Posted on 09/10/2004 12:47:25 PM PDT by WoodstockCat
Compare one of the Jerry Killian memos given to CBS News,
and allegedly produced in 1972, to the same text created using MS Word 2002. A person who wishes to remain anonymous forwarded a link to me for an animated presentation which overlaps the two documents and shows, using a current font, how tab spacing and inter-line spacing match the defaults in Microsoft's Word.
You'll need to have Macromedia Flash installed to watch the slide show. Check it out at:
http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf
Partial article from my link above:
November 10, 1999
NEW YORK (CNN) -- To keep a producer from being thrown into jail, CBS News on Wednesday turned over the transcript of an interview that Dan Rather conducted with the third defendant being tried for murder in the dragging death of a black man.
The trial of Shawn Allen Berry, 24, got under way in Jasper, Texas, on Wednesday after a judge refused a defense request for a change of venue.
Two other men, white supremacists John William King and Lawrence Russell Brewer, already have been convicted and sentenced to die for chaining James Byrd Jr. by his ankles to a pickup truck and dragging him along a country road until his body was torn apart.
The interview with Berry was conducted by Rather two months ago. Portions were aired on "60 Minutes II" on September 28. CBS released the entire transcript Wednesday after an appeals court Tuesday refused to overturn two contempt citations against producer Mary Mapes.
Judge Joe Bob Golden, who is presiding at Berry's trial, ordered Mapes jailed twice for refusing to comply with prosecution subpoenas to provide a transcript and videotape of the interview.
Brent Bozell, President of the MRC, is scheduled to appear
tonight, Friday, on FNC's Hannity & Colmes. CBS's "Memogate" is sure to be a topic. Hannity & Colmes airs twice nightly. By time zone:
EDT: 9pm and 2am
CDT: 8pm and 1am
MDT: 7pm and 12am
PDT: 6pm and 11pm
Supposedly it has been said that they got these records from the deceased colonel's PERSONELL records. Number 1, how would CBS get a release of the colonel's personnel records? Number 2, Those type of documents WOULD NOT appear in anyone's personnel records. What a crock of crap. Whoever perpetrated this lie is banking on the general public not knowing what goes into a military personnel record. You won't find any personal memos I wrote in my personnel records, the admin/personnel records would laugh at you and recommend you to psych services if you tried to get them to do it. I have my personnel records, they were given to me when I retired. The master records are banked away in whatever AF repository. These morons are definitely smoking dope.
Gonna be a broken record here, but this is a very important detail, 13 point type!! Typewriters were either elite or pica. Elite is 12 CPI (characters per inch) & Pica is 10 CPI. Platten return height, distance beteen the top of one row of characters, to the top of the next row of characters is also an important element of a document to examine. The exact match up with the Word docs created create as much concern as the width of each of the characters.
Apparently, Mary doesn't consider Pro-Bush people to be credible. Even if it involves the Colonel's own family!!!
anti-Bush are paragons. Pro-Bush are liars.
Yes, I noticed the "th" up and the "th" down also. I agree with what you are saying. Intentional sloppiness.
The question for the next quarter century and beyond: who was Deep Font?!
"It is Mary Mapes. She recieved the documents."
You have to wonder. If she did not have the docs a few weeks ago when she talked to Killian yada yada yada then some very bad fakes show up.
"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.
"I think that perhaps the hoaxers weren't especially serious, and didn't think anyone would take them very seriously, upon careful examination. Probably just trying to pull a prank on a friend.
"
A possibility. Boy, if that's the case, did it ever backfire!
Maybe it was done by someone who was out to GET Dan Rather?
You may be giving the forger too much credit. Almost anyone, regardless of typing skills, can knock out a decent-looking document in MS Word, using default settings (as this doc used). The average user doesn't know much about fonts or spacing, only that the typefaces look somewhat similar. Heck, anyone below the age of 30 might not even know typewriters ever existed!
You assume that spaces were inserted intentionally to prevent superscript, but it could just as easily have been a typing error by someone with not much eye for detail.
Perhaps you, or anyone with a degree of intelligence/experience, would have paid much more attention to detail, such as aged paper, the use of a typewriter of that era, and conformity to military abbreviations, but suppose the originator never thought these documents would be publicly distributed (by the White House, no less) and thus would not subjected to the resulting scrutiny?
Dumb? Yes. An intentional strawman? Not necessarily.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Y39Sb.5962239%24be.974637%40news.easynews.com
29 January 2004
George, I don't know if you have any military background or not, but if you do and you looked at those documents, you could very easily discover the obvious forgeries, alterations and lack of authenticating seals. If you want, go back to them and check out these things. One chronological listing that is typed, except for a couple of handwritten entries. Wouldn't you think the guy making those entries would at the very least know the military date format? On another, look at the address of the Capitan. Do you really thing official military or National Guard business would be conducted using an officer's HOME ADDRESS? On another you will note the address as being PO Box 34567, gosh isn't that imaginative? And, check out the ZIP Code versus the city. Not even close. And check all the documents to see if you can see any of the 3 required authenticating seals. I bought those documents from the great Marty Heldt web site. Only 1 record actually has all three authenticating seals and marks and it has nothing at all to do with the charges being made. This is an uban legend that a couple of guys are making a lot of money off of. It was there well before the election of 2000 and had absolutely no bearing at all on the election and will probably have even less now that it has all been proven a lie. The people that fall for this are a bunch of juvenille jerks that would not know their ass from a bass fiddle when it comes to military matters. But, it makes them feel like they are somebody amongst their playmates and that's all they can claim as the major accomplishment in their miserable lives.
That's exactly right!
Why? Because they know we're on their side.
(sarcasm) Gee, I wonder why there are no 'Commies for Bush?' (/sarcasm)
See my reply to MineralMan. MS Word does different spacing in the same example of "iiiii", "ooooo", "wwwww", "mmmmm".
It's probably that nasty Kerning that does it. The IBM didn't have it. MS Word does.
You got it. The Pumkin Papers typewriter.
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