Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Uh, Rove plant maybe.

this OT I know, sorry.
Just finished this, and am suggesting for the blogs reading list.
Haven't felt like this after reading a book since I read the Valachi Papers.

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=8-0375508465-0

Consider me on the fence, leaning toward forgery. One thing that has been brought up, however, is whether these guys are full time employees of the TANG at Killian's level, or was he also a "weekend warrior". In other words, did he have a primary full time job? If so, what was it, and was it at the tape of place that might have had a reason to have a nicer typewriter?

I haven't seen anyone answer that, but if these memos were for his personal file, it's possible he could have had somewhere there type them for him. I could be dead wrong, though. Just trying to cover all bases.

Way premature. No real experts in this stuff. No real documents to examine.

And Bartlett's reaction.

I think you are premature, and a bit ingenuous on this.

Maybe forged, but "ben trovati".

Dear Brad,

I am on the begging for policy discussion and leadership side. John Kerry must win with policy that is clear and compelling and known widely.

OK. But why hasn't the White House said anything about this?

Well, better late than never. Now the "right" question to ask is how to keep the fire contained to CBS and whoever forged the memo. It would have been easier if more people who don't like Bush had come around to the forgery side last week.

I agree it is still sort of interesting that the White House never questioned the validity of the memos. But Bush is so thoroughly innoculated against the whole issue that it should probably be dropped.

Anyone who hasn't read Newcomer's analysis really should. http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm He's an objective expert "not a fan of Bush" but who "was working with laser printers before they had lasers." A must read if you want to talk kerning and pseudo-kerning with the best of them.

I was beginning to wonder if there is some kind of cognitive deficit that keeps otherwise intelligent people from noticing glaring differences in fonts. I figured someone who is highly verbal probably converts the text to symbols at such a low level that the fonts never make it into the perception areas. I'm still kind of wondering. It is difficult to see how an intelligent person paying attention could hang on long to the belief that these memos are authentic.

There's an article in the Boston Globe saying the opposite yesterday.

I don't know which is true, but I would second source anything from Howie "conflict of interest" Kurtz.

The two big questions are:

* Did Bush ditch his service (Yes).

* Why didn't the media approach the Swift Boat Liars the same way?

I'm all for holding CBS's feet to the fire with exactly the same zeal and to the same degree that the current administration and its partisans have been all for holding Bob Novak's feet to the fire on the Plame business.

(I know, I know, the moral high ground is an important tactical advantage for progressives. But I'm getting really tired of taking the high road and still getting screwed.)

Does all of this really matter in light of the US News piece?

> I don't know which is true, but I would second source anything from Howie "conflict of interest" Kurtz.

Read Newcomer (referenced above). His only conflict of interest is an inordinate desire to tell you more than you need to know about computer typography.

> Why didn't the media approach the Swift Boat Liars the same way?

Because the swifties are better liars. They did not produce any obviously fake documents to support their claims.

Look, I'm all for running a smear campaign against Bush if it's the only way (and it seems like it might be). But running an incompetent one is worse than not even trying.

> Does all of this really matter in light of the US News piece?

It matters because it destroys the credibility of anyone who hangs their reputation on the validity of these memos. CBS is toast. Rather is toast. Dig a fire trench around them and let them burn.

It also makes it difficult to discuss other evidence of Bush's irregularities because the memos have got so much attention that people will assume that that's what you're basing your claim on.

Both CBS and USA Today have recieved copies of documents purorted to have originated in the 1970's by Killian. Neither news service has an original. It is easy to verify a document was typewritten rather than produced on a laserjet as the paper would be compressed at each letter stroke. (Unless it was on onion skin, which complicates the job of verification)

So I think it is beyond stupid to claim memos of this importance to be authentic without a close examination of the originals.

On the other hand, why are CBS and USA Today protecting the identity of their source? If these are frauds they have no obligation to protect him. So maybe they are not frauds.

I read the Newcomer. On page one, the comparison of the "187th" I noticed at least a half dozen differences that Newcomer dismisses as artifacts of poor resolution. The most obvious one is the "8" which is vertically symmetrical in the Word version but asymmetrical (larger bottom than top) in the memo.

http://img17.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img17&image=typeface_comparison.gif

This also notices that problem.

There is a font that has that assymetrical "8" called Pict Roman or Pint Roman or something. I have forgotten both the specific info and where I saw it, drowning in an ocean of conflicting minutiae. Which was the purpose of the freeper attack all along.

Ken, the most likely reason CBS & USAToday are protecting their source(s) is because they feel disclosure of their identities would be even more damaging than the knowledge that these were forgeries.

(Hypothetically speaking), if the source turns out to be Rather's daughter, who's connected to the chief accuser in the 60 Minutes II piece, Roy Barnes, CBS would definitly want to protect the source even after admitting forgery. Ditto if it were to have come from anyone known to be working for Kerry's Oppo Reserarch Squad.

If it were anyone connected to Karl Rove, CBS would have flipped on them the second there was a hint of forgery.

I read the TNR piece by Andrew Sullian and the Wash Post.

Right now, I am leaning to the forgeries side too.
If CBS can not come up the originals than Rather's career is all but over. Only the Ink smeared originals can save Rather.

Why wasn't story about Ben Barnes and the White House lying that all Bush's records being released. Why did not CBS follow up on the efforts of the A.P. and the AWOL project (Paul Lukasiak), Eric Boehlert at Salon. Where was a request for the microfilm of the TANG records in Colorado.

Unless this potboiler takes another turn. I think Rove just scored a coup on CBS. The AWOL is not dead, but the publis is mighty confused

Professor DeLong is mistaken to bite so quickly.

1. The Washington Post has clearly been leading the charge against 60 Minutes and has a dog in this fight.

2. Some of the allegations made by The Washington Post have proven to be false.

3. The fact, if we accept it as such, that many memos were not typed on a particular typewriter is evidence of nothing at all.

4. As is pointed out by Armando, drawing conclusions based on copies is doubtful.

5. At this stage, it's completely unnecessary to decide whether the documents are real or not. They provide one possible explanation for why George Bush failed to take a physical and was grounded. His failure to take a physical and subsequent grounding are accepted facts, for which he has not supplied an acceptable explanation.

It's a shame that so many Democrats don't know how to fight. The Republicans had no trouble trouble standing by completely ridiculous allegations against Clinton until suddenly they didn't and never had.

This would be the same WaPo that told us last week that neither the typewriter nor the font existed in the early 70s. The ever-so-'liberal' WaPo that called for the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Chavez.

Sorry, but the WaPo has no credibility with me.

Gee, Brad, I guess Tang could spend a million dollars on Bush's flight training but could only afford one typewriter and one company clerk. Those "comparison" memos were only a half dozen in number and nobody has seen the originals of either. Rather than joining the lemmings jumping to a precipitous conclusion why not sit back and watch the fun. I don't think this hand is quite over yet.

