"YOU CALL THIS A DEFENSE?" EPISODE II

[rexbo 104]

in a court of law, you will go straight to prison.

"YOU CALL THIS A DEFENSE?" EPISODE II

Let's take a close look a CBS's defense, Part II, according to the transcript from the folks at RatherBiased.com.

RATHER: Besides checking on John Kerry's service record,

This includes requests/demands for Sen. Kerry to sign Form 180, right? No? Oh.

CBS has been checking President Bush's service in the National Guard, including whether or not he did or did not fulfill his commitment. We're gathering information, asking questions and probing. CBS is also addressing questions about documents used to corroborate some of the information in our reporting. Some of these questions come from people who are not active political partisans.

What a noble concession! I guess this means that some of the criticism has come from inactive political partisans? Coach potatoes? How about mentioning that the questions have come from the top forensic document examiners in the field, contacted by your rivals at ABC, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News...

It is tonight's inside story. At a Democratic national press conference today,

the shots being fired by some retired military men were aimed directly at President Bush's National Guard service.

UNIDENTIFIED INDIVIDUAL, LATER IDENTIFIED AS FORMER AIR FORCE GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK: But official records showed he skipped a physical and was grounded. Do you know how hard it is to get your annual physical? I took 37 of them in a row.

RATHER: There has also been criticism of the new documents obtained by CBS. But CBS used several techniques to make sure these papers should be taken seriously. Talking to handwriting and document analysts and other experts who strongly insist that the documents could have [been] created in the 70s.

Name them. The man you cited Friday is now telling the Washington Post that there is no way he could authenticate the memos.

BILL GLENNON, information technology consultant: Everything in those documents that people are saying can't be done, as you said, 32 years ago, is totally false. Not true. Like I said, proportional spacing was available, superscripts was available as a custom feature. Proportional spacing between lines was available. You could order it any way you like.

Yes, such features could be custom ordered. But how expensive were they, and how likely were those features to be found on a typewriter in an Air National Guard office in 1972? And please explain why Mr. Glennon told the Washington Post last night, after CBS's report, that he is "not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices."

(cont)