Bush service papers denounced as hoax
From Roland Watson in Washington
THIRTY-YEAR-OLD memos questioning President Bush’s account of his Vietnam-era National Guard service were branded a crude hoax yesterday as the US presidential campaign became consumed by conspiracy theories. Experts in typography and typesetting lined up to question the documents’ authenticity, saying that they were the product of a modern computer rather than a 1970s typewriter. CBS News, which produced the documents and aired their claims that Mr Bush had skimped on his duties and refused orders to undergo a medical examination, was standing by its story last night.
Dan Rather, the network’s iconic anchor, who presented the story, insisted that the four memos were authentic and there had been no question of providing a retraction or apology. The family of the alleged author, Mr Bush’s squadron leader in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s, said that they did not believe the memos were genuine. The dispute served to steer a backward-looking campaign even further into details of how Mr Bush and John Kerry, the Democratic challenger, spent the Vietnam war in Texas and the Mekong Delta, respectively. Barring the unlikely discovery that the disputed documents were produced on the orders of Mr Kerry or Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s chief strategist, the details of the affair are almost certainly not going to endure until polling day on November 2.
Time spent by the US media arguing over long-ago events does not, however, help Mr Kerry to try to claw his way back into the race. It is a given among many strategists that voters have made up their mind about Mr Bush’s character and past, both good and bad, and are unlikely to have their views changed by disclosures such as those in the memos, even if they are proved to be true. The Democrat candidate has tried to fire up his flagging campaign by pushing a more aggressive message on domestic issues such as the economy and healthcare. But a Washington Post poll yesterday underlined Mr Bush’s current primacy, giving him a nine-point lead over Mr Kerry. The surfacing of the documents, apparently signed by Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Killian, raised awkward questions for the Bush campaign. They contradicted Mr Bush’s assertion that he won his coveted National Guard slot without his influential family pulling strings, and that he fulfilled all his responsibilities.
Colonel Killian, who died 20 years ago, wrote that Mr Bush had been trying to evade drills and had refused a medical exam. He said that he was under pressure from superiors to “sugar coat” Mr Bush’s record, and Mr Bush was “talking to someone upstairs” to engineer a move to Alabama. No sooner had the memos surfaced, however, than the internet was alive with questions. The letters in all four documents were spaced proportionately, which a computer does automatically, giving “i”s less space than “m”s or “w”s, rather than the monospacing used by typewriters. The font appeared to be Times New Roman, the default typeface in Microsoft Word and other word processing programs. Richard Polt, a professor from Xavier University in Cincinnati who runs a website dedicated to typewriters, said: “Either these are later transcriptions of earlier documents, or they are crude and amazingly foolish forgeries. I am 99 per cent sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s.” CBS said it had subjected the documents to authentication by outside experts. They also checked with Colonel Killian’s superior, Major-General Bobby Hodges. He said that the sentiments in the memos were the same as Colonel Killian had expressed to him. Marjorie Connell, Colonel Killian’s widow, said: “The wording in these documents is very suspect to me. I just cannot believe these are his words.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1256458,00.html 
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