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September 11, 2004

I WASN’T HAPPY with the photos the MSNBC folks ran with my September 11 post over at GlennReynolds.com, so I asked them to make some changes. They did, and now there’s an excellent slideshow and video links.

JIM GERAGHTY ON CBS: “Game over.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Yes, Virginia, they’re fake:”

The chances that you could produce, by accident, a typewritten document that looks exactly like what comes out of your laser printer when you write the same thing in Microsoft Word, is a hell of a lot smaller than the chance that the earth will be destroyed by an asteroid: i.e. too small to worry about.

What flabbergasts me is how Dan Rather could have been taken in. He’s old. He knows what typewritten things look like. These documents don’t look like that. It also makes me wonder if 60 minutes is staffing its newsroom with twelve-year-old Pakistani children in order to save money on labour. How else could not one person say “y’know, this looks an awful lot like the stuff I type on my computer.”

Indeed. (Note: Since she blogged this from an Internet cafe in ~~Ireland~~ London, she presumably wasn’t pajama-blogging.)

BILL AT INDCJOURNAL REPORTS that the Boston Globe misquoted a forensic expert regarding the allegedly forged CBS memos. The expert is quite unhappy, and Bill has a lot of quotes from him.

THIS IMAGE comes with the following message:

The proud warriors of Baker Company wanted to do something to pay tribute to our fallen comrades. So since we are part of the only Marine Infantry Battalion left in Iraq the one way that we could think of doing that is by taking a picture of Baker Company saying the way we feel. It would be awesome if you could find a way to share this with our fellow countrymen.

I was wondering if there was any way to get this into your papers to let the world know that “WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN” and are proud to serve our country.” Semper Fi

1stSgt Dave Jobe

(Via American Daughter). However, since — unlike CBS, apparently — I try to vet my sources, I should note that this picture is actually from last year. Don’t think that undercuts the message, though. I’m sure that the Marines, at least, still remember.

UPDATE: Read this letter from Iraq, too.

MARK STEYN IS MERCILESS: “CBS Falls for Kerry Campaign’s Fake Memo:”

Are Dan Rather and ”60 Minutes” a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ”The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.”

Hey, why not? Who’s gonna spot it? If CBS says it’s so, that’s good enough for Thomas Oliphant’s Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ”basic standards.” On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times’ excitable economist, filed a column called, ”The Dishonesty Thing,” and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush’s ”pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn’t …”

The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn’t hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator’s AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.

That last certainly seems right. Meanwhile Jay Bryant asks: “What Did Rather Know, and When Did He Know It?”

As of this writing, the network is said to be investigating the situation. Of course, this is not a real investigation, in the police sense. CBS leaves that sort of thing to fiction, on its CSI programs, for example. What they’re investigating is how to minimize the public relations damage. . . .

For someone like Sandy Berger, it is always better to claim sloppiness than evil intent, but for a news organization, the issue is not nearly as clear. It is the job of an organization like CBS to sort out the real from the phony. If they don’t do that, what earthly good are they?

Indeed.

UPDATE: The New York Post asks, in an editorial, “What are CBS — and anchor Dan Rather — trying to hide?”

Sure, news organizations sometimes need to protect sources.

But it’s one thing for CBS to withhold information about the documents’ origin — and quite another for it to refuse to disclose the names of those who (it claims) authenticated them.

Why, after all, would folks who make their living doing such analyses want to remain anonymous?

By continuing to “shield” their experts after two days of mounting controversy, Rather and CBS left folks to wonder how they authenticated the documents.

More to the point, by airing last night’s segment at all, CBS and Rather were admitting something extraordinary had happened — that serious challenges to their original reporting had been mounted.

But no challenger was brought on the show.

Rather defined the terms of the discussion, asked the questions, picked the individuals who responded, presumably screened their answers — and basically declared himself innocent.

That is, he stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum — and said: “What a fine anchor am I.”

That probably won’t cut it. In the age of the Internet, the truth will out.

Dan Rather can count on that.

Indeed.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR CBS:

A handwriting expert says the two signatures on purported Texas National Guard memos aired by CBS News this week are not those of President Bush’s squadron commander, as asserted by “60 Minutes.”

Until now, press scrutiny of the memos supposedly written by the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian focused on the finding that the documents were, in the opinion of experts, produced by computers not yet in use in the early 1970s.

Then there’s this: “Gary Killian said one paper with his father’s signature appears legitimate, but he said another — in which his father says he was under pressure to ‘sugar coat’ Bush’s performance — seems fake.” I’m no handwriting expert, but the signatures sure look different to me.

CBS needs to come clean by explaining where it got the documents (chain of custody matters!) and making its original (or, as it appears, its original copy”) available to independent experts.

