I'd rather be thinking about other things, but the CBS memo scandal won't die. Or was it a scandal?
Consider Paul Lukasiak's latest, WAS THE 'KILLIAN MEMO SCANDAL' A SET UP. Lukasiak argues,
Newly released documents from George W. Bush’s personnel files lead new weight to the theory that the White House engineered the recent scandal regarding CBS’s use of the “Killian memos”. Acting under a court order, on Friday, September 24, the Department of Defense released 10 new pages of documents, including an official Texas Air National Guard memo which conclusively refutes the technological questions that were raised about the “Killian memos.”
And it can now be shown that these “new documents” were deliberately withheld by the White House when it released “absolutely everything” on February 13, 2004.
The document in question is a memo written to “First Lieutenant George W. Bush” notifying him of his promotion to First Lieutenant. The memo is dated Febrary 19, 1971, more than a year before the date on the first of the Killian memos. And, like the Killian memos, this document uses a “proportionately spaced font”, and has all the characteristics of a document produced on a modern day computer using “Microsoft Word”.
When the White House released “all the documents” in February, they were arranged in three groups; “Personnel File from Texas ANG”, Personnel File from NPRC in 2000”, and Personnel File from NPRC in 2004”1. (“ANG” is “Air National Guard”, “NPRC” is the National Personnel Records Center”, which holds the “master files” of all former military personnel.)
The proportionately spaced “promotion memo” in question was among those documents released under FOIA to at least two researchers in 2000, including a reporter from a major media organization, and Marty Heldt, an independent researcher from Iowa. In other words, this memo was provided to the White House as part of the “Personnel File from NPRC in 2000”, but was withheld by the White House when it released “all the documents” in February.
The Department of Defense, under orders from the Bush administration, fought a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press in July to have the original microfiche records examined to determine if documents were withheld by the White House. And even though the DoD released Bush’s flight records on September 10th, just when the “Killian memo” controversy was gaining steam, and released 200 additional pages of records on September 17th, it did not release the “proportionately spaced” memo at either point.
It was not until the date on which a Federal court order required all documents to be released, September 24th, that the Department of Defense finally released the “proportionately spaced” document, even though this document was in the “2000 NRPC files.” And it was not until the next week that the document was made available to the general public on the DoD website…
I don't know what to make of all this. It feels a bit like beating a dead horse, but as the author of the meticulously researched AWOL project, Lukasiak has earned our attention even if he has something outlandish to say. (Thus, 'the horse that won't die'.) I just wish there were some way to dump this in the inbox of the people CBS has appointed to head its self-investigation.
