OK, its speculation time. Here is mine. I hope that I have refrained from introducing any tinfoil hat logic here.

I think that this was coordinated effort with Burkett and Barnes in the middle. First of all you have Barnes who has time line difficulties of the same nature that are shown in the CYA memo. That is, he claims that he helped Bush senior get into the Guard using his position of Lt Gov of Texas. Of course we all now know that GWB entered the Guard a year before Barnes became Lt Gov. Barnes was in Geneva at the time. We also know that the alledged CYA memo claimed that Killian was under pressure from Col Staudt in 1973. Staudt had retired 18 months earlier. So we have the same kind of made up story coming from Barnes as the forged memo from Killian.

So who is backing Barnes? “Texans for Truth” is a 527 connected to Moveon.org. They apparently received money and serves from Moveon.org. We also know that Moveon.org has been the prime purveyor of the Deserter Meme. What we have is Barnes marketing a Moveon.org meme. George Soros is big funder of Moveon.org. There are a number of stories about Soros playing the intel games that were going on in the Balkans in the 1990s. LGEN Sir Michael Rose, the last UN Peacekeeping CO in Bosnia has suspicions that Soros was working with the CIA. There also have been suspicions that Soros worked for the KGB during the cold war. I believe that Soros knows how to play disinformation games.

What is the relationship to the DNC? We know that there is an overlap between Moveon.org and the DNC. I think McCauliff is witting of the forgeries. He has established several cutouts to isolate Moveon.org coordinated activities from the Kerry campaign. Remember, McCauliff was in the thick of the Clinton era campaign finance money laundering operations. You can bet that he knows his way around the McCain-Feingold restrictions.

Is Kerry witting of the fraud? No, McCauliff is smart enough to let Kerry know what is coming down the road without having to tell Kerry that the documents are fraudulent. By fooling Kerry into thinking that the documents are authentic both Kerry and Edwards would come across a more sincere. I donít buy the deliberate sabotage angle. I think McCauliff thought he had a winner here.

Finally, where is CBS News in all of this? CBS had to know that these documents were fake. Maybe Rather was out of the loop for the same reasons that McCauliff left Kerry out. It would enhance the credibility of the report. The reason I believe CBS was in on it is because of their verification process. They told Hodges that they had handwritten notes and then misquoted him. Same thing with the documents in Boston. If CBS thought they were real they would have had no trouble showing to Hodges.