BILL AT INDCJOURNAL earlier reported that the Boston Globe misquoted the statement of forensic expert Philip Bouffard. He has posted the results of a telephone interview with Bouffard, where Bouffard says they misrepresent his conclusions, suggesting that the documents may be genuine when he didn't say that, and reports that he's "pissed."

Now Bill reports that CBS is repeating the Globe misquote as part of its efforts to defend its own position. Bill has posted the Globe ombudsman's address and suggests that you contact her.

UPDATE: I don't know what they said on the air, but CBS is amazingly sloppy on their website, where they get Bouffard's name wrong, calling him "Phillip Broussard" -- even though they're referencing the Globe story which, despite misquoting Bouffard, at least gets his name right. CBS reports: "Saturday's issue of the Boston Globe reports that one document expert, Phillip Broussard, who had expressed suspicions about the documents, said 'he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.'"

Bear in mind that to be quoting from the Globe article they must have had it in front of them, and they still got the name wrong. (Even adding an extra "l" to the first name.) Sheesh. Get these guys some pajamas, fast!

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Hogberg saw the broadcast and reports. They seem to have gotten the name wrong on the air, too.

THIS DAN RATHER INTERVIEW is as genuine as the Bush National Guard documents! As reliable as a Boston Globe photo essay on prison abuse in Iraq! As honest as an AP report of booing crowds!

OK, it's probably more truthful than those. But it's still a satire. And it's funny.

JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE: Elliot Minor of the Associated Press has a story on veterans' reactions to the CBS National Guard documents -- and it makes no mention of the likelihood, or even the claim, that they're fraudulent.

Forget editors -- do these guys have lawyers?

UPDATE: A reader points to a sentence saying that "questions have been raised" about the documents' authenticity. Did I miss that, or was it added later? Not sure, but it's hardly adequate to describe the importance of the debate.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this earlier version, which doesn't mention the problems (except in the headline, which I don't think came from AP) but which is, overall, much more sympathetic to Bush than the one linked above.

NEW TIME POLL: "Last week’s seismic voter shift to George W. Bush showed no signs of dwindling in this week’s Time Poll. Bush continues to lead Democratic challenger John Kerry among likely voters by double digits, 52% - 41%, in the three way race, with Nader at 3%, the same as last week."

UPDATE: Has Dan Rather re-elected Bush? Look at how the TradeSports market moved for Bush on Friday after Ra^therGate broke.

I WASN'T HAPPY with the photos the MSNBC folks ran with my September 11 post over at GlennReynolds.com, so I asked them to make some changes. They did, and now there's an excellent slideshow and video links.

JIM GERAGHTY ON CBS: "Game over."

MEGAN MCARDLE: "Yes, Virginia, they're fake:"

The chances that you could produce, by accident, a typewritten document that looks exactly like what comes out of your laser printer when you write the same thing in Microsoft Word, is a hell of a lot smaller than the chance that the earth will be destroyed by an asteroid: i.e. too small to worry about.

What flabbergasts me is how Dan Rather could have been taken in. He's old. He knows what typewritten things look like. These documents don't look like that. It also makes me wonder if 60 minutes is staffing its newsroom with twelve-year-old Pakistani children in order to save money on labour. How else could not one person say "y'know, this looks an awful lot like the stuff I type on my computer."

Indeed. (Note: Since she blogged this from an Internet cafe in Ireland, she presumably wasn't pajama-blogging.)

BILL AT INDCJOURNAL REPORTS that the Boston Globe misquoted a forensic expert regarding the allegedly forged CBS memos. The expert is quite unhappy, and Bill has a lot of quotes from him.

THIS IMAGE comes with the following message:

The proud warriors of Baker Company wanted to do something to pay tribute to our fallen comrades. So since we are part of the only Marine Infantry Battalion left in Iraq the one way that we could think of doing that is by taking a picture of Baker Company saying the way we feel. It would be awesome if you could find a way to share this with our fellow countrymen.

I was wondering if there was any way to get this into your papers to let the world know that "WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN" and are proud to serve our country." Semper Fi

1stSgt Dave Jobe

(Via American Daughter). However, since -- unlike CBS, apparently -- I try to vet my sources, I should note that this picture is actually from last year. Don't think that undercuts the message, though. I'm sure that the Marines, at least, still remember.

UPDATE: Read this letter from Iraq, too.

MARK STEYN IS MERCILESS: "CBS Falls for Kerry Campaign's Fake Memo:"

Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''

Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."

The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.

That last certainly seems right. Meanwhile Jay Bryant asks: "What Did Rather Know, and When Did He Know It?"

As of this writing, the network is said to be investigating the situation. Of course, this is not a real investigation, in the police sense. CBS leaves that sort of thing to fiction, on its CSI programs, for example. What they're investigating is how to minimize the public relations damage. . . .

For someone like Sandy Berger, it is always better to claim sloppiness than evil intent, but for a news organization, the issue is not nearly as clear. It is the job of an organization like CBS to sort out the real from the phony. If they don't do that, what earthly good are they?

Indeed.

UPDATE: The New York Post asks, in an editorial, "What are CBS — and anchor Dan Rather — trying to hide?"

Sure, news organizations sometimes need to protect sources.

But it's one thing for CBS to withhold information about the documents' origin — and quite another for it to refuse to disclose the names of those who (it claims) authenticated them.

Why, after all, would folks who make their living doing such analyses want to remain anonymous?

By continuing to "shield" their experts after two days of mounting controversy, Rather and CBS left folks to wonder how they authenticated the documents.

More to the point, by airing last night's segment at all, CBS and Rather were admitting something extraordinary had happened — that serious challenges to their original reporting had been mounted.

But no challenger was brought on the show.

Rather defined the terms of the discussion, asked the questions, picked the individuals who responded, presumably screened their answers — and basically declared himself innocent.

That is, he stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum — and said: "What a fine anchor am I."

That probably won't cut it. In the age of the Internet, the truth will out.

Dan Rather can count on that.

Indeed.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR CBS:

A handwriting expert says the two signatures on purported Texas National Guard memos aired by CBS News this week are not those of President Bush's squadron commander, as asserted by "60 Minutes."

Until now, press scrutiny of the memos supposedly written by the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian focused on the finding that the documents were, in the opinion of experts, produced by computers not yet in use in the early 1970s.

Then there's this: "Gary Killian said one paper with his father's signature appears legitimate, but he said another -- in which his father says he was under pressure to 'sugar coat' Bush's performance -- seems fake." I'm no handwriting expert, but the signatures sure look different to me.

CBS needs to come clean by explaining where it got the documents (chain of custody matters!) and making its original (or, as it appears, its original copy") available to independent experts.

Reader John MacDonald thinks that CBS will go on the offensive, instead of answering questions: "Wait for them to do hard hitting analysis of the blogosphere in order to diminish its credibility."

Well, they can try that, but it won't help them. Indeed, the more you disparage the blogosphere as a bunch of guys in pajamas, the more embarrassing it is when they show you up. (No word yet on what Pajama Pundit thinks about his newfound fame. . . .) [LATER: My mistake -- Pajama Pundit is a she, not a he. This revelation will no doubt produce additional traffic.]

And as I've said before even if -- as seems increasingly unlikely -- these documents were to turn out to be real, it now seems pretty clear that CBS was gravely irresponsible in taking these documents public and presenting them as unimpeachably accurate without looking at them more closely first. No amount of after-the-fact lawyering will change that.

MY SEPTEMBER 11 MEMORIAL POST IS UP over at GlennReynolds.com. There's nothing terribly poetic or deep about it. If you want that, read this piece by Lileks.

I don't know if I'll post nonstop like I did in 2002, or post hardly at all, like I did in 2003. Or maybe I'll just react to events as they happen, like I did in 2001.

It's important that people remember what we're about here. But those who want to forget (those who are part of what Andrew Sullivan, back in September of 2001, called a "paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column," plus those who are just tired of the war, or those who just naturally live in the eternal present) will forget -- or already have forgotten -- and the rest of us don't need a lot of reminding.

But maybe I'm wrong. Back in September of 2001, some people were already looking to the future, and thinking that we'd forget.

That's why they made this memorial video. It's still hard to watch, three years later. But it should be hard to watch.

One day, I suppose, these images will be like the images of the exploding Hindenburg, or woodcuts of the Chicago fire: historical, without much power to move people. We're not there yet. And we won't be, for quite a while.

UPDATE: In a related vein, this post from Harry's Place is a must-read.

And Ed Cone links some columns he wrote in the year following 9/11.

Howard Lovy takes a more positive perspective.

Arthur Chrenkoff has more reminiscences.

So does GayPatriot, who remembers a friend who died that day.

Ryan Sager has more memories of lost loved ones.

Pejman Yousefzadeh adds his own thoughts.

JUST CAUGHT Jonathan Klein debating Stephen Hayes about the CBS forgery scandal. Klein says that "Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas."

But ABC has this report:

HODGES SAID HE WAS MISLED BY CBS: Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".

I guess this is the independent verification that Rather was talking about.

But it gets worse. Much worse:

The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugar coat" President Bush's military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service record shows.

An order obtained by The Dallas Morning News shows that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972. CBS News reported this week that a memo in which Staudt was described as interfering with officers' negative evaluations of Bush's service, was dated Aug. 18, 1973.

That added to mounting questions about the authenticity of documents that seem to suggest Bush sought special favors and did not fulfill his service.

You don't say. To paraphrase Lincoln's remarks on Ulysses S. Grant, maybe CBS should get its journalists some of those pajamas. . . . Or maybe, in light of what we've learned, some of these Pajamas.

UPDATE: Reader Allen Roberts emails:

Bloggers ARE the checks and balances.

Driving along today and listening to talk radio mention LGF and Powerline, with others was just a terrific experience today. Finally, a real use for the Internet.

Not everyone is as pleased.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, Patterico notes that NPR and Media Matters can't tell time. Funny that they should both make the same obvious error. (Well, it was really ABC's The Note that made the original time-stamp error, but it was so obvious that picking it up was an obvious error.)

MORE: Mickey Kaus:

NPR hasn't corrected the error, according to Patterico, and David Brock's Media Matters still posts it. ... P.S.: Media Matters might want to decide if a) the documents are authentic, as argued at the top of their Web page or b) the documents are forgeries planted by Republicans, as argued at the bottom of their Web page. Lawyers are allowed to plead in the alternative, but a) and b) can't both be true, and the evidence for each of those propositions is also evidence against the other one.

Neither NPR, nor Media Matters, is covering itself with glory here.
Send them some pajamas, too.

STILL MORE: Charles Johnson: "I’d like you all to know that despite the intensely humid SoCal heat I have been blogging all day in a three piece Giorgio Armani suit. I haven’t owned pajamas for at least 20 years."

Brings a whole new meaning to the term "fact-check your ass."

MORE PROBLEMS FOR DAN RATHER?

The Former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes' recollections over how he helped President Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War have evolved over the years from fuzzy to distinct.

Barnes, who once claimed he did not help Bush enter the National Guard, reversed his story and told CBS News 60 Minutes that he in fact did help Bush.

Mr. Barnes daughter, Amy Barnes called the Mark Davis Show and spoke with guest host Monica Crowley on WBAP September 9th dismissing Barnes' claims as political and opportunistic.

Ouch. More here.

THIS DAN RATHER TRANSCRIPT is surprisingly close to what I watched earlier. . . .