Posted on 09/11/2004 12:21:04 PM PDT by woodb01
Paging Sumner Redstone...
Check this out cuz! I love it.
Contact Dan's bosses:
Sumner M. Redstone, chairman/CEO - Viacom
sumner.redstone@viacom.com
Leslie Moonves, president/CEO, CBS -
leslie.moonves@tvc.cbs.com
NO it is not. It has been used in at least one other correspondence outside the 4 memo's CBS aquired.
This isn't a game, you are making serious charges, so it would be inexcusable to go off half-cocked with notable errors when you are accusing(with good reason) CBS of doing same. Amateurism can backfire.
If you really want to go down this road, I'd advise, at a minimum, at least first vetting this through legal professionals, though if this is really actionable there are other bulldog conservative legal foundations that will pursue this, who have experience fighting the DNC machine.
You and the many, many other FReepers who are holding CBS and Dan Blather accountable have reinvigorated a cynical old fart who had started to believe this generation of folks didn't care enough about what was going on and would allow the libbers to take over by default.
I'm gladly humbled by hard-chargers like you. I salute you, sir. Go get 'em and keep us updated of your progress.
Since most ANG units are not on active AF installations, the use of PO Box #'s during this period was common.
My units was Rt 4, Box 30K. This was not changed until some of the more rural areas were assigned street addresses with the implimentation of 911 systems.
CBS Bombshell - PROOF of foregery OR authenticity
IS POSSIBLE - NG-FOIA REQUEST COMING
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy.
pttt
Bump!
Separating the wheat from the chaff can be arduous.
Ping
Go get 'em Bill. Let the Big Dawg hunt!
I pray this will be the beginning of the end for Rather, 60 Minutes, See B.S., and the MSM in general.
Out with the old media...in with the new media! Go FR!
Good job!
The Air Force Style Manual, Tongue and Quill, in use in the 1970s was changed little until the early 1990s. The updates of the 1990s dealt with how the Air Force would treat e-mail which had not be in the earlier manuals even though e-mail existed on some computer systems as early as the mid- to late 1970s.
Tongue and Quill was the Air Force style manual which specified how official Air Force correspondence was to be prepared. One of the things I noticed missing from the letter were file notations. CBS would be highly unlikely to have a copy of the original letter since that letter would have been sent to then-1Lt George W. Bush. Only that copy of any genuine letter -- or a xerographic copy made from the original but not used as a file copy of the letter (a highly unusual procedure) -- would lack annotations indicating where the copy was to be filed. Such annotations were typed along the left side of the page.
Another missing element is an indication of who drafted the letter and who typed it. That is, I did not see any annotation such as MGH/ldm. (The upper case letters are the initials of the person who drafted the letter. The lower case letters are the initials of the typist.)
My experience was that commanders rarely had the time to draft their own correspondence. A letter of this type would have almost certainly been drafted by the executive officer or the deputy commander of the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron and typed by the commander's secretary. Why? Because -- again assuming the letter is genuine -- this subject deals with a sensitive personnel matter which could lead to disciplinary action. I doubt Dan Rather and the CBS crew knows who the executive officer was or who the commander's secretary was.
The letter does not appear to be on squadron letterhead stationery. The unit name and information appears to have been typed across a plain sheet of bond paper. While that practice was permitted when letterhead was not available, for example, when a person was in the field and needed to execute a memorandum of understanding, it was not permitted when letterhead was available. To think that the commander of the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron did not have access to letterhead stationery for a letter of this type is incredible.
If my memory of the early 1970s version of Tongue and Quill is correct, the proper order of the lines identifying the functional office from which the letter was sent, the subject of the letter, and the person or functional units to which the letter was being sent was:
From:
Subject:
To:
In this particular case that information should have been:
From: 111 FIS/CC
Subject: Annual Flight Physical
To: 1Lt George W. Bush
111 FIS/DON
Street Address
Houston, Texas 77027
I do not believe the “MEMORANDUM FOR” was used until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The reason the “To:” was the last line was so multiple addressees could be added before the body of the letter.
The proper official abbreviation in the 1970s for a First Lieutenant was 1Lt, not “1st Lt.” and no official abbreviation of rank had a period.
