So,
I was watching Truth, the docudrama
about CBS chasing the Bush Air Guard records. I’m not really going to get into
the politics of it because I’m sure that we’ll all disagree with one another
about that in some way. Instead, I was struck by the investigation into the
records and the vetting process, or lack thereof and the story’s similarity to
MJ-12.
As
most of you know, CBS, on 60 Minutes II,
aired a report that President George W. Bush had been given preferential
treatment to enter the Air National Guard and had not properly completed his
Guard duties once he was clear of the Vietnam War… and I’m sure that many of
you know that service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War practically
guaranteed a man would not find himself involuntarily in Vietnam so that many
of the wealthy and the connected used their influence to ensure their sons
would not find themselves on active duty being trained for combat.
According
to the story, documents surfaced that suggested that Bush had not properly
fulfilled his obligations and that no one had really called him on it. CBS had
copies of documents that looked authentic and provided them to a number of
questioned document experts who seemed to be divided about their authenticity. CBS
talked to the officers whose names surfaced in the documents, or rather some of
them, and the talked to others who had some sort of knowledge about them. CBS talked
to a general, on the telephone, and read him the documents. His rather lukewarm
response was that they sounded right to him.
CBS
then went on the air, in a Wednesday 60
Minutes II broadcast, saying they had proof that George Bush had skated out
of his military assignment (for those of you without a military background,
skated in this context means avoided). Not long after the broadcast it began to
look as if the documents might not have been real. Bloggers suggested the fonts
were wrong; there was proportional spacing in the documents which wasn’t done
on typewriters from the 1970s, and that the superscript in some of the unit
names was inaccurate because typewriters couldn’t do that. Enough questions
were raised that CBS began to review the whole process that lead to the story.
Here’s
where the UFO connection comes in and for those of you who have been following
the great MJ-12 debate, you’ll recognize some of this. One of the first things
discussed was that they didn’t have the originals. They were dealing with
copies so that it was difficult, if not impossible to properly analyze the
documents. Questioned documents experts said they needed the originals so that
they could analyze the ink and paper and study other aspects for their
examination and two of them suggested that CBS contact Peter Tytell, who, as
you all might remember, did the original work on MJ-12. The experts couldn’t
validate the copies. As I have heard many times in the past, all forgeries have
some mechanism to explain why the original is not available. Examination of the
original often reveals the fraudulent nature of a document.
CBS
went back to the man (Bill Burkett) who had given them the package in the first
place, and in a tale that might have been written by Bill Moore, Burkett said
that he had received a telephone call about this, telling him to call a hotel
between certain hours and ask for a specific room. This apparently set up some
sort of clandestine meeting. While in Houston at a livestock auction, Burkett
was handed a package by some unidentified, “dark-skinned” person. Instructions
in that package said to copy the documents and then burn the originals… to remove
the possibility of tracing the leak through DNA. The originals no longer exist
and to be fair to CBS, it seems that the person who gave them the documents had
lied about how he came into possession of them prior to the broadcast and only
told this cockamamie story after it, when questioned again about how he had
obtained the documents.
As
all this unraveled, CBS began an internal investigation. While it seems that
there was nothing nefarious about the investigation prior to the story, some red
flags were ignored, and it does seem that there were misunderstandings and
leads that weren’t followed… or, to my way of thinking, the documents were
taking them to a place they wanted to go so they were less than enthusiastic in
following the leads that might go somewhere else. For example, from this
docudrama, there was no evidence that they FOIAed any of the records from St.
Louis which might have provided them with another source and a much better
provenance than they had. Nor did they seem to attempt to get copies of the
documents from the Texas Air Guard, but by the time of the CBS investigation,
those documents might have been destroyed, lost, or in some other way
unavailable. Some of the documents that they had copies of might have been
found in Texas Air Guard records which would have been a nice verification from
an official organization that the documents were pristine.
At
the end of the CBS investigation, Mary Mapes, the producer of the story and
apparently the only one fired over it (others, such as Dan Rather, resigned),
made a statement to the men investigating the fiasco. In words that seem to
mirror some of the arguments about MJ-12, she said that the forger would have
had to know the lingo of the time, the jargon used by the Texas Air Guard, the
names of the various, and often obscure officers (she didn’t use the term
obscure, but I believe that is what was meant), would have to know the format
of the letters, memos, reports, and other documents so that they would appear
authentic. To her, it was just impossible for the forger to have had the access
needed, the time to investigate the history of the Air Guard, to get the
relationships between the officers correct, and know many other, subtle
details…
And
she would have been right if not for something we all have learned from the
MJ-12 boondoggle. All the forger actually needed was access to documents,
which, given the way these things work, might well have been in the hands of a
single, retired officer (in this case a man named Jerry Killian). Once those
documents were in hand, it was just a matter of retyping them, inserting a line
or two that contained the critical information, and he now had a document that
seemed to verify the accusations against Bush that contained the jargon,
contained the proper names, and contained the relationships among the various
officers and organizations mentioned. The only way to break this would be to
locate the originals that might have been stuck in some dusty file somewhere,
but that more than likely had been thrown out long ago.
It
didn’t seem as if they attempted to find originals… they talked to people who
were there at the time, and whose stories seemed to change. The retired general,
Robert Hodges, who had been read the documents during a telephone conversation,
said after the program aired and he had a chance to actually see them, that the
documents were faked. And he had talked to the family of the man (Killian) who
had supposedly signed them. The family said they were fakes.
But
the real red flag should have been the source that handed the documents to
them. They could trace them no farther. He was retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill
Burkett who claimed the documents had come from Bush’s commanding officer, the
late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B.
Killian. That meant that Killian was not available to attest to the validity of
the documents, and as mentioned, Barnes admitted to lying to CBS and burning
the original documents. Burkett, who seemed to be bitter about his Guard
service and treatment in retirement, had also asked to be put in touch with someone
in the Kerry presidential campaign, which should have also raised a red flag.
Not to mention that Burkett had been shopping around the story about Bush’s
failure to meet his obligations since 2000.
And,
in a very telling statement in the docudrama, which I don’t know was made by
any of those at CBS for real, one of those involved in the research for CBS
said that had Mary Mapes’ mother not died in 2000, when she first began to
investigate the story, then Gore might have been president… or in other words,
CBS News would have influenced the election with a tale that they could not
prove was accurate when push came to shove.
As
I say, I don’t want to get into the politics of this thing but I find the
parallels between the research into MJ-12 and the investigation of these
documents to have the same problems. MJ-12 is traceable only to Bill Moore and
the Bush documents only to Burkett. Those who could verify them are all
conveniently dead and both sets of documents suffer from the same lack of
provenance. I would suggest that anyone interested in MJ-12 and how that whole
sorry mess has evolved, watch Truth
and see the same sorts of errors being made by those who are supposed to be the
best at what they do. In both cases, those wanting the documents to be real
should have taken a step back and asked some very basic questions. Both are
examples of how not to investigate questioned documents.
PS:
I haven’t compared this to the Not Roswell Slides, but there certainly is a
parallel there as well. For those interested in reading more Burkett and the
documents, see:
