JunkYardBlog

BIAS AT NETSCAPE HEADLINES

Netscape.com runs headlines from the latest stories similar to Yahoo!'s news block. Apparently Netscape's headline writers are as in the tank for Kerry and the Democrats as CBS, the Boston Globe and the rest of the media.

Here's the headline that Netscape put on the infamous AP story about the Killian memos:

Bush Files, Body Count Anger Vets

But if you read the story, first, even the AP didn't put such a slanted headline on it. AP tagged the story "U.S. Servicemen React to Bush Guard Memos," which is accurate. It's a story about varying reactions to the memos and to the 1,000th combat death in Iraq. If you actually read the story, it's clear that Netscape's headline doesn't describe its contents at all. Let's take a look at what the veterans quoted have to say:

Frank Jones says he's angry about newly revealed memos that indicate President Bush got preferential treatment in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam war, but he's not surprised by favoritism in the Guard.

Jones, a Republican from Troy, N.Y., served in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971 before doing 16 years in the Guard himself. As the presidential election nears, Jones says controversy over both candidates' military records and the mounting death toll in Iraq are important issues.

``I'm really in neither camp at this point,'' he said. ``However, I do see a direct correlation to Vietnam. The body count is really starting to get to me.''

Ok, that's one angry vet, and AP chose to lead with him. But note that AP didn't quote him saying he's angry, and apparently his anger isn't deep enough for him to rule out voting for Bush anyway. Next:

Lt. Col. Jim Driscoll, spokesman for the Georgia Army National Guard, said retired service members may comment on political issues such as the Bush documents, but most current reservists and active-duty service members will hesitate to voice their political opinions.

``It would be inappropriate,'' he said. ``The president is our commander-in-chief and so we have to be very careful from an ethical perspective of how we express our political opinions.''

That's one "no comment." No apparent anger, and no words of anger put into the witness' mouth. Next:

Ralph Bradley, 56, a Republican from Albany who served three years in Vietnam in the Air Force and 17 years in the Georgia Army National Guard, said members are encouraged to make up drills so they don't lose pay or retirement benefits.

``There's all kinds of situations ... that cause a person to go out of state for a period of time,'' he said.

No anger there, and he's got the Guard/Reserve culture pretty much right. Next:

Army Reserve Sgt. Tim Wilding, 37, of Jefferson City, Mo., agreed.

Back home for two weeks of leave from Iraq, Wilding said he remains a staunch Bush supporter despite allegations Bush may have tried to get out of Guard drills for several months in 1972.

``A lot of guys don't serve for four or five months at a time,'' he said. ``They've got other stuff going on. They'll make it up later on, or they just won't get paid. That's really no big deal to a lot of National Guard soldiers.''

This guy is so angry with Bush that he staunchly supports...Bush!

We're half way through the story, and so far not one vet is quoted as being angry. One is said to be angry, one doesn't comment, one sees the flap as no big deal and one is a Bush backer. So much for Netscape's headline.

Let's continue our vet anger check. Next:

Ahmad Majied of Albany says the latest allegations about Bush's military record are more troubling to him than allegations about service honors leveled at Democratic challenger Kerry.

Majied, a Democrat from Albany who served 30 years in the Navy, including five years as a SEAL in Vietnam, said the memos support his belief that Bush was a ``playboy'' during his service years.

``He had enough money to get what he wanted,'' Majied said. ``I think his main concern was not to go to Southeast Asia. I bet he never dreamed it would come back to haunt him.''

A self-identified Democrat takes the fortunate son line--big surprise. But note that even this guy isn't quoted as being angry, just "troubled." Next:

Neal Eubanks of Leesburg, who served 39 years in the military - 23 in the Air Force and 16 in the Georgia Army National Guard - said the presidential candidates should move beyond their military records and focus on the issues, such as the economy and unemployment.

``You don't see Korean veterans or World War II veterans or Grenada veterans always talking about 'I served here and I served there,''' said Eubanks, 67, a Bush supporter.

Another vet so angered that he doesn't give a rip about what happened decades ago and still supports Bush.

Netscape's headline, to recap, was " Bush Files, Body Count Anger Vets." It was a lie, because the story didn't support it. But to millions of people who just see the headline and never bother to read the story, the impression is made that Bush is in some kind of trouble and is losing his support among veterans.

Now that we've shredded Netscape, let's look back at the story. What does it fail to mention at all? Oh yeah, the fact that the memos in question are most likely frauds created by people with an axe to grind against Bush. You'd think journalists might find that part of the story relevant. Apparently if you thought that, you'd be wrong.

Here's a screen cap of Netscape's headlie, I mean headline. Look in the News section on the right hand side. Unlike CBS' memos, I verify personally that this screen cap is authentic.

RATHER FAMILIAR

"I want to make clear to you, I want to make clear to you if I have not made clear to you, that this story is true, and that more important questions than how we got the story, which is where those who don't like the story like to put the emphasis, the more important question is what are the answers to the questions raised in the story, which I just gave you earlier."

-Dan Rather in curbside interview 9/10/04

"I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time-never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people."

-Famous friend of Dan Rather

UPDATE: Wizbang sees the same Clinton pattern and elaborates.

ANOMALIES AND FORGERIES

After CBS' spirited but ultimately unconvincing defense of the Killian memos last night, I have a few observations.

Up until last night, CBS News and Dan Rather could have portrayed themselves as victims of a scam. They could have offered a non-apology apolgy and a weak, circular retraction and offered to investigate the matter and report back to the world in a couple or three months, along with a nice blast at the source of the memos, and by running such a piece on a Friday night before the third anniversary of 9-11 they might have effectively killed the story's momentum.

But that's not what CBS did. CBS produced a defense of the stories that was so full of lies, distortions and sleights of hand that it compounded the problem. This story will live past the weekend, and it will do damage, and CBS has forfeited any possibility of claiming to have been a victim of a scam. CBS is now part of the scam, if it wasn't from the beginning. Why would they do this?

The second anomaly is the behavior of the Democrats. The Killian memos represented a major new weapon, if you buy into the Kerry way of thinking that his Vietnam service several decades ago put up against President Bush's service in the stateside National Guard makes him a better leader today. In those memos, you had evidence that Bush was a bad egg with help from on high in the TANG, that he might have been AWOL or at least derelict, etc. Those memos were Michael Moore's silver bullet. But as soon as questions of authenticity arose, what did the DNC do? They didn't defend the memos at all, but instead appealed to "trust" in CBS. From the get-go, the DNC via Terry McAuliffe and spinmeister Chris Lehane pushed any questions about forgeries onto White House strategist Karl Rove.

Now think about that for a second. Why would the DNC run away from what amounted to their nuclear weapon on the Bush AWOL story so fast? And why would they run so quickly to point the finger at Karl Rove? It makes inquiring minds suspect that perhaps the Democrat hierarchy had some inside knowledge of the memos' provenance, and therefore knew that defending them was suicidal.

Couple that with this attitude, expressed by Oliver Willis of Media Matters fame:

Frankly, my major beef with Bush is the dead soldiers in Iraq and the economic stupidity at home. All this other stuff is icing on the cake, if it sticks good, if not oh well. As long as its mud.

As long as it's mud, and irrespective of whether or not it's even true, anything goes if it hurts Bush. I don't mean to suggest here that Willis is speaking for all Democrats, but he's a mainstream (by today's standards) Democrat and is an insider in one of George Soros' many anti-Bush money piles. If that's Willis' attitude and he feels free enough to splash it across his blog, isn't it reasonable to believe that it's an attitude shared by many of his cohorts? I think so. Anything goes, right down to forging documents to smear the President of the United States.

Which returns us back to CBS and the DNC. Why didn't CBS retract and retrench instead of dodging and smearing last night? There must be some reason, known to Rather and others involved in the story, that retracting isn't a viable option at this point.

CBS producers know where the documents came from, at least to the extent that they know who gave them to CBS. It's usually standard practice in journalism to protect sources of confidential information, but that protection does not extend to protecting sources of bogus information. Such sources become inflammable immediately, and most news organizations are only too happy to burn them. But CBS chose not to light that match for some reason.

Here's what I think. The forgeries came from the DNC. Probably not directly; I would hope Terry MacAuliffe and Co. were at least smart enough to use an intermediary to get the docs to CBS, but given the sloppiness of the forgeries themselves we can't rule out a scene in Dan Rather's office involving Gunga Dan, Terry Mac and Clippie, with the phrase "What's the font size, Kenneth?" being the inside joke of the day.

If the forgeries came from the DNC as I believe, both the behavior of CBS and the Democrats make some sense. CBS doesn't want to burn its source because if it does, the election is over and John Kerry's campaign is finished. It's no secret that Dan Rather favors Kerry and Democrats generally, and there's nothing worse for ratings than an electoral blowout by mid-September. Proving that the Democrats are committing crimes to oust Bush would turn this close into a landslide pretty fast. As for the DNC, it moved too fast to finger Rove because they knew the docs were fakes and panicked, thinking CBS just might burn them to save its own reputation. Little did the Democrats know that Dan Rather was prepared to die with his boots on for this story.

UPDATE: The scandal widens. Is there a legal term for verbal forgery? After trying to strongarm Ben Barnes' daughter Amy into a political confession that would help save CBS, DemocRAT operatives obviously decided a fake memo signed by one "Amy Barnes" had no chance of fooling anyone. So they apparently settled on a paperless method of forged statements in another attempt to smear somebody's reputation. I'm sure they thought, "Those digital brownshirted pajama bloggers will never catch us this time!"

CBS COVERS ITS DERRIERE

Folks, we're looking at CBS' own Tailwind debacle.

Quick refresher--in 1998, CNN aired a documentary that accused the US military of using chemical weapons in Vietnam. In order to create this story, CNN went to some lengths, including distorting interview responses and fabricating whole sections of the story. Once exposed, that scandal cost everyone involved their jobs. Peter Arnett was the on camera correspondent for that report, and after discrediting himself as being nothing more than the face for the story, he too lost his posh gig fronting for Saddam Hussein.

Back to CBS. This week it aired fake memos purporting to cast a negative light on George W. Bush when he was in the Texas Air National Guard. Tonight Gunga Dan offered up a defense that will be enshrined in the Newseum as a study in damage control and bias. He slammed anyone question the authenticity of the documents in question as partisan political operatives, then offered up a partisan political operative of his own in order to defend the documents. Except that his operative--some guy who has written a couple of anti-Bush books (and what person of any influence on the left hasn't written their own anti-Bush book by now?)--had nothing to day about the documents themselves. He essentially offered the "larger truth" defense, which was that they fit with the times and mood of the early 1970s. So what? That doesn't make them real.

CBS then finally offered up an expert, and this guy was wholly unconvincing. He didn't deal with most of the major points of contention. CBS failed to follow up with the puported memo author's surviving relatives, both of whom insist that the memos appear to be fraudulent, and it also failed to take into account the various motives that some people might have for faking said documents.

In short, it was a pathetic and unconvincing defense of the indefensible.

Oddly enough, the local station I tend to watch (Fox 45) led off its late newscast with the Bush memo story. Its report was quite fair, taking into account the kerning and proportional spacing issues that CBS either omitted or glossed over. The local folks found their own expert, and that expert stated flatly that she believed the documents were fakes. Fox 45 practiced something that Rather appears to have left behind--journalism.

I also caught Peter Jennings' report earlier on ABC, which amounted to reading CBS' response press release. ABC World News Tonight didn't even bother to scratch the surface of this one at all. So the local folks did a much better job with this story than the two networks I happened to catch.

As for Dan Rather, he appears to be intent on going down with the ship on this one. He may soon find himself sharing a cubicle with Peter Arnett at whatever rinky-dink news outfit he's working at this week.

UPDATE: ABC is reporting that CBS set up their witness:

Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".

It's not nice to set up General Officers in order to knock down the Commander in Chief. And it doesn't matter if an officer is retired or not.

The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugar coat" President Bush's military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service record shows.

An order obtained by The Dallas Morning News shows that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972. CBS News reported this week that a memo in which Staudt was described as interfering with officers' negative evaluations of Bush's service, was dated Aug. 18, 1973.

...But a CBS staffer with extensive knowledge of the story said later that the departure doesn't derail the story.

"From what we've learned, Staudt remained very active after he retired," the staffer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He was a very bullying type, and that could have continued."

That's absurd on it's face. CBS is the only bully in this scandal, and now they're having to deal with being hit back by a thousand little guys. Instapundit also notes:

Jonathan Klein debating Stephen Hayes about the CBS forgery scandal. Klein says that "Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas."

The no-brainer retort to that is: Bloggers are the media's checks and balances. Hayes was a bit on his heels during the interview so he missed knocking that hanging curveball out of the park.

Also, Dan Rather's excuse that there's no original memos for anyone to analyze simply confirms the blogosphere's serious investigative work -- and does nothing to confirm the lame "investigation" of 60 Minutes. We predicted CBS did not have, and could never produce, original memos because they would be snow-white printouts. We also predicted the memos were repeatedly copied/scanned/faxed scores of times to produce the false aging process. Rather essentially confirmed that tonight as well. Thanks Dan.

DAN RATHER MAY HAVE COST KERRY THE ELECTION

Pat Caddell, one of the few honest Dems allowed to speak on TV from time to time, is steamin' mad over forgery-gate.

Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell said Friday that if documents aired by CBS newsman Dan Rather Wednesday night turn out to be forged, as alleged by experts, the presidential race "is over." . . .