Reader John MacDonald thinks that CBS will go on the offensive, instead of answering questions: “Wait for them to do hard hitting analysis of the blogosphere in order to diminish its credibility.”

Well, they can try that, but it won’t help them. Indeed, the more you disparage the blogosphere as a bunch of guys in pajamas, the more embarrassing it is when they show you up. (No word yet on what Pajama Pundit thinks about his newfound fame. . . .) [LATER: My mistake — Pajama Pundit is a she, not a he. This revelation will no doubt produce additional traffic.]

And as I’ve said before even if — as seems increasingly unlikely — these documents were to turn out to be real, it now seems pretty clear that CBS was gravely irresponsible in taking these documents public and presenting them as unimpeachably accurate without looking at them more closely first. No amount of after-the-fact lawyering will change that.

MY SEPTEMBER 11 MEMORIAL POST IS UP over at GlennReynolds.com. There’s nothing terribly poetic or deep about it. If you want that, read this piece by Lileks.

I don’t know if I’ll post nonstop like I did in 2002, or post hardly at all, like I did in 2003. Or maybe I’ll just react to events as they happen, like I did in 2001.

It’s important that people remember what we’re about here. But those who want to forget (those who are part of what Andrew Sullivan, back in September of 2001, called a “paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column,” plus those who are just tired of the war, or those who just naturally live in the eternal present) will forget — or already have forgotten — and the rest of us don’t need a lot of reminding.

But maybe I’m wrong. Back in September of 2001, some people were already looking to the future, and thinking that we’d forget.

That’s why they made this memorial video. It’s still hard to watch, three years later. But it should be hard to watch.

One day, I suppose, these images will be like the images of the exploding Hindenburg, or woodcuts of the Chicago fire: historical, without much power to move people. We’re not there yet. And we won’t be, for quite a while.

UPDATE: In a related vein, this post from Harry’s Place is a must-read.

And Ed Cone links some columns he wrote in the year following 9/11.

Howard Lovy takes a more positive perspective.

Arthur Chrenkoff has more reminiscences.

So does GayPatriot, who remembers a friend who died that day.

Ryan Sager has more memories of lost loved ones.

Pejman Yousefzadeh adds his own thoughts.

September 10, 2004

JUST CAUGHT Jonathan Klein debating Stephen Hayes about the CBS forgery scandal. Klein says that “Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it’s] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.”

But ABC has this report:

HODGES SAID HE WAS MISLED BY CBS: Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian’s supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were “handwritten” and after CBS read him excerpts he said, “well if he wrote them that’s what he felt.”

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70’s and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been “computer generated” and are a “fraud”.

I guess this is the independent verification that Rather was talking about.

But it gets worse. Much worse:

The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to “sugar coat” President Bush’s military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service record shows.

An order obtained by The Dallas Morning News shows that Col. Walter “Buck” Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972. CBS News reported this week that a memo in which Staudt was described as interfering with officers’ negative evaluations of Bush’s service, was dated Aug. 18, 1973.

That added to mounting questions about the authenticity of documents that seem to suggest Bush sought special favors and did not fulfill his service.

You don’t say. To paraphrase Lincoln’s remarks on Ulysses S. Grant, maybe CBS should get its journalists some of those pajamas. . . . Or maybe, in light of what we’ve learned, some of these Pajamas.

UPDATE: Reader Allen Roberts emails:

Bloggers ARE the checks and balances.

Driving along today and listening to talk radio mention LGF and Powerline, with others was just a terrific experience today. Finally, a real use for the Internet.

Not everyone is as pleased.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, Patterico notes that NPR and Media Matters can’t tell time. Funny that they should both make the same obvious error. (Well, it was really ABC’s The Note that made the original time-stamp error, but it was so obvious that picking it up was an obvious error.)

MORE: Mickey Kaus:

NPR hasn’t corrected the error, according to Patterico, and David Brock’s Media Matters still posts it. … P.S.: Media Matters might want to decide if a) the documents are authentic, as argued at the top of their Web page or b) the documents are forgeries planted by Republicans, as argued at the bottom of their Web page. Lawyers are allowed to plead in the alternative, but a) and b) can’t both be true, and the evidence for each of those propositions is also evidence against the other one.

Neither NPR, nor Media Matters, is covering itself with glory here.
Send them some pajamas, too.

STILL MORE: Charles Johnson: “I’d like you all to know that despite the intensely humid SoCal heat I have been blogging all day in a three piece Giorgio Armani suit. I haven’t owned pajamas for at least 20 years.”

Brings a whole new meaning to the term “fact-check your ass.”

More on kerning here.

MORE: Still more on kerning and the lack thereof here from Jon Henke. He’s updating this post, so keep checking back.

And read these observations from Thomas Lifson, too.

