posted September 10, 2004 03:05 PM            

Even the kool-aid drinking radical hard left members of the Democrat party won't be able to swallow this...or will they?

Friday, Sept. 10, 2004 12:59 a.m. EDT
Caddell: Dan Rather May Have Cost Kerry the Election

Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell said Friday that if documents aired by CBS newsman Dan Rather Wednesday night turn out to be forged, as alleged by experts, the presidential race "is over."

"It would be the end of the race," Caddell told Fox News Live. "It would be the end of the race," he repeated.

"[Democratic officials are] so involved in this," the former Carter pollster worried. "They have gotten themselves so involved in this issue [in] the last 24 hours that somebody's going to, if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this."

Caddell said he wasn't trying to sensationalize the issue, explaining that instead "I'm trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth."

He said that forfeiting the presidential race would be the least of his party's problems if Democrats are tied to any forgery scandal.

posted September 10, 2004 03:13 PM            

In a stunning journalistic fiasco from which the mainstream press may never recover, a full frontal attack by two out of the three major broadcast networks on President Bush's re-election bid has collapsed amidst questions about forged documents and fraudulent testimony.

CBS anchorman Dan Rather's already shaky journalistic reputation was in tatters Friday morning after documents unearthed during his Wednesday night "60 Minutes II" broadcast purporting to show a cover-up of Bush's National Guard record were called probable forgeries by forensic experts.

Memos uncovered and touted by Rather's team appear to have been written in Microsoft Word, the experts said - a computer program that did not exist at the time Bush was in the Guard.

The same documents, purportedly authored by Bush Guard commander Jerry Killian, were challenged by Killian's widow and son, who told reporters on Thursday that the deceased National Guard commander would never have written such memos.

A second portion of Rather's "60 Minutes II" broadcast, featuring allegations against Bush from former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, also was discredited when his daughter Amy told a Texas radio station that her father was a "liar" who had changed his story to sell a book.

NBC News also was mired in a credibility crisis as a spokeswoman for the network's "Today" show insisted it was going forward with its planned rollout of Kitty Kelley's Bush-bashing book, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty" – even though Kelley's key witness against Bush has recanted her account that Bush used cocaine and has accused Kelley of fabricating her interview.

"I categorically deny that I ever told Kitty Kelley that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David or that I ever saw him use cocaine at Camp David," ex-Bush sister-in-law Sharon Bush said in a statement issued Thursday.

Instead, the one-time Bush family insider insisted, "When Kitty Kelley raised drug use at Camp David, I responded by saying something along the lines of 'Who would say such a thing?'"

Still, "Today" spokeswoman Lauren Kapps insisted that NBC producers had no plan to cancel or even scale back Kelley's three-day mega-promotion on the program, touted by the network as the crown jewel of morning TV.

"This was a very competitive interview that all the morning shows were after and, as we do with all of our interview subjects, we'll review the material beforehand and ask all the appropriate questions," Kapps said in a statement issued Thursday.

posted September 10, 2004 03:23 PM            

Robert B. Bluey, CNSNews.com
Friday, Sept. 10, 2004

CNSNews.com -- Additional questions were circulating Friday about the contents of four purported military documents regarding President Bush's National Guard service that served as the basis for a Bush-bashing segment on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" Wednesday night.

Doubts about the authenticity of the documents spread across the Internet and cable news shows Thursday when several forensic document experts, typographers and retired military officers offered their analysis. Friday's newspapers also carried stories questioning the documents' authenticity.

Even the widow and son of the alleged author of the memos, the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, questioned whether the documents were real. Killian's widow, Marjorie, called the records "a farce," according to The Washington Post, and his son, Gary, who retired from the Texas Air National Guard in 1991, told The Associated Press one unsigned document looked fake.

A memo dated May 4, 1972, claims that Bush refused to follow an order to undertake a medical examination. Another unsigned memo from May 19, 1972, suggests that Bush was "talking to someone upstairs" to get out of his duty with the Texas Air National Guard.

"It just wouldn't happen," Gary Killian told the AP. "The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things. ... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."

"I don't think there were any documents," added Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, in a Washington Post article. "He was not a paper person."

