September 16, 2004

Memogate: WHADDABOUT THE TYPEWRITER?!?!?!

Having read the transcript and watched the video of last night's 60 Minutes segment on the forged memos, I am shocked at just how bad a journalist Dan Rather is.

Dan Rather doesn't want to know the truth about the memos. He brought Marion Carr Knox, the former secretary of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian (President Bush's commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard), onto the show not to find the truth but to prop up CBS's claim that the memos "accurately reflect" Killian's thinking at the time.

Having learned that documents can be challenged, CBS has decided to base its story on the word of a secretary about the thinking of a dead man who can't be interviewed.

And, Dan, what about the typewriter?

Why didn't you ask Knox what kind of typewriter the TANG office had back in 1972. Why didn't you plop an IBM Selectric Composer down in front of her and ask her: "Did you have a typewriter like this? Did Lt. Col. Killian have access to a typewriter like this?"

It would seem to be a key question, as the Composer is the only typewriter that existed that anyone contends could have produced the memos in 1972-73. And it was a unique machine with lots of unique buttons and features. Surely, if Marion Carr Knox - who seemed sharp as a tack - had used an IBM Selectric Composer at the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 and 1973, she would remember it.

If the TANG didn't have one, that it doesn't matter if the Composer existed somewhere in the world back then or if, as some contend, it could produce the memos. If the TANG didn't have one, the memos are forgeries. If the TANG didn't have one, then somebody passed forged documents to CBS in an effort to impact the presidential election. If TANG didn't have one, then CBS aired a hit-piece against President Bush using forged documents and now, instead of trying to find out the truth and identify the person or people who were the source of the forgeries and thus behind a major political dirty trick, CBS is going to stand by the "content" of its story, though not its evidence.

The problem is, that aside from the forged documents, there is no evidence that Bush failed to fulfill his National Guard commitment to the satisfaction of his commanding officer, his superior officers and, indeed, of the U.S. military itself.