Tinfoil Hat Time: What evidence points toward the CBS memos being a plant

[Sandpiper]

Point #1: This was a dream scenario for Bush in two ways.

A) The memos became the topic of discussion, rather than his questionable military record.

B) The questionable authenticity of these memos has poisoned any further discussion of Bush's military service.


Point #2: Harry W. MacDougald aka "Buckhead"

Harry is affiliated with The Federalist Society, The Southeastern Legal Foundation, and helped draft the petition that attempted to the Arkansas Supreme Court to get President Clinton disbarred.

He is a lawyer by trade. Yet within four hours of CBS releasing the memos, he had suddenly become an expert on type face, fonts, spacing, and copying.

He has repeatedly declined to state how he came to know so much about the memos in such a short time.

All in all, this was quite a feat for someone with a total lack of forensic expertise.


Am I missing anything?

:tinfoilhat:

[dogtag]

1. Tin foil is too messy -

I've taken to wearing a metal collander instead. It's handy, has holes for airconditioning purposes, lightweight and rather fetching in an odd sort of way. The dog has gotten used to seeing me in it and no longer barks.

[Warpy]

8. You forgot the best part

You can decorate the upturned feet with seasonal items, so it's always in style.

[Steely_Dan]

9. HAHAHAHAHA

[benddem]

2. with or without tinfoil or

colanders...this has the rovemeisters finger prints ALL over it.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. That the news scoop was offered ONLY to CBS/Dan Rather,

who broke the Abu Ghraib story and was sure to be discredited with these memos.

[AgadorSparticus]

16. that's a biggie. nt

[Minstrel Boy]

4. "Who Is ‘Buckhead’? Kerry Assaulter Seemed Prepped"

First (leaving aside how suspiciously well Buckhead puts sentences together for a righty blogger), there’s the extraordinary, yeah, boggling, knowledge of typewriting arcana. More remarkable still are the circumstances under which discernment occurred. Namely, viewing the document on a TV screen from a presumed distance of six to a dozen feet. Folks who make their living at this sort of thing rely on magnifying glasses, if not microscopes. And they don’t venture opinions unless the document’s in their puss.

Then there’s the warp speed with which Buckhead discerned monkey business. The last big document mess was the trove that conned Seymour Hersh into believing Jack Kennedy signed a contract with Marilyn Monroe agreeing to pay a hundred grand in consideration of her shutting up about their adventures between the sheets, as well as his pillow talk of owing the 1960 election to the good offices of Chicago mob boss Sam (Momo) Giancana. Their exposure (in which your correspondent had a walk-on) took weeks. And those documents were nutso on their face.

Another timing oddity which may or may not be related to the mysterious Buckhead, depending on your choice of villain, is the Pentagon’s release of allegedly newly-discovered records of Mr. Bush’s flight hours and middling piloting abilities one day almost to the minute before Mr. Rather’s report—following four months of insisting there were no more documents to disgorge. Second coincidence: The Pentagon release came hours after the Boston Globe, poring through yet other records, reported that Mr. Bush "fell well short of meeting his military obligation" by failing to report to a Boston-area Guard unit after he enrolled in the Harvard Business School, and by earlier ducking out on required training and drills for a total of nine months. Either could have landed Mr. Bush on full-time active duty for two years, potentially in Vietnam. But he received no punishment whatsoever.

Finally, there’s a detail that appears to have escaped press notice: The Web site where Buckhead’s posting appeared also happens to be the repository for anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual, anti-John Kerry rants by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. And whom, you ask, is Dr. Corsi? Co-author of the best-selling Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, that’s who.

http://observer.com/pages/frontpage3.asp

[Sandpiper]

6. To me, Buckhead is the smoking gun

n/t

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. Well, it was a nice distraction from the real issue facing the country.

Such as Iraq. While the media got itself into a "gotcha" frenzy over a meaningless issue, a few hundred more Iraqis were killed and a few GI's - all relegated to page 16 while everyone was inspecting typewriters.

Could have been a plant. Either way it worked.

[starroute]

7. A couple of arguments against your theory

#1 The memoes are not really a dream scenario for Bush. They give more publicity to the questions about his service. Marian Knox said the facts in them were true. If Rove was going to go to the trouble of faking something up, you'd think he'd concoct documents that would make Bush look good, rather than making him look bad and then debunking it.

#2 The White House was given a look at the documents before CBS aired the story. This would have allowed enough time for them to prepare their counter-attack and feed it to Buckhead. (I do agree with you on that aspect of the story.)

#3 There is still no plausible explanation of how the memoes could have been faked. The idea that they were computer-generated and then xeroxed fifteen times has been debunked on multiple grounds. They give every appearance of having been typed on a forty year old IBM Executive typewriter with a special character for the raised -th-. And what are the chances that there are any machines like that still around and in working condition today?


This story is bizarre and keeps getting more so. But I don't think Rove-did-it is the solution.

Now, if we only knew the answer to "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

[dogtag]

10. I noticed something while watching the rupug heads

blathering away today. They are getting really, really full of themselves....one of them was just on babbling about just how very, very honorable the chimp's discharge actaully was. Me thinks they may be about to step into a nice pile of shit. More rope, Earl, they're gittin ready to hang themselves.

[wickywom]

11. but that's the key they have to

be a little damaging or they wouldn't have passed as authentic at all --
I think the originals were probably hiding something more serious for them-- perhaps the name of family friend, could be anything ?
Who knows-- we never will.

They had to cut their losses -
No files at all is too obvious-- its Rove -- if you can't control the information make your own and confuse the populous. Then hammer t away til their heads explode.
Attack their credibility .
He attacked CBS -- Rather.

[Eloriel]

14. Here's why I think Rove did it

ALL of what's been posted so far, plus:

* PROVENANCE (still very cloudy)
This USAToday article identifies who contacted Burkett about these memos in the first place:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-09-21-cover-guard_x.htm

Burkett now maintains that the source of the papers was Lucy Ramirez, who he says phoned him from Houston in March to offer the documents. USA TODAY has been unable to locate Ramirez.

snip

Burkett said Ramirez told him she had seen him the previous month in an appearance on the MSNBC program Hardball, discussing the controversy over whether Bush fulfilled all his obligations for service in the Texas Air Guard during the early 1970s. "There is something I have that I want to make sure gets out," he quoted her as saying.

He said Ramirez claimed to possess Killian's "correspondence file," which would prove Burkett's allegations that Bush had problems as a Guard fighter pilot.

Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.

--------

* HISTORY (Rove's)
James H. Hatfield wrote a book called "Fortunate Son." For the book, he was able to interview Karl Rove and Rove confirmed Bush's cocaine use, along with a number of other details (now, just imagine how likely THAT is, that Rove would confirm Bush's cocaine use!!) However, just as St. Martin's Press had released the book to bookstores, and I guess it started being talked about in the press, it was revealed that one of Hatfield's "facts" he'd gotten from Karl Rove was wrong. Something about someone being a Repug but he was really a Dem, or some such. Not only that, but the press somehow got hold of some extremely damaging information about Hatfield himself. Between the two, Hatfield's credibility was in tatters, despite his exhaustive research and excruciating documentation for the book. St. Martin's destroyed the books. It was subsequently published and Hatfield died (suicide, they say) about 2 weeks after publishing this article:

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?
By James Hatfield
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html

Editor's note: In light of last week's horrific events and the Bush administration's reaction to them, we are reprising the following from the last column Jim Hatfield wrote for Online Journal prior to his tragic death on July 18:

July 3, 2001—There may be fireworks in Genoa, Italy, this month, too.

-- more --

----------------------
I think Burkett was set up to be the conduit for this little caper. After all, he was a Dem, had a grudge, and served as a commander in the TANG. He's had those documents for months. Whether CBS was tipped off to the existence of these "documents" or just decided to contact him on their own because he was a TANG commander isn't known.

Notice the pattern: the underlying information is true (just as it was with Hatfield's book), but dirty "facts" -- or in this case, apparent forgeries -- were planted along with the truth. (And that IS one of the cardinal rules of propaganda and black ops, etc., btw: pepper the shit with liberal doses of the truth.)

[funnymanpants]

15. memos forged

"They give every appearance of having been typed on a forty year old IBM Executive typewriter with a special character for the raised -th-."

No, they don't. I don't know on how many different threads I have to post this. It is true that many typewriters from the Viet Nam era had many of the same features that showed up in the memos such as superscript and proportional font widths. But no one typewriter had all of these features, which is why no one can produce a similar looking document with a typewriter. Yes, there are typewriters around from that era.

On the other hand, you can create *nearly* the identical document using MS Word. I know that there are slight variations, but the variations between doing it with a computer as opposed to doing it with a typewriter are almost non-existent. What are the odds that a document created 40 years ago would have the same kearning an leading?

I mean, what I'm being asked to believe is because the glove doesn't fit, I must acqite. That is, the defence was able to get OJ off because they were able to point out miniscule problems with ten mountains of evidence. No I am being asked to overlook the huge descrepencies between a typewriter and the memos, but to focus on the miniscule ones that *might* exist with a computer.

One explanation for the small descrepcencies is that the the docs were printed on an older printer (this is just my theory, thrown out at the top of my head).

However, nearly all the experts think the documents were forged. Even the CBS experts have since come out and admitted that they either they had doubts about the docs, or only looked at the signature.

[Swede]

12. Check this out.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2376346

[markus]

13. I think CBS needs to drill Mr. Buckhead a new lower orifice

I mean, that should be the real story here, shouldn't it?

Do we have any real journalists left in this country, who just want to know WTF really happened?

<sigh>