Bush documents forged?
SUBJECT: CYA? No way!

Having been with a surgery patient and family all day, I only now learned of the kerfuffle over the supposed Bush-related documents shown on 60 Minutes II. They purport to show what a poor performer Bush was when wrapping up his term in the Air Guard.

But even before reading a lot of the technical analysis about the fonts and superscript and so forth, one thing jumped at me on this memo. It is the "SUBJECT: CYA" line.

No officer in the military would ever put CYA down as the subject of an official memo. CYA'ing means that you know you're not really doing your duty. Yes, I was in the Army beginning in 1977; I wasn't in the Air Guard a few years earlier. But the culture doesn't change that much that fast. When you heard it said of another officer, "He's just covering his [rear]," it was no compliment. It meant the officer had screwed up, knew it, and was trying to head of the just desserts. For a military officer actually to write a memo with the subject, "CYA" is really just unimaginable.

Second point: the page states, "Memo to file." Again, this is nonsense. Memos are to persons, either by name or by office, and if the originator wanted to keep a copy, it might be so annotated below the signature block. But probably not, as it was assumed that originators kept file copies anyway.

So this purported memo "to file" is really just an unnamed person griping and thinking that his rear's on the line for (apparently) refusing to write an efficiency report for George Bush. Why write a memo "to file" for this, especially since it is unsigned ? What I did on the few occasions I thought I needed to make a record of uncomfortable situations was simply note the details in my personal notebook and that was that. Yanking an unsigned memo out of a file cabinet wouldn't do any good to make my case.

So this particular piece of paper smells on the surface. Now add to that the fact that Charles Johnson used MS Word to write the same memo on his computer and discovered that the PDF printed version (the purported original from 1973) and the computer-generated version of today overlaid exactly:



This is an image Charles made of his MS Word document and the "original" document overlaid. His posts explaining this process are here, then here. Charles's server has been overloaded with hits today, so if you can't get through, go to DigitalBranch and page down.

Another "Memo to file" with no signature is here. Does it not strike you as odd that the only two documents CBS presented that are signed display the signature of a man long dead, Jerry Killian? And, as other bloggers have pointed out, how did a man who died 20-plus years ago manage to sign a piece of paper almost certainly produced on a modern computer using MS Word?

by Donald Sensing, 9/9/2004 05:24:28 PM. Permalink |