Questions about the documents, which were the basis of Wednesday's "60 Minutes" program, prompted a swift reaction from the network.

"As a standard practice at CBS, each of the documents broadcast on '60 Minutes' was thoroughly investigated by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity," the network said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

In a subsequent interview with WorldNetDaily, CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said, "CBS verified the authenticity of the documents by talking to individuals who had seen the documents at the time they were written. These individuals were close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian and confirm that the documents reflect his opinions at the time the documents were written."

The documents were released Wednesday night by the White House, which didn't question their accuracy but characterized them as "dirty politics," after obtaining them from CBS News. The network has refused to reveal the source of the documents.

Initial questions about the 32-year-old documents arose when two Internet blogs - Power Line and Little Green Footballs - noted some of the computer-like characteristics of the documents. Typographers who spoke to CNSNews.com confirmed some of the discrepancies.

According to Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Agfa Monotype in Wilmington, Mass., the documents couldn't have been produced on a typewriter because they contain the superscript "th" in "111th F.I.S." and apostrophes in words like "I'm" and "he's."

Those characters are native to current word processing programs. Microsoft Word, for instance, automatically changes the "th" after numbers to a superscript. Most typewriters, except perhaps the most high-end models, couldn't process such a character in 1972, typographers told CNSNews.com.

"The 'I'm' is set with an apostrophe," Haley added. "There were no apostrophes on typewriters. There were foot and inch marks that had to do double duty."

Another characteristic not typically found on typewriters in 1972 was a proportional typeface. Although some typewriter models included this feature, they were not widespread. Each of the documents is set in proportional type, meaning the letter "m" occupies a larger space than "i."

Strange Military Lingo

Former military officers and others with knowledge of military correspondence contacted CNSNews.com Thursday to present their own critique. Among the problems they cited:

The documents are not on a standard letterhead. Instead, they feature a typewritten and centered address with a post office box rather than an actual street address of the squadron. The address is P.O. Box 34567, which coincidentally includes five consecutive numbers.

Dates in the letters - "04 May 1972" and "14 May, 1972" - are inconsistent and do not follow military form. The military prefers the following example, according to ex-officers: 4 May 72. It doesn't include a zero preceding the date or a comma following the month.

The lines "MEMORANDUM FOR:" and "SUBJECT:" that begin the May 4, 1972, document, weren't officially used in the 1970s. According to one retired military officer, the correct format then was most likely "REPLY TO ATTN OF:" then "SUBJECT:" and finally "TO:" preceding the text of the message.

Bush's name was listed in the memo as "1st Lt. George W. Bush." But other military documents, including those posted on Sen. John Kerry's website use a different format. Bush's name would have likely appeared as "1LT Bush, GW" or "1LT G Bush."

There shouldn't be disparities in the May 4, 1972, letter such as, "111 F.I.S." and "111th F.I.S.," according to ex-military officers. Also, the acronym "F.I.S.," which stands for Fighter Intercept Squadron, shouldn't have included periods.

The signature block with Killian's name lists his rank as "Lt. Colonel," when in reality most military commanders abbreviated that title as "LTC" or "Lt. Col.," according to retired officers. The signature block also includes the word "Commander" when "Commanding" was the preferred reference.
Source of the Letter

Despite the attempts of news organizations to obtain the source of the "60 Minutes" documents, CBS News has refused to budge. The Washington Post reported Thursday and Friday that the network wouldn't disclose where the documents came from.

Gary Killian told the AP the documents didn't come from his family, even though an article on the CBS News website said they were retrieved from Jerry Killian's "personal file."

One anti-Bush group distanced itself from the controversy Thursday amid suspicion that it was a possible source of the purported memos.

The group Texans for Truth, which has received support and assistance from MoveOn.org, was formed in late August and has created a television ad critical of Bush. A spokesman for MoveOn.org said the left-wing group hadn't supplied CBS News with the documents.

In an article published Thursday by The Weekly Standard, author Stephen F. Hayes wrote that CBS News could clear up the controversy if it provided the name of the expert who authenticated the documents, offered outside experts the opportunity to review original copies of the documents and disclosed the source of the documents.

posted September 10, 2004 03:24 PM              

This question could be asked to many from the left about the right as well... but I don't really understand it.