The new memos are a sideshow. Both the Boston Globe and US News have come to the conclusion -- independent of the new documents -- that Bush failed to fulfill his commitments to the ANG.

Now it is up to the press to let the public know that the Bush and his aides have not told the truth about his service. The WH argument that Bush's honorable discharge excuses is behavior is without merit. There is ample evidence in Mr. Bush's official records that his ultimate discharge from the reserves was highly irregular and that he received special treatment.

In the next few weeks, we're going to see if the US press can salvage some its tattered credibility by detailing the lies and deception used by the WH to obscure Bush's service record.

Here is an analysis of the key deceptive document
peddled by the WH.
http://ftm.dailykos.com/story/2004/4/21/20304/0592

FOR FUCK'S SAKE

Why do you guys keep responding to this chewbacca-defense bullshit?

The proper response to all things regarding the memos is this:

"Oh, great, someone found memos saying GW Bush skipped out of duty. That's like finding secret memos saying that the Allies won World War 2. NO SHIT SHERLOCK."

It doesn't matter where the damn memos came from- the facts are established, and the fact is that Bush shirked Guard duty, just like he shirked Presidential duty before 9/11.

End of story. Fuck the typewriters. Fuck the forensics. Facts are facts.

CBS has to come forward with evidence.

I have been very dubious, scornful even, of the forgery theory, based heavily on the lack of WH attacks on the documents.

But CBS needs to defend itself vigorously, not just offer reassurances.

What do the Rosenbergs and Dan Rather have in common? see here

Paul Callahan said, "I'm still kind of wondering. It is difficult to see how an intelligent person paying attention could hang on long to the belief that these memos are authentic."

I think it's called believing what we want to believe. I thought it was mainly a conservative malady, but evidently it's endemic to the human race.

Another thing is I thing is that someone who read only liberal blogs wouldn't have had a full picture of why the case against the documents. There was a bit of a liberal echo chamber in effect; the general attitude seemed to be to leave this alone and let the other side handle it. Someone who read only liberal blogs wouldn't have found the link to http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm, and wouldn't have seen the case made as well as you did. One good thing that's come out of this is I've added a couple of conservative blogs (like http://www.indcjournal.com/) to my formerly exclusively liberal blog list.

Also, the best case against the memos depended on an argument from Occam's razer. It was the improbability of something typed up matching a Word document so closely overall rather than any one feature that was convincing. I think most people on the liberal side didn't get that (hence all the arguments about old typewriters being able to reproduce this or that feature). Not seeing the forest for the trees, perhaps.

--Rick Taylor

My opinion all along has been, let it come out in the wash. Don't reject the memos too soon -- let the other side do the work. But don't rely on the memos. I will not have to change my opinion.

The US News story and the Boston Globe story both make strong cases against Bush's NG performance, and neither even mentions the memos. There's also Barnes's case about Guard favoritism, and it doesn't rely on the memos.

The winger spin is that Bush's service has been validated and that the Kerry campaign has been discredited. Neither is true.

The real story here is another attempt by the right to bully the media into framing the issue the way the right wants it framed. The real issue here, they shout, is "KERRY CAMPAIGN TRIED TO FRAME BUSH WITH FORGERIES" (caps in original). And the media might buy it / probably will buy it.

The real issue is that Bush is the worst President in US history. A very secondary issue is that he seemed to have neglected even his cushy guard service in order to party. A tertiary issue is that about 5% of the evidence against his Guard service may have been forged. But the echo chamber is spinning it differently.

If the memos are forged, Rather, CBS, Rather's source, and the forger should be ashamed of themselves. But no one else needs to be.

The remaining evidence for typed production is that some letters are vertically misaligned some, but not all, of the time. I've written to the Flounder person about this, but he hasn't responsed (I'm sure he's getting hundreds of emails)

> As is pointed out by Armando, drawing conclusions based on copies is doubtful.

Well, not really. Several so-called document experts have used this as a fallback position, but it's misleading. Copies are usual in a one-sided sense. I.e.:

(1) An electronic reproduction of a paper document will never suffice to prove its authenticity.
(2) An electronic reproduction may in many cases suffice to disprove its authenticity.

In order to prove a document is authentic, you need to show that it meets every conceivable criteria that can be expected for it and (crucially) that it could not have been created some other way. Electronic copies by their nature can be created to say nearly anything you want. Even if they check out on all possible criteria, you might be able to conclude something about the information they contain, but not about whether the document itself is authentic. CBS should not have claimed to authenticate anything without an original, because it cannot be done.

On the other hand, to show something is a fraud, you only need to find one fraudulent element. A genuine document would not contain even one. In logical terms, the distinction is between proving a universal (true for all) and proving an existential (false in some case). While you lose a lot of detail in a copy, you often retain enough information to find an inconsistency. The business of the "th" superscript or even the centering of the header, while not reproduced perfectly, is reproduced with sufficient precision to demonstrate that these are inconsistent with the kind of memo that would be produced in 1972 and very consistent with the kind of memo that would be produced in MS Word today.

As someone admittedly better at following typographical arguments that developing political talking points, the best Kerry-camp talking points I can think of would be as follows:

(1) We're not typographic experts. We just watch the news like everyone else.
(2) CBS failed in due diligence. It's a shame that a once impeccable news organization [keep a straight face here] has sunk to the level of the tabloids.
(3)We don't watch CBS anymore and we are sorry that Dan Rather, much like Pierre Salinger a decade ago, has ended his career in such humiliation.

After this, the talking points diverge depending on whether you ever trumpeted the memos in the first place. If so, you need to make the most abject show of apology. If not, you can simply reiterate (1), that you were never sure who to believe and were waiting to see how the whole thing pans out.

Rove theories have to be discarded unless Rove really was behind it and (more important) you can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Better to ascribe it to a "lone gunman" type--obviously someone who does not like Bush, but also not someone affiliated in any way with Kerry.

Finally, this is probably enough to torpedo the whole guard story, not because it refutes other evidence but because it muddies the water. I doubt that it will be possible to use this in the campaign. Best to move on.

One hates to sound paranoid and conspiracy-minded, but..

Wouldn't a forger who didn't want to be found have located a 1970-vintage typewriter and used that? The possible conclusions that follow -
(i) these were forgeries that were meant to be detected, i.e. some sort of double-cross.
(ii) these are real, and the experts are being too clever by half in debunking them..
(iii) CBS are major-league idiots who can be taken in by even the most transparently bogus evidence if the story is too good to check..

The 'CBS are idiots' hypothesis does not exclude the other two, of course..

