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Why would they have 5 people transcribing presidential calls? Sounds flintstonian.

I heard there were 4 transcribers, but I'll take your word that you've got that right.

The answer is redundancy. It actually lends credibility to the "officialness" of the document. For example, say one transcriber decides NOT to include something...maybe he's a political hack and figures it would make the president look bad...he has four other transcribers' accounts to contend with. If one can't understand a word, he has four other transcribers' accounts of what word was said. You've got 10 ears making darn sure that the call is transcribed properly.

When they run around boo-hooing about how this isn't a verbatim recording, they are intentionally being misleading. This transcript is produced by five professionally trained transcribers to ENSURE the record of the call is correct.

You don't have tapes with "blank spots". You don't have digital recordings that are edited together. You don't have servers that are "bleachbitted". You have human beings ensuring that every second of this portion of the American historic record is recorded accurately. Human beings that, if called upon, should be able to TESTIFY that their accounts were correct.

"Why would they have 5 people transcribing presidential calls? Sounds flintstonian."

Good question. It turns out this "transcript" is really a document called "A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation," something that's close to a verbatim transcript, but not quite that. What actually happens is there are five people listening to the conversation and each is taking notes that are as close to a transcript as possible, like a college history student taking the best possible notes of a professor's lecture he can, but not an actual transcript. Then the five sit sown and reconcile their notes to produce a quasi-transcript that's as accurate as possible. Here's the explanation of this from the "transcript":

CAUTION: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation.· (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty "Officers and-NSC policy staff assigned t_o listen.and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place. A numper of factors can affect 'the accuracy of the reco�d, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation. The word "inaudible" is used to indifate portions of a conversation that the notetaker was unable to hear.