Both parties have a mixture of good and bad people belonging to them.

I don't hold the entire Republican party responsible for Strom Thurmond (and the like). That would be ridiculous.

posted September 10, 2004 03:29 PM            

quote:

---

Finally, the deception, lying and downright dishonesty of the Democrat party leadership is in jeopardy of being totally exposed....Even the kool-aid drinking radical hard left members of the Democrat party won't be able to swallow this...or will they?

---

posted September 10, 2004 03:34 PM              

The left does this too... I just don't understand why.

jw.. not starting sh*t here... I really just want to know why? Is it a competitive thing? Like in sports?

posted September 10, 2004 04:20 PM            

It's a story of how a rock ribbed Democrat alleges he secured a spot in the Texas Air National Guard for George Bush. A story about how this dyed in the wool Democrat acted on behalf of someone from the opposition party when he was Lt. Governor of the state of Texas.....except George Bush secured his spot in the Air National Guard and began serving before this guy became Lt. Governor

Kind of reminds me of the Kerry story of how Nixon secretly sent him into Cambodia when Nixon was President. An event "seared" into Kerry's memory. Whoops again, the date Kerry gave for his excursion into Cambodia was 6 weeks before Nixon became President.

Ben Barnes:
John Kerry’s Unbelievable Last-Ditch Weapon
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com
September 8, 2004

"THE LAST SMEAR,” THE DOOMSDAY WEAPON that John F. Kerry’s sinking campaign desperately hopes can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, is ready and is scheduled to be launched against President George W. Bush on Wednesday night, September 8, on CBS’ weeknight version of “60 Minutes.”

This bomb is an already-taped Dan Rather interview with former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in which Barnes will hint, and deceptive CBS editing will strongly imply, that during the Vietnam War the Bush family pressured him to use politics to get a young George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard.

“Barnes comes off as very sympathetic,” the American Spectator quotes an unnamed CBS news producer with whom its reporter spoke. “This is a guy who has been under intense, brutal pressure from a family that is very powerful in Texas. You get the impression that he just can’t take it anymore.”

This story “is clearly the Kerry campaign’s response to the Swift Vets controversy,” noted one source quoted by the American Spectator. It is an attempt to undermine President Bush’s credibility in the same way that testimony by 254 of Kerry’s fellow Swift boat veterans undercut his carefully-cultivated Kennedy-esque image of honor and heroism during the Vietnam War.

But before anybody swallows the story Ben Barnes tells, America needs to know some things about Mr. Barnes that CBS and the rest of the establishment media are unlikely to mention.

Ben Barnes was born in 1938 in De Leon, Texas southwest of Fort Worth. After graduating from the University of Texas and earning a law degree from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Barnes in 1960, at age 22, was elected to the Texas House of Representatives. He served there until 1969, the last four of these years as the youngest Speaker of the House in Texas history. From 1969 until 1973 Barnes was the state’s Lt. Governor.

President Lyndon B. Johnson compared the young political wunderkind to Thomas Jefferson and predicted that Ben Barnes would be the next Texan elected President. The leftwing Texas Monthly called Barnes the “golden boy” of Texas politics.

But “after he was involved in a bribery and stock fraud scandal in the early 1970s,” wrote leftwing Mother Jones Magazine, Barnes “never held office again. He was involved with a number of banks and thrifts that were mentioned during the S&L crisis, and forced into bankruptcy when the Texas thrift industry cratered in the late 1980s.”

By the late 1990s Barnes had become a millionaire lobbyist working for GTech, a company that operated lotteries in 37 states including Texas. The Texas lottery was losing money, in part because of a sweetheart deal in which Barnes received 3.5 cents for every ticket sold – more than $3 million per year. When the Texas lottery commission re-bid GTech’s contract, the company sued and – after buying Barnes out for $23 million – hired a new lobbyist. A fired Texas lottery director sued, claiming that he had taken the fall for GTech because Barnes had a National Guard story embarrassing to then-Governor George W. Bush.

