Les Jones

This is going to make 60 minutes look like 60 dopes. They did not research the documents very well and will pay for it over the next several weeks in bad PR, but they deserve it in my opinion.

I'm waiting to see which way people who actually know what they're talking about come down on this, and I'm yet to be convinced that this has conclusively been proven a forgery. A lot of the freeper rightwingnut stuff about "proportional fonts! 'th' ligatures! This was 1973!!!! All typewritten documents were in monospaced courier!!!" And the kerning!!! THE KERNING!!!" is pretty unconvincing, but a lot of the leftwingnut stuff is also equally unconvincing. Daily Kos 'definitely' proved that a $20,000 IBM Selectric Composer typesetting typewriter could have produced this, and with a straight face argued that Killian, or a secretary in a secretary pool in the freakin' Texas Air National Guard, used that to type a memo for Killian's personal file. Uh, right.

But still, this certainly sets about 18 BS klaxons off. The two documents sure do seem to line up awful closely, especially when they are overlaid. It seems really super improbable to me that a typewritten document would line up that well with a Word document made with default settings.

But, on the other hand --
I obviously don't know squat about typesetting and typewriters, so maybe the lining up isn't particularly unlikely at all. So, suspending my significant doubts about the authenticity of the memo for a second, I see a couple of discrepencies that I'd like someone to convincingly explain away:

1. the characters in the "original" seem to deviate slightly up or down from a baseline throughout the document, as you'd expect in something that was produced by a typewriter, and unlike a word processing document in which all of the characters sit precisely on a baseline. Just looking at the supposed original by itself, without comparing it to the Word document, it really looks to me like it was typewritten.

2. The "th" in the two documents look totally different to me. In the supposed original, it seems to sit much higher relative to the '7' than in the Word document.

But maybe those kind of discrepencies can arise from repeated xeroxing, followed by scanning, followed by conversion to a low quality PDF. Or maybe my eyes, or my irrational blind hatred of Bush, are just playing tricks on me.

Still, I'm leaning towards the memo being real. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm tending to give CBS the benefit of the doubt here. Faking the document with a word processor would seemingly be so totally obvious to any legitimate expert that I can't imagine the people they vetted this with wouldn't have waved all sorts of red flags and jumped up and down telling them that the memo could be bogus. It's possible, I suppose, that the people they showed it too said that it was of too low quality to really make a definitive conclusion one way or the other, and CBS decided to run with the story anyway because it came from someone they thought was totally reliable, Or maybe they just consulted with completely incompetent experts. But neither of those scenarios seem all that likely to me.

If this does turn out to be a fake, though, Kerry is so totally fucked, even if his campaign had nothing to do with it.

Glad you're keeping an open mind. INDC and the Washington Post talked to forensic document experts, and they're leaning strongly towards it being a fake. So far I haven't seen any qualified experts putting their names on the line to say it's genuine.

The "th" is giving a lot of people problems. It looks wrong in the screen capture, but it looks exactly like the CBS News document when printed. I'd scan in a print, but for the life of me I can't find the cable for my scanner right now.

I still haven't found my cable, but now I don't need it. Charles at Little Green Footballs has posted a comparison of the CBS Killian document and a printout of his Word doc, and it's a perfect match, "th" and all. link

Well. I think all the "experts" have now weighed in and the doc. IS a fake. With Staudt having retired 18 months previous being a huge red flag. Add in Rather's hatred of Republicans and he was eager to put this out help the Dems. Backlash!! FYI, if you want letters on your document to look a little off just print "fast" and in grayscale! There is no doubt in my mind and the only action I will be taking will be #1- to convince more people to vote Republican and #2- to wage an assault on CBS! We're having fun now!!LOL

Well, these memos may still be forgeries, but I DO know a little about Microsoft Word, and the memos were most likely NOT produced using Microsoft Word, as Republicans claim. Here's why:

Word has a default setting called "Autoformat as you type," which can be turned on or off. Within this, it has options, which include "Ordinals (1st) with superscript." If both these settings are on, Word will create a superscript such as the "111th" in the memo dated 04 May 1972. HOWEVER, it will also produce a superscript if you type "1st Lt. George W. Bush." Note, however, that there is no superscript in this line on the May 4 memo.

If somebody did forge these documents using Word, they were pretty clumsy, first taking care to turn off the superscripting and then turning it back on in a stupidly obvious spot. This doesn't pass the sniff test to me. More likely the superscript was done manually on a typewriter.

Also, the 19 May 1972 memo has a telltale sign that it was created by someone who had taken typing classes a good long time ago. The typist double spaced after each sentence, a common practice before the advent of word processing.

Incidentally, the Times New Roman font has been available since 1931 and the superscript "th" has been available on typewriters since the early 1960's. The "st" superscript, however, was much more difficult to find on a typewriter, which probably explains why the "th" was superscripted and the "st" was not.

Someone else has pointed out that the characters do not sit accurately on the baseline. My conclusion is that the documents were typewritten.

"If both these settings are on, Word will create a superscript such as the "111th" in the memo dated 04 May 1972. HOWEVER, it will also produce a superscript if you type "1st Lt. George W. Bush.""

If you type "1 st" and then move off the word, MS Word doesn't superscript it. If you then go back and delete the space and click off the word or use the cursor keys to move the cursor, Word doesn't superscript the "st."

The doublespace thing is interesting (though it's hardly dispositive) because it indicates that whoever typed this was either fienddishly clever (ha!), had noticed that other documents were doublespaced, or was an old-schooler who learned to type on a typewriter rather than a word processor.

The first thing that stands out to me is the the "Memo for File" Everyone I knew in the military called it "Memo for Record" also "Memorandum for Record". Type in Memo for Record on Google and you get tons of docs.

Here's the format I remember in my military days. Dates were left justified. I didn't change my format because I was to used to typing the same way....

DATE: January 01, 2004

From: Your name and personal or staff call as appropriate to the content.

Your mailing address can go here, on one line, if not in the header

TO: Name of person, title (should be highest echelon you want it to go to)

VIA: Itemize via chain, usually starting with State Director

INFO: such as the Assistant Director, Region Ten

these are persons not in TO or VIA lines.

SUBJ: APPROPRIATE ONE LINE DESCRIPTION (all upper case)

REF: as needed Identify each refer with an upper case letter as in a msg.

ENCL: A. list all enclosures, if any, each is identified with an upper case letter,

one item per line

Dan Rather and CBS are notorious for misleading the public and spinning everything they touch counter-clockwise. From a false documentary in 1988 covering Vietnam veterans and their atrocities to daily politics including these forgeries, if it sounds good for Democrats and hurts Republicans it will see the airwaves. What surprises me is that anyone with a brain thought Dan Rather and CBS were credible on any subject.

Wow. Look what CBS is claiming now:

http://www.holyobserver.com/detail.php?isu=v02i04&art=cbs

I believe it was a copy of a computer scanned document. that the military began scanning and OCR documents and able to preserve documents was going on for years. The dukester was convicted of aiding such a company that did 100 million dollars of such scanning and theirs were not liked by the military.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/05/AR2007110501693.html?wpisrc=newsletter

this is perfectly in line with what could happen when scanned and OCR is used with signatures preserved.. interestingly the Guard never said this was not a document in their electronic records.