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Bush Service Memos Questioned
Twirlip of the Mists writes "Last night, CBS News released a set of memos dated 1972 and 1973 that are purported to raise questions about President Bush's National Guard service. Some are saying those memos might have been produced with a computer. Blogger Scott Johnson ran with the story first this morning, raising questions about the typography of the memos. Blogger Charles Johnson (no relation) went one step further, actually reproducing one of the memos in its entirety using Microsoft Word's default settings.
Matt Drudge is running the story now with a link to a CNS News article that includes quotes from typography experts at font foundries Afga Monotype and Bitstream.
There's a round-up of key facts about the story on this blogger's web site." The experts in the CNS News story and others could come to no conclusion, and even if the documents are not originals or photocopies of originals, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't faithfully retyped copies of originals. CBS continues to assert the documents are authentic.
While I agree with the assertion that these could be retyped, CBS is claiming that's not what has happened, that these are originals.
I've made a superimposed image of Word vs. the documents. They have been lined up according to the period after the '1' in the first paragraph. The 'originals' are in red, the Word version in blue.
CBS's reputation is at stake. They must obtain and release the originals. That is the only way to satisfy the critics. As it stands now, it is blatantly obvious that CBS hasn't been checking their sources and as such, they can't be trusted to break stories.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
If these are forged, why did the White House release them?
At first I thought it was idiot Democrats trying to smear, now maybe it is idiot Republicans trying to make Democrats look bad.
I can't wait to see if anyone can demonstrate what military typewriters in 1972 were capable of proportional fonts!!!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
... and nothing on John Kerry's service record or his post-service Vietnam war related activities? Kerry is anything from a hero to a traitor who should have been executed a long time ago, depending on who you believe. Much more interesting stuff.
I think Slashdot's political section is biased.
There's a lot of motivation right now, both to discredit Bush and to make him look alright. I wouldn't be surprised if this is fake.
I said it before today but I'll say it again:
.
Whether or not you can replicate the doc in word or on your 1907 eniac prototype typewriter is irrelevant if the candidate doesn't come out to deny the allegations . .
If he DOES come out and call shenanigans then let professionals take a look at the docs and make a judgement - if he won't deny what's being implied then it's fairly obvious that reproduced or not, they're the truth . