-Caveat Lector-
By Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen Documents unearthed by CBS News that raise doubts about whether President
Bush fulfilled his obligations to the Texas Air National Guard include several
features suggesting that they were generated by a computer or word processor
rather than a Vietnam War-era typewriter, experts said yesterday. Experts consulted by a range of news organizations pointed out typographical
and formatting questions about four documents as they considered the possibility
that they were forged. The widow of the National Guard officer whose signature
is on the bottom of the documents also disputed their authenticity. The documents, which were shown Wednesday night on "60 Minutes II," bear
dates from 1972 and 1973 and include an order for Bush to report for his annual
physical exam and a discussion of how he could get out of "coming to drill." The dispute over the documents' authenticity came as Democrats stepped up
their criticism of Bush's service with the National Guard between 1968 and 1973.
The Democratic National Committee sought to fuel the controversy yesterday by
holding a news conference at which Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) pointed to the
documents as a fresh indictment of Bush's credibility. CBS News released a statement yesterday standing by its reporting, saying
that each of the documents "was thoroughly vetted by independent experts and we
are convinced of their authenticity." The statement added that CBS reporters had
verified the documents by talking to unidentified people who saw them "at the
time they were written." CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards declined to respond to questions raised by
experts who examined copies of the papers at the request of The Washington Post,
or to provide the names of the experts CBS consulted. Experts interviewed by The
Post pointed to a series of telltale signs suggesting that the documents were
generated by a computer or word processor rather than the typewriters in
widespread use by Bush's National Guard unit. A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not
want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources
as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents'
alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the
documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things
that Killian had expressed to me at the time." "These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda,
but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically,
we've gone several extra miles." The official said the network regarded Hodges's comments as "the trump card"
on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he
did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview
to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in
Texas. In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian's widow, Marjorie
Connell, described the records as "a farce," saying she was with her husband
until the day he died in 1984 and he did not "keep files." She said her husband
considered Bush "an excellent pilot." "I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person," she
said, adding that she was "livid" at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly
before Wednesday night's broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to
authenticate the records. If demonstrated to be authentic, the documents would contradict several
long-standing claims by the White House about an episode in Bush's National
Guard service in 1972, when he abruptly gave up flying and moved from Texas to
Alabama to take part in a political campaign. The CBS documents purport to show
that Killian, who was Bush's squadron commander, was unhappy with Bush for his
performance toward meeting his National Guard commitments and resisted pressure
from his superiors to "sugarcoat" the record. After their initial airing on the "CBS Evening News" and "60 Minutes II"
programs Wednesday night, the documents were picked up by other news
organizations, including The Post. A front-page story in The Post yesterday
noted that CBS declined to provide details about the source of the documents,
the authenticity of which could not be independently confirmed. On Wednesday evening, the White House e-mailed reporters copies of the
documents, as supplied by CBS, as well as the transcript of a CBS interview with
White House communications director Dan Bartlett rebutting allegations that Bush
had shirked his military duties. While Bartlett described the emergence of the
documents as "dirty politics," he did not dispute their authenticity. After doubts about the documents began circulating on the Internet yesterday
morning, The Post contacted several independent experts who said they appeared
to have been generated by a word processor. An examination of the documents by
The Post shows that they are formatted differently from other Texas Air National
Guard documents whose authenticity is not questioned. William Flynn, a forensic document specialist with 35 years of experience in
police crime labs and private practice, said the CBS documents raise suspicions
because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. Documents generated by
the kind of typewriters that were widely used in 1972 space letters evenly
across the page, so that an "i" uses as much space as an "m." In the CBS
documents, by contrast, each letter uses a different amount of space. While IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional
spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government. In addition,
Flynn said, the CBS documents appear to use proportional spacing both across and
down the page, a relatively recent innovation. Other anomalies in the documents
include the use of the superscripted letters "th" in phrases such as 111th
Fighter Interceptor Squadron, Bush's unit. "It would be nearly impossible for all this technology to have existed at
that time," said Flynn, who runs a document-authentication company in
Phoenix. Other experts largely concurred. Phil Bouffard, a forensic document examiner
from Cleveland, said the font used in the CBS documents appeared to be Times
Roman, which is widely used by word-processing programs but was not common on
typewriters. CBS officials insisted that the network had done due diligence in checking
out the authenticity of the documents with independent experts over six weeks.
The senior CBS official said the network had talked to four typewriting and
handwriting experts "who put our concerns to rest" and confirmed the
authenticity of Killian's signature. The doubts about the documents left the White House and the Bush campaign in
a state of suspended animation, with Bush aides encouraging doubts about the
documents but conceding that the possibility that they were forged seemed too
good to be true. White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said that officials there
had not attempted to authenticate the documents but simply released copies
"provided to us by CBS in the interests of openness." The Bush administration's strategy yesterday was to let news organizations
raise doubts and conduct forensic examinations, without taking an official
position on whether the documents were genuine. "It's clear in reviewing the documents that they do nothing to change the
fact that the president served honorably, and was proud of his service in the
Air National Guard," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. Staff writer Howard Kurtz and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to
this report.
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