Barnes, facing potential charges of yet more wrongdoing, told his National Guard story in a deposition in a successful effort to politically deflect his own responsibility in this matter. In multiple re-tellings since 1999, the details of Barnes’ story have changed several times. Its gist is Barnes’ claim that when he was the Democratic Lt. Governor he intervened to get Republican Houston Congressman George H.W. Bush’s son George W. into the Texas Air National Guard (alongside the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrats). Barnes now says he is “ashamed” of this. Trouble is, George W. Bush began the first of six years’ service in the National Guard in 1968, but Barnes did not become Lt. Governor of Texas until 1969. Barnes has acknowledged that no member of the Bush family sought his help, but claims he was approached by a Bush family friend (who died three years before Barnes began telling his self-serving story).

Because Barnes’ tale rests solely on his word, how good is his word? Given his long past of shady dealings, the shipwreck of his career on scandal, and the changes and inconsistencies of his story, Barnes appears to be less than a credible witness.

More doubt is raised by this partisan Democrat’s motives. Barnes promoted an earlier version of his story in 1999 and 2000 in a clear attempt to damage the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. And Barnes apparently has had the same aim in reviving this story, long ago discredited by an investigation by the liberal Los Angeles Times, in 2004. As CNN reported in 1999, “the Los Angeles Times said it found no evidence that either Bush or his father, former President George Bush, had personally tried to influence or pressure anyone to get the younger Bush a place in the Texas Guard.”

Ben Barnes has a large vested interest in the outcome of the 2004 election. He is a co-chairman of John F. Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Barnes, as CBS News reported in June 2004, has made bundled contributions of more than $500,000 to Kerry’s campaign. Barnes owns a home near his friend Kerry’s home in Nantucket on the Massachusetts shore.

For many years Barnes and the lobbying firm he founded in Austin, EntreCorp, have made many millions of dollars by acting as the go-between bringing special interest groups and companies together with highly-placed Democrat officeholders. The Center for Responsive Politics has listed Barnes as the third largest all-around Democratic donor in America 1999-2004. So influential and important is Barnes to the Democratic Party, as this column reported last January, that Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle has nicknamed this fat cat money man and lobbyist “the fifty-first Democratic Senator.”

If Kerry becomes President, reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in July 2004, Ben Barnes is at the top of the list of those close to the Kerry Administration likely to become “gatekeepers and endorsers for…appointees and job-seekers.” Given his sticky-fingered past, Barnes would likely also become a toll-collector at this gate, charging everybody he allows through it, and overnight he could become an even wealthier and more influential political lobbyist and “fixer” serving special interest groups, corporations, nations and individuals.

Given Ben Barnes’ shady past, dubious reputation and selfish mercenary motive to defeat President Bush and elect Barnes’ close friend and partisan ally John F. Kerry, what honest reporter would give credence to an unsubstantiated Barnes tale calculated to damage President Bush in the final days before the November election?

CBS Anchorman Dan Rather, according to the American Spectator, “has been pushing for months” to get his network’s most watched news program “60 Minutes” to air this non-credible story in an already-videotaped interview with Ben Barnes. This interview, the Spectator reported in September 2004, has been edited deceptively to imply that the Bush family directly pressured Barnes to get George W. Bush into the Air National Guard. Rather only half succeeded. His Bush-smearing interview will air on “60 Minutes,” but on its lightly-watched Wednesday version this week, not its far more widely seen Sunday night version.

(Dan Rather is an extreme partisan who, while Anchor for the CBS Evening News, participated in a Democratic Party fundraiser in Texas. The leftwing slant of CBS itself has been documented by that network’s former reporter Bernard Goldberg in his 2002 best-seller Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.)

What is the truth about George W. Bush and the Texas Air National Guard? He apparently was chosen to defend his nation in this service for a reason so obvious that few notice it. Mr. Bush was accepted by the Guard less than two weeks before his graduation from Yale University, and Guard commanding officers logically concluded that any young Texan bright and hard-working enough to graduate from such a prestigious university had thereby demonstrated both excellence and high character.

Mr. Bush served in the National Guard for six years. During the first four of those years George W. Bush far surpassed the time and work requirements for National Guard service, and during his remaining two years Mr. Bush complied with those basic requirements. (After returning from his four months in Vietnam, metamorphosed radical anti-war leader John Kerry was required to serve for several years in the Naval Reserve, but the establishment media has refused to investigate charges that Kerry shirked this required duty.)

