USATODAY.com – Memos debate eclipses content
Document analysts differ over whether the memos, ostensibly written by Bush’s commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, are genuine and could have been produced by typewriters available at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston in 1972 and 1973. Two retired FBI forensic document examiners who studied the memos at USA TODAY’s request said Sunday that they probably are forgeries. Four other authorities interviewed by USA TODAY, including typewriter and type font experts, said the technology existed at the time to create the documents. None of the experts consulted offered an unequivocal opinion.
Whether the memos are authentic was further clouded by conflicting or changing stories — or refusal to comment — by some of the people who were Bush’s superiors in the Guard.
and this
from The Washington Post
A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network’s sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents’ alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that “these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time.”
“These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people,” the CBS News official said. “Journalistically, we’ve gone several extra miles.”
The official said the network regarded Hodges’s comments as “the trump card” on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.