The American Spectator

br> Milford, Connecticut /p> p> Why wouldn’t the network fully investigate before releasing their story and then later realize the memos very likely are forgeries? Why hasn’t the network had interviews with the Swift Boat authors, just as it had a full segment on television with Clinton about his book? Why hasn’t the network insisted that Kerry release his military records, so they can be fully scrutinized to the degree that Bush’s have? What is Edwards’ military record? Does he have one, and if not, why is any comment or criticism of either Bush or Cheney’s military record even given any credibility at all? Why don’t you people do your work???!!!! br> — Steven F. Stucker /p>

Regardless of the documents’ source, Dan Rather and the CBS news department were guilty of two errors. One is fact checking, running back the documents to source. Had they done this, they could not have run the story. The original author has passed on and there is no other source available to authenticate them. The second mistake was to highlight their eagerness to tear down our president by behaving the way they did in the first place, by running with unauthenticated documents. I rather like this one.

The Prowler must be respected for his (?) patience, as he had prior knowledge and sat on it. It would not have worked otherwise. My compliments.

This story is devastating on many levels. It illustrates Blather’s rabid desire to tear down our president to the extent of ignoring warning bells and leading with his chin. This incident also illustrates how mass media would rather have the sensation, and the resultant power of the story, than the accuracy. If both Blather and his industry are so willing to run a story without the minimum fact checking — because it suits their purpose — this is a very telling incident that will not go away, and will not be attributable to talk radio, the Internet and that cable news network. It highlights the obvious bias and lack of credibility of the mass media and their agenda.

Regarding the source of the documents, Blather and CBS now cite copying, faxing, scanning, etc., to account for the current condition of the documents. Total crud. Had the documents been copied, faxed and/or scanned in accordance with government requirements, they would be fuzzy but faithful copies of the original. Only if the documents were scanned with optical character recognition (OCR) software could they have ended up in Times New Roman with superscript. As soon as they are scanned with OCR, they immediately become unusable as official documents as they would have editable text, violating government requirements for integrity. As to F.I.S. versus FIS, MIL-STD-12 is the governing document for abbreviations and acronyms. The last version I can claim familiarity with is MIL-STD-12D, still in effect in the early '90s. Having pored through that spec many times to ensure drawing and document accuracy and compliance, I can state rather firmly that periods are not used for the majority of abbreviations and acronyms. If the abbreviation or acronym is not specifically covered by MIL-STD-12, it must be spelled out in the title or text of any document before the abbreviation or acronym can be used subsequently. Many of us checked back then, and BS was not there (in 12D, anyway).

Blather’s house on Lake Travis meets more codes than his “journalism.”

p>Keep up the great work. br> — Mike br> (serial reader)