So far, these memos appear to have been a major success for the Republicans. Discrediting the memos has discredited the charges of draft-dodging against Bush (I know the logic isn't watertight, but let's face the fact that most voters aren't following all of the detail here).. It has also kept liberal commentators busy for a week on an issue that no serious person really cares about. That's one week less to go after Bush on something that might turn this election..

Paul,

I'm curious. You mention the 'th' superscript as proof that the document was a forgery, but I've read that a similar superscript exists on those documents that Bush chose to release. So did Bush release a forgery? I've read that one could order custom type balls at that time with that superscripting feature. Do you have some knowledge that in your universe these typewriters did not exist? Can it withstand the existence of even one such typewriter? Centered headings? Are you sure they were impossible? I've seen that the Composer can produce documents which are both right and left justified. There are pictures of word processor documents A/B'd with Selectric documents on the web. I guessed wrong in identifying them.

The content of the documents matches exactly what we have been allowed to know of Bush's failure to perform his service. As a child of a career Army officer, the tone of the documents matches what I observed from my Dad and our family friends but that while meaningful to me that is only suggestive. However, Killian's fellow officers say that it matches the man they knew.

Well, you know, it's almost certain that the TANG also had fixed-spacing typewriters as well as Executives (if they had those) and probably more correspondence would have been typed with them than with Executives. Any military base produces mass quantities of memos--it wouldn't be very difficult to find 100 that used fixed spacing, even if there were 100 more that were typed on Executives. So I don't think much is proven either way. My take is still: (1) yes, the memos could have been produced at that time, (2) yes, they are consistent with the rest of W's service record, so (3) they are probably authentic, and (4) the rest of the evidence damns W. anyway, so what's the fuss?

Brad, every single point the 'experts' have made in debunking the memos has now been debunked. There comes a point when you have to look past credentials when the statements themselves are factually incorrect.

The case against the memos supposedly rests on the fact that no common typewriters in 1972 could have created them. We know now that both the IBM Selectric Composer and the IBM Executive Model D could have created them. (There is evidence of the Air Force cerifying Selectric Composers for purchase in 1969!)

But the collective desire on the part of the right for the memos to be fraudulent keeps the story going. The same tired arguments debunked days ago keep getting made, as with Rick Taylor above:

"It was the improbability of something typed up matching a Word document so closely overall rather than any one feature that was convincing."

But this is only convincing to someone who doesn't understand typefaces. The letter and word spacing in MS Times New Roman is based on long established parameters of fonts of that family. (The font in the memos is NOT Times New Roman by the way. Many of the character shapes are different).

(And if you continue to apply Occam's razor, if the document was done in Word, why was the superscript function turned off for part of the memos?)

I have yet to see any credible evidence that the memos are forgeries.

However, there is much evidence that that they are real. They are consistent with the story as known on a great many details, and CBS, no slouch in the news business, has staked their credibility on them.

> (i) these were forgeries that were meant to be detected, i.e. some sort of double-cross.

Just want to throw in a "triple-cross" theory. The forgeries were meant to be detected, but the goal is to hurt Bush. Getting CBS to trumpet false documents is a way to keep Bush's National Guard absence story in the news. The assumption is that most of the public cannot follow a technical discussion of fonts, and is willing to accept CBS's word over an odd consortium of rightwingers and geeks in pajamas who are nonetheless useful in creating a buzz around the story.

This would be a high risk gambit, and I consider it about as like as the memos being the work of the ancient astronauts. But it is amusing to think about.

Paul Callahan wrote, "Because the swifties are better liars. They did not produce any obviously fake documents to support their claims."

That's true---they (or someone else) produced real documents that invalidated their claims. (To wit, their own battle citations.)

:-)

Not that I disagree with anything you say---I was never wedded to the idea that the documents had to be genuine---just pointing out that the treatment of the Swift Boat story by the press was nutty.

Rick Taylor wrote, "Another thing is I thing is that someone who read only liberal blogs wouldn't have had a full picture of why the case against the documents. There was a bit of a liberal echo chamber in effect; the general attitude seemed to be to leave this alone and let the other side handle it."

Huh? I read zero conservative blogs, and I doubt my lag time in agreeing the docs were questionable was more than, say, 1 or 2 days.

> I'm curious. You mention the 'th' superscript as proof that the document was a forgery, but I've read that a similar superscript exists on those documents that Bush chose to release.

It's not a true superscript. The "th" symbol on the only example I saw never goes above the top line of the preceding text. So I would not really call it similar.

But the other half of the "th" argument is the existence of tell-tale indications that the composer of the CBS documents was trying to defeat Word's automatic superscript by leaving a space. We are supposed to imagine a typist who sometimes uses a special keystroke to form an ordinal and other times leaves a space in violation of all style guidelines. It's not a very plausible scenario, and far less plausible than the simple explanation of what a naive Word user might do if they were trying to suppress the superscripts.

We have two stories: one simple and consistent, the other complicated and somewhat contradictory. Anything's possible, but I'll bet money of the simpler one.

There is no compelling argument that the memos were technologically infeasible. Indeed you can get very close using an IBM composer.But no one has produced a copy on the technology of the day that comes as close as the ones done with MS Word. There is also no reason to believe that TexANG had anything other than a plain vanilla electric typewriter, with maybe one removable typebar (a feature I remember on my father's typewriter) that could have excepted a special character like "th" (but which never appeared as a true superscript).

If you want to see what some of the nicest typewritten documents of the day looked like, check out LBJ's security memos: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/NSAMs/nsamhom.asp

I assume these were done on an IBM Executive. They put aside any questions of whether proportional type was possible, but they also look nothing like the CBS memos.

All I can suggest is that use google image search (hint: go to advanced, limit to black and white) and look for documents of the time period. You can debate minutiae all you like, but the CBS memos JUST DON'T LOOK LIKE any other documents from that time period.

"the CBS memos JUST DON'T LOOK LIKE any other documents from that time period."

You've seen them all, and you know.

> You've seen them all, and you know.

I've seen a sufficient statistical sample to conclude (under some admittedly simplistic assumptions about the distribution) that with high confidence they do not look like 99% of the documents of that time period, including the nice proportionally spaced ones.

This is not sufficient to debunk them, but it certainly places the burden of proof on those who claim the documents are real. BTW, that is always where the burden of proof lay.

The existence of an electronic reproduction proves nothing whatsoever about the physical nature of the document it purports to reproduce. CBS ought to know that. The information on the memos could be checked in other ways, but CBS has no grounds to claim that the documents ever existed unless it has the originals, which it does not.

BTW, I am voting for Kerry, who I think will make a fine president, just in case there was any doubt about my motives.

I am a conservative and there is an echo chamber in both the liberal and conservitive blog camps.

