Posted on 09/09/2004 7:15:52 PM PDT by Mike Fieschko
Farrell Shiver is the owner of Shiver & Nelson, a document investigation lab in Woodstock, Georgia. Here are his qualifications:
* Certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners
* Member and Treasurer of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners
* Member of the Questioned Documents Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences
* Member of the Southeastern Association of Forensic Document Examiners
* Former Chief Document Examiner - U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory
* Editor, Journal of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners
* Graduate of, and former chief instructor for the U.S. Army's two-year resident training program in Forensic Document Examination
* Court qualified expert, including U.S. Federal District Court
* Experienced in criminal cases and civil cases
* Author of numerous papers and articles on the subject of Forensic Document Examination
* Retired Special Agent of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command
I interviewed Shiver on air two hours ago, and here's the transcript of that exchange:
HH: Farrell Shiver, welcome to the program.
FS: Thank you for asking, Hugh.
HH: Have you had a chance to take a look at these documents?
FS: Just briefly, this afternoon.
HH: Do they raise any questions in your mind?
FS: Yes they do.
HH: Can you tell me what kind of questions they raise?
FS: Well, I looked over some of the websites that have been discussing this, and I downloaded the pdf files showing the memos from the internet. One of the things that people have been discussing is the proportional spacing of the documents, and just to give your listeners an idea of what I am talking about, when I am talking about proportional spacing, if you were to type on a your computer just a row of the letter w, and then underneath that a row of the letter i, and you were to change that font that you used on your computer between the courrier type font and the Times New Roman type font you would see in the courrier type font that the letters would wind up in nice little neat vertical rows, and that is typically how a typewriter would prepare a document, in these nice little neat vertical rows, unless it was a proportional spacing typewriter. In the Times New Roman, you will see that they do not line up in neat rows. Each letter is given just enough space for that letter, so the lowere case letter i would not need as much space as a w, which is a wider letter. Now, all the memos that are in question, are what we would call proportional spacing, how a book is typed, if you buy a book off the shelf, how they are type-set. And in some of these web sites they have talked about how pro[portional spacing would not have been available in 1972, that it only became available with the advent of computers and word processing, and that's not really true. Proportional space typewriters originated as early as the late 1930s, and were introduced commercially in 1944. So proportional space typewriters have been around for quite a while, so just the fact that these memos are done proportionally spaced is not enough to say that they are not genuine.
However there are some other features that are in the documents such as the "th" combination behind the 11th in the 4 May 1972 document.
A quick google on "Shiver Nelson Document" certainly shows this man's credentials. Wow, I think CBS is toast on this one....
According to sources close to CBS, Dan Rather now claims that the instrument (computer) used to type the Bush documents was secretly removed from Area 51 during the mid-1950s. Area 51 is also known as Groom Lake, which is a secret military facility about 90 miles north of Las Vegas.
Mr. Rather is going to do a special on this within the next week, however, because of closely guarded military secrets, he may not be able to reveal the entire truth.
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