"[Democratic officials are] so involved in this," the former Carter pollster worried. "They have gotten themselves so involved in this issue [in] the last 24 hours that somebody's going to, if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this."
Caddell said he wasn't trying to sensationalize the issue, explaining that instead "I'm trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth."

He said that forfeiting the presidential race would be the least of his party's problems if Democrats are tied to any forgery scandal.

"The race is over – and we've got bigger problems than that," he warned.

The bigger problem is the loss of the media credibility monopoly the Left once held in controlling what Americans see, hear and believe. It's going to eventually lead to the collapse of the Democratic Party. CBS and Viacom tried so hard to get Bush and boost Kerry this summer that they ran amok, tripped and fell on their swords.

UPDATE: The Pentagon is questioning the laughable P.O. Box on the forgeries. They ought to question everything.

Oh, and the sound you heard behind Dan Rather's denials today wasn't traffic, it was the buzz of shredders at CBS and DNC/Kerry Campaign HQ. Paging John Ashcroft and/or Judicial Watch. Someone should seek a court order to preserve all correspondence related to the creation and dissemination of the forged documents.

MORE: Of course it may also end Dan Rather's career:

Michael Medved, host of a nationally syndicated radio program and a media critic, believes that if the documents are proven false, it may mean the end of Dan Rather's career.

"I honestly believe that if this continues to go the way it's going, it could mean the end of Dan Rather's illustrious career," Medved told CNSNews.com.

Medved called the potential that the documents were forged "absolutely shocking."

"What is most shocking about it is [CBS News] didn't have ready at hand -- some kind of immediate memo that said this is how we authenticated, this is how we documented," Medved said.

"The fact that they haven't issued anything like that just is a stunning admission of journalistic malfeasance," he added.

MORE: Details about the address and PO Box issue.

FEDERAL FORGERY LAWS

One year ago today, 10 SEP 2003, Senator Lindsey Graham introduced what looks like a John "Forges" Kerry amendment to title 18, United States Code:

SECTION 1. ENHANCED PENALTIES FOR FORGERY OF MILITARY DOCUMENTS AND MEDALS.

Section 704 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) in subsection (a)--

(A) by inserting `or knowingly obtains, possesses, manufactures, or sells any military certificate or similar document awarding any decoration or medal,' after `colorable imitation thereof,'; and

(B) by striking `six months' and inserting `2 years'; and

(2) in subsection (b)(1), by striking `1 year' and inserting `5 years'.

Happy Anniversary Sen. Kerry! If "W" stands for wrong, "F" stands for forges.

MORE: As for CBS passing the White House the forged documents they reportedly got from the Kerry campaign operatives, it appears the intent may have been to lend credibility to the fraud -- knowing the White House would be forced to pass them on to others in the media:

It's illegal to knowingly give a false document to a federal agency.

United States Code makes it a crime, punishable by five years in prison.

A formal federal prosecutor, Bill Jung, said the charge is relatively common and straightforward. If someone supplies a federal official with a signed document, knowing that the signature is forged, that could qualify, he said.

"If you lie to a federal official, even if it's not under oath, it's a crime," Jung said. "It's not required that the federal agency rely on the statement. Just that you made it."

Were the forged Guard documents mailed, emailed or faxed to CBS -- or from CBS to the White House?

Forgery is any intended and willful altercation or fabrication of any written documentation with a malignant intent to harm or injure the interest of another person or entity in a fraudulent way.

...in all fifty states, forgery is a crime but if a forged document is sent through the mail, then it is no longer a state crime but a federal crime.

MORE: I'm not a lawyer but...besides the Kerry campaign's document fixer, either CBS execs or Dan Rather (Who was said to be a potential Kerry campaign operative as of 24hrs ago) may be in criminal jeopardy. It would explain their willingness to go to the death to deny, deny, deny knowledge of the probable fraud and protect their sources from any questioning or investigation. And why does Dan Rather get the choice to investigate himself (or not) when a federal crime might possibly be involved? If the Bush campaign and Fox News had reportedly been involved together in creating or disseminating forged records of John Kerry's military service in the media and to a federal agency, Attn Gen Ashcroft would be forced to appoint an Independent Prosecutor by tonight. That's a fact. It would be said by Dan Rather himself to be a scandal bigger than Watergate.

Another thought: If Kerry campaign document fixers were indeed involved in creating or using the forgery for political reasons, what does this say about Kerry's respect for the military, military documentation, military honor, deceased honorable servicemen, etc??

I think it's additional evidence that the National Guard, the military, it's history and customs, it's medals, it's records, etc. are just pawns to be manipulated for John Kerry's personal ambition. Doesn't our government have a important responsibility to protect the honor of deceased military personnel and the integrity of all military records by immediately investigating Kerry's continuing pattern of military documentation fraud? If not, then the message being sent to people like Michael Moore is that you can feel free to smear soldiers fighting in Iraq with faked documents, or alternatively type yourself up a Medal of Honor in Microsoft Word.

EXPLOSIVES FOUND IN RUSSIAN CINEMA

The terrorists who attacked Beslan school #1 were able to preposition guns and explosives around the school prior to the attack while it was being renovated. It looks like a similar operation was underway to attack a movie theatre:

Police in the Russian city of St Petersburg have found explosives, detonators and a gun in a cinema closed for repairs, Russian media have said. Interior Ministry officials said that the discovery followed the arrest of three men from Kazakhstan.

---

The discovery of explosives was made at 2000 local time (1600 GMT) on Wednesday in offices in the Progress cinema, gazeta.ru website reported.

Police found 23 cartridges, 900g of plastic explosives, a 200g stick of dynamite, two home-made bombs and a rifle.

A search of the premises is continuing, as police believe there could be another cache.

The cinema is in the same block as a police station and local government offices, gazeta.ru said.

Police say the owners of the explosives were probably using the cinema as a store and were planning to use them somewhere else.

But they are not ruling out the possibility that an attack was being planned in the cinema itself.

POST FRONTS THE FORGERIES

Interesting bits in the WaPo's treatment of the fake docs:

The dispute over the documents' authenticity came as Democrats stepped up their criticism of Bush's service with the National Guard between 1968 and 1973. The Democratic National Committee sought to fuel the controversy yesterday by holding a news conference at which Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) pointed to the documents as a fresh indictment of Bush's credibility.

The words "Harkin" and "credibility" should never be used in the same sentence. Sen. Harkin oversold his own military service, turning ferry flights into air-to-air combat with MiGs over Vietnam. He also created his own little Abu Ghraib during Vietnam, called "tiger cages." The man's flake and a leftwing tool. Why the Post doesn't point any of this out, as it is relevant to Harkin's fitness to judge Bush or anyone else on military merits, I'll leave you to guess.

We do, however, finally get a name attached to CBS' "experts" who authenticated the docs. Is he a forensic doc expert? No. Does he have any background at all in investigating document authenticity? No. He worked with Killian, and never saw the documents CBS fronted on 60 Minutes:

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."

CBS regards Hodges' story as unassailable since he's a Republican. Why is it that the only time the media regards Republicans as just unimpeachable honest is when they're somehow hurting fellow Republicans? I report, you ponder.

Moving along, the Post found Killian's widow. She ain't happy with CBS:

In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records as "a farce," saying she was with her husband until the day he died in 1984 and he did not "keep files." She said her husband considered Bush "an excellent pilot."

"I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person," she said, adding that she was "livid" at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly before Wednesday night's broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.

Mother and son, both agreeing that the docs are fakes.

The Post then runs through a gauntlet of forensic document experts, all surmising the docs in question to have been forged.

So face it CBS, all your bases are belong to us. Blogs rule, Rather is left muttering "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" It's correction time at the Tiffany Network.

But if the docs were real? They would prove nothing. Bush accumulated roughly five times the amount of points he needed for his honorable discharge, which Killian himself signed. That doc, alas, is all too real for the Democrats to squirm away from.

Now, about Kerry's records....

RATHER, PUNK'D

It now appears to be a slam dunk that the CBS-Killian memos are forgeries. To date, not one forensic documents expert is on record substantiating or even defending their authenticy. Several bloggers and blog readers have been able to replicate the memos using Microsoft Word and its default font, Times New Roman, a font that apparently didn't exist in the early 1970s, and those electronic versions demonstrate conclusively that the memos use proportional type and kerned text, both features not common to early 1970s or late 1960s typewriters.

So now we must turn to the questions of Who and Why? Who punk'd Dan Rather, 60 Minutes and CBS, and for what purpose?

Two schools of thought arise. One says the perp wanted to smear the President and thereby change the course and outcome of the upcoming election. The other says it was an inspired move by Karl Rove to discredit the third stanza of the Bush was AWOL story.

I discount the latter on sight. It's just too cute, and far too risky. If not for blogs and Free Republic, this fakery would have never been discovered. The mainstream media wouldn't have devoted a nanosecond to exposing if it hadn't been forced to by blogospheric pressure. To believe Rove planted the fakes, you have to believe in a conspiracy theory with lots and lots of moving parts which would never get exposed, and the exposure of which might lead to criminal prosecution (more on that later). Someone had to make the docs and get them to CBS via some channel which would not raise any sorts of Rovian questions. Then someone would have had to make sure the suspicion of fakery got its airtime, and that the story would develop legs from there. It's not impossible, just improbable. Rove would have to be an awfully wired guy to use Free Republic, and if he did that maybe he'd lurk there long enough to see what the typical Freeper thinks of his boss' immigration policies. That the Bushies haven't reversed course on that hints Rove doesn't spend any time on Free Republic.

So anyway, I'd put the possibility that this was an administration gambit at about 10%. Who else, then?

The most obvious culprit would be Democrat operatives, to include their various allies in the media. That's a wide field from which to select a target, so let me just say it straight out now that I don't think Dan Rather faked these docs. I hope he did, and I hope his friends at Nightline discover that he did and expose him. That would be a delicious ending to this sordid little story. For the record I don't think anyone within CBS faked these things either.

Whoever faked them doesn't know much about the military; Rather served and so presumably would have made better fakes (though he didn't see any problem with airing them, so maybe he would've made just as lousy a set of fakes as the real faker). Whoever faked them doesn't know much about typography or how to wrangle Word into doing what you want instead of letting it tell you what it wants. Word is an egotistical program, so I give the faker a pass on that last bit.

The 60 Minutes story centers on Ben Barnes, Democrat and former Texas Lt. Gov. Barnes was convicted of fraud in the 1970s and is a partisan Democrat. He's a very likely suspect.

Others within the DNC hierarchy could also be the perp or perps. As Charles Johnson proved, making these fakes took no more than 15 to 20 minutes on a word processor, and you might want to allow a half hour for the multiple photocopies they did to make the docs look dirty. If that's what they did. There is probably a Photoshop plugin out there to dirty up an image to make it look haggard or worn from age. I know for a fact there are video effects that do that. Our perp could have just Photoshopped the age without resorting to photocopying at all, and that process probably took no more than 10 minutes or so (and to me, the dirt does have a digital feel to it, fwiw). But let's be generous and give our perp an hour. Can we get a rundown of every hour of activity of every single Democrat operative or staffer from, say, the past month or so? Unlikely. If it's a Dem wag, we'll probably never know.

But what if the perp is even more sinister than your average Kerry doorknocker? What if, and I'm putting on a more serious hat here, the perp is a terror operative or ally?

We know the terrorists have access to somewhat sophisticated video editing gear--they're always putting out those horrible murder tapes that they have to have edited somehow. Some of their rousing call to arms tapes show basic effects and transitions common to computer-based editing programs like Premiere or lower end apps. The point is, these guys have computers and many of them speak and understand English quite well. They could easily have made these forgeries and found a pliable channel willing to get them to CBS. Michael Moore would have been only too glad to hand deliver them from Osama bin Laden to Dan Rather personally.

If our perp is a terror op or ally, then their purpose is fairly obvious: Get Bush. It's their way of supporting the Anybody But Bush crowd, the kind of people who put bumper stickers on the cars that read "Defend America: Defeat Bush." This little terror op is just doing his part.

Whoever did this, we may be talking federal crime here. I'm not a lawyer, don't want to be a lawyer and don't like lawyers much, but I'm pretty sure it's a crime to forge military documents, especially if your intent was to smear the President of the United States in the middle of a war in order to effect the outcome of the election. If the intent was truly malicious (i.e. not Rove pulling a sneak on the media), then what we have here is an attempt at a soft coup. That's serious business, and rises to a level far beyond a mere political dirty trick. The FBI should get on this case pronto.

So what are the odds?

As I said, Rove--10%.

CBS/Rather, probably about the same--10%.

Democrat operative with malicious intent but very poor forgery skills--maybe 30%.

Ben Barnes or someone connected to him--30%.

Terrorist operative or ally--20%.

My money's obviously on a Democrat angle. The Anybody But Bush crowd has already been talking assassination and impeachment should Bush win. They're not above a bit of felonious computer play.

But if this turns out to have al Qaeda or other terrorist roots, CBS was more than punk'd. It was a tool for the enemy.

And almost any way you slice it, if these docs are fakes, someone committed a serious crime.

UPDATE: The docs apparently came from the Kerry campaign.

More than six weeks ago, an opposition research staffer for the Democratic National Committee received documents purportedly written by President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian. . . .

