Ben Barnes, Dan Rather, and the FORGED Dubya documents "exposed" tonight on "60 Minutes II"

Update (Thu Sep 9 @ 4:40pm):  I'm satisfied that the "new documents" CBS produced last night are indeed forgeries.  See the updates at the bottom of this now extremely rambling and disorganized post for details.

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I'm repeating myself.  I didn't intend to write about this again, so soon.  But while I don't have the exact quote — and didn't have my videotape running, unfortunately, and missed the first few minutes of the segment — Dan Rather told a whopper on "60 Minutes II" tonight when he said (quoting from memory) that "Ben Barnes hasn't told this story before tonight."

Dan, as the WaPo noted last week, as part of the breathless buildup to your new exposé — Ben Barnes told this same story, and actually gave an affidavit and/or deposition testimony pretty much to the same effect, in 1999.  His spin now is more colorful, but his facts haven't changed.

Barnes thinks he did a favor to get young Dubya into the Texas Air National Guard.  He didn't say in 1999 — and he again didn't say tonight — that anyone from the Bush family asked him to do so.  Nor has it been established that without Barnes' unsought intercession, Dubya wouldn't have gotten into the same spot in which he ended up.  And the unit for which Dubya signed up had pilots flying in combat over Southeast Asia at that moment.  Even stateside Guard service flying an F-102 was dangerous duty — certainly at least as dangerous, and similarly honorable, as serving as a junior officer aboard a guilded missile friggate.

But Barnes almost wept on camera tonight — oh the guilt!  The anguish!  Barnes says he had the power of life or death, and ignobly chose to save Dubya from death!  Why, if that's so, it's a wonder lightning doesn't jump out of the Vietnam Memorial and strike Barnes down!

Except he didn't have that power, and the spot he thinks he got Bush into wasn't safe, or even safe from combat.  And neither young Bush, nor Poppy and Barb, had anything to do with whatever it was that Barnes thinks he did.

But wait!  There's more!  CBS' crack investigative reporters turned up previously unreleased documents "from the personal files of [the late] Col. Jerry Killian, Mr. Bush's squadron commander."  And — I know you're holding your breath for this — they say the same thing the previously released documents said!  That is, that Bush sought permission from the TANG to move briefly to Alabama to work on a political campaign.  From CBS' website:

Another memo refers to a phone call from the lieutenant in which he and his commander "discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November." And that due to other commitments "he may not have time."

Well, hell.  He asks for permission, and gets it.  There's a new document that refers to the discussions when he asked for permission.  This is AWOL?  This is news?  (CBS hasn't posted the new documents — we just have to take their word for what they say, since after all, CBS is the oracle of truth and knowledge for the free world. [edit — see Update below for links to and an analysis of the documents.])

And yes, we know Dubya didn't maintain his flight status and didn't take the physical that would have been necessary to do so.  We've known that for years, as we've also known that Dubya wouldn't have been flying one way or the other during that period because the TANG had more pilots than they had planes for.  I don't know whether to yawn or retch.

The website story doesn't mention Barnes' heavy personal contributions to, and fundraising for, the Kerry campaign.  I don't know if that was in the portion of tonight's broadcast that I missed — perhaps my readers can address that in comments — but if it wasn't, it should've been.  Likewise, the fact that nobody in the Bush family asked Barnes to do whatever he did should've been highlighted in the broadcast, but it certainly isn't in the website story.  We're talking minimum standards of objectivity here; but is anyone surprised that CBS and Dan Rather are unacquainted with those standards?

Ben Barnes is still famous here in Texas — as a scoundrel thrown out of office after the Sharpstown Scandal.  Texas native Dan Rather seems to be working hard to earn the same reputation with the few fair-minded people who haven't already reached that conclusion.

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Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 9:45pm):  Seventeen paragraphs down, the NYT tucks this into its Thursday-edition story about Barnes' "60 Minutes II" appearance and his contemporaneous interview with the NYT (boldface added):

Mr. Barnes maintained, as he has since 1999, that he had contacted his friend who headed the Texas Air National Guard, Brig. Gen. James Rose, not at the behest of anyone in the Bush family, but rather a Houston businessman, Sidney A. Adger, a friend of the Bushes who has died.

And the NYT also described "Mr. Barnes, 66, [as] an adviser to Senator John Kerry's campaign and an influential lobbyist with offices in Austin and Washington."  No mention of the $464,250 in contributions to Kerry attributed to Barnes' efforts from 1999-2004.  I suppose that detail isn't part of "the news that's fit to print," but it's a sad commentary on CBS that the NYT looks (relatively) objective in contrast.

