Category Archives: Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals

Robert Waldman — who deserves more readers! — has a nice post on The CBS Memos.

Robert's random thoughts: The debate about whether the alleged Killian memos are forgeries has its delights. Every geek dreams of the day in which fonts, superscripts, proportional spacing and kerning make the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Well not quite every geek. I consider myself a geek and I just learned what kerning is. Also the thought of total humiliation of George W Bush, Dan Rather or (most likely) both, must delight all right thinking people.

…

the alleged memos are not the first documents which suggest that Bush disobeyed a direct order. Back on St Valentime's day, Mark Kleiman noted that The Democratic Veteran linked to the order grounding Bush and James R Bath (you know Bush's link to the Bin Laden family) as posted by Martin at coldfeet@cis.net who I believe is a hero farmer in Iowa.

This order from the General Francis Greenlief (chief natinal guard bureau) grounds Bush and orders “Off will comply with para 2-10 AFM, 35-13.” This is an order from a major general. It is written in militareese. What exactly does para 2-10 AFM, 35-13 require ? The most reasonable guess is that it is an order to take a flight physical. This would mean that there is uncontested proof that Bush disobeyed a direct order. However, no one has replied to Kleiman's request for a 1972 Air Force Manual, so we don't know. The manual must be an archived document, so it seems to me that it would make more sense to look it up than to argue about kerns and superscripts.

Questions, credible ones, swirl about the authenticity and provenance of the Lt. Col. Jerry Killian documents revealed by CBS.

There are very odd things about these papers. Yet, the case for forgery is lessened, I think, by the White House's failure to claim the documents are not real. That said, I have no faith at all in arguments that claim 'if this were a forgery they surely would have done a better job'—carelessness is rampant in the world.

Document authentication not being my forte, I'm just going to link here to anything interesting I read on the subject. I'll update this post in the next day or two if I find more interesting stuff.

• Powerline jumps all over them
• CBS stands by its documents, and a former colleague of Col. Killian's thinks they are real. Col. Killian's son, however, doubts they are real.
• Warblogging.com looks at the technical issues, the possible motivations for forgery
• The Washington Post interviews experts dubious about the documents
• At “The Blogging of the President: 2004”, Stirling Newberry summarizes the ways in which the documents look too modern and then offers and evaluates various hypotheses as to how they came to be that way. Most plausible:
  

  Any expert worth his salt would look at the signatures we see, and the difficulties in producing the documents contemporaneously, and scratch his head. However, if there are hard originals – that is typed or hand written originals – and these are the readable typed or “fair” copies, then the problem vanishes. CBS saw the real things, can't release them (off the record), but can release documents which, while not originals, are copies which have the same content in them, prepared by Killian (his signature on them). They are on solid ground, with provenence, and the holders of the originals – whoever they are – are not bothered by nagging questions of how they got those originals. CBS protects confidentiality, and if need be, can prove that yes, these things are legitimate.

Update1: The Spectator claims that 'a retired military officer' has been peddling these documents for weeks and that the Kerry campaign may have passed them on to CBS.

Update2: First Draft, Now I'm a 'Document Expert', Too finds superscripts in old National Guard documents

Also CBS News has reiterated its full confidence in the authenticity of the documents. Dan Rather said, “The story is true” and “no retraction has been discussed, nor should it be.”

Item: CBS posts the full text of memos showing then Lt. Bush ignored a direct order, and that there was pressure to shield him from higher-ups.

• May 4, 1972
• May 19, 1972
• August 1, 1972
• August 18, 1973

Item: When Bush skylarked off to Alabama, what he missed was not the pointless desultory flying of geriatric airplanes, as his campaign had been suggesting, but rather a sudden increase in alertness, a '24-hour active alert mission to safeguard against surprise attack' in the southern United States beginning on Oct. 6, 1972 (although it beats me against what they might have been defending—the Viet Cong? Castro?).

Of course, if you want excruciating detail on all this, the place to go remains The AWOL Project

We know that nobody ever came forward to claim the $10,000 reward offered “If you personally witnessed George W. Bush reporting for drills at Dannelly Air National Guard Base between the months of May and November of 1972”. But how come no one has ever asked GW himself if he can name one person he trained with? That's what Texans for Truth wants to know. And they have a slick ad featuring Robert Mintz, who served in Alabama's 187th Air National Guard during the period that Lt. Bush perfected the art of invisibility.

I can name people I worked with in summer jobs 20 years ago (30 years ago I was in high school — I can probably name just about everyone in my 100 person class, but that's hardly a fair comparison)—can't GW name just one or two he trained with?

Although, as many bloggers noted, the AP tried to whitewash the sudden Hilary-Clinton-like rediscovery of Bush's military pay records by saying that they “shed no new light on the future president's activities during that summer” it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that in fact they do shed light on a dark corner. Like the curious case of the dog in the nighttime, the pay records speak volumes for what they do NOT say: they lack any indication that Lt. Bush met his service obligation.

That's simple. How Lt. Bush got away with an honorable discharge anyway is much more complex. The fullest descriptions of the whole paper trail are provided by Paul Lukasiak and can be found at his AWOL Project. Mr. Lukasiak has now released part III of this saga, 'Fraud: The Secrets of Bush’s Payroll Records Revealed. It's pretty powerful stuff, but it's also complicated and set out in an over-wrought style.

The combination of complexity and pushy style mean that the major media will probably ignore it. If a story is a little technical and can't be explained in a sound bite, even most print reporters these days are reluctant to cover it, and doubly so if the person offering the data isn't either a known member of the pundit class or sounds very calm and sober. No one wants to be thought shrill, after all.

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I would be prepared to believe that an unfortunate accident with aging microfilm just happened to destroy Lt. Bush's personnel records for the three key months of his career so long as it could be shown that the same thing happened to many others, and so long as someone would come forward and say they were involved in the failed “restoration” project. Routinized military incompetence is something I can accept.

But it's darned odd that the Bush folks, who presumably knew about this destruction for several years never mentioned it.

And it's even odder that Bush — who promised he'd release all his military records — has nevertheless consistently refused to sign the waiver that would in fact make good on this promise. (In which context it is just short of amazing that the New York times buried this story deep in the paper rather than running it on the front page. SCLM indeed.)

Given that people have been doing a serious analysis of the Bush military records and have found many peculiar anomalies, things that are at least consistent with a pattern of cronyism and illegality, and given that the current administration lies about everything out of habit, well, excuse me if I need a little more reassurance that Occam's Razor doesn't lead you straight to skullduggery.