A CBS producer, who initially tipped off The Prowler about the 60 Minutes story, says that despite seeking professional assurances that the documents were legitimate, there was uncertainty even among the group of producers and researchers working on the story.

"The problem was we had one set of documents from Bush's file that had Killian calling Bush 'an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot.' And someone who Killian said 'performed in an outstanding manner.' Then you have these new documents and the tone and content are so different."

The CBS producer said that some alarms bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story. "This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn't show it," says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.

And CBS' producers suspected the docs were bogus but went ahead with the story anyway. Heads should roll.

UPDATE: Iraq, al Qaeda and their joint expertise in document forgery:

CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda."

FORGERIES?

Are the memos to file that CBS and the Boston Globe are trotting out to smear Bush--and give Bush Was AWOL v3.0 some legs--forgeries?

I was a clerk/typist for the US Navy at the Naval Underwater Systems Center (NUSC) in Newport RI for my summer job in 1971 when I was in college. I note the following with regard to the Killian memos:

1) Tom Mortensen is absolutely correct. Variable type was used only for special printing jobs, like official pamphlets. These documents are forgeries, and not even good ones. Someone could have at least found an old pre-Selectric IBM (introduced around 1962). Actually, I believe we were using IBM Model C's at the time, which was the precursor to the Selectric.

2) I also used a Variype machine in 1971. I fooled around with it in my spare time. It was incredibly difficult to set up and use. It was also extremely hard to correct mistakes on the machine. Most small letters used two spaces. Capital letters generally used three spaces. I think letters like "i" may have used one space. Anyway, you can see that this type of machine was piloted by an expert, and it would NEVER be used for a routine memo. A Lt. Colonel would not be able to identify a Varitype machine, let alone use it.

3) US Navy paper at the time was not 8 1/2 x 11. It was 8 x 10 1/2. I believe this was the same throughout the military, but someone will have to check on that. This should show up in the Xeroxing, which should have lines running along the sides of the Xerox copy.

4) I am amused by the way "147 th Ftr.Intrcp Gp." appears in the August 1, 1972 document. It may have been written that way in non-forged documents, but as somone who worked for ComCruDesLant, I know the military liked to bunch things together. I find "147 th" suspicious looking. 147th looks better to me, but the problem with Microsoft Word is that it keeps turning the "th" tiny if it is connected to a number like 147. And finally......

5) MORE DEFINITIVE PROOF OF FORGERY: I had neglected even to look at the August 18, 1973 memo to file. This forger was a fool. This fake document actually does have the tiny "th" in "187th" and there is simply no way this could have occurred in 1973. There are no keys on any typewriter in common use in 1973 which could produce a tiny "th." The forger got careless after creating the August 1, 1972 document and slipped up big-time.

In summary, the variable type reveals the Killian memos to be crude forgeries, the tiny "th" confirms it in the 8/18/73 memo, and I offer my other points as icing on the cake.

Who is forging documents to smear the President of the United States? You can see these documents for yourself from links on the left-hand side of this CBS story about them.

My opinion? The tiny little "th" on the May 4, 1972 document is a dead giveaway. The vast majority of typewriters of the era were incapable of producing that type. It's a forgery, probably made in Microsoft Word since that app has the annoying tendency to attempt to think for you and make editorial decisions you don't want made. In this case, it apparently made a tiny little "th" that the forger couldn't fix and/or didn't catch.

UPDATE: Related, here. The sig looks forged, too. Noted elsewhere in the thread, the abbreviation NLT refers to "not later than," and would be understood by any military personnel and would therefore not have been spelled out, yet it is spelled out in one of the memos. Also, the abbreviation for Lieutenant Colonel is usually LTC or Lt Col, not Lt. Colonel--the latter is in one of the memos as well. The name of the month is also not spelled out in military correspondence. Things are not adding up here, or rather they are adding up, just not in favor of authenticity.

This point is also interesting:

"...the language used in the August 18 memo is all wrong for 1973. The Oxford English dictionary cites the first use of the word 'feedback' in a non-scientific context in 1971, in a rock magazine."

More here at The Kerry Spot.

UPDATE: Word.

Also, INDC Journal found himself a forensic documents expert, who says we could be looking at a forgery made on a computer.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's another thought. When I was in the AF, our squadron kept detailed property logs of every piece of equipment in its inventory. This list included everything we used, from computers to field cameras to lenses to typewriters--everything but the pens, pencils and paper and tapes. Was that the practice back in 1971? Probably. If so, and if those records still exist (a big "if"), someone could track down what kinds of typewriters and word processors would have been available to Bush's superiors, and therefore figure out whether a superscript "th" could have been made by routine means.

Related, I've run across a couple of arguments here and there that say surely the AF had the most advanced gear and would have had superscript available in some form. Most likely, that's not true. Other than actual warfighting gear--planes, bombs and the like--the military tends to lag behind the civilian sector on equipment adoption and purchasing. That's true for all sorts of reasons, and most of them are good reasons, but it's true nevertheless. For instance, I was a broadcaster in the AF at the time digital editing gear was first hitting the market. I built a little solo production company at the time, and later merged it with a friend's company. Bankrolled only by ourselves, we adopted digital editing systems and cameras several years before the military did. And though I had an official need to have a PC on my desktop at work during my AF years, I never had one. I always ended up in sections where there weren't enough machines to go around, so we shared, and the machines we had were usually a few ticks below top of the line. At home, I always had the latest and greatest. The AF lagged behind me, because I was an early adopter and it always takes a more cautious approach to emerging non-lethal tech.

YAU II: Gary Killian, son of Lt Col Jerry Killian (author of the CBS memos), doubts at least some of the memos are legit.

Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said one of the memos, signed by his father, appeared legitimate. But he doubted his father would have written another, unsigned memo which said there was pressure to "sugar coat" Bush's performance review.

"It just wouldn't happen," he said. "The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things. ... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."

CBS denies the docs are forged, yet its process of authenticating them amounted to asking some unnamed people what they thought about what Killian thought 32 years ago. That's hardly reassuring or convincing.

MORE: Here's an excellent take on the forgeries from a National Guard Officer.

KERRY COERCED 1971 "WAR CRIMES" TESTIMONY; TOSSED PURCHASED RIBBONS OVER THE FENCE

In 1971, John Kerry led Vietnam Veterans Against the War. That group conducted what it called the Winter Soldier investigation, which ferreted out stories of US atrocities committed in Vietnam. Most of the stories that resulted from that investigation were false; many of the "veterans" who testified were liars who either weren't where they claimed to have been or weren't even veterans at all.

But what about the real vets who testified to war crimes before Kerry's Jane Fonda-funded panel? One says they were coached into lying to smear the US military, by none other than John Forbes Kerry:

A witness in the 1971 Winter Soldier investigation, which was organized by John Kerry and bankrolled by Jane Fonda and formed the basis for Kerry's Senate war crimes testimony later that year, is accusing Kerry of coercing his account to make the military look bad.

