HunterByrd

The Drudge Report redlines four articles this evening which concern the CBS 60 Minutes piece that aired Wednesday evening. The segment revisted and cast negative light on W's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The 32-year-old documents produced Wednesday by the CBS News program "60 Minutes," shedding a negative light on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, may have been forged using a current word processing program, according to typography experts.

Proportional fonts and superscript in 1972 and 1973? The article intones that there were word processors capable of proportional fonts at the time, but they were expensive to the tune of $20,000...not something one would see with regularity "in the office of a flight inspector in the United States government." However superscript (i.e., 'th') was even rarer.

"There weren't any typewriters that did that," said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Agfa Monotype in Wilmington, Mass. "That looks like it might be a function of something like Microsoft Word, which does that automatically."

And another article on the subject has the son of the late officer who allegedly wrote the 'sugar coat W's performance' memo casting further aspersions on its authenticity. Another expert also seriously questions the memo's authenticity. "I'm virtually certain these were computer-generated," independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software. "

I don't know...there will be MUCH more research and fact-checking the fact-checkers before this is over. CBS has its posterior in a sling if they are upstaged and shown to have presented false information in this tempest of an election season...with all the emphasis which has been placed on the truth of late.

CBS stood by its reporting. "As is standard practice at CBS News, the documents in the '60 Minutes' report were thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts," CBS News said in a statement. "As importantly, '60 Minutes' also interviewed close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian. They confirm that the documents reflect his opinions and actions at the time."

UPDATE: Dr. Philip Bouffard, and he has indictaed that he is about 90% certain that the documents are not genuine. That and beaucoup other discussion on Hugh Hewitt's site.

ADDENDUM: I would want immediate access to where the documents had been kept. I would want the (now obvious) oppurtunity to check not only other documents in the file these documents were taken from, but also other contemporaneous files produced by Jerry Killian. Might not conclusively settle the issue of whether the memo is forged, but it would be getting close to 'certain'.