As to Bush missing his physical, Knox said it "would have itself been a violation of standards."
So who wins? The conservative bloggers win, if they are correct, that the memos are not the real thing. Who loses? Bush, if it turns out the memos are merely reconstituted rather than fake, and that they accurately reflect the content of Killian's real memos.
CBS and Dan Rather lose either way. The smarter move would have been to confirm its initiation of an investigation into the memos, rather than denying it, in the apparently futile hope that the outcome of their internal investigation would verify the legitimacy of the memos. The coverup is always worse than the crime. Who would believe that CBS was not going to launch an investigation after all the challenges?
Fox (both Britt Hume and Bill O'Reilly) is trumpeting Little Green Footballs for outing the memos as faked. The site's traffic has jumped exponentially. So has Powerline's traffic. In fact, all the conservative bloggers have had a big traffic jump this week.
As to all the "forensic document experts" who are coming out of the woodwork, they have less credibility than the conservative bloggers. At least the bloggers' arguments are based on somewhat verifiable issues, such as were there proportionally spaced typewriters when the Killian memo would have been typed and was there a superscript "th" key?
The document experts mostly want to say the memos are fake because they aren't a visual match. Or because Killian's signature looks forged. They should be ashamed. They know they can't make that determination without the actual document -- A faxed or xeroxed copy won't suffice. For typewriting comparison, they know they need the actual machine that created what's referred to as "the known document."
Forensic document examination, whether of handwriting or typewriting, involves a comparison of a known document to an unknown document. The point is to determine whether the same person authored two documents--or whether the same machine created two documents.
Here's the test to determine if documents were written by the same person or typed on the same machine:
Are there a significant number of similarities in the absence of a significant dissimilarity?
If there is one significant dissimilarity between the two documents, then the document examiner will conclude they were not written by the same person or typed on the same machine.
Now, here's why it's all bunk. No expert can define "a significant dissimilarity." They will tell you they know it when they see it. If an expert wants to validate his or her conclusion that the docments were typed on different machines, they will tell you there's a significant dissimilarity between the two documents. If they want to validate the opposite conclusion, that the documents were typed on the same machine, they will tell you there are no significant dissimilarities. If you point out difference, they will tell you it's only a "variation," not a significant difference. How do they distinguish between the two? They can't say, but they know it when they see it.
In other words, forensic document examination is no science. It is a subjective exercise. That's why federal courts in recent years have been preventing document examiners from expressing their opinion as to whether two documents were authored by the same person--or typed on the same machine. Instead, they limit the examiners to pointing out similarities and dissimilarities between the documents. One of the first federal judges to so rule was Judge Matsch in the Oklahoma bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh. Several judges around the country have followed suit in recent years.
So, if the documents turn out to be accurate in content but physically created years after the fact, credit the bloggers, not the document examiners.