"When I got [to the Winter Soldier investigation], I had no intention of saying anything," Vietnam combat veteran Steven J. Pitkin told WABC Radio's Mark Levin on Wednesday.

---

"He wanted me to get up and talk about what everybody else was talking about," the Vietnam vet said, remembering that Kerry asked him: "Didn't you see any beatings of civilians? Any rapes? Destruction of villages?"

As Kerry pressed him to give him false testimony, Pitkin said, other VVAW members surrounded him and began urging, "C'mon, people need to hear this, man."

"It was a big pressure job," the Special Forces veteran told Levin. "[Kerry] did what I call extreme coaching."

Pitkin, who was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge, Army Commendation Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal, RVN Cross of Gallantry, Air Medal, Purple Heart for his Vietnam service, said also that Kerry's famous medal-throwing protest was staged, with some VVAW protesters discarding phony ribbons in a show for the media.

"I heard that they had been scouring Army surplus stores and asking everybody to bring in various ribbons," Pitkin said.

Kerry has told reporters he kept his medals that day, but threw away ribbons belonging to somebody else.

In a sworn affidavit filed last Tuesday, Pitkin said.

"During the Winter Soldier Investigation, John Kerry and other leaders of that event pressured me to testify about American war crimes, despite my repeated statements that I could not honestly do so. . . Kerry and other leaders of the event instructed me to publicly state that I had witnessed incidents of rape, brutality, atrocities and racism, knowing that such statements would necessarily be untrue."

Read the whole thing. Kerry lied, and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died.

DEPARTMENT OF WELLNESS?

John Kerry is a leftist buffoon:

The other head-scratcher uttered by Kerry in the past two days came Wednesday in Greensboro, N.C. There, in response to a question from a woman about the health problems caused by mold and indoor air contamination—and her complaint, "There's not one agency in this government that has come forward" to deal with the problem—Kerry endorsed the creation of a new federal department. "What I want to do, what I'm determined to do, and it's in my health-care plan, is refocus America on something that can reduce the cost of health care significantly for all Americans, which is wellness and prevention," Kerry said. So far, so good. But then, "And I intend to have not just a Department of Health and Human Services, but a Department of Wellness." Again, what? Apparently this idea comes from Teresa Heinz Kerry, who told the Boston Herald in January 2003 that she would, in the Herald's words, "be an activist first lady, lobbying for a Department of Wellness that would stress preventive health." Oh, boy. Preventive health is a fine idea, but do we need a new agency—I assume it's not Cabinet-level—to handle it?

Assume nothing. Kerry's idiotic Department of Wellness would probably be a Cabinet-level cush for bureaucrat lifers, and would work alongside Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace , which would replace the Department of Defense if Kucinich gets his way. In the middle of a war, no less.

Kaus sums it up well:

"Department of Wellness"! Spirit-crushing foolishness from my candidate, John Kerry. The nation is trying to figure out how to fight global terrorism and he's talking about having "not just a Department of Health and Human Services, but a Department of Wellness." How about a Department of F***ing Perspective?

C'mon, Karl Rove. Bash Kerry for all you're worth over this one.

THE POPE AND THE MULLAHS

Just read:

Pope John Paul II (bio - news) met on February 12 with Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, and expressed confidence in a "spirit of collaboration" between the Holy See and the Islamic regime.

---

However, the Pope did mention that the Vatican and the Shi'ite regime share "issues of mutual concern," and expressed the hope that the two would continue working together "to safeguard the inalienate rights and dignity of the human person." (my emphasis)

The Pope and the mullahs--men who preside over executions of 16-year-old girls and routinely force children to watch their dissident fathers hang to death--will "continue working together" on human rights? Is the Pope senile?

All I can say is, when I read stuff like this coming from the Vatican, I'm glad I'm a Southern Baptist.

BUSH WAS AWOL v3.0

Well here we are again. What's old is new again, in the "scandal" that has more lives than a slasher flick villain.

This "scandal" only has life because the media/left doesn't understand the military, doesn't care about the military and doesn't give a tinker's damn about a little thing called truth. If any of the above wasn't true, there would have been no v2.0 of this "scandal," and certainly no v3.0. The media/left would have scuttled this nonsense the second it erupted from Tubby Reifenstahl's mouth and torpedoed Wes Clark's run for the presidency.

So here we go, one more time, to refute The Scandal That Just Won't Die, this time courtesy The Hill:

The future president joined the Guard in May 1968. Almost immediately, he began an extended period of training. Six weeks of basic training. Fifty-three weeks of flight training. Twenty-one weeks of fighter-interceptor training.

That was 80 weeks to begin with, and there were other training periods thrown in as well. It was full-time work. By the time it was over, Bush had served nearly two years.

Not two years of weekends. Two years.

Guard service is very, very simple. You have to work enough in your unit or specialty (work which in many cases can be done alone and away from any unit, as long as the chain of command approves) to earn 50 points. If you earn those 50 points, you have fulfilled your duties to the Guard. Everyone still with me? If you're having a hard time getting it, just remember that number: 50.

Now, let's look at the points Bush earned during his Guard years, according to his official service record:

1968: 253
1969: 340
1970: 137
1971: 112
1972: 56
1973: 56 (two months, discharged July 1973)

Now for you liberals I'll slow down a bit so you can keep up. Is 253 equal to or greater than 50? Yes, so Bush fulfilled his obligations in 1969. Is 137 equal to or greater than 50? Yes, so ditto for 1970. Go on down the line at your leisure. Are there any years in which Lt. Bush didn't hit 50 points? No. Therefore, Bush did his duties as spelled out in military regs and earned his Honorable Discharge (and without smearing any of his fellow vets as "war criminals" on the way out). Case closed. In fact, if you add up all those points, you can see that Lt. Bush accumulated enough points to fulfill 15 years of Guard duty in just a little over four years.

Do you liberals still want to make the case that he was AWOL? You'll have to invent some other way to do it, because the paperwork isn't on your side.

You people should stop outsourcing your national security policy and your muckraking and you consciences to Michael Moore and start focusing on just why your party is so terminally screwed up.

(via Captain's Quarters and JYB reader MW)

MORE: And see Tom Maguire on "Texans for Truth," an organization that is not made up of or funded by Texans, and is as a group a stranger to the truth. TFT is another component of v3.0 of the AWOL "scandal."

Oh, and since the polls had Bush up and since everyone knew he'd get a bounce of some kind out of the convention, and since the media/left waited to spring v3.0 of this rehashed crap until the RNC was done, I question the timing of the simultaneous Boston Globe, New York Times and CBS stories on this along with the TFT ad. Do ya think some of this might have been coordinated with the DNC? I do.