In mid-1968, when George W. Bush joined the National Guard, Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, and Texas was still a yellow-dog Democratic one-party state that would take another decade to elect its first Republican governor in more than 100 years. The Republican Bush family had no power to twist then-Texas House Speaker Democrat Ben Barnes’ arm, even if it wanted to. The notion that Barnes was “pressured” by the “powerful” Bush family to get George W. into the National Guard is absurd. But this phony claim is apparently what CBS, to rescue the desperate Kerry campaign, is preparing to broadcast.

President Bill Clinton, a master at extracting donor cash in exchange for political favors, once told a group of Methodist ministers: “If you all will take a sinner like [Ben] Barnes, you might take me.”

If people can be C-BSed into believing a disreputable sinner like Ben Barnes, America might yet suffer the devastation of a President John Kerry.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14993

posted September 10, 2004 04:32 PM            

It appears the documents originated with the Democrat party or passed through the hands of the DNC on their way to CBS and Dan Blather.

This appeared in one of the stories.

Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell
"[Democratic officials are] so involved in this," the former Carter pollster worried. "They have gotten themselves so involved in this issue [in] the last 24 hours that somebody's going to, if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this."

Ivan is projected to track right over my home in Madeira Beach, Florida, Tuesday morning. I haven't even finished cleaning up after Frances....yet.

posted September 12, 2004 01:46 AM              

The true problem is that the lying does not stop with the liberal media. Sen. Kerry is guilty of it as well. Since the RNC, Kerry has stated in every speech he has made that Pres. Bush attacked his VietNam record during the convention. Pres. Bush did NO such thing! In fact the only thing the president said in regards to Kerry's service was that he should be commended, highly, for it, AND he has said that Kerry's service was much more honorable than his own service in the Texas Air National Guard. How can the American people trust their country to a man who cannot see or hear what really happened?

Even further than this comes the true question for a lot of people I know here in the midwest. The Kerry/Edwards campaign seems to be talking only about how bad things are and that they need to be changed. HOW? That is the thing they never seem to get around to saying, maybe because they spend all of their time bashing their opponents. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd rather vote for the candidate who talks about him/herself and what they will do rather than the candidate who wants to continually point out the mistakes of others. By the way the viewing public is reacting I'd say much of America feels that way about the Presidential election as well as the media.

Blessings to all

posted September 12, 2004 11:24 AM            

WHO LIED TO WHOM?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
Issue of 2003-03-31
Posted 2003-03-24
Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration’s advocacy of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace “a world in which states consider themselves subject to law” with “the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.” A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress.

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world’s largest producers. The uranium, known as “yellow cake,” can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.)

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret—that Iraq had sought to buy “significant quantities of uranium” from an unnamed African country, “despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.” The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, “african gangs offer route to uranium.”

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” (The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or “scrubbed.” Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. “I don’t think anybody here sees that thing,” a State Department analyst told me. “You only know what’s in the P.D.B. because it echoes—people talk about it.”

President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He commented, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said.

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A. official told me.

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.

Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, “confronted the United States with the forgery: ‘What do you have to say?’ They had nothing to say.”

ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.” A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. “It came from other sources,” Powell testified. “It was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”

The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in Europe about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an American official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as explaining, simply, “We fell for it.”

The Bush Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in Washington. “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.”

Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,” the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. “I knew a bit,” one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, “but I was never officially told about it.”

None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British—President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech—and that “the Brits placed more stock in them than we did.” It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that “something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere.”

What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President’s State of the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by Iraq—more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?

Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the President’s State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain’s MI6. Harlow’s statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.

The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’ ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?’ The Secretary of State never saw the documents.” He added, “He’s absolutely apoplectic about it.” (A State Department spokesman was unable to comment.) A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.

“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.” (The White House declined to comment.)

Washington’s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation. But George W. Bush’s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world—in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not. It can’t help the President’s case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.

On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.” He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and “why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated.” A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it.

posted September 12, 2004 01:05 PM            

Published on Saturday, September 11, 2004 by the Boston Globe
Authenticity Backed on Bush Documents
by Francie Latour and Michael Rezendes

After CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered documents that referred to a 1973 effort to ''sugar coat" President Bush's service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the documents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time.

