[Ronn_Bman]

Critical memos on Bush's Guard service faked? September 10, 2004 BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB A day after CBS News presented documents questioning President Bush's National Guard service, the veracity of those papers is coming into question. The development comes in a campaign in which charges continue to fly about the authenticity of Bush's time in the Guard and Sen. John Kerry's Web site listing of medals and Naval service. On "60 Minutes II" on Wednesday night, CBS' Dan Rather introduced four documents he claimed were written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, 1st Lt. George W. Bush's superior, establishing that Bush failed to meet the standards required by the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. These appeared to support charges by Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Kerry that Bush had been "AWOL" and had failed to meet his Guard commitments. The documents were presented by CBS as coming from Killian's secret personal files. In them Killian appears to complain that he was being pressured by his superior officers to "sugar coat" Bush's substandard performance in his official records and described how Bush had asked him "how he could get out of coming to drill," among other things. Forgery experts take a look The morning after the "60 Minutes II" airing, the Internet was buzzing with claims that the documents were forged. Powerlineblog first aired speculation that there was persuasive evidence from the typefaces and spacing that the documents supposedly prepared in the age of typewriters in the early 1970s showed the unmistakable characteristics of computer printing. Another blogger, Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal, who had read Powerline, said, "I decided to find a top typeface expert and ran his analysis on my Web site." Ardolino's expert, Philip D. Bouffard, is a nationally recognized forensic authority in typewriter and electronic typefaces. Bouffard has the largest collection of full letter impact typewriter specimens in a private collection today. More than 3,000 of them are commonly used in forensic work. Having worked at NCR and a forensic laboratory for more than 30 years, Bouffard still works with entities such as the state of Ohio on Medicare fraud cases. Times Roman on a computer? Bouffard said the CBS documents appear to have been copied about 10 times in the state he saw them. Nevertheless, he states, "All the documents have been created on the same printer. And the proportional spacing and the common characteristics of numbers like 4 and 7 and letters like lower case c and upper case G are beyond the capabilities of any of the typewriter impact specimens I have in my collection. The centering of headings is also beyond the capabilities of any typewriter I know of." His conclusion: "It is remotely possible that there is some typewriter that has the capability to do all this that I have never seen, but it is more likely that these documents were commonly generated in the common Times Roman font and printed out on a computer printer that did not exist at the time they were supposedly created." Bouffard is a registered Democrat and says he is planning to vote for John Kerry. CBS stands by its story In a related story, the Associated Press has reported that the son of Killian, Gary Killian, has questioned the authenticity of the documents as well and said they didn't come from his family. CBS says it stands by its story and claims that the handwriting and document experts it consulted believe the documents are genuine. The White House released these documents after obtaining them from CBS and did not question their accuracy, according to the Associated Press. Thomas Lipscomb is chairman of the Center for the Digital Future in New York.