said Bush’s honorable discharge does not settle the question of whether he skipped Air National Guard drills when he was supposed to. "Just because you get an honorable discharge does not in fact answer that question,'' Kerry told reporters.

Both the DNC and Kerry himself made a huge issue out of Bush's military service, and yet they complained like stuck pigs when the Swift Boat Vets made an issue out of Kerry's service. The hypocrisy is pretty delicious.

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

Kerry actually fulfilled his service requirement, rather than shirking it and failing to meet the obligations of the shirk.

 

[sunmaster14]

Kerry actually fulfilled his service requirement, rather than shirking it and failing to meet the obligations of the shirk.

Well, Bush did too. Perhaps more importantly, though, Bush didn't make his "heroic" military service a centerpiece of his campaign for President.

 

[Giordano]

Well, Bush did too. Perhaps more importantly, though, Bush didn't make his "heroic" military service a centerpiece of his campaign for President.

Was Bush's service heroic? Did he receive any medals? Did he serve in combat?

What again was the smoking gun evidence that the documents in the 60 mins case were printed on a computer printer? Not the WORD 2003 aspects previously discussed to death here- the direct evidence that it was a printer?

 

[Meadmaker]

I do think that Kerry shouldn't have made the effort to question Bush's military service. I thought the DNC in particular was acting pretty disgracefully in that regard.

Bush served, sort of, and that's ok. it's not especially admirable, but the issue should have been left alone. It was stuff like that that made me really not like Kerry. I voted for him, but when it became clear that he was losing, I wasn't especially upset. He had run a campaign that was so awful that it made me question his ability to be President. It was so full of this kind of grandstanding that it all seemed phony.

I still think the swifties were much worse, but that's just a tu qoque sort of thing, pretty much by definition. It doesn't excuse Kerry slinging mud at Bush, andnothing justifies the Bush surrogates slinging mud at Kerry. There was just a whole lot of mudslinging going on in that campaign.

 

[sunmaster14]

Was Bush's service heroic? Did he receive any medals? Did he serve in combat?

Bush's service was more heroic than not serving at all (e.g. like Bill Clinton or Bernie Sanders). Flying fighter planes is dangerous work, even if it's not in combat. IIRC, one fighter pilot from Bush's unit died in a crash during Bush's service. Also, it was not a forgone conclusion that he would avoid combat service, as a trained fighter pilot is a pretty valuable resource that the military presumably would draw upon if needed.

What again was the smoking gun evidence that the documents in the 60 mins case were printed on a computer printer? Not the WORD 2003 aspects previously discussed to death here- the direct evidence that it was a printer?

The documents were printed electronically. If you want to argue that MS Word 2003 could have been used to drive a hot-wired typewriter of some sort, then perhaps you can take issue with the use of the word "printer." I'm not sure what the point would be. I have pointed you to an extensive technical analysis, which shows that a computer generated document is different in many ways from a typewritten document. This shows up in a pixel by pixel analysis of the electronic images of the documents. It is utterly implausible that something created in the early 1970s, let alone something created by a random dude in a national guard office typing brief memos on an inexpensive typewriter, and not a professional typesetter, would match the default output of MS Word 2003, a software program designed to incorporate the most professional, elegant and modern typesetting techniques into software. Even the claim that MS Word 2003 was designed to mimic manual typewriters of the 1970s doesn't fly because, well, it wasn't. It was designed to look nice. So, with the default settings, it employs a proportionally spaced font, page centering of headers, perfect line spacing, elegantly placed and sized superscripts, and pseudo-kerning of characters. Nobody in his right mind would jump through hoops to do all of that for a memo typed in a national guard office, if it was even possible at the time.

 

[Crossbow]

Well, Bush did too. Perhaps more importantly, though, Bush didn't make his "heroic" military service a centerpiece of his campaign for President.

Like Hell Bush did the kind of millitary service that Kerry did.

Bush's daddy used his influence to get his son a job with an outfit that never left Texas and Bush, Jr did not even bother to maintain his flight status. While Kerry was in an actual combat unit in Vietnam.

It is no wonder that the stupid, idiotic, lying George W. Bush never made a big deal about his military service.

 

[Giordano]

Bush's service was more heroic than not serving at all (e.g. like Bill Clinton or Bernie Sanders). Flying fighter planes is dangerous work, even if it's not in combat. IIRC, one fighter pilot from Bush's unit died in a crash during Bush's service. Also, it was not a forgone conclusion that he would avoid combat service, as a trained fighter pilot is a pretty valuable resource that the military presumably would draw upon if needed.



The documents were printed electronically. If you want to argue that MS Word 2003 could have been used to drive a hot-wired typewriter of some sort, then perhaps you can take issue with the use of the word "printer." I'm not sure what the point would be. I have pointed you to an extensive technical analysis, which shows that a computer generated document is different in many ways from a typewritten document. This shows up in a pixel by pixel analysis of the electronic images of the documents. It is utterly implausible that something created in the early 1970s, let alone something created by a random dude in a national guard office typing brief memos on an inexpensive typewriter, and not a professional typesetter, would match the default output of MS Word 2003, a software program designed to incorporate the most professional, elegant and modern typesetting techniques into software. Even the claim that MS Word 2003 was designed to mimic manual typewriters of the 1970s doesn't fly because, well, it wasn't. It was designed to look nice. So, with the default settings, it employs a proportionally spaced font, page centering of headers, perfect line spacing, elegantly placed and sized superscripts, and pseudo-kerning of characters. Nobody in his right mind would jump through hoops to do all of that for a memo typed in a national guard office, if it was even possible at the time.

You posted that the documents were printed on "typewriters [which] were all printers driven by MS Word 2003." I thought you had some direct evidence of the printer part- but now I see that your evidence was your prior arguments as to WORD 2003. Once again I agree that the evidence indicates that these documents could well be a forgery, which is what I concluded before this discussion. But interestingly enough, I realized through this thread that the evidence is not as completely open and shut as I originally thought or as you still seem to feel it is. There were typewriters of the era that did superscripts, and the mix of superscripts and on-line ligatures were in different documents suggest the possibility of different typewriters/typists. The only reason I have pursued this minor issue is that you appear so very certain in your posts (being willing to die an agonizing death if not true) so I wanted to know if you had some unrevealed evidence for your certainty.

I have come to agree with Meadmaker here: the documents may well have been a forgery and even if not, who cares? I also agree that the Kerry campaign should not have made it a big deal, but political campaigns go after any perceived weakness in an opponent like it or not. Frankly I don't think that Bush's service should have been questioned for the reasons in the memos, although I too was subject to the draft in that era and it clearly took connections to end up in the National Guard rather than as a combat soldier in Viet Nam. Nor do I think it was okay to smear Kerry ( in the absence of any facts) who actually served in combat and received medals for heroism.

In the world of American politics many candidates have relied on their military careers as a boost for their political ambitions; I don't think Kerry stood out by being publicly proud of both his combat service and his anti-war efforts afterward. Attacking Bush's record for the reasons in the memos I do think was "over-the top."

 

[KDLarsen]

I do think that Kerry shouldn't have made the effort to question Bush's military service. I thought the DNC in particular was acting pretty disgracefully in that regard.

I felt that Kerry was entirely entitled to attack it, especially after the Republican convention where Purple Heart band-aids were handed out to delegates, to mock the, according to some, dubious awards Kerry had recieved.

Bush spent an awful lot of time referring to himself as a war president, up to and including that infamous carrier landing off the coast of San Diego, and yet there was clear cut evidence that his time in the TXANG was all but clean.

I remember reading elsewhere, probably in one of his parent's biographies, how he was terrified of flying the Delta Dagger, and how it was part of the reason why he quit flying early.