I was, early on, a skeptic of the forgery claims, and was somewhat irritated by the glee that seemed to be clouding the right-blogs' commentary. CBS's refusal to put forward a detailed rebuttal pushed me solidly into the forgery camp.

The Bush AWOL story, while it may be a valid criticism of Bush as a young man, is not relevant to the election. The DNC et al are damaging themselves by mentioning it. You don't see the RNC's chairman touting the swift boat vets' claims. Maybe he's doing it in secret, but at least he looks like he's on the moral high ground. Maybe Rove isn't a genious, maybe all his opponents are just idiots.

You can also "defeat" the superscript function in Word by:

Going to the Tools Menu.
Selecting AutoCorrect Options.
Click on the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
Uncheck the Replace Ordinals function.

Word also allows you to use monospaced fonts. Some of which ship with Windows.

To assume that the documents were forgeries, we have to figure that they were made by somebody with a very in-depth knowledge of the case (so in-depth that the White House ACCEPTED THE MEMOS AS AUTHENTIC), and who was able to confine themselves to writing only information consistent with the facts, but who is a complete moron when it comes to using a word processor and not bright enough to get a typewriter.

The universe of such possible people should be fairly small, one would think.

It still seems that the most plausible explanation is that the memos were copied from authentic originals.

I wandered on to this site via a link. After reading through the various comments I would like all concerned to, reasonably, answer a question.

What does what two young men did 35 years ago matter so much that all discussion of the other issues facing the country?

This is an old mans question. I did a lot of stuff in my youth that I am not pround of, a lot I am proud of and enough to never want to run for President. But all of this wasted debate and vitriol is not worth your time. We all age and mature. We are not the same people we were at 20.

A given in politics is that both sides lie, shade the truth and if necessary deceive. I think your time would be spent better working for your candidate, getting into the daily details of the campaign and accomplishing something rather than (as both right and left do) listen to yourselves in an echo chamber.

Thanks for listening.

Jim K.

"But no one has produced a copy on the technology of the day that comes as close as the ones done with MS Word."

You can read the manual for the Selectric Composer to learn that it was completely capable of the memos. PC Magazine showed a complete match between a Composer Text from the manual and standard, justified MS Word Text. And another question to ask is just how many Composer Type balls do you really think are left out in the world, much less the custom ball the memos would have been created on? These aren't vintage collectibles but obsolete office equipment from the seventies.

"There is also no reason to believe that TexANG had anything other than a plain vanilla electric typewriter, with maybe one removable typebar (a feature I remember on my father's typewriter) that could have excepted a special character like "th" (but which never appeared as a true superscript)."

That's just pure horseshit. Every organization likes the capability of producing nice (camera ready) copy for special occasions, something we take for granted in the computer age. While it would make sense for the typing pool to have plain vanilla models, it also makes sense for the colonel's secretary to have something extra, as a reflection of status in addition to the above reason. To justify it, all it would take is the combination of Colonel A seeing his correspondence outshined by Colonel B along with a little leftover end-of-fiscal-year money.

Without the originals I think it is easier to prove that these memos could NOT have been produced on Microsoft Word than that they WERE produced on a typewriter.

It is virtually impossible to use word processing to produce memos with ragged lines to imitate a typewriter. One of the built in features of word processing is the razor sharp alignment along the bottom of each line. Typwriten documents, however, never had perfect alignment. Even the so called mimic copies of the memos have perfect alignments along the bottom of each line. The purported memos do not, they show ragged alignment. This is conclusive proof that they were not produced by Microsoft Word.

> The universe of such possible people [who know a lot about Bush's TexANG career but are idiots in front of a computer] should be fairly small, one would think.

Really? Many people's typing skills don't go beyond hunt-and-peck. Many people (it should be clear by now) till now never noticed the difference between fixed and proportional font, nor the fact that "th" now commonly appears as a superscript in correspondence, but usually didn't back when typewritten text was the norm.

These memos are entirely consistent with a naive user who might occasionally use Word to write letters but never bothers to use the menus for anything. That's most people. If I sound like a snob, note that I don't hold it against anyone that they are not fascinated by one particular aspect of technology.

"It is virtually impossible to use word processing to produce memos with ragged lines to imitate a typewriter."

This is also why you don't see anyone stepping up to claim the $10,000 or so prize for making an exact match of the memos with an old Executive or Composer today. Because of the nature of the old electric typewriters each machine would have its own specific "signature" inconsistencies. Now add in dozens of different people, across several years, in different offices and multiple machines in the various typing pools and I'm sure there is no clear match in the files. That's why CBS interviewed several people outside of their source to verify that the content was consistent with what other people who worked directly with Killian said Killian said directly to them.

The "forgery" nonsense is just broken wing bullshit to distract from the larger issue of Bush's current inability to truthfully recall his past.

Paul,

Your reference to the superscript is further proof that these documents could not have been produced using Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word creates the 'th' superscipt above the line, while the originals show the 'th' superscipt to be aligned with the top of the letter line. This is exactly how the special typewriter keys for superscipt worked.

Now this is not proof of the documents authenticity but it is proof that they were not done on Microsoft Word.

I'll agree with ken, who appears to be affirming both that it's not sensible to draw firm conclusions from pdf's, but also to be saying that if anything these repros would indicate typing rather than word processing if anything at all. Besides, think about the internal evidence, the inconsistencies within individual documents, like the occurence of "th" on the line and in the same document a superscript "th". Word processing would be very unlikely to produce inconsistencies like this; in fact using a word processor makes it very hard to be inconsistent.

> That's just pure horseshit. Every organization likes the capability of producing nice (camera ready) copy for special occasions,

"Memo to file" is not a special occasion. You could come close with the IBM Composer, which might have been available in the print shop, but there is very little reason to believe Killian would use one for routine memos. I actually spent a long time looking for examples of memos from that period that might have been done in Composer. They might be out there, but I have given up looking.

>It is virtually impossible to use word processing to produce memos with ragged lines to imitate a typewriter.

Actually not true. MS Word leaves a ragged margin by default when you start a new blank document. If you want justification (right margin flush) you have to select it on the toolbar. Even if you were stuck on a word processor that insisted on justification, you could still get around it by hitting a linefeed after each line you want to keep ragged.

OK, now I give up. The truth will eventually come out to everyone's satisfaction. I have done my best to explain where I stand on the forgeries, and why I call them that without reservation. If you don't find the foregoing convincing, then I have nothing else to ad.

This post is brought to you by the letter "L":

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-etcbs143967115sep14,0,2784849,print.story?coll=ny-lipolitics-print

Paul,

Thank you for your clarification on the 'th'. What I found even better was "There is no compelling argument that the memos were technologically infeasible." That is more defensible than your original universal/existential argument that the 'th' and centered header proved that the documents were forgeries. As to plausibility, I seem to remember that 2 IBMer's said that the documents were consistent with the typewriters they developed or serviced -- somewhere on the Web. Maybe we can move the ball a little further down the field now.