But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the documents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters in wide use in the early 1970s, when Bush was a first lieutenant.

Philip D. Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe yesterday that after further study, he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.

Analysts who have examined the documents focus on several facets of their typography, among them the use of a curved apostrophe, a raised, or superscript, ''th," and the proportional spacing between the characters -- spacing which varies with the width of the letters. In older typewriters, each letter was alloted the same space.

Those who doubt the documents say those typographical elements would not have been commonly available at the time of Bush's service. But such characters were common features on electric typewriters of that era, the Globe determined through interviews with specialists and examination of documents from the period. In fact, one such raised ''th," used to describe a Guard unit, the 187th, appears in a document in Bush's official record that the White House made public earlier this year.

Meanwhile, ''CBS Evening News" last night explained how it sought to authenticate the documents, focusing primarily on its examiner's conclusion that two of the records were signed by Bush's guard commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. CBS also said it had other sources -- among Killian's friends and colleagues -- who verified that the content of the documents reflected Killian's views at the time.

One of them, Robert Strong, a Guard colleague, said the language in the documents was ''compatible with the way business was done at that time. They are compatible with the man I remember Jerry Killian being."

But William Flynn, a Phoenix document examiner cited in a Washington Post report Thursday, said he had not changed his mind because he does not believe that the proportional spacing between characters, and between lines, in the documents obtained by CBS was possible on typewriters used by the military at the time.

Flynn told the Globe he believes it is ''highly unlikely" that the documents CBS has obtained could have been produced in 1972 or 1973.

Flynn said his doubts were also based on his belief that the curved apostrophe was not available on electric typewriters at the time, although documents from the period reviewed by the Globe show it was. He acknowledged that the quality of the copies of the documents he examined was poor.

Also suspicious is Killian's son, Gary D. Killian of Houston. ''I still contend that my father would not have written these documents. I know the type of man he was -- if he felt he was being pressured, he'd confront it head on, not write a memo about it," Killian, 51, said in a telephone interview. His father died in 1984.

The controversy over the authenticity of the documents has all but blocked out discussion of their content. In the first document, dated May 4, 1972, Killian appears to order Bush to show up for a flight physical ''no later than 14 May, 1972." On Aug. 1, 1972, a document bearing Killian's signature notes that he had suspended Bush from flight status ''due to failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards and failure to meet annual physical examination (flight) as ordered."

At the time of the memo, Bush had not flown since April. He moved to Alabama in May of that year to work on a political campaign, and had not attended drills for more than four months.

In a ''memo to file" dated May 1972, Killian appeared to write that he had counseled Bush about his commitment to the Guard. And the final memo obtained by CBS, dated Aug. 18, 1973, said that the group's commanding general had sought to have Killian ''sugar coat" Bush's annual fitness report -- even though Bush had apparently not trained at his Houston airbase during the year in question.

But reporters and political figures focused much of their attention yesterday on the suggestion that CBS might have been the victim of a hoax.

Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.

In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.

As for the raised ''th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM.

''You can't just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer," Bouffard said.

Meanwhile, the political fray over the documents continued unabated. At a news conference yesterday, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, again accused Bush of lying about his record.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the president's service record, but offered no view on whether the CBS documents are authentic.

Globe reporters Stephen Kurkjian and Walter V. Robinson contributed to this report.

posted September 12, 2004 05:15 PM            

Sugar coating is like listing ones job as a burger flipper on their resume look like calculated stepping stone while in pursuit of a solid career and education.

Blatent lying or forging is putting on your resume that you owned the restaurant, made millions and then decided to flip burgers to know how the little man feels.

posted September 12, 2004 06:24 PM            

Hi Pid...welcome back to LL.

Blatant lying vs. sugar-coating? Well, it's interesting that so many could leap to the conclusion that Bush's alleged service records were forged...

...but that our government agencies couldn't discern the blatant forgery of Nigerian/African documents that were used as a key piece of evidence to support the belief there were WOMD in Iraq, and thus some of the most 'important' documents to support waging war on Iraq. (see article I posted earlier)
At the time they were used, according to various articles, these documents were not released by the Bush administration. We had to take them on good faith.