Regarding whether Mr. Barnes' unsolicited efforts had any effect, here's what the Dallas Morning News reported (.pdf of Lexis/Nexis download) in 1999 — still unrebutted to the best of my knowledge:

Records provided to The News by Tom Hail, a historian for the Texas Air National Guard, show that the unit Mr. Bush signed up for was not filled. In mid-1968, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, based in Houston, had 156 openings among its authorized staff of 925 military personnel.

Of those, 26 openings were for officer slots, such as that filled by Mr. Bush, and 130 were for enlisted men and women. Also, several former Air Force pilots who served in the unit said that they were recruited from elsewhere to fly for the Texas Guard.

Officers who supervised Mr. Bush and approved his admission to the Guard said they were never contacted by anyone on Mr. Bush's behalf.

"He didn't have any strings pulled, because there weren't any strings to pull," said Leroy Thompson of Brownwood, who commanded the squadron that kept the waiting list for the guard at Ellington Air Force Base. "Our practices were under incredible scrutiny then. It was a very ticklish time." ...

According to several former officers, the openings in the unit were filled from a waiting list kept in the base safe of Rufus G. Martin, then an Air National Guard personnel officer.

In a recent interview, Mr. Martin of San Antonio said the list was kept on computer and in a bound volume, which was periodically inspected by outside agencies to make sure the list was kept properly.

Mr. Bush said he sought the Guard position on his own, before graduating from Yale University in 1968. He personally met with Col. Walter B. Staudt, commander of the 147th group.

In an interview, Mr. Bush said he walked into Col. Staudt's Houston office and told him he wanted to be a fighter pilot.

"He told me they were looking for pilots," Mr. Bush said. He said he was told that there were five or six flying slots available, and he got one of them.

While Guard slots generally were coveted, pilot positions required superior education, physical fitness and the willingness to spend more than a year in full-time training.

"If somebody like that came along, you'd snatch them up," said the former commander, who retired as a general. "He took no advantage. It wouldn't have made any difference whether his daddy was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Such old non-news.  I can't bring myself to retch — yawning is indeed appropriate, though.  (Hat-tip to QandO, which has more links and info.)

Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 9:45pm):  Just in case you haven't figured out Mr. Barnes' angle on all this, here's more (.pdf from Lexis/Nexis download) from the Dallas Morning News on July 29, 2004, describing a lobbyist party at Sen. Kerry's nominating convention, to help you get the flavor:

Federal law sharply restricts the size of contributions to candidates and political parties, but there are no limits on donations to the convention's host committee (which collected $40 million in donations, some $1 million each).

And businesses and lobbyists are free to spend whatever they want on private parties.

Texas lobbyist Ben Barnes' invitation-only reception at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian-style palace housing 600 years of priceless art, attracted enough members of the Senate to hold a committee meeting. The event was a fund-raiser for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and Mr. Barnes had invited a host of high rollers.

"There's nobody here who can't give $25,000," Mr. Barnes said, standing in a courtyard resplendent with flowers and ancient sculpture.

Guests walked among the Botticellis and Manets and sipped champagne.

Trial lawyers John O'Quinn of Houston and Wayne Reaud of Beaumont, who shared in the state's $17 billion tobacco settlement, chatted by the sculpture of Horas. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont glided past the Renaissance art, shaking hands.

Sen. Jon Corzine of New Jersey greeted Mr. Barnes warmly in the atrium, which soared four stories overhead.

"I've never had anybody reach out and help me more than Ben Barnes," Mr. Corzine said.

Then he threw his arms around Mr. Barnes, the lawmaker and the lobbyist.

Pretty tall cotton for one of Texas' most famous bankrupts.  And hey — John Kerry can sure count on Ben Barnes to reach out and help him, too!  (More on Barnes, albeit from a partisan source, via this link sent by one of my readers.)

Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 11:40pm):  WaPo's Dobbs is still ignoring Kerry's cover-up and recycling this old news, but does manage to point out that "Barnes has raised money for Democrat John F. Kerry's presidential campaign," and that

[Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt] has insisted that he was not influenced by Bush's status as the son of George H.W. Bush (R), a Texas congressman in 1968 and later head of the CIA. He has also rejected claims by former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes (D) that he intervened with the head of the Texas Air National Guard to secure a position for Bush there at the request of a Bush family friend.