I think there is a value here to understand modern Public Relations. The mimos are probably forgeries, but concocted by the Bush campaign. The scenerio reads: You create the Swift bopat campaign against Kerry, and milk it for all it is worth. When serious authorities seriously start to question the Smear campaign against Kerry, you introduce the fake memos against Bush. They are patently and provable fakes, and poor Georgie W. get a boost at the Polls because Democrats were not playing fair. This was the demonic concept of Republicans. lgl

"Actually not true. MS Word leaves a ragged margin by default when you start a new blank document."

He's not talking about the right margin, he's talking about whether the letters all land perfectly on the baseline. Electromechanical devices like typewriters had some baseline jitter. Take a look at some 'zines from the 70s or early 80s.

Everyone really should read the Newcomer link which deals with many of the issues cited, inadequately in my opinion. I don't yet have a position on whether they are forged, but am still working the arguments. Externally, CBS and Rather have an incredible amount to lose, and not enough to gain by taking such a risk......unless, as the freeper furor indicates, they are much more important than zizka and Yglesias think.

1) Bush must be attacked on character. I honestly believe 100 soldiers a day could die in Iraq, and Bush could send the government into default, and If the American people like the guy, he wins. Failure does not rub off on popular presidents.

2) The memos are to the guard story as the stained dress and Goldberg tape were to the Monica story. Physical evidence that goes beyond spin.

3) Physical evidence of what? Crimes, perhaps beyond the statute of limitations, or perhaps not, if proof can be shown that files were cleaned out during the 90's, at the bequest of Rove and Gov Bush.

4) All said, the memos may not be quite real. I think the source might be apparent if the original docs were shown in their original form, and is probably Burkett.

> He's not talking about the right margin, he's talking about whether the letters all land perfectly on the baseline.

I stand corrected. I wasn't reading carefully. Now I see it refers to the bottom of the line, not the page margins.

The memos look a little wavy, an effect (in my judgment) more likely to be due to optical distortion than mechanical displacement.

Paul,

The point about about alignment is that typewriters never perfectly lined up the letters of each word along the bottom of the line of type. This is because not only did the device have to move a letter to hit a ribbon but it also had to move a, what was it called, a roller or whatever from right to left as the typing took place. Not only that but if the paper was even a little lose against the roller this raggedness was greatly increased.

The memos have ragged bottom alignment. This proves that they could not have been done on Microsoft Word which always produces a razor sharp alignment.

It does not necesarily prove their authenticily only that they could not have been done on a word processor and printed out on a laser printer.

> The memos are to the guard story as the stained dress and Goldberg tape were to the Monica story. Physical evidence that goes beyond spin.

Exactly. But a pdf of a semen stain is not a semen stain. CBS seems genuinely confused about the rules of evidence when it comes to authenticating original documents. Even their expert Marcel Matley concedes that he cannot authenticate an electronic copy.

If the Killian documents are forgeries, (and I honestly don't know and can't tell from what I've seen), they were meant to be revealed as such. Interesting too that there were so many people already on the ground and running, ready to do just that.

If the documents were forgeries put out by Bush, it would be pretty damn easy for CBS to reveal their source.

CBS won't be revealing their source for obvious reasons--the forger is either in CBS (which they could never admit) or is in the Kerry camp (which they would never admit).

"I've seen a sufficient statistical sample to conclude (under some admittedly simplistic assumptions about the distribution) that with high confidence they do not look like 99% of the documents of that time period, including the nice proportionally spaced ones."

So?

At a guess, though, the typing pool at the TANG had both standard and Executive typewriters, and higher-level officers--like Lt. Colonels--probably had their memos typed on Exectuives, while the grunts and the line officers had their memos typed on the standards. So most memos would have been typed on standard typewriters.

"Memo to file" is not a special occasion."

No, you misunderstand me. The quite plausible scenario is that the Composer was suitable for routine typing by the colonel's secretary as well as justified in its purchase for its extra capabilities it when needs arose.

Think about how modern offices buy their own office equipment and you will understand. It's not difficult.

"Memo to file" is not a special occasion."

No, you misunderstand me. The quite plausible scenario is that the Composer was suitable for routine typing by the colonel's secretary as well as justified in its purchase for its extra capabilities it when needs arose.

Think about how modern offices buy their own office equipment and you will understand. It's not difficult.

"Memo to file" is not a special occasion."

No, you misunderstand me. The quite plausible scenario is that the Composer was suitable for routine typing by the colonel's secretary as well as justified in its purchase for its extra capabilities it when needs arose.

Think about how modern offices buy their own office equipment and you will understand. It's not difficult.

Paul Callahan (and others) have here pointed out the excruciating details of fonts, kerning, etc. There are other lines of evidence that cast doubt on the authenticity of the documents -

(1)The memos have multiple nomenclature & protocol oddities for military memoranda;

(2) Killian's wife and son deny they are authentic;

(3) The content of the memo has errors such as referring to a certain 'Staudt' who had retired long before the memo was dated, yet apparently still exerted influence in that wing of the TANG.

"CBS won't be revealing their source for obvious reasons--the forger is either in CBS (which they could never admit) or is in the Kerry camp (which they would never admit)."

Nah, the media community, if the forgery were indisputable, would not allow it. And CBS would have little restraint in tossing Rather, Rather's daughter, Kerry, Shrum, anybody if their survival were at stake.

Ain't like the Whitehouse or Republican Party. CBS is a business to make money, and has no concept of loyalty whatsoever. Hasn't anyone seen "The Insider"?

notice: we're still talking about this. This is good; you can't unring the bell. Bush's record in the Guard is being talked about, his credibility is at issue once again even...there's an elephant in the room, and with a leak or two in the coming months, soon everyone will see.

The ONLY reason CBS and USAToday have for not reporting the source for the memos is that they must have evidence that leads them to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are legitimate documents. Otherwise they would be protecting a source that is trying to scam them and they have journalistic obligation to do that.

Clearly, no earthly force could have produced those documents. Only the cigarette smoking man and his corrupt alien minions could have made them.

Until you have original documents you have nothing. Nothing. Nothing. On either side. Father Gerrigan wrote an entire book on the process of historiography including document analysis, which has a history going back hundreds of years. Someone had to be able to authenticate government orders when they were handwritten and sealed with wax-the methodology is the same.

some people just don't want to believe they could be so dumb as to have made an emotional investment in someone who is so clearly flawed and working at cross purposes to their own interests. Sounds like a great test case for some game and decision theory people. There is clearly evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt from multiple sources that Bush failed then, and is still lying about it today. That is the critical factor-if he is lying about such basic things, is he lying for personal advantage or is he delusional?
President Von Munchhausen, your flying horse awaits to take you back to Texas.

