Waking the Dead and the Rather memos.

[aquart]

Did anyone catch this at the time?

Sometime in early July, 2004, the BBC aired the first episode of the 4th series of "Waking the Dead," their own cold case files show.

It recently aired here on BBC America. The name of the episode is "In The Sight of the Lord." I'm watching a tape of it now.

A plot device it uses is a forged memo. A memo forged to look like it was written in 1948, on almost the right paper and a period machine, but the letterhead was made by a laserjet printer. And it was found out.

July. The Rather scandal was in September. Any White House insiders spend the summer in Britain?

I love a good coincidence.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Haven't you heard? there are no coincidences --

unless you are a repub and they are stacking up against you.

[shraby]

2. Since Bush has been pResident,

this country has been full of coinky dinks.

[vpigrad]

3. Maybe that's where Bushie's employee...

got the idea for embarassing Rather?

[aquart]

5. I cannot help but wonder.

[AliciaKeyedUp]

4. The problem with the memos is they weren't that well done

Rather just got over-zealous pursing the story.

[aquart]

6. They were very well done.

They were deliberately inexact copies of the real memos. Rather was fooled because the content was truthful, THE SECRETARY WHO TYPED MANY SUCH MEMOS SAID SO. But she also said she didn't type these. They said the same thing, but used some words she never would have.

[LynnTheDem]

7. bullshit.

The rightwingnut "fakes" crap was so EASILY debunked.

[AliciaKeyedUp]

8. I have no reason to doubt the content

But those memos were crap.

[LynnTheDem]

9. Bullshit.

Their "debunking" was bullshit. And it was damned easy to debunk their debunking.

If the EXPERTS, examining CBS's original copies, can't debunk them, then they obviously aren't "crap".

Links:

First, much of the bloggers' vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic.

The bottom line, which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty. The memos that were circulated online were digitized, scanned, faxed, and copied who knows how many times from an unknown original source.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/1/pein-blog.asp

To this day, the evidence is inconclusive; the documents bear good evidence of being typewritten, when you look at the higher-resolution documents initially published by CBS (they quickly posted smaller, more pixellated versions in an apparent attempt to save bandwidth, which is the version of the docs most "proofs" of forgery relied on)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/7/214951/9910

DailyKos was one of the very few sites that did any serious counterinvestigation into the claims that the documents were word-processed forgeries, through this story and multiple followups, and found that the right-wing blog "forgery!" claims could be disproved pretty easily.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603

[aquart]

10. The only credible person to say they were fakes

was the secretary. And she said the real documents had the same content. So they were true. We know Killian wrote many CYA memos of the same type regarding worthless George.

But the chain of evidence reeked.

[Rockerdem]

11. I dont know what to believe

The absence of a spirited defense of their authenticity by CBS instills grave doubts about it. Instead, they are whispering about heads rolling. We'll know soon. Maybe the delay is the accumulation of rocksolid proof that they ARE authentic. The AWOL story will revive and become hotter than ever. Stay tuned.

[6000eliot]

12. The "debunkers" were so sure that the memos were fake

because THEY faked them.

[wicket]

13. the memos looked pretty real

:shrug: