"You and I know that, but the people involved may not have thought that, for various reasons. The forger may have been an amateur, CBS being afflicted with groupthink and absence of critical analysis.
The only other calculus that makes sense is to keep something else out of the news for a few days, and risk the credibility hit as being short-lived and shallow-reaching."
Or, as someone suggested, an office prank that slipped out the door somehow. It has happened here on FR, as I remember.
I just don't know. I do know that if I wanted to produce a fake document of this type, nobody would ever figure it out, and I'm an amateur, but a smart one. I can't imagine a dirty tricks unit being that boneheaded. So, I'm sure there's some other answer. Maybe it's just a prank and we'll find that out. I don't know.
So could an IBM Composer kern? Dr. Bouffard can't say with 100% accuracy, but he does not think it's possible that early machines had the computer memory necessary to complete such a function. The only possible way to find out would be to obtain an IBM Composer circa 1972. Long story short? I'm just presenting the analysis one expert forensic document examiner that specializes in typefaces, so, ignoring the statements by Killian's family that disavow the documents, ignoring the inconsistencies in tone, format and the active military status of individuals mentioned in the memo, soley based on forensic typographical analysis, it is highly unlikely that the documents are real, and if someone can verify that a 1972 IBM Composer cannot kern (or auto center, for that matter), then it will be completely verified that the documents are frauds. Once again, I am not commenting on the myriad of other angles that question this story, merely providing an in depth summary of Dr. Bouffard's findings. To quote: "Because it takes such a stretch to come up with all of the remote possibilities involved in creating the (CBS) document, it is much more likely that it is a computer generated document. ... I can't imagine the Composer would have enough memory (to kern)."