An honest liberal (if a week late). Truly a rare pearl of great price. Professor DeLong keeps his credibility, the key reason a committed conservative reads him semi-daily and is forced to struggle with his arguments. Now the question, to restore any civility to discourse, could you admit that not all conservatives are idiots or hacks just because they have by the most part been selected or self selected out of the academy and the main stream press?

If an infinite number of amateur typographers type away on an infinite number of IBM Executive typewriters for an inifinite amount of time, will they finally settle this case?

Big deal.

I know the Prof is upset, and the Prof gladly admits that he has become shrill. But getting a substantive message out about substantive issues is more important. I read a Yahoo news article about the attitude of military personnel towards Bush's sevice in the Guard. Guess what? -it didn't change many minds.

Substantive arguments that the current admin's anti-terro policies have been a mess is more important, for example.

Mark, is radical conservatism a contradiction in terms?
Wouldn't a real conservative at this juncture in history be trying to conserve the advancements in social policy made by FDR and LBJ while attempting to more fairly manage the economy and the commons as, say, Nixon did with the establishment of the EPA and the passage of NEPA? Have we not just turned the corner to the Hoover days on our way back to feudalism?

He said "committed" conservative, not radical. While I enthusiastically agree that most conservatives should be committed, let's keep our language straight, Bigfoot.

As for the memos: since I know zilch about typewriter fonts, the two elephants in the room as far as I was concerned were:

(1) The White House's steadfast refusal (and Buck Staudt's) to call them (or the facts stated in them) fakes. No matter how many convoluted "they were trying to trick the liberals into revealing themselves as chumps" arguments we see from the Right (such as Jim Glass), this still strikes me as very pecuilar behavior -- I can't possibly be the only American who was persuaded by the White House's utter silence that the memos probably WERE authentic, and I wonder how many of them will retain this belief even now (just as many Americans retain the belief that most of the SBVT stories were true despite the fact that most of them have been effectively demolished).

(2) The Elephant on the Other Side was the revelation that Staudt had quit his job a year and half before the "sugarcoat" memo claims that he was still putting protracted pressure on Hodges. It's conceivable that he might still be able to keep putting pressure on Hodges from his position as a retiree, but it's unlikely.

As lesser factors, we have the fact that Killian's signature on the memos featured a capital "K" that looked very different from one on one of his authenticated memos -- but CBS' document expert says that he DID check Killian's signatures thoroughly and that the evidence is strong that they match. We also have the new fact -- mentioned by the Post -- that the 5-4-1972 misstates Bush's home address, as indicated by other Guard documents of the time.

Of course, there is -- when one thinks about it -- a theory that fits all this conflicting data fairly well: the memos are forgeries, but the White House knew that they must have been forged by someone with good inside information on what Bush was really doing during those thrilling days of yesteryear, and decided to keep quiet rather than loudly deny the truth of the memos because it didn't want to prod this particular sleeping dog. Tom Maguire, of all people, has suggested this idea, and the new US News & World Report story strengthens it.

Paul,

I read that site you linked to, and he makes some good points, but the thing that I can't shake is that if you put 187 in TNR from Word next to 187 from the document, it's obvious that they don't match. The seven goes below the baseline, for one thing, and the 8 is much smaller up top. (The seven's don't always go below the baseline, which could be optical distortion.) Similarly for the "t" in the so-called superscript: the line thicknesses are much greater. And the j in "job," and the serifs in general. The lower-case g's also look different.

Of course this isn't proof that the documents weren't forged, but the font is obviously not Times New Roman. The font could have been a lot of different things that look very similar to Times New Roman, and yet still forged on Microsoft Word, but anyone who argues that it is Times New Roman, and that this is how we know it's a forgery is just plain wrong. I'm sure this guy can write Postscript until the cows come home, but if he's not even aware of Times lookalikes that had all kinds of crazy names, some of which were used in typewriters, it's hard to say that he's an expert in typography.

He even spends a paragraph talking about how, since it's obviously in Times New Roman (which it isn't) it's impossible that it could have been generated in the seventies, because laser printers didn't have that high of resolution. I'm sure they didn't, but who claimed that they had? All you need is a Times look-alike to appear in a typewriter, which is definitely the case. (IBM's version was called "Press Roman," to avoid trademark problems.) In fact, given Times' popularity, it would be hard to believe that there wasn't a typewriter that could do it.

I mean, for crying out loud, he puts those two examples of "from" next to each other to demonstrate the negative "C-spacing" as proof that the documents were computer generated, and he fails to notice that the shapes of the f's in both cases are completely different. (The negative C-spacing isn't that convincing either.)

The uneven baselines seems like an obvious thing to spot in a typewritten document, but it is true that they could be artifacts of reproduction. In fact, there's lots of things that can't really be pinned down without a higher-resolution copy.

There's one really important thing that we need to look at: the actual golf-balls with the "th" ligature glyphs. There's no reason why they couldn't have typed above the top of the characters, but it ought to be easy to verify.

I think Big Media Matt has a link to the story where they put actual typewritten output next to actual Word output and they are indistinguishable.

Doesn't anybody remember Whitewater?

After all this time, I can't believe how easily we assume these things are forgeries simply because the Washington Post says so.... There seems to be a pattern here, a claim is made that these are forgeries, EVERYONE either believes it blindly or suspects it is true, and then a few days later, it gets pointed out how the claim isn't correct, and then another claim is made. rinse and repeat.

I'm not a document expert, but from what I've seen, every supposed "expert" claim has in time been shot down.

Someone above mentioned an idea that I recently had independently.

First, consider that if the documents are 'forged', where did the forger get a passable "Killian" signature?

So, my theory is this. Karl Rove's minions had the real documents. These might be handwritten or typed in Pica on an Underwood. And hand-signed. Doesn't really matter. Those are the authentic documents that Killian created in the early '70s when the Nixon Justice Dept started investigating TANG, hoping to find some dirty Democrat kids who slipped into the Guard, so Nixon could add their parents to his blacklist (this story broke yesterday: google it yourself).

Karl sez to his wily self: "Self, if I were to make a word for word copy of these authentic documents, but in a way that would be found to be inauthentic, including scanning, Photoshopping, and pasting the authentic signature onto the docs, then fax it to myself a couple times, then Xerox it a couple times, then pass it along to, oh let's see, which news org have I had the longest running feud with and would most deliciously love to burn, AHA! CBS, of course!

Well, what would be the harm in that? If they (CBS) bite and run with it, we'll already have dropped the hint into the ears of the wingnut blogs to be on the lookout for mischief. If they don't bite, then these documents will never see the light of day in either a forged or an authentic form.

