CBS (60 Minutes) Forged Memos Comparison Evidence

[Update - see my CBS Memos page]

After continuing to think about the 60 Minutes / forged memo issue this weekend, and reading some of the responses which talk about the required typewriters perhaps being available at the time, I did some contemporaneous document comparisons. Whether or not such a typewriter could exist in theory, it seems Bush's Air Force base definitely didn't have one!

The directory http://www.glcq.com/docs/ has a cache of documents involving Bush from that base and time period. They are glaringly different in typography and format.

Look at the various base memos, especially 1972 and 1973. There's no proportional spacing (and the printing seems blockier). I don't see any superscripts in base memos at all, much less small-font superscripts.

For example, compare: http://www.glcq.com/docs/(72-09-06)187th_killian_hodges.pdf
with
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf

And http://www.glcq.com/docs/(72-09-05)flight_status_order.pdf
with http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardaugust1.pdf

Note that no base memo date ever begins with a zero (the CBS memos have dates starting with zero).

Picking up on an item from the military critics, the base memo signature format is (always left-margin)

name, rank, TexANG
job

Or

name
rank, TexANG
job

So the memo signature is always, for example

JERRY B. KILLIAN, Lt Col, TexANG
Commander

I don't see any exceptions.

The suspect memos have (tabbed over to right-hand side)

JERRY B. KILLIAN,
Lt. Colonel

Or

JERRY B. KILLIAN,
Lt. Colonel
Commander

No "TexANG". The "TexANG" always appears in the base memos. Also note "Lt Col" vs "Lt. Colonel".

Observe the CBS memos have a space in "147 th" or "9921 st". The base memos don't have spaces (e.g. "147th"). And the space makes sense as a clumsy way of avoiding the MS WORD auto-superscripting.

Particularly interesting are the files http://www.glcq.com/docs/(73-09-05)discharge_request.pdf and http://www.glcq.com/docs/(73-09-05)discharge_request_2.pdf

This is obviously a paired original and an official retyped copy. Compare the thick, monospaced, no-superscript, base memos, to the clean, proportionally-spaced, pretty-superscript CBS memos, e.g. http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay19.pdf - even at low resolution, it's dramatically different.

The modern word-processor characteristics of those memos don't appear in any of the base memos, and the format details seem too different. I'd put this as beyond a reasonable doubt that the CBS memos are forged.

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)