MORE: Related. Media mavens describe "the bounce". Different times, different shows, same words, starting with the Kerry campaign and then entering the chat fray:

CAHILL: The thing about a bounce is, it goes up, and then comes down. A bounce is a bounce. You go up, and then you go down.

MABRY: Remember, the reason we call it a bounce is because it goes up and it comes down again.

LEWIS: The reason they call it a bounce is numbers go up, numbers go down. You know what a convention bounce is? A bounce goes up, and a bounce goes down.

CLANTON: What you're seeing is a convention bounce, and a bounce is something that goes up and it goes down.

RUSH: Now, tell me this is coincidental! I mean this is just like the old gravitas montage of the 2000 campaign when all of these journalists were all saying Bush didn't have any gravitas. Now they're all saying this about the bounce. And one of these people is a Newsweek reporter who's reading off the Kerry campaign talking points. Are we surprised? Hell no! Uh, heck no.

DONK DEFLATION

Take this anecdotal evidence for all it's worth. I think rank and file Democrats are depressed that John Kerry is their nominee, and they expect Bush to defeat him easily.

I had to ride a shuttle bus earlier today. The retirement-age driver greeted my sole fellow passenger, a young woman, and she greeted him in return. They knew each other.

She is apparently a grad student at one of the area universities. She and the driver talked about the progress of her studies, and he prodded her to keep up with them and do well. But she didn't want to talk much about her studies.

Without any provacation, she lit into John Kerry. It was clear from her tone that she is a Democrat, as is the driver. The young lady lamented the fact--foregone in her mind--that President Bush would win re-election easily. She offered a few choice criticisms of Bush and his policies, and the driver agreed enthusiastically. He is a Democrat, too. He described some conspiracy theory involving felons in Florida not being able to vote this year. I could have told him that they aren't legally allowed to vote in Florida in any year, but chose to listen rather than participate.

But then the young woman said that Kerry's inevitable defeat will be all his fault, and not due to some Bushite prank. She said Kerry can't connect, doesn't make sense and just won't win. She evidently doesn't think much of her party's standard bearer.

The bus driver agreed, and added a few other insults to describe Mr. Kerry. Then he prodded the young woman to forget politics for a while and concentrate on her studies.

Given their politics, it sounded like good advice to me.

MORE: Ah, I love the smell of desperation in the, um, afternoon:

Frothing-at-the-mouth Democrat attack dog James Carville is accusing Republican Party officials of drugging Sen. Zell Miller for media appearances after his speech to the GOP convention last week.

"They probably shot him up with something," the wild-eyed Ragin' Cajun insisted Wednesday during an interview with radio host Don Imus.

So Miller was a drugged up sock puppet for Karl Rove, huh? Carville is lucky we don't live in the day of pistols at dawn. Miller would challenge him to a duel, and win.

PEANUT NUTTER

Jimmah Carter, the man who never met a tinhorn dictator he didn't like, blasts fellow Democrat Zell Miller:

Former President Jimmy Carter is accusing fellow Georgia Democrat Zell Miller of "unprecedented disloyalty" for the senator's speech at the Republican convention.

In a letter sent over the weekend, Carter also called Miller's speech "rabid and mean-spirited."

This, from the man who sat next to Tubby Reifenstahl at the DNC convention. Where was the criticism of a man's "unprecedented disloyalty" then?

And I'm sorry, but that bit about being mean-spirited is just the whining of a has-been girlie man. Carter is and always was a whiner who blamed his troubles ("malaise") on the American people, on his staff, anyone but himself. Loser.

We continue with some Georgia whine:

"By now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral pre-emptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth and the political technique of character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause."

Carter's office declined to release the letter Tuesday, but Miller's office confirmed the contents.

Why would Carter's office refuse to release the letter? What is he, chicken?

The fact is, as Miller pointed out in his fine speech last week, Democrats such as Carter have put their loyalty to party far above their loyalty to the safety of their families or to the security of the nation. That is why they will embrace Michael Moore's enemy propaganda but shun legitimate criticism from Miller. It is their loyalties, not those of Miller and Ed Koch and other Democrats with consciences, that must be questioned. Carter is just another party apparatchik, an apologist for Castro and Arafat and Chavez and the rest of that ilk, a terrible statesman and a wretch of a human being.

Have I made myself clear?

RATHER, BIASED

I'll let the RatherBias folks give you the low-down on CBS/Viacom's latest smear of the president:

Five months after Dan Rather denounced the just-formed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as "an experienced and successful Republican operation made up of veterans attacking Vietnam war hero John Kerry," the 72-year-old anchor and avowed Democrat is set to unveil an extensive interview with Ben Barnes, a former Texas Democratic politician who claims he helped a young Bush avoid service in the Vietnam War by getting him into the Texas National Guard in 1968.

Tonight's Bush attack marks the latest broadside that Rather and his CBS
colleagues have launched against the Bush family. Beginning with his infamous
ambush of George H. W. Bush during the Republican primaries in 1988.

Later in the same year, on the eve of the Republicans' convention, Rather was
the sole network anchor to report on a lone man who accused the then-veep of
lying about his service in World War II.

Despite such efforts, Bush was elected but Rather and his colleagues continued
to dog the president whose staff swore he would "never" allow the Texas Democrat
to interview him. CBS, meanwhile, repeatedly rejected the administration's
offers to allow other network correspondents to interview the president,
insisting "only Dan Rather interviews the president."

After some time, CBS relented and sent Morning News anchors Harry Smith and
Paula Zahn to the White House. Unbeknownst to the White House, however, Evening
News producer Susan Zirinsky had tagged along.

Bush's press secretary at the time, Marlin Fitzwater recounted what followed in
his memoirs:

"As the show was about to end, I discovered Susan Zirinsky, Rather's producer,
crouched behind some Rose Garden hedges, shouting into her two-way radio: 'Ask him about Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra!' That confirmed everyone's feelings about the depth of Dan Rather's hatred for the president."

CBS and its Goliath media parent Viacom have been dogging the president for the entire year.

THE PARTY THAT CRIED "WOLF!"

Here's the thing. When you call a guy "Hitler" for more than a year, and when you call his supporters "Nazis" during that same period, over and over and over and over again, and it's pretty obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that the guy isn't Hitler and his supporters aren't Nazis, you've pretty much shot your political smear wad. There's nothing you can now say to top what you've already said, and what you've already said is demonstrably untrue.

So when Kitty Kelly airs a bit of litter about that same guy doing bad things, who cares? I mean, it's not like the guy's Hitler or anything.

KERRY DEBATES KERRY

John F. Kerry, Aug 9, 2004:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said Monday he would not have changed his vote to authorize the war against Iraq...

John F. Kerry, Sept 6, 2004:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has called the invasion of Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and says his goal is to withdraw U.S. troops in a first White House term.

