When I first wrote about this on Thursday, in a column that appeared on Friday, it seemed likely but not certain they were phony. We called the column “CBS’ Big Blunder?” with a question mark just to be careful.
There’s no need to pull any punches now. I’m going to be blunt here: Anybody who spends an hour reviewing the evidence and the expert testimony knows they’re forgeries.
The discrediting has gone on now for five straight days. The conclusion isn’t just overwhelming, it’s inarguable.
The documents aren’t just forgeries, they’re bad, blatant, ludicrous forgeries. They’re forgeries so easily detected that in the space of a few hours after CBS released computer photographs of them on the Internet, they had already been pegged and deconstructed.
Then there’s this:
News has always been a dog-eat-dog business. The blogosphere just makes it more so, and with a nonstop feeding schedule. CBS’s problem is, they seem to be determined to act like a Milk-Bone™ instead of a dog.
Meanwhile this Washington Post story just tightens the screws:
The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush’s former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer’s signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.
“There’s no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them,” Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are “copies” that are “far removed” from the originals.
A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush’s National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.
The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS’s Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word. . . .
Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted “th” in expressions such as “147th Group” and or “111th Fighter Intercept Squadron.”
Ouch. Read the whole thing, which is just devastating — though not really news to people who have been reading blogs.
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein is hearing things.