Ace--

You bring up an interesting point about Killian's secretary that occurred to me when she first showed up in this saga.

Now, I don't know how the 1970's TANG operated. Obviously, there was a secretary pool, being pre-computer days and all.

However, even if Mrs. Knox was Killian's *personal* secretary, so what? CBS buying her story hook, line, and sinker shows how ignorant they are of military life.

Unlike in the business or J-world, military secretaries are just that-- secretaries. They're not administrative assistants, or "office managers." Those functions are performed by uniformed execs. Perhaps Col Killian liked to chat up the secretaries about the weather, but I doubt he relayed any detailed knowledge about his officers to anyone but his exec.

Anyways, that whole line of debate just set off my BS detector. Again, things may have been very different back then, but in nearly a decade in the Pentagon and at bases around the country I've never once met a secretary who could do much more than answer a phone (and badly)-- the execs and mil assistants are the ones who know the most because they're the ones who sit in on the meetings to take notes, not the secretaries.

Of course, by the point Ms Knox showed up, I was already long convinced of the forgery by the LGF MS Word test. Chuck should get a National Press Award or something. . .

Cheers,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

Here's a completely different line of BS in Rathergate.

According to KVI AM 570 talk show host John Carlson, who worked with Mary in the '80s, she's had something similar happen before.

In 1987, working for KIRO TV 7 Seattle, Mary Mapes was a producer on a story called 'Shot in the Dark'. As the Bloods & Crips were carving up turf in Seattle, the police had started a new aggressive procedure of raiding crack houses. On one of the raids, the man inside leapt up and pointed a black shiny thing at the police - which got him shot. The dead man was black - and racial tensions and outrage went through the roof. Near the end of the inquest, KIRO airs 'A Shot in the Dark', an _eyewitness_ account from a man who none of the other observers had seen. His account was "No one knocked, they just busted in and started shooting up the place." Which was a long way from the police account.

Practically the entire inquest had to be redone to ask more questions. Eventually, they got to a reporter from the Seattle PI, which had been along on the raid as an 'embed'. His testimony was that 1) the new witness had NOT been an eyewitness - he'd stumbled out of the blackberry bushes outside while the aid card was tending to the corpse with statements like "Dude, what's up?" No one else could recall the witness inside - and the inquest ends up with the police story as the official findings.

Mary Mapes - her sole piece of evidence destroyed - flies into a rage. And moves on to CBS Evening News.

The best way to lie is to tell the truth in such a way that you create an impression that's different from reality. For instance, take your camera to the political rally and take a tight shot of the protesters standing close together. Seems like that there are a lot of people protesting. A wider shot might show them surrounded by a sea of empty seats. It creates another impression.

In this case, CBS gave us the impression that Mr. Killian's secretary was sort of like Perry Mason's Della Street, picking up his laundry, adjusting his tie, lending a sympathetic ear as Mr. Killian had difficulty doing his job because of those meddlesome Bush politicos. That's one narrative, and when I heard Ms. Knox, I got that impression.

Conversely, Mr. Killian's son gave me the impression that she was one of the girls in the typing pool. That's a completely different matter. I don't think (now) that was her role either.

I think it was closer to the situation I saw when i worked for the government (and I had forgotten until I heard this part of the story). Ms. Knox was the department secretary. Before we all had computers on our desks, the department would share a secretary who did the of typing. It all depended upon how important you were. Lowly guys right out of grad school (like myself) shared a secretary with a couple dozen similar minions. Exalted personages each had a Della Street at their beck and call. I don't think that was the case with Mr. Killian. I think Mr. Killian was somewhere in the middle.

The CBS/DNC narrative depends upon Ms. Knox being a confidant. We saw Ms. Knox's role as secretary from two perspectives: the CBS "personal secretary" and the son's "departmental secretary." I believe the CBS perspective was more misleading.

Hey Al,
I hate to tell you this, but the national guard/reserves isn't anything like an office environment. They don't have the financial resources that most offices have, be they small or large. Did you spend even one day in the military??? How can you say that a guardsman at that particular post would NOT know exactly what the set up was for pool secretaries.

Andy
USN Retired

My bad, that was for steve...not al