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[politics] Those memos...
Sep. 15th, 2004 01:31 pmWhen I took a law class in college, we had the chance to hear from a prosecuting and a defense attorney speak on the topic of examination of witnesses. They spoke about how important it was to be precise in what you asked and how people answered. The example they gave was a trial in which a man was accused of biting another man's ear. Prosecution called a witness who said he did it. Defense on cross-examination:
Q. Did you see the man bite the ear off?
A. No, sir.
Q. Ah-Hah! Then can you sit here and say that he did?
A. Because I saw him spit it out of his mouth, sir.
The defense attorney, we were told, should have said, "No further questions, your honor" after the first answer.
People have been going back and forth about the provenance of the Kilian Memos. It was alleged that 1973 typewriter technology could not have produced those memos. People who worked as secretaries during that time pointed out that typewriters had been making memos like that for 10 years and more. Finally, someone asked his secretary, one Marian Karr Knox, age 86.
Her opinion is that the memos are forgeries, because she would have typed them and they use words she would not have used.
"it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it.
And that's where Bush's people really should have tried to get her to shut up, because the very next thing she said was,
It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."
"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about... I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done."
The relevant data is that we have eye witness who says that the information in the Kilian Memos, whatever the provenance of the sheets of paper given to CBS, is so accurate that they were probably forged from genuine documents -- and that such documents did exist.
Q. Did you see the man bite the ear off?
A. No, sir.
Q. Ah-Hah! Then can you sit here and say that he did?
A. Because I saw him spit it out of his mouth, sir.
The defense attorney, we were told, should have said, "No further questions, your honor" after the first answer.
People have been going back and forth about the provenance of the Kilian Memos. It was alleged that 1973 typewriter technology could not have produced those memos. People who worked as secretaries during that time pointed out that typewriters had been making memos like that for 10 years and more. Finally, someone asked his secretary, one Marian Karr Knox, age 86.
Her opinion is that the memos are forgeries, because she would have typed them and they use words she would not have used.
"it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it.
And that's where Bush's people really should have tried to get her to shut up, because the very next thing she said was,
It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."
"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about... I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done."
The relevant data is that we have eye witness who says that the information in the Kilian Memos, whatever the provenance of the sheets of paper given to CBS, is so accurate that they were probably forged from genuine documents -- and that such documents did exist.