Posted on 09/09/2004 1:22:10 PM PDT by TastyManatees
That should be a task that can be accomplished with a little effort. Anything that came over the Commanding officer's signature which dealt with official business should be discoverable. For instance See BS claims to have had originals of the Col's signature to compare with their documents. Where did they find it? If on an official memo or order they should produce it for comparison.
Drudge already has it up! Prepare for a fecal-fling!
Thanks for enlightening us all. No really, you raised our level of understanding of the issue to a level I personally didn't think could be achieved. You are absolutely vital to this discussion, and you deserve credit for holding CBS to their words. Without your expertise and calm help in sorting out the forgery question, we all would have been lost.
Really. I mean it.
Look, we are in agreement at this point, but how half baked was the assumption about the proportional font being an indicator of forgery in view of the fact that this expert endorses it?
sorry, that's a bogus rationalization.
First, have you ever worked with a scanner? It doesn't make things less legible.
Second, they'd retype the documents, and then create all the artifacts to make it look like an old document?
Third, instead of putting up the original document online, they put up their re-created document, and pass it off as original?
Sorry, this theory is ridiculous.
IBM typewriter with proportional spacing was introduced in 1941.
IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was further enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page. The proportional spacing feature became a staple of the IBM Executive series typewriters.http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1941.html
On the Executive, you could optionally have removable type-bars. This is somewhat like later Smith-Corona portables which have removable type-slugs on the two outermost type-bars, with corresponding changeable keytop caps. In this case, though, it's the whole type-bar.http://www.geocities.com/wbd641/TypeManuals2.html
Howie Carr, Boston Herald, RKO Radio Boston, is now reading the articles on air....audience New England and NY.
If you fire up Word with default margins and default font (Times New Roman at 12 pts), and type the text of the memos yourself, the results are exactly the same as the pdfs of the actual memos. Characters line up with characters on adjacent lines perfectly. (I did this myself with the last memo.) It's hard to avoid the conclusion that not only are these memos fake, they're not even very good fakes. I hope this ends Rather's career.
LOL. This place is amazing...
This is so cool . . . how many times has the partisan media twisted some seemingly positive piece of information about Bush into a bizarre negative attack (like that whole yellow cake uranium fiasco, where the entire focus of the MSM was on who in the Bush Whitehouse leaked the info) . . . now the blogosphere is pulling the same thing on CBS . . . CBS thought they had nailed Bush, but now the story is all about CBS and how big of a lie they told . . . the point they tried to make has faded into the background noise, drowned out by this new hoax scandal . . . they are going to have to defend themselves, rather than attack Bush . . . sweet . . .
He's pretty good at steering this ship, too!! He's always on Watch. God love him and protect him.
The above is a superimposition of an MS Word 2002 document (red) and the "original" memo (gray).
The document was typed using Times New Roman size 12. The document used the standard MS Word formatting. The only deviation: The header was further indented 1/8th of an inch from the default.
In order to superimpose the 2, the original was resized twice, once in the horizontal direction and once in the vertical. The relative proportions were NOT changed on either document.
Anybody would like to guess the chances that a 1970's typewriter and a 2002 version of MS Word would yield documents that are so similar???
These things have feet, even hard core rats that I know read Drudge.
The obvious question is why would CBS would not vet them very carefully before airing them?? I know Dan Rather is in the tank for Kerry, as reported earlier. Did he run roughshod over the other producers and editors at CBS who may have counseled further investigation?? This may have been Rather's swan song and he couldn't resist it!! Could this have been a plant by some anti-CBS hoaxers who couldn't believe that CBS would go for such obvious bait?? Fun questions to ponder this afternoon.
The expert was suspicious about the proportional font, but consider this: wouldn't that be the first thing anyone would notice? How smart would it be for CBS to present a document that couldn't possibly be typed in 1972?
Don't answer that.
How smart would it be for a forger to produce an impossible document that sticks out like a sore thumb, especially when ordinary military typewriters are easily available?
I respect the expert's opinion, particularly when he gets into the nuts and bolts of typeface differences. This is enough to require a look at the original document.
Can someone dig up other documents prepared by this guy around the same time to see if they match the type on these? Go!
I guess the same odds that Kerry will sign standard form 180 and release "ALL" of his records.
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