Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.
[…]
A second document examiner hired by CBS News, Linda James of Plano, Texas, also told ABC News she had concerns about the documents and could not authenticate them.
“I did not authenticate anything and I don’t want it to be misunderstood that I did,” James said. “And that’s why I have come forth to talk about it because I don’t want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents.”
Other than these, the only expert to give a thumbs up (Marcel Matley) verified only the signature. Note that this all happened before the story was broadcast.
To computer science professor Andrew Appel, who has given $4,000 to Kerry this year, the imbalance is not unexpected.
“Does it surprise me that smart people should be supporting Kerry?” Appel said. “No.”
Because some things are so stupid only intellectuals will believe them. I’d put “President Kerry” in that class of things.
On Sunday, a celebrating crowd gathered around a burning U.S. armored vehicle. Then a helicopter opened fire; a child and a journalist for an Arabic TV news channel were among those killed. Later, the channel repeatedly showed the journalist doubling over and screaming, “I’m dying; I’m dying.”
I’m left with two questions.
“We’re having a hard time tracking how we got the documents,” says the CBS News producer. “There are at least two people in this building who have insisted we got copies of these memos from the Kerry campaign by way of an additional source. We do not have the originals, and our sources have indicated to us that we will not be getting the originals. How that is possible I don’t know.”
It’s not possible to start with Dan Rather, asking “where did you get these documents?”? Seriously, is Rather refusing to answer CBS internal staff about where he got them, or that he lead a major news report with documents that he got from a source even he didn’t know?