Meanwhile, CBS, to its credit, now has up a transcript of the segment, plus links to .pdf files with the new documents (here, here, here, and here).  I'll take a close look and may post another update, or a new post, depending on whether there's any "there" there.  (I'm pretty sure I've caught one error in the transcript, where Rather refers to Barnes' predecessor as Texas Lieutenant-Governor as "Preston Smith, communist governor Preston Smith as lieutenant governor."  But with Rather, who knows? [edit: CBS has changed "communist" to "current," which was accurate — contrary to Rather's and Barnes' recollections, Smith had already taken over the governorship from John Connally in 1969 after the November 1968 election, and Smith was reelected to a second (then two-year) and final term in 1970.  Like Barnes, Smith was also turned out of office in the 1972 election as a result of the Sharpstown Scandal, although Smith had been far less involved than Barnes in it.  Dolph Briscoe was elected in November 1972 and took office in January 1973.])

Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 11:59pm):  Well, that didn't take long.  There's no "there" there.

First, the transcript is apparently from the full interview Rather conducted with Barnes, and if I'm recalling correctly from the broadcast, the transcript includes things that got left on the editing room floor — such as Barnes' acknowledgement that he's "a supporter of Sen. Kerry."  (No mention of fundraising, etc.)  The transcript doesn't include the other talking heads that appeared in the broadcast segment with their bloviating on "power attracting power," etc.

Regarding the documents, as I've emphasized many times on this blog, I have no military background to draw upon, and I invite corrections from my readers who do.  But here's what it looks like to my unschooled eyes: 

• The first one, dated May 4, 1972, is a standard order for Bush to get his regular physical, which he'd need to keep his flight privileges.  Describing this as something that Bush "balked" at — which is how the WaPo headline reads — is incredibly bogus.  Yes, it's phrased as an order, it's not something Bush could ignore — but in the nature of things, was a reminder of a regular obligation that all pilots had if they wished to keep their flight status.  It begs the question of whether maintaining flight status was or wasn't a big deal at that time.

• Indeed, the next  document, dated May 19, 1972, shows that Killian and Bush talked Bush "getting his flight physical situation fixed," and Bush said he would "get his physical in Alabama if he stays in a flight status."  This is exactly consistent with what Dubya has said — that if he opted to continue flying, he knew he'd need a physical — and certainly indicates that Killian had no objection either with the delay of the physical or the possibility that Bush wouldn't stay in "flight status."  Yes, it says they "[d]iscussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November."  Well, duh, that means Dubya was getting a superior officer's suggestions and blessing — absolutely what he should've done in order to take advantage of the fact that he wasn't particularly needed by the Guard in Texas and wanted to finish out his obligations, with the Guard's blessings, while living in Alabama to work on a political campaign.  This is some sort of scandal?

• The third document, dated August 1, 1972, simply confirms that since Bush hadn't had the physical, Killian was ordering that Bush "be suspended from flight status due to failure to perform to USAF/TexasANG standards and failure to meet annual physical examination status (flight) as ordered."  There's no mention of any "failure to perform" other than the failure to get the physical.  This isn't a reprimand, it's just confirmation of the fact that Bush couldn't fly without the physical.  The document notes that Bush's spot could be filled "with a more seasoned pilot from the list of qualified Vietnam pilots that have rotated" — again, exactly matching what Dubya's said regarding there being more pilots than TANG had airplanes for them to fly.  They didn't need him in Texas.

• The fourth document, dated August 18, 1973 — note well, a full year later — is more cryptic.  Killian says he "will not rate" because "Bush wasn't here during rating period and I've received no feedback from 187th in Alabama."  Killian stuck to his guns, so whatever pressure he may have been feeling — and there's no indication whether that pressure was simply to close out the paperwork on long-past events or instead (as Bush's opponents would like to characterize it) from someone exerting pressure on Bush's behalf, with or without his knowledge — nothing ever came of it.

Meantime, Kerry continues to stonewall on documents that might show he obtained one or more medals by fraud, while Dan Rather, the NYT, and WaPo continue to fixate over this non-story.  I declare MEGO (mine eyes glazeth over) — it's bedtime for Beldar.  (Last thing before bedtime: changing the title of this post slightly to include a reference to the new documents.)

