10 September 2004 Blog Home : September 2004 : Permalink
I believe the memos are fake because all three investigations turn up major inconsistencies.
In the first category we have to posit that in 1973 an officer or his secretary in the Texas ANG would use a typewriter that supported kerning, proportional spacing, curly quotes and superscripts to write memos for his private file. It is true typewriters did exist that could probably under expert control do all of these things but to do so would take a lot of work which is unlikely to occur for a memo.
In the second category we have odd abbreviations, jargon and so on which are unlikely to be used by the purported author. Again it is possible that military people in 1973 would mistype occasional abbreviations and it is conceivable that some of the jargon might be used. But it is unlikely there would be about one each criticism per line as there is in these cases.
In the third category we have fellow former TANG personnel and the purported author's wife and son who deny that he would have written such memos. And as well as other verifiably correct writings by the author which show a different view of Bush (which have BTW a different signature to the memos under discussion) and other documentary evidence that General Staudt retired a year before the Aug 1973 memo was written.
Each line in turn may be debatable but it seems to me that, just as fictional detectives would be happy only when they had method, motive AND opportunity, for these memos to be true they have to be convincing explanations for all three lines of investigation. So far what we have seen is unconvincing "it is not utterly impossible" explanations for each and that is not sufficient. As murdoconline (mental note: add to blog roll) writes in respect of my analysis
It's not that these things COULDN'T have been done in 1973. It's that they WOULDN'T have been done on that base in that office, or in bases or offices like that one, in 1973.
Again, if these formatting issues aren't an issue, it should be easy to produce (I mean FIND, not PREPARE) millions of other documents with the same formatting.
Proving that these documents are genuine should be as simple as wandering into the appropriate section of Texas ANG archives and taking documents at random. If the CBS memos are genuine then we will find hundreds of apparently typeset documents from 1973 from the same Air Force Base, we will find thousands with the same sloppy usage of abbreviations and general violation of air force standards and we ought to be able to find a large number written by the same author using similar slang even if none express similar opinions of superiors and so on. Moreover there wll be other references to (say) Gen Staudt poking his nose into things even though he was retired.
In fact of course when we look at the memos published or linked to at http://www.awolbush.com/ we a complete lack of proportional typewriters, different rank abbreviations etc. All this is basic analysis and scientific method as practised by detectives and scientists and other investigators for centuries. It may be a low blow but it seems to me that the majority of the people who are attempting to defend these documents are not trained in fields where such methods are used. There might just be a connection...