Replies to post #18097 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: Analysis: Dem 'liar' claims may be mistake ( United Press International )

WASHINGTON, Sep 10, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe Friday said more than a dozen times that George W. Bush has lied to the American people, even as questions surfaced about the veracity of some of the recent allegations about the president's military record.

"It has become crystal clear that the president has lied to the American public about his military service," McAuliffe said.

"What were they covering up?" he added. "This White House makes the Nixon White House look like it was open, honest and trustworthy."

But even as he launched Democrats' third day of accusations the president was untruthful about whether he fulfilled his duties in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, McAuliffe said the he called the president a liar only reluctantly.

"This is painful for me to have to sit here -- stand here today and to say the president of the United States lied," he said.

"But you know what? I'm not doing this for me. I'm not doing this for the Democratic Party. I'm doing this for every American whose life has been adversely affected" by the Bush administration.

McAuliffe also said the party and the campaign for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., just wanted to get back to the issues.

"Clearly we want this campaign to be fought on the issues of job creation, healthcare, education, a foreign policy based upon nations around the world respecting and working with the United States," he said. "That's what this election needs to be fought on.

"(But) we have found ourselves having to defend John Kerry against scurrilous lies."

McAuliffe used a derivation of the word "lie" nearly 20 times in the third news conference in as many days at DNC headquarters, despite reports questioning the authenticity of one of the sets of documents alleging Bush received special treatment due to his lineage.

In the face of those questions, the Democratic Party Friday released a statement outlining the "irrefutable facts about George Bush's National Guard record."

Included were allegations that Bush received preferential treatment in getting into the Texas Air National Guard, that he was AWOL on two occasions during his term as a fighter jet pilot, and that he was grounded at one point for his failure to take a physical as directly ordered.

Separate documents produced by CBS Wednesday night, allegedly written by one of Bush's superior officers, charged he was under pressure to give the then-congressman's son a positive review despite his performance.

According to the Washington Post, experts said raised script in the text of the letter was unlikely to have been made by the typewriters available in the early 1970s, thereby casting doubt on the document itself.

CBS is standing by the document, and McAuliffe said Friday the Democrats stood by it as well. DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera would not speculate on whether the party would disavow the report if the documents were proven to have been forged, despite Democrats' repeated calls on Bush to disavow attacks on Kerry's military record.

McAuliffe Friday repeated the party's accusation that the charges against Bush have nothing to do with the war in Vietnam, but raises questions about his suitability to serve as the country's president and commander in chief.

"This is not about something that took place in Texas, Alabama, Boston 30 years ago. This is about character. This is about credibility. The character and credibility of the president of the United States today," McAuliffe said.

Despite McAuliffe's call for a return to the issues, the scandal over the president's service -- and the questionable memo -- have taken top billing in the news. The reason for that had nothing to do with the party, Cabrera said, but was due to the media's preference of conflict over policy.

Cabrera also rejected the notion the campaign was particularly negative. "In every campaign you've got to convince people why they've got to vote for one guy and against another," he said. "I mean, these things happen concurrently in every election cycle."

McAuliffe said he would let the Kerry campaign say whether the candidate agrees with his assessment that Bush is a liar. The campaign did not return a call for comment.

However, Bob Muller, who was paralyzed in the Vietnam War and is one of the Kerry's "Band of Brothers," broke in to give an emphatically affirmative response.

"Of course he does, of course he does, of course he does!" he told reporters.

Kerry has not publicly commented on the charges. He continued campaigning across the country, and would do so without break until Nov. 2, McAuliffe said. He added that he was satisfied with the campaign's place in the polls and that Kerry's plans would win over voters.

"He's going to take that message right out to the American people, and the more they hear it the more they're going to like it," McAuliffe said of Kerry's policy plans.

He later added: "Swing voters, they've known George Bush for four years. They don't like what they see right now, and they don't want to vote for George Bush.

"We've got the next 53 days to close the sale on these swing voters, and that's what we're doing here today, and that's the message to our people."

Steve Clemons, executive vice president of the non-partisan New America Foundation, questioned the strategy of attacking the president's record during the Vietnam War.

Democrats "continue to be more about being anti-Bush than being pro-Kerry, and I think that's a huge mistake, especially with the independent voter," he said.

"The Kerry people have, in a way, de facto, defined Kerry's entire agenda around war-service questions."

He added, "I think if Kerry wants to win, they've got to get out of this game."

Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, characterized the attacks as a risky strategy, but said it was necessary after weeks of attacks on Kerry's character and his own military record.

"I don't think Democrats would have been trying this against an incumbent president if they would end up looking as if they're the aggressors," he said.

The Bush re-election campaign did not return a call for comment, but the administration Friday repeated its statement the documents indicated Bush had been honorably discharged from the Air National Guard and that the attacks were a coordinated Democratic plan to sully Bush's reputation.

"There is an orchestrated effort by Democrats and the Kerry campaign to tear down the president because of the direction the polls are moving," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday.

"And it's not surprising that we're seeing the same old recycled attacks. The Democrats are determined to throw the kitchen sink at us, and I suspect this is just the beginning," he said.

-----

(Please send comments to [e-mail].)

By MARIE HORRIGAN, UPI Deputy Americas Editor

Copyright 2004 by United Press International.