Update (Thu Sep 9 @ 11:30am):  As one of my commenters did below, Power Line notes the proportional spaced typeface used in CBS' four new documents, the paper size (there's an assertion that the military didn't typically use 8-1/2 x 11 paper then) and, in one of them, the superscripted "th" after the squadron number, and posits that the documents may be forgeries, since the typewriters used in 1972-1973 didn't commonly permit that sort of thing.  Jim Geraghty's Kerry Spot notes that the Boston Globe also has a front-page story up about the CBS documents, and points as well to the curved apostrophes.  Geraghty reserves judgment, as do I, but notes that if the documents turn out to be forged, "this report will join Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cooke in [mainstream] journalism's hall of infamy."  But see an email from a reader posted on NRO's The Corner, arguing that the military did have access to correcting IBM proportional spacing typewriters during the relevant time period.

These are good questions.  Even if CBS acquired handwritten documents and typed them up on modern word processing equipment, they'd have had to do some cut-and-paste photoshopping to add the marginia and signatures; and presenting retyped versions as if they were originals would itself be deceitful.  I also recall something from the CBS broadcast about them having had the documents examined by some sort of expert to establish their authenticity and to verify Col. Killian's signature and/or initials.  How could an expert on forgeries miss this stuff?

I'm left wondering, though — if someone hostile to Dubya were to take the risk of forging such documents, why wouldn't they make up something more incriminating?  (Title of this post edited again to reference authenticity issue.)

Update (Thu Sep 9 @ 2:45pm): INDC Journal quotes from a forensic documents examiner who opines that there's a 90 percent chance the documents are fake; some of his commenters also make excellent points.  Kevin Drum reports that the copies the White House released were simply what CBS had faxed them before they aired their broadcast (dunno his source and he doesn't say — bad Kevin! [edit — via Power Line, here's a .pdf showing the CBS News fax header]), so that's no indication that the documents are genuine.  Captain's Quarters has a thread up, and Jim Geraghty's Kerry Spot, linked above, has some newer posts than the one I first linked.  Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs created what looks to be a duplicate of one of the documents using the default settings for MS Word.  More experts weigh in on Cyber News Service.com, a source not previously familiar to me and for which I cannot vouch.

Update (Thu Sep 9 @ 4:40pm):  I'm persuaded that the CBS documents are forgeries, and bad ones at that.  (Post title changed accordingly.)

At some point, there are just too many peculiarities to be reconciled, and I think we're well past that point.  The latest update over on Power Line (and similar comments elsewhere) note that the signatures of Col. Killian don't match up well.  But I'm finally persuaded that these documents were created by a modern word processor by the kerning observation (explained pretty clearly at Power Line).

One of my commenters below noted that it's odd that someone would use a word processor for these forgeries when one can buy a 1972-vintage typewriter for a few bucks on eBay.  Yes, that is odd, I agree.  I continue to marvel that someone would go to the trouble and risk of forging documents like this without coming up with something more damning.  A possible explanation might be if CBS' source was working from handwritten notes or something almost illegible, and tried to be "helpful" by retyping them on a computer and then forging the signatures, initials, and other marginalia (lawyer-speak for handwritten stuff on typed or printed documents).  In other words, a conclusion that these documents were forged does not rule out the possibility that similar legitimate documents exist, nor necessarily lead to the conclusion that the forger had evil motives.  I continue to withhold judgment on those counts.

But these documents aren't real.  That's my conclusion, not as an expert, but just using common sense.  And CBS — and through it, WaPo, NYT, the Boston Globe, and every other mainstream media source that's written about these documents last night or today — look stupid and gullible because they have been stupid and gullible.  There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Update (Thu Sep 9 @ 5:30pm):  Regarding the fourth document, and whether the "pressure" was to clean up overdue paperwork or instead to cut some special slack for Dubya:  Note the reference to "Austin."  In 1973, no Bush was in Austin.  Barnes said he never followed up with TANG after his initial "favor" on behalf of Dubya, so it wasn't him exerting pressure.  But Austin would indeed have been where the resident bitch-gods or -goddesses of incomplete paperwork were located for the Texas Air National Guard.

Update (Thu Sep 9 @ 8:00pm): The Politburo Diktat has tracked down Rather's source and discovered, to the Commissar's surprise, that he also has conclusive proof that Sen. Kerry actually did spend Christmas 1968 in Cambodia.  It's right there in the document.

Meantime, as one of my commenters noted, the Weekly Standard has consulted forensic experts who turn thumbs-down on the CBS documents.  Power Line and INDC continue to ride herd on this turkey with frequent updates.