If CBS runs with it, we'll immediately release our inauthentic copies without comment, contritely apologizing for having missed them earlier in the big Document Dredgeup that we've now several times claimed was COMPLETELY finished....before recanting.

Then once the faked copies are shown to be more or less untrustworthy, we just sit back and watch Rather sink in the quicksand, and everyone in the country, left and right, conclude that any further discussion of little George's Summer of Rehab is no longer to be looked at, except through the distorting mirror of 'any evidence you have is possibly fake'. Beautiful. Self, you know I love ya!"

This explains the signature verification, the typeface non-verification, and casts a pall over the meaning of the actual text. I'm not saying that the 'copier' might not have introduced a few minor changes (Commander vs. Commanding; 1stLT vs 1LT, etc.) during the transcription process. That's just spice for the stew.

Consider this, esp. in light of Rove's well-documented past experiences in the black arts.

A perfectly logical reason why Killian memos don't perfectly match official guard documents... These were personal CYA memos, so he typed them himself. Different typist type differently, often on different typewriters.

Hasn't anybody ever worked at an office that produces a lot of documents? Not having every document being identical in formatting doesn't prove crap to me.

> There seems to be a pattern here, a claim is made that these are forgeries, EVERYONE either believes it blindly or suspects it is true

I don't believe blindly what is apparent on seeing it. I would like these memos to be real, and I believe that the rightwingers would be calling them forgeries even if they were real. But I've studied them. I've studied other text from that time period. I've posted links to a good bit of it on Brad's discussion board. I've learned the difference between an IBM Executive, an IBM Selectric, and an IBM Selectric Composer. I've seen examples of text done with Composer that is close but not close enough to the memos. It's been a fun education.

Based on a preponderance of evidence, I have personally reached the conclusion that the simplest, most believable explanation for these memos is that they're forgeries.

Now, that's just me. You can believe whatever you want. Actually, I don't even care if you believe me. But please don't insult me by suggesting that I'm taking the word of bloggers or whatever "experts" show up in media accounts.

A couple additions to my theory above.

1. The relevance of the Nixon investigation was that it set off a flurry of CYA writing by many TANG commanders, past and present, since it looked like it might end up scandalizing some careers. This explains why Staudt could still expect the people he once commanded to cover his backside for acts that took place while he was in command.

2. This explains Hodges agreeing with the expression of feelings in the Killian memos, but is in perfect agreement with him stating that the memos are 'forgeries'.

3. There is an epistemological question though: is a perfect copy of an authentic document, done by another method, a 'forgery'? Are all Xerox copies forgeries? Second drafts? Hmm.

4. All the verbiage wasted on proving the docs compare to MS-Word docs is ipso facto moot. The copies are Word documents. So what? I'm not going to defend Rather who I hate for numerous reasons (and note to true believers; he has been taken in before), but didn't he say "CBS has come into possession of copies of documents..." or words to that direct effect? So even unknowingly, he hasn't claimed them to be the authentic documents, has he? Not that that and $5 will get him a cuppa java at the nearest Starbucks.

> is a perfect copy of an authentic document, done by another method, a 'forgery'? Are all Xerox copies forgeries? Second drafts?

Not sure what you mean by "perfect". If it is recognizable as a xerox copy, then clearly it is not a perfect duplicate.

In any case, a xerox copy or any other easily manipulated form clearly does NOT prove the existence of an original. It might have at one time when forgeries would have created artifacts from cut-and-paste, but it is now possible to produce entirely fabricated output that is indistinguishable from a copy of an original.

In the case of the Killian memos, we are not even dealing with xerox copies but electronic representations purportedly of photocopies.

Therefore, unless you can produce the original, you have not proven or even made a compelling case for the existence of the original document.

Why am I the only one who notices huge glaring differences between Times New Roman and the font in the CBS documents? A short list (taken from observations at this link:
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/006148.php#13144)
Differences in CBS documents from MS Word:
"7" goes below baseline.
"e" is thinner.
"o" is thinner.
"d" stem is shorter.
"f" serif at base more pronounced.
"I" serif much more pronounced.
"g" lower half completely different.
"8" upper half completely different.
"s" is smaller on upper half.

and so on...
And who is to say Killian didn't type these docs at some later date after the FBI began investigating TANG for abuses involving priviledged people getting into the guard to avoid Vietnam? When did CBS ever date these memos?
There are dates on the memo's, but they could be dates to reflect when the orders were given, not when they were created.
This whole thing is so irritating. Nobody has any solid evidence except for USA Today and CBS and looking at these faxes involves so much conjecture that it seems pointless.

Some general points.
1) What it looks like on the screen is not how it looks on paper. WYSIWIG is far from perfect.

2) Different printers look differnt. 1200 DPI? 600 DPI? Which exact version of a font is used. PCL vs Postscript.

3) Ragged alignment of the baseline would be easy to fake in Photoshop, Quark Express. No serious forger would use MS Word.

4) Exact alignment of tm (raised baseline vs text-top alignment) is quite possible to fiddle with in XHTML (xml + css)
see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visudet.html#propdef-vertical-align
see text-top vs super.

5) Claiming 'Obviousness' is not a proof. I never got away with it in collage Math

(And yes, I am a computer programmer working on text layout and display issues.)

6) This could be resolved if CBS revealed their sources and the versions of the docs they have. Why not?

Hot Air Holsclaw just **knows** that the forger, if any, works either for Kerry or CBS. He needs no evidence to say that for sure. (And to think that Sebastian is actually one of the smarter trolls.)

Mark Brown: "An honest liberal (if a week late)."

Yeah sure, everyone who didn't agree with LGF immediately last Thursday is dishonest. Talk about restoring civility. ("A week late"? You actually wanted us to reject the memos a day before they were released -- since that's what you did).

There are intelligent, honest conservatives, but by your post we can conclude that you are not one of them.

Killian's secretary, who did all his typing, including memos to his personal file, says the memos are fakes. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/washington/elections2004/stories/090904dnpolmemos.fae722ba.html

To determine if the documents are forgeries, please turn to your Microsoft word document and type the following two letters. F and R as in fr.

type it in 48point so that you can clearly see.

the r is tucked under the f. No typewriter in the world, not the IBM Selectric Composer or the Selectric can do that. yet, you find it in the memos in the 19 May 1972 first word, second line paragraph one. Nuff said, proof positive.

> Killian's secretary, who did all his typing, including memos to his personal file, says the memos are fakes.

Significantly, she corroborates the content anyway(!)

http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/9663320.htm?1c

New documents critical of President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard are fake, although they accurately reflect the thoughts of one of Bush's commanders and were likely based on notes he kept in a personal file, according to a former secretary.