-0-


*** end of story *** (emphasis added)

[F6]

Rather Defends CBS Over Memos on Bush

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 2004; Page A07

Dan Rather vigorously defended his "60 Minutes" story on President Bush's National Guard service yesterday, saying the 30-year-old memos he disclosed on the show this week "were and remain authentic," despite questions raised by some handwriting and document experts.

"Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not, I don't see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill," the CBS anchor said. "My colleagues and I at '60 Minutes' made great efforts to authenticate these documents and to corroborate the story as best we could. . . . I think the public is smart enough to see from whom some of this criticism is coming and draw judgments about what the motivations are."

The memos, described as having been written by Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, indicate that Bush got special treatment as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard and failed to carry out a superior's order to undergo a physical exam. Several experts consulted by news organizations say the memos contain typographical and formatting features that suggest they were written on a computer or word processor rather than on an early 1970s government typewriter.

Rather said that CBS's lead expert was Marcel Matley of San Francisco, a member of the National Association of Document Examiners who has taught, lectured and written about his field, testified in numerous trials, and consulted for government agencies. Matley said last night that a "60 Minutes" executive had asked him not to give interviews.

The Dallas Morning News cast fresh doubt on the documents by reporting last night that the officer named in one memo as exerting pressure to "sugarcoat" Bush's military record was discharged a year and a half before the memo was written. The paper cited a military record showing that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972, while the memo cited by CBS as showing that Staudt was interfering with evaluations of Bush was dated Aug. 18, 1973.

The White House is raising doubts for the first time about the documents' authenticity. "I think there's a big question mark, like major news organizations are suggesting," communications director Dan Bartlett said last night. "Obviously, we see the same things that other people are pointing out now. But at the time, I had every reason to believe that a major news organization had authentic documents."

Killian's widow and son have also questioned whether the documents are real.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward staunchly defended the piece. "I have full confidence in our reporting on this story and in every reporter on both sides of the camera," he said last night. "This is going to hold up. This was thoroughly vetted."

Conservatives hammered Rather and CBS yesterday on talk radio and Internet sites. "I predict . . . that it's only a matter of time before CBS admits it was deceived," wrote Weekly Standard Managing Editor Richard Starr.

In an interview, Rather stressed that CBS had talked to two people who worked with Killian in the Texas Guard -- his superior, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, and his administrative assistant, Robert Strong -- and both described the memos as consistent with what they knew of Killian. Hodges, who told CBS he was "familiar" with the documents, is an avid Bush supporter, and "it took a lot for him to speak the truth," Rather said.

Before airing Wednesday's segment, he said, CBS "vetted" the confidential source who provided the memos and concluded that "he did have the ability to get access to these documents and he was being truthful." Beyond that, Rather said, CBS consulted with military experts about Killian's language and the documents' format and compared them to other Bush service records previously released by the White House. "We decided there was a preponderance of evidence that they are what they purport to be," he said.

Asked if he was troubled by the handwriting and document analysts who say some of the typography and spacing did not exist in the early 1970s, Rather said he could not rule out the possibility of a hoax but sees no need for an internal inquiry.

Some CBS employees, who asked not to be identified while questioning their bosses' actions, expressed concern that the network had issued only a terse statement Thursday, when the authenticity of the documents was first questioned and until yesterday had refused to name any of the experts it had consulted or provide an on-the-record spokesman. One staff member, who has examined the documents but did not work on the "60 Minutes" piece, saw potential problems with them: "There's a lot of sentiment that we should do an internal investigation."

"The first rule of public relations is to get all the bad news out right away," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University's College of Communication. "It looks like CBS News has made some serious errors here, and if so, they should plead nolo contendere and not do the perp walk later."

Others at the network noted that the producer on the Texas Air National Guard segment was the highly regarded Mary Mapes, who helped "60 Minutes" break the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

"It's hard to separate legitimate concern from political blowback and propaganda," Heyward said.

On last night's "CBS Evening News," Rather defended the piece against what he called the "counterattack." He interviewed Matley, who said he concluded after comparing Killian's signature on the memos to other undisputed documents that "yes, it's the same person."

Rather noted the critics' claim that typewriters in the Vietnam War era could not produce a raised superscript, such as the letters "th," but he maintained: "Some models did." As for contentions that the memos were written in a more modern font called Times New Roman, Rather said: "The company that distributes this typeface says it has been available since 1931."

Other experts have told The Washington Post that the spacing between letters is suspicious for documents of that era. But Rather cautioned that the memos become less clear as they are downloaded and photocopied.

In the interview, Rather said the controversy should not detract from these questions raised by the program: "Did a wealthy oilman who was a friend of the Bush family come to the speaker of the Texas House and ask for preferential treatment for George Bush, and did he get it? Did or did not then-Lieutenant Bush refuse to obey a direct order from a military superior?"

In 1999, "60 Minutes" apologized, as part of a legal settlement with a Customs Service official, for reporting on a memo that was later found to be fake.

Matley, who told Rather last night that he knew the Bush documents would be professional "dynamite," has been involved in high-profile cases, including a 1997 controversy over purported John F. Kennedy documents. After "60 Minutes" cast doubt on those documents, the man who unearthed them, Lawrence Cusack III, retained Matley in a suit against CBS that was rejected in court. Matley could not vouch for the documents' authenticity.

Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12809-2004Sep10.html