DRIPPING-WITH-IRONY QUOTE FOR THE DAY:

“To err is human but to really foul up requires a computer.”
Author: Dan Rather

Heh. And thanks to reader Greg Freitag for the tip.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE IN NEW YORK CITY on Sunday, 9/12, consider attending this rally against the genocide in Darfur. And if you go, try to take a digital camera and send me some pics. I’d appreciate it.

HERE’S AN INTERVIEW WITH DAN GILLMOR, about his new book, We, the Media. It’s worth reading.

JUST WATCHED DAN RATHER ON CBS: The thing that struck me most was his voice — as in the CNN interview linked below, he sounded as nervous and uncomfortable as any news anchor I’ve heard. Compared to the voluminous material about these documents on the Internet and in the Washington Post and on ABC, his story didn’t offer much. And nothing about the widow and the son, who dispute the authenticity of the story: They say that writing memos like this would have been out of character for Killian; Rather instead produced an author of anti-Bush books who said it was in character, but ignored the comments of people much closer to the facts. All told, it was consistent with Power Line’s prediction.

UPDATE: Somebody is offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who can replicate the CBS documents on a typewriter.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nick Gillespie is calling it “cover your assgate” and observes: “Maybe this is Dandy Dan’s payback for the tongue-lashing Poppa Bush gave him way back when? Or maybe it’s just a precursor to a flood of ‘Kenneth, What Is the Point Size?’ t-shirts flooding the streets of America.”

MORE: Possible criminal liability for forging these documents is discussed by Eugene Volokh, though I think it’s fair to say that the likelihood of any prosecution is low.

And SayUncle watched the segment repeatedly thanks to TiVo, and has some observations. Plus The Comedian has produced the charming logo visible on the right.

Jeff Quinton liveblogged it. Wizbang looks at the credentials of CBS’s document expert, and observes: “Anyway the Forensics guy said (in a nut shell) that since the signatures match (which they don’t to my layman’s eye) the whole document is legit. Because obviously nobody would scan a signature and paste it into Word.. No, never.”

Here’s some speculation on where Rather might have gotten the documents. It’s just speculation — but, then, Rather won’t say. Here’s a transcript of an interview with a guy who served with Bush and doesn’t think the documents are legit.

And Byron Matthews thinks he knows what the real agenda is here:

I think Rather is not really trying to defend the documents as real; he only needs to build a case that they are good enough fakes so that he and CBS can be excused for being fooled.

At that point the documents will be dismissed as not all that crucial, anyway, old news, who cares, and attention will shift to the he-said/he-said aspects of the case against Bush and his NG service. He started that shift of emphasis tonight.

This may work well enough to save Rather’s job.

Here’s more on CBS’s expert Marcel Matley.

And a reader emails to ask “If the TANG documents are from Killian’s personal file, then why have they been photocopied so many times?”

Good question. And reader Patrick Graham observes: “None of the persons who appeared on camera was on the other side of the issue from CBS. All were defenders of CBS. Such fairness!” They’re noted for that.

Finally, Chris Kanis observes:

Isn’t that interesting?

CBS’s standard for accusing the President of lying, corruption, fraud, dereliction of duty, etc., is “a preponderance of the evidence.”

CBS’s standard for reporting on evidence that contradicts CBS’s initial take, on the other hand, is “definitive evidence.”

In other words, if CBS finds a story bashing the President is 51% likely to be true, they’ll run it. But if the story questions the Gospel according to Dan Rather, CBS won’t touch it unless it’s handed down on stone tablets.

I guess they deserve points for being honest about their agenda.

Or something. And reader Harry Helms — who works in publishing — emails:

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it seems like CBS is implying they have originals or “near-originals” of the documents.

Do they? If so, they really need to produce them fast for independent examination before they lose what credibility they have left.

I remember the McGraw-Hill/”Howard Hughes autobiography” and Newsweek/”Hitler diaries” fiascoes, and so far CBS is following the McGraw-Hill and Newsweek playbooks exactly.

Seems like a poor choice.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Brian Carnell has more, including a revealing screen capture. “How stupid do they think we are?”

I think they’ve been making that clear for years. . . .

And reader Bob Conyne emails with an amusing analogy:

Dan Rather, 9/10/04:
“I want to make clear to you, I want to make clear to you if I have not made clear to you, that this story is true, and that MORE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS THAN HOW WE GOT THE STORY, which is where those who don’t like the story like to put the emphasis, the more important question is WHAT ARE THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS RAISED IN THE STORY, which I just gave you earlier.”

Dan Rather, interviewed using CBS’ own standard of journalistic ethics:

“Mr. Rather, when did you stop beating your wife?”

“I have never beaten my wife – where did you hear this?”

“It’s not important where I heard it, or even whether it’s true – only your answer to these lingering questions about your wife-beating.”

