Killian Memos Crumpled and Smoothed Out

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Politics

Sept. 17, 2004, 11:17PM

Lawyer is source of memo challenge

'Buckhead' ties to GOP likely to cause speculation over efforts to discredit CBS

By PETER WALLSTEN
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON - It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush's National Guard service — a technical explanation posted on the Internet within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles.

But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes and who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Los Angeles Times has found.

The identity of "Buckhead," a blogger known previously only by his screen name on the Web site freerepublic.com and lifted to folk-hero status in the conservative blogosphere since last week's posting, is likely to fuel speculation among Democrats that the efforts to discredit the CBS memos were engineered by Republicans eager to undermine reports that Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.

GOP officials have denied involvement in debunking the story.

Declining to answer

Reached by telephone Friday, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead but declined to answer questions about his political background or how he knew so much about the CBS documents so fast.

"You can ask the questions but I'm not going to answer them," he told The Times. "I'm just going to stick to doing no interviews."

Until The Times identified him by piecing together information from his postings over the past two years, MacDougald had taken pains to remain in the shadows — saying the credit for challenging CBS should remain with the blogosphere.

" 'Freepers' collectively posess more analytical horsepower than the entire news division at CBS," he wrote in an e-mail, using the slang term for users of the freerepublic site.

MacDougald is a lawyer in the Atlanta office of the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice and is affiliated with two prominent conservative legal groups, the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, where he serves on the legal advisory board.

'This should be pursued'

MacDougald wrote that the memos CBS's 60 Minutes presented on the evening of Sept. 8 as being written in the early 1970s by the late Lt. Col Jerry B. Killian were "in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman."

"The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software and personal computers," MacDougald wrote on the freerepublic Web site. "They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."

I believe the May 4th crumple doc is indeed the smoking gun. The key to finding the culprit may just rest on printer roller marks.

Like tiretreads or footprints, copy machines and printers can lay down tell tale clues to give away their identity. Looking at the center of the page on the crumple May 4th doc you will see 4 significant vertical roller marks which point to a particular machine.

This doc was printed in Word, copied several times, THEN crumpled immediately before a digital RGB scan which was then converted via Acrobat 5.0 Image Conversion Plug-in (as mentioned several times in previous posts).

Most likely CBS got the docs either directly from Burkett (who either created them himself or got them from someone else) and simply scanned them digitally in order to post them in PDF format. But the question remains, who crumpled them, Burkett or CBS?

The scanner operator at CBS would have no motive whatsoever to crumple a clean straight copy in order to scan it on a flat bed. It wouldn't "age" the document, but merely, serve to make the text less readable.

The doc must have been hand-delivered to CBS and most likely to Mapes personally who then passed it on to someone within CBS to scan and convert to PDF. Therefore whoever recieved the original forgery from, it is clear that they knew who the source was all along, whether it was Burkett himself or someone else.

Someone owns the copier or printer that produced the ghost roller marks. All printers and copiers from possible forgery suspects should immediately be seized and tested for these marks.

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