Killian Letters – The Perfect “Sting”

In honor of the real author of the Killian Letters, I am composing these thoughts on Microsoft Word using Times New Roman (TNR) and 12 point font.

Remember the movie “The Sting?”

Paul Newman and Robert Redford team up in this 1973 movie to rob a mob boss who had a friend killed. .

Ever since it became obvious that the Killian letters were forgeries, the question was asked: who did it? Was it the usual suspect: someone in the Kerry dirty tricks department? Others have been named: Dan Rather himself, Carl Rove, Bill Burkett (a disgruntled former National Guard officer), CBS News producer Mary Mapes?

Here’s my theory: the Killian Letters were a sting operation originating somewhere in the military designed to kill at least four birds with one stone. And I think it’s going to work.

Back to “The Sting.” In the modern version, the mob boss is Dan Rather. As an added bonus we see the destruction of accessories Mary Mapes and Bill Burkett and an indelible stain on CBS. And as icing on the cake: collateral damage to the Kerry campaign.

The motive is Abu Ghraib.

It was Mary Mapes, Dan Rather and CBS News that made Abu Ghraib a household name and smeared the military’s name. They decided to run the story despite Pentagon requests to wait until their internal investigation was complete and despite that damage that the story did to the American cause in the Arab world.

So, here’s the payback. And it’s not over yet because the Pentagon and the Bush administration has been mum so far. My belief is that they will carry the story forward.

Why do I believe the memos were composed by a military man? No ordinary civilian would be sufficiently conversant with military memos to provide both a reasonable forgery (to the civilian eye) of a military document, but one that uses unauthentic nomenclature so that it can be discredited on that basis.

Second, it was typed using a computer to provide another way of destroying its authenticity.

Of course, like any good forgery, it has to be gotten into the right hands. Enter Bill Burkett and Mary Mapes. Bill Burkett has a grudge against the National Guard and George Bush ever since he became ill in 1998 while on duty with the Texan ANG and blames Bush, who was governor of Texas at the time, for failure to provide him with medical care.

Someone (we’ll call him “X”) finds a way of getting the Killian Memos to Burkett. While Burkett is a military man, he is not the sharpest tool in the shed (for a sample of his writing click HERE and scroll to the end). He's had several nervous breakdowns so he overlooks the problems with the memos and gets hold of Mary Mapes, a fellow Texan.

Mapes has no way of knowing a fake memo from the real one, but believes that, thanks to Burkett’s familiarity with the Texas ANG, she’s got a real scoop.

The memos pass up the food chain reaching Rather. Rather, a devout Liberal, wants to believe these are real. He is also a technophobe without a clue about computers, Microsoft Word, fonts, superscripts or any of the other wonders of modern computer technology being able to do what 1973 typewriters could not. Furthermore he doesn’t care. He decides that this is the time to counteract some of the Swift Boat controversy by attacking Bush’s National Guard record (again). As the 700 pound gorilla at CBS news, what Dan wants, Dan gets. So that’s how we get to “60 Minutes” and the Killian Memos.

Enter the blogosphere. CBS News obligingly puts the memos up on their web site, a major mistake because it gives literally thousands of people with arcane knowledge of computers the opportunity to examine them. Within a few hours, the fraud is exposed. But here’s where the hook is set: CBS and Captain Dan ‘stand by their story.” They have to! That’s the way the Mainstream Media (MSM) has always done business.

The fraud is so obvious, so blatant, and so widely discussed via the Internet that the MSM has to take notice. At this point, most of the MSM articles are referring to the Killian Memos as “disputed” rather than hopelessly discredited. In solidarity with CBS and Captain Dan, they hope the controversy will just go away.

If I’m right, however, there are several more legs to his story. The Bush campaign has not been heard from and neither has the Pentagon. I predict that there will be a reaction from those quarters until there is general public acceptance that CBS and Rather are exposed as having peddled forgeries.

My other prediction: the original forgeries will never be found. They are no longer in existence and Burkett was fed a photocopy. That way the fraud would be less likely to be discovered until it was too late.