Notice I wrote the unit abbreviation in the From line as “111 FIS/CC” and not “111st F.I.S./CC”. No periods were allowed in unit abbreviations. It is incredible to believe a squadron commander would not know how to use the correct designation of his own squadron. It is also incredible to believe he would not know the correct abbreviation for a first lieutenant as he was signing numerous Officer Effectiveness Reports (that’s what they were called in the early 1970s) for first lieutenants. My experience with OERs was that any OER which used an incorrect unit designation or an incorrect abbreviation of rank came back to be retyped.
I also find it incredible that Lt Col Killian, his executive officer, and his secretary all did not know what the commander’s signature block should look like. While the signature block is lined up under the date on the letter which is correct form, both the date and the signature block are in the wrong place. The proper location was four spaces to the right of the middle of the page. My secretary had both her Remington manual typewriter and her new IBM Selectric® (which she was fearful to use in 1972 because she had pounded the manual typewriter for so long she ruined numerous documents and had to start over because of the Selectric®’s sensitivity resulted in double (or triple or quadruple or more) characters being typed if she hit the keys too hard.) with hard tabs for precisely those locations. The correct form for the commander’s signature would have been:
JERRY B. KILLIAN, Lt Col, TXANG
Commander
If my memory is correct, the Remington used a Courier typeface. The only way that typewriter could create a superscript was to roll the paper one-half line. The type would be the same fixed font as the rest of the text not a few points smaller as MS Word automatically formats superscripts. The IBM Selectric® had very expensive type balls. We had an OCR typeface for AUTODIN messages to be read by the Optical Character Readers in the message center. (The OCRs didn’t work very well, but they did reduce the workload on the people in the communications center some.) We also had a Courier 10 point type ball. The IBM Selectric® had a key which would move the paper a half-line up for superscripts or a half-line down for subscripts. But the superscript and the subscript were the same point size as the rest of the text, not smaller as in the second paragraph of the letter.
The body of the letter itself would not have been signed by any commander for whom I worked for several reasons. While it is possible that the squadron commander ordered 1Lt Bush to report to him, Lt Col Killian is unlikely to have ordered 1Lt Bush to conduct an annual flight physical because 1Lt Bush is not a flight surgeon. Perhaps Lt Col Killian’s syntax is the problem and that he wanted 1Lt Bush to report to him so he could conduct a flight physical on 1Lt Bush. But I do not think Lt Col Killian was a flight surgeon. Back in the early 1970s the orderly room would receive a computer printout of individuals whose annual physicals needed to be scheduled within the next 3 to 6 months. The orderly room would send a form letter signed by the commander of the “headquarters squadron section” to those individuals with instructions on how to make the appointment. Whenever I received a notification I need to make an appointment with the dental clinic or schedule a flight physical, I was always given the name and phone number of the person who would schedule the appointment. That person also received a “cc” on the notification. There are no carbon copies to either the orderly room or the hospital/clinic at Ellington AFB.
While the date on the letter has the correct form, the date by which 1Lt Bush has been reported to report to the commander is not. The correct form for military dates in the 1970s through the present is day month year with no commas. One of the features of MS Word is that it inserts a comma after the date. There is also no space after the closing parenthesis surrounding the word flight.
There is no indication how Lt Col Killian transmitted the letter to 1Lt George W. Bush. Since the street address is blacked out, it would appear he mailed the letter on that date (assuming he followed the required practice of dating the letter on the date he signed it and it was posted the same day). That date was a Thursday which means Lt Col Killian could not have expected the letter to be delivered even though the address has a zip code in Houston until Monday, 09 May 1972. That means Lt Col Killian expected 1Lt Bush to receive the letter, make an appointment for a meeting with the commander and make an appointment with the flight surgeon (and Lt Col Killian did not have the authority to compel the flight surgeon to perform a flight physical on a specific date) to schedule the flight physical.
Tongue and Quill was hammered into the head of everyone who attended Officer Training School, Squadron Officer School, and Air Command and Staff College. Lt Col Killian had to have been sick of that document by the time he became a squadron commander. But he also had to have been reasonably proficient in the contents of that manual. One of the tenets of Tongue and Quill is to write and to speak clearly. I know a few of my classmates in Squadron Officer School graduated without learning how to avoid pompous writing. Maybe one of my classmates at Squadron Officer School would have graduated without being able to write a clear declarative sentence. I am fairly certain none of my classmates from Air Command and Staff College would have written the first sentence in the letter. Lt Col Killian seems to have a bad case of third person speak and an inability to end a sentence at the end of the thought. Even if Lt Col Killian had such problems, his executive officer and his secretary are unlikely to have suffered from those maladies. The first paragraph should have been: “1. You are ordered to report to me NLT 14 May 1972. I need to ensure you schedule your annual flight physical as required by AFM 35-13.” (I have assumed that AFM 35-13 from 1972 was the prescribing document but I doubt it was. Back in the dark ages of 1972 we had Air Force Regulations, Pamphlets, and Manuals. Manuals noted procedures to be followed. Regulations were the directives. I am not certain the number of the 35-series (Military Personnel) regulation was mandating that individuals on flight status have an annual flight physical but it is unlikely an Air Force Manual was the directive.)
The second paragraph is difficult to reconcile with the first paragraph. The first paragraph seems to say, “George, see me within a week of your receipt of this letter because you need a flight physical which will be conducted when you report.” The second paragraph seems to say, “Well, okay, seem me but contact Captain So-and-so who is scheduling appointments. He will provide you with additional instructions.”
The last sentence in the letter seems pretty standard for a Guardsman or a Reservist. It simply says 1Lt Bush will get credit for a drill day when the flight physical is performed. That sentence seems to indicate that Lt Col Killian knew (assuming again that the letter is genuine despite all the problems noted above) that 1Lt Bush was not scheduled to report of drill during next week.
If the computer printout from the hospital listed 1Lt Bush as requiring a flight physical within the next 6 months while 1Lt Bush was assigned to the 111 FIS but had permission to do his duty elsewhere, Lt Col Killian may have sent him a letter saying, “George, please give me a call. You need to schedule your next flight physical. I need to know you got this letter and will take action. The action you need to take is to call Captain So-and-so to schedule your flight physical. He can give you any additional information you need.” I was required to have a flight physical 91 or fewer days before my birthday. I believe President Bush was born July 6, 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut. He would have had to have had his flight physical between 6 April 1972 and 6 July 1972. Since one month of that window had passed, Lt Col Killian (assuming he wrote this letter) may wanted to ensure 1Lt Bush was aware he was due for a flight physical. One of the rather annoying aspects of a central computer spitting out the names of individuals scheduled for flight physicals is that the list of names was only as good as the data in the computer’s database. People who do not remember what life was like B.C.N., that is, before computer networks, are likely to be unaware that the processes for updating the computer databases (regardless of the database) was often disjoint from the process of supplying the service. It would often take months before the database reflected flight physicals which had been performed (or parts that had been ordered or delivered or whatever else was required.) Each base had a computer center. I think the computer centers were called Phase IV computer centers. (I don’t know what Phase I , Phase II, and Phase III centers were, but they must have been extraordinarily bad because Phase IV was really bad.) The people in the hospital filled out forms on procedures accomplished, appointments made, appointments kept, etc. Those forms were then punched on IBM 029 keypunch machines creating a deck of Hollerith cards. The Hollerith cards were then delivered to the Phase IV computer center and transmitted over AUTODIN to a front-end processor for the hospital records computer. Any error by anyone in the hospital or the keypunch operator or the computer center operator resulted in the rejection of the record. For example, if a card had the wrong information or the wrong format or used an improper character in a field, the card was rejected by the front-end processor. The list of rejections was (I kid you not!) printed out and mailed to the originator and the process began (or at least was supposed to begin) again. In many cases, people simply submitted the forms with the format error which resulted in another rejection. If there were a front-end processor for the 04 May 1972 letter, that letter would have been rejected for the format errors.
CBS really should tell the American people the source of the 04 May 1972 letter and allow individuals who are experts in authenticating documents to examine the documents rather than simply posting images of them on their website. One need not be ancient to remember numerous cases of fraudulent documents being passed off as genuine by various media sources. CBS seems only able to produce a handwriting analyst who notes that Lt Col Killian’s signature seems to match other known signatures. But we do not know if the signature has been scanned from another document (perhaps with the top portion of the document) with the body having been added later. I find CBS’s inability or unwillingness to provide any of this information to be an indication that the letter is not genuine.
NICE!!!
bookmarking and passing around
Excellent work!
This effort might, however, force out some more exemplars that will help to nail the coffin closed on CBS and Dan Rather. That makes it worthwhile.
Billybob
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
