CBS Experts warned CBS they were forgeries.

[DKW 86 7,433]

Link

Document Experts Say They Warned CBS of Doubts

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 15, 2004; Page A10

A document expert retained by CBS News for the disputed "60 Minutes" story on President Bush's National Guard record said yesterday that she had warned the program that the memos involved "had problems" and that she had questioned "whether they were produced on a computer."

Asked whether CBS had taken her concerns seriously, Linda James, a forensic document examiner in Texas, told The Washington Post: "Evidently not."

A second document expert, Emily Will, told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross that she had cautioned CBS in writing that there were "significant" problems with the documents, which were used in a "60 Minutes" broadcast last Wednesday as evidence that Bush received favorable treatment while he was in the Texas Air National Guard.

"I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will told ABC. A third document consultant, Marcel Matley, told The Post on Monday that although he vouched for the signature of Bush's former squadron commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, there was "no way" he could authenticate Killian's purported memos because they were copies.

CBS News Senior Vice President Betsy West said last night: "As far as I know, Linda James raised no objections. She said she'd have to see more documents to render a judgment."

As for Will's account, West said: "I'm not aware of any substantive objection she raised. Emily Will did not urge us to hold the story. She was not adamant in any way. At one point she raised a concern about a superscript 'th,' which we then discussed with the other experts we hired to examine all four of the documents we aired. We were assured the 'th' was consistent with technology at the time, an assessment that has since been backed up by other experts."

CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius added that both women "played a peripheral role and deferred to another expert," Matley. But James said she did not defer to Matley and merely recommended him to CBS. The network says it relied on two additional document experts, whose names have not been made public.

The accounts by Will and James add to the mounting questions about whether the 1972 and 1973 memos reported by CBS could have been produced on a Vietnam War-era typewriter. This is the first time that people involved in the process have said that they raised warning flags about the memos, whose authenticity has been doubted by the president's wife, Laura, and some outside document experts.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward and anchor Dan Rather have defended the story, saying the program relied not only on document analysis but also on interviews with people who worked with Killian at the time.

In a telephone interview, James, who spoke first to ABC, said she examined two disputed Killian memos -- not one, as CBS said -- and found "they were structurally different" from a Killian document released by the Pentagon. James said she questioned differences in the signing of the "J" of Killian's first name, to the point of wondering whether the lieutenant colonel had health issues that would have affected his writing. She said she also told CBS that she questioned whether the superscript could have been produced on an early-1970s typewriter.

Given these concerns, James said, she was surprised that "60 Minutes" went ahead with the story.

In the ABC interview, Will said, "I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter." But though she expressed her concerns the day before the story aired, Will said, "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply."

CBS's West said Will wrote the network three days before the broadcast, not the day before. "The only e-mail we received raised some preliminary points about the handwriting, which [CBS's] other experts addressed and ruled out."

CBS began to doubt Will because she started expanding her role and doing Google searches about Bush's whereabouts at the time, said an executive who insisted on anonymity because the network did not want to go beyond the official statements.

[BamaGrad03 0]

Dan Rather is an ass.