Here: (boldface mine)

The title alone is worth the price of admission:

Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says

By MAUREEN BALLEZA and KATE ZERNIKE

The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they are fakes.

CBS and the Democrats are still trying to pretend there is doubt on this matter. Still.

But she also said they accurately reflect the thoughts of the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, and other memorandums she typed for him about Mr. Bush. "The information in them is correct," the woman, Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home here. "But I doubt,'' she said, pausing, "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. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."

So the memos are fake, but accurate. Right. According to a single hearsay source.

...Mr. Killian died in 1984; his widow and son have said that they did not find any memorandums among the private effects they cleared from his office after his death. Mr. Killian's son, Gary, who also served at the squadron and who initially thought that the signatures on the documents matched his father's, has come to believe they are fakes, and said he doubted Mrs. Knox's account, though he recalled her fondly.

"She's a sweet old lady, but she's wrong and it didn't happen,'' he said. "I always thought well of her, and I know my dad would have also, but she's a sweet old lady.''

Another secondhand source disagrees with Mrs. Knox. Now what?

Mrs. Knox's comments add to the mystery around the four memorandums that were reported by CBS News last Wednesday, which indicated that Mr. Bush had been suspended from flying because he failed to meet standards and report for a physical examination and that Mr. Killian felt pressure to "sugarcoat" his rating because the young Lieutenant Bush, then the son of a congressman, was "talking to someone upstairs."

Executives at CBS said Tuesday that they continued to stand by their statements that they believe the documents are authentic, despite the new questions, and concern from others inside the network, and a report on ABC News that two more experts whom CBS News had consulted to authenticate the documents for its report said they had expressed concerns about the documents' authenticity to the network's producers.

When questions about the documents first arose last week, the anchor Dan Rather said at least four experts had helped convince the network of their authenticity.

I'm curious as to just exactly how much evidence would be required to finalize this point with CBS and the Democrats. Remember, the burden of proof is on CBS. There's more...

But the network has continually declined to provide the name of more than one of those experts. That one, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he validated only that the signature on the documents was Colonel Killian's. But, he said, he did not vouch for the documents themselves and could not rule out that the signature had been cut and pasted onto the records.

On Tuesday, two more experts came forward and said they had been consulted by CBS. One, a forensic document examiner from Texas, Linda James, said in a telephone interview with The New York Times that she noticed indications that the two documents she inspected were the product of a word processor and relayed that to the producers.

"I had questioned the superscript on there," she said, referring to the raised letters that appear after the number 111 to indicate the name of the flight squadron, adding she also had some questions about what she believed were some inconsistencies in the documents' signatures. She said she was awaiting more documents and more type samples to draw a stronger conclusion but with time running out she referred the network to another expert, who officials at CBS identified as Mr. Matley.

Ms. James first made her comments Tuesday night on "World News Tonight'' on ABC. The newscast also presented a second document expert, Emily Will, who said she raised still more serious concerns about the authenticity of a document she inspected for CBS's producers. Ms. Will said during a telephone interview afterward that she told network producers as late as the night before the report was shown, "I had a lot of questions and I would not support the documents." She said she also warned the network, "if they ran the story on Wednesday they would be asked the same questions I was asking on Tuesday on Thursday, by a whole lot of document examiners."

The women's accounts seemed to undercut CBS network officials' previous denials that producers had questions about the documents' authenticity just one or two days before the report was shown.

"Seemed to undercut???

...Officials at CBS News said on Tuesday that they would at some point in the day provide the name of a document expert who expressed confidence in the records' authenticity before the report was broadcast. But they did not do so, and Ms. West declined to say why.

CBS has refused to say how it obtained the documents. But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Governor Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush's military personnel files, had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played.

Mr. Burkett declined to return telephone calls to his home near Abilene, Tex. His lawyer, David Van Os, on Tuesday repeatedly refused to say in a telephone interview whether the officer had played a part in supplying the disputed documents to CBS. Mr. Van Os said "the real story is and should be, where was George Bush?" and that Mr. Burkett "is not the proper object of attention."

Mr. Van Os called Mr. Burkett "a man of impeccable honesty who would not permit himself to be a party to anything fake, fraudulent or phony." He also said, in response to questions, and stressing that he was speaking only hypothetically, "If Bill Burkett were to later discover that something he was a party to were fake or phony, as a man of honor who lives by a code of honor of the military, he would not permit the falsity to continue." But, the lawyer hastened to add, "This is not intended to be any kind of specific statement."

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush's military service, Mr. Van Os said: "If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done'' - then, he continued, "what difference would it make?"

Just let that soak in a while. "Replicas of documents they believed had existed." and "What difference would it make?" See what we're dealing with?