Heh. That sounds about right.

Meryl Yourish, who has a long background in typesetting and desktop publishing, is mocking Dan Rather’s defenders. “You cannot become an expert in typography by simply Googling information. That’s like saying you’re now a lawyer because you Googled some cases in online law libraries.”

Perhaps we need the IANAT disclaimer, to go with IANAL.

THE POWERLINE GUYS are on Hugh Hewitt right now. Listen online here.

You can see a Dan Rather interview here. He looks, and sounds, nervous and defensive. And he spends most of his time making counter-accusations. It’s an astoundingly unconvincing performance.

He doesn’t help his credibility when he makes an obvious lie: that he stands behind the President in wartime. Riiigghht.

What we need from CBS is (1) the provenance of the documents; (2) chain of custody; (3) extrinsic evidence of reliability — and the original documents, not just PDF copies on the web, made available to independent outside experts for review.

I think what we’re getting is “trust us” and after-the-fact lawyering.

VANDALISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE: John Brown notes that a 9/11 memorial on campus was vandalized:

As hard as it may be to believe, the 9/11 memorial placed on campus here at UT Tuesday night has been vandalized.

Apparently, some cowardly and despicable individuals snuck onto the amphitheater Wednesday night and removed all 3,000 flags. They moved them to Humanities Plaza (about 100 yards away) and replanted them, spelling out “The World Suffers.” They also chalked various antiwar and anti-Bush slogans on the buildings and on the pavement – in direct violation of University rules.

Fortunately, we were on top of this by 8 am. We quickly washed away the libelous cliches, and returned the flags to where they belong. The memorial stands again, despite the wishes of these idiots.

This is quite disturbing for many reasons. First of all, the memorial was a nonpartisan one – the College Democrats were invited to attend. People of all political persuasions were involved. It had nothing to do with the Iraq war. Yet apparently in this world of rabid antiwar sentiment, even a 9/11 memorial can be considered offensive by certain activists.

Secondly, the cowardice of those responsible is also telling. Why, pray tell, did they not do this during the day? Were they ashamed to be seen? Or were they simply cowards?

Finally, how could someone be so callous as to remove this? 3,000 flags were involved. Every one was taken out of the ground, moved about 100 yards, and planted in the ground again. This was not something that was done in five minutes. These people obviously put a lot of efforts into their vandalism. What message does the fact that they are willing to do this send to the families of those who died on September 11, 2001? Whose side are these people on?

Whose, indeed? He’s got photos, too. More here. (Via Michael Silence).

WE’LL KNOW THAT BLOGGERS HAVE HIT THE BIG TIME when they start to have problems like this. I think Kaus will be the first.

POWERLINE NOTES that the Kerry campaign is playing the Creedence Clearwater song Fortunate Son, as a subtle dig at George W. Bush’s National Guard service. (Okay, it’s not that subtle.)

It’s a great song. But, of course, the song was written by John Fogerty, who served stateside in the Reserves:

John went to college but in 66 Uncle Sam knocked, Doug and John became reservists in the Coast Guard and Army respectively. John married and had a child.

Or as Salon reports it:

Fogerty, who until two years earlier was serving once a month in the Army Reserve, wrote “Fortunate Son” in 20 minutes, sitting on the edge of a bed with a legal pad in his lap. “It’s a confrontation between me and Richard Nixon,” he once said.

(Emphasis added.) Does the Kerry Campaign think that John Fogerty betrayed his country by not serving in Vietnam? (Mary Anne Marsh transcript here).

Call me crazy, but I think that a better song for this campaign would be the lesser-known single by John’s brother Tom, entitled Goodbye Media Man:

You spread your paranoia all over this land
Creating situations you don’t understand
If I could get next to you & turn you around
At place that we all could share & get on the ground

But that’s just me.

THE BELMONT CLUB notes the shot heard ’round the world.

DAN RATHER IS DIGGING IN, and RatherBiased.com has Bernard Goldberg’s reaction. (Er, the part after the helpless chortling wore off, I guess. . . .)

And for Dan Rather, perhaps a copy of Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas would be in order. Though I’ve never really thought of Dan as an intellectual.

UPDATE: Reader Addison Laurent emails:

All that’s missing from the CBS fiasco is Dan Rather being tied up, on a floor somewhere, someone pulling a mask off of his face as the police grab him, and him snarling “And I would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you MEDDLING KIDS!”

That does seem to sum up Old Media’s attitude toward the blogosphere.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here it is!

EVEN WITHOUT THE DOCUMENT-FORGERY BUSINESS, what in the world were the Democrats thinking when they trotted out already-exposed fake Vietnam war hero Tom Harkin to attack Bush’s National Guard service?

TOM MAGUIRE and Power Line once again have lots of stuff worth reading.

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