In
the early summer of 2004, months before Dan Rather’s day of infamy in
September, I stumbled onto a website called “The AWOL Project,” a
bloviated screed against President George W. Bush and his Air National
Guard service. It got my attention because, from 1970 to 1974, I was a
pilot in the same Texas Air Guard unit as Bush. Even had the same
squadron commander, the famous Jerry Killian. So I read it. With 33
years of service in the Air Guard, I think I knew a little bit about
its workings.
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As
I had explained to Lanpher, the OETR item alone was a silver bullet
for proving these memos as frauds. If it were a “Columbo” episode, it
would be the point where the police take Rather away in handcuffs.
The blogger who created the website, a Democrat activist from
Philadelphia named Paul Lukasiak, did a yeoman’s job in assembling
released Bush Air Force records and relevant Air Force regulations, but
then he distorted and dissembled them to reach egregiously wrong
conclusions to incriminate Bush.
It was like examining the Old Testament in great detail and then
concluding that Moses was an Egyptian who helped the Pharaoh cast the
Jews into barren lands in some ancient holocaust.
Then, in perusing Lukasiak’s work that summer, I found George
Washington’s wristwatch.
I came across a chapter he labeled “The OETR Scam.” What the heck is an
OETR? I thought. We had “OERs” (Officer Effectiveness Reports), and as
a commander I wrote scores of them every year. But an OETR?
Maybe I had missed something, so I did an exhaustive search for that
acronym. It simply did not exist. Those letters were the code for the
Turiaf Airport in Saudi Arabia. Maybe this involves a baggage tag, but
officer effectiveness reports? Never.
So I did a little more research on the webpage and found that one Bush
record was labeled “Notice of Missing or Correction Of Officer
Effectiveness / Training Report,” a multi-use sheet for both OERs and
training reports. But Lukasiak did not notice that a hole punch at the
top had punched out the “/” (slash). Hence, he mistook it for “Officer
Effectiveness Training Report” and created the acronym “OETR.” At the
time, I dismissed it as one of many Lukasiak errors and
misrepresentations in that blog and put it out of my mind.
It seemed like old news about a simple typo. Nothing to see here.
But the point is that, until it was accidently created by Lukasiak in
July 2004, the acronym never existed.
There was no way the acronym OETR could appear in a 1973 Killian memo
when that acronym was not created until July 2004.
And there was no way it could be in the famous Lucy Ramirez Cattle Show
documents in March 2004.
It was a silver bullet. When I saw that acronym again late in the
September night of the CBS “60 Minutes” show, I knew the memos could
not be any more real than George Washington’s digital wristwatch. And I
knew immediately where the forger got his information to create the
documents.
In a barely coherent ramble on an Aug. 25, 2004, blog post, Bill
Burkett described how he had just discovered the Lukasiak website and
had new “files which we have reassembled,” which propagated the OETR
error into the Killian memos. Every item in Burkett’s memos can be
traced to a reference on that website.
In those early hours after the Rather “60 Minutes” exposé, the national
focus was rightly and understandably on anachronistic typographic
oddities in the documents. But those typos did not corroborate or
determine the accuracy or authenticity of the documents or the content
therein. This is why even today, so many think the memos were real.
[Bug Jump]
Epilogue
So
now we have a movie titled “Truth,” produced by a company fittingly
named Mythology Entertainment. It portrays Rather and Mapes as
journalistic heroes battling the dragons of CBS executives, the
Thornburgh-Boccardi panel, the Bush White House, pajama-clad bloggers,
and real witnesses.
The
OETR clue was but one fatal flaw in the Killian memo saga. There were
many more scattered throughout those memos, and they didn’t have
anything to do with typeface and superscripts that the movie and most
of the commentaries have obsessed over. They will have to await a
future posting.
Dan
Rather’s “60 Minutes” fraud will be a permanent stain on the
self-exalting yet frequently failing profession of journalism. But the
blame for it even happening, and its continuing longevity, does not
fall only to Rather and Mapes.
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