I worked with similar documents from that era from 1988-1993 while doing resumes for lifers who went into the military circa 1968-1973. The consistency people associate with military documents is grossly overblown. Prior to PCs even paper size was not standardized (a goal maybe, but not one that was widely met). One authenticated Bush document shows at least six different typewriters were used to update the information. This was not uncommon.

Guard documents were the least standardized, in part because civilian soldier officers often took work off the base with them for their secretaries to do. Mahablog has posted on this at length, and is a good resource on the IBM Selectric. The IBM Composer frequently referenced, to the best of my knowledge, used the same element (typeball) as the Selectrics, so the availability of machines with superscript (not platin-jiggling) capability was widespread. I would guess Selectrics were at least as common then as Macintosh computers are now, and for similar reasons.

My memories of those documents is not exact and I did not retain copies, but I distinctly rememember working with Guard documents composed on Selectrics as I used to own a Selectric and recognized some of the fonts and tricks that other typewriters didn't do.

Since these memos could easily have been created off base, much of the arguments about the equipment used are moot. If any machines of that era could have created these documents, then there is no compelling reason to doubt their authenticity. As to Guard documents, I'd say there was less than a 50-50 chance of my seeing a package that was remotely consistent in the use of typing equipment, so dissimilar documents would be more the norm than the exception.

In no way shape or form am I vouching for the authenticity of these documents, but as a former Selectric user now on a Mac who loves fonts, I have been distressed by some of the truly stupid things I have seen used as examples to prove the forged nature of these documents.

I also have little use for "experts" who would hazard an opinion based on online .pdfs of faxed photocopies. It should be noted that the expert Brouffard had to back off when it turned out his allegedly vast collection of typewriters didn't include one single IBM Selectric.

This really is a silly debate being driven by people who can't bring themselves to take a hard look at George Bush's service record. As Jeanne d'Arc said, "On the right, 'evidence' is just whatever supports what you want to believe."

If you want to have a serious debate, get the original documents or find a catalog of every element ever released by IBM for use with the Selectric.

Fort Wayne Star-Telegram: "Killian's ex-secretary says memos on Bush are forged, but information on them is correct"

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/special_packages/election2004/9663309.htm

Which, if true, could explain everything we need to know right there -- including the White House's silence. Admittedly the lady makes it clear she detests Bush; but this story is far from over, however it ultimately turns out.

"Which, if true, could explain everything we need to know right there -- including the White House's silence."

Well, exactly, as I said above. Way above. Has CBS ever said they were anything but accurate *representations* of actual documents?

By "accurate representations", CBS made it clear they meant that they were photocopies of supposedly authentic typed documents -- NOT typed notes of someone's supposed memories of the handwritten originals. If CBS has any sense -- which I strongly doubt -- they'll try to salvage as much of this sitution as they can by staging an interview with the lady, who is apparently very talkative.

Why is the press fretting so over these memos and yet remains utterly incurious about whoever it was who forged the Niger uranium documents--which just happened to end up in the hands of an Italian journalist who just happened to be working for a right-wing Italian magazine that just happened to recommend she immediately turn the documents over to the American Embassy?

There is an obvious reason why these memos might be different from all other memos: they are for Killian's personal file, i.e. they are *all* cover your ass memos. They are not routine documents.

The people and process by which they were created might very well be different from SOP documents. E.g. lack of letterhead, different typing style, and so on and so on.

He was building a file, not conducting normal business.

It's not the meat, it's the motion.

Nothing sticks to the Teflon Don,
which makes you wonder why Ms. Bush
is doing such ernest damage control!

Could it be real memos are out there?

Or could the memos have been written
in '80's (when they had IBM Selectrics)
just before Killian then mysteriously
died, at the demand of higher ups for
gap-closing paper prior to GHWBush's
re-election and the big RR Star Wars
Defense putsch? But because Killian wrote
"I'll backdate but won't rate (GWB)"
they sent Luigi to have a "talk" with him?

People play for keeps in George'stown.

This problem is best solved by outsourcing to Haiti - will need a Tier 1 voodoo outfit . B ring this Killian guy back from the dead

Skip the details. The real issues in all of this wreckage are:

1) Bush obviously failed to meet his National Guard commitments as well as the penalties. This information can be gleamed from his own, released records and from his biography.

2) The Bush administration's failure to come forward on this issue is yet another indication of this administration's lack of self-accountability and self-denial, and that's the REAL issue of this election.

End Of Story

Couple of points people on this thread don't seem to know about:

1. The Selectric Composer theory is dead in the water. Someone with a Selectric Composer tried it and the character spacing doesn't match at all and could not be adjusted to match.
http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/09/the_ibm_selectr.html

2. CBS News was warned before they went to air by the document experts they hired that these documents were highly dubious:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation/bush_guard_documents_040914-1.html

1. The Selectric Composer theory is dead in the water. Someone with a Selectric Composer tried it and the character spacing doesn't match at all and could not be adjusted to match.
http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/09/the_ibm_selectr.html

You can't do that.
The CBS documents is a copy of a copy which is scanned into .pdf which is then enlarged digitally. We have more than one type of distortion.

And you expect the font to match? Of course it won't.

Come on, jsut watch the rest of Bush documents, All the fonts are mangled. Some even appears to be a fax copy.

Hate to say it, but CBS is toast. That secretary Brad quotes in the post says she also typed memos for the file. (Back then, real men didn't type.)

Somebody should buy Don Hewitt a drink. He's been gone, what 4 weeks? and Rather blows the 60-Minutes franchise. Even their defense keeps breaking down. The docs clearly weren't thoroughly vetted.

2 possibilities:
1) CBS's likely source for the docs was Burkett. He knew Killian and witnessed the original doc purge. It's possible he was trying to reconstruct the docs from memory. Remember, at the same time the secretary says the docs are forgeries, she also says that they accurately reflect Killian's thinking at the time.

2) It's a Rove black op. No doubt Rove would be willing to do it. Hey, maybe it's a joint operation between Chalabi's people & the Italians who produced the Niger whopper. But this seems like an awfully big risk, unless you're willing to kill everybody who knows who created the forgeries. And no, I don't think Killian was killed to shut him up.

Best thing for Kerry to do is have the campaign issue a statement reminding everyone that it had nothing to do with the CBS report, then summarize the uncontroverted record which is plenty damning. Arranging some interviews with Bush's Harvard b-school prof wouldn't be a bad thing either.

Speaking as a long time graphics professional, the font issues alone are enough to destroy the memos' credibility. But to claim that their content is true without proof is wishful thinking and uses its inherent assumption to prove itself. That's a no no. A fallacious argument.

The Bush folks have taken the high ground here, saying nothing about the content. The White House merely sent out copies of the CBS memos without comment. That is not proof of anything.

CBS is sitting on the limb it's sawing off with one hand while busy shooting itself in the foot with the other.