Make sense of this yourself. I can't. In August he wouldn't have changed his vote to authorize what he calls in September "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Huh?

But the one thing on which Kerry is consistent is that his goal isn't to win the war, just end it unilaterally. Sound familiar?

BESLAN SCHOOL NO. 1: AN AL QAEDA OPERATION?

To me, the horrific terrorist attack against Beslan School No. 1 bears striking similarity to the training and methods known to be the work of al Qaeda. Whether the terrorists were actual Qaeda operatives or were simply trained by Qaeda for this mission is still under investigation:

BESLAN, Russia — Among the wilted flowers brought to celebrate the first day of classes in the now blackened wreckage of Beslan's School No. 1 were signs of a sophisticated terrorist operation. That evidence is sparking a re-examination of Chechen links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

"They were so well trained, the highest level," said Oleg Tedeyev, deputy chief of a police unit here. He was involved in Friday's battle with hostage-takers that left at least 338 people dead, half of them children."

170 dead children, many shot in the back as they fled. Does anyone out there have any evidence that these animals can be reasoned with?

Ties between Chechen radicals and al-Qaeda stretch back to the first Chechen war of independence (1994-96). A radical element began to develop in the late 1990s. By 1999, when Basayev, a Chechen warlord, invaded Russian territory in Dagestan, prompting a second war, it became clear that Islamic radicals dominated Chechen rebel groups.

Russian media reports that as many as 10 of the attackers were Arab also raise questions about the link with Islamic militant groups. "I think it's al-Qaeda. I think it's Saudi Arabia, Arabs, and possibly Afghan terrorists, and terrorists who are here in Russia as well," said Soslan Sikoyev, the deputy interior minister for North Ossetia. Sikoyev has offered to resign for failing to prevent the crisis.

Qaeda ops or not, the Beslan terrorists were sophisticated, thanks in part to their training and in part to the media which insists on showing every detail of anti-terrorist operations and tactics:

Tedeyev says the hostage-takers had learned from past terrorist mistakes. While many Russians complain that the government tried to cover up the crisis, Tedeyev blames the media for giving the terrorists the information they needed to conduct the attack.

The hostage-takers carried gas masks and broke windows to avoid being gassed like Chechen separatists who took over a Moscow theater in 2002. During that rescue operation, 129 hostages died.

"It seems they studied all the cases," said Tedeyev. "It becomes more difficult for the state to fight terror. TV shows everything the Spetsnaz (special forces) does. We seem to teach (terrorists) ourselves, and then we suffer for it."

KERRY'S THOUGHTS ONCE AGAIN TURN TO ASSASSINATION

John Kerry's involvement in a discussion and vote on assassinating U.S. Senators (Was he in favor of the plan before he voted against it?) -- and the lack of major media scrutiny of his dark past -- has led to Monsieur Kerry being a little too willing to joke about the subject:

In West Virginia, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, gave Kerry the gift of a rifle, said to be from UMWA members. Kerry, who describes himself as a gun-owner and hunter, quipped: "I thank you for the gift, but I can't take it to the debate with me."

I hope union thugs and "SNIPERS WANTED" aren't considered a solution to the Kerry campaign implosion and impending Bush landslide. Let's hope no one takes Kerry's little hint seriously.

With Kerry ranting and raving about Iraq again this weekend, it could be that he just finished reading Checkpoint and is only blowing off a little steam.

"Checkpoint," a 115-page dialogue between two characters about assassinating George W. Bush, originated in Baker's own fury, grief and helplessness over Iraq. "I was plodding along, writing my little books," he tells Newsweek in the current issue, "and then suddenly this thing speared into my life and it just took me over."

I thought Democrat's ideas about assassinating Donald Rumsfeld were plenty enough for one election cycle. I know Kerry's hopes are fading fast, but let's keep it clean folks.

We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger," the ad read under a banner "St. Petersburg Democratic Club."

"Do you want to salvage our country? Be a savior of our country? Then vote for John Kerry and get rid of the whole Bush Bunch!" The ad then directs financial donations to Kerry's campaign headquarters in Washington.

Flashback to Vietnam: John Kerry: Hunter, Dreamer, Wacko

"My good luck hat," Kerry said, happy to see it. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."

Kerry put on the hat, pulling the brim over his forehead. His blue button-down shirt and tie clashed with the camouflage. He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an imaginary gun. He looked silly, yet suddenly his campaign message was clear: Citizen-soldier. Linking patriotism to public service. It wasn't complex after all; it was Kerry.

He smiled and aimed his finger: "Pow."

Yikes.

JOHNNY

(With apologies to Mr. Kipling and the British Army)

Johnny went public with ‘is boasts, an’ ‘ero without fear,
“Til sudden like the Swifties say, “We got a turncoat ‘ere.”
The Libs they just ignored ‘em, sayin’ “Ah, it’s all a lie!”
Then Johnny’s outted by their ads an’ to myself says I:

Oh it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, ‘e’s the ‘ero of the day.
But it’s wait now, Mr. Kerry, what’s that record really say?
The horns are loudly blowin’ boys as our band begins to play,
An’ it’s goodbye, Mr. Kerry, as they blow your arse away.

Johnny goes to Cincinnati sober as a man can be,
An’ they give ol’ George a “Bravo Lad!” but John no sympathy.
They give ‘im plain their message, sittin’ silent in the ‘alls,
That when it comes to fightin’ men, they know oo’s got the balls.

For it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, but wait, he might ‘a lied
From the platform of his campaign train an’ on the Boston tide.
His ship is on the tide, my boys, his ship is on the tide,
An’ it’s plain as day she’s sinkin’ boys, because the turncoat lied.

Yes Johnny mocked our uniforms that guard you while you sleep.
He cheapened all our medals throwing his upon that heap;
An’ rustlin’ up his phony troops, he led them for a bit,
Until his aspirations and theirs no longer fit.

Now it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, an’ Johnny how’s yer soul,
In that brave front rank of ‘eroes as our drums begin their roll?
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
An’ they’ll keep right on a rollin’ boys, ‘til we chuck ‘im in the hole.

We make no claim as ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But ‘onorable men an’ warriors fightin’ once agin for you.
An’ if your ‘ero’s record, our charges soundly taint,
That’s what we’re tryin’ to tell you blokes, your ‘ero ain’t no saint.

For it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, an’ “Check him out, the Loot!”
Was ‘e the “Savior of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot?
Now it’s Johnny’s turn to prove us wrong, an’ make us all out liars,
By signin’ that one eighty form an’ puttin out the fires.

Oh it’s Johnny this an’ Johnny that, ‘e’s the ‘ero of the day,
But it’s hold on, Mr. Kerry, what’s that record really say?
The horns are loudly blowin’ boys, as our band begins to play,
“Cheerio, Old Man,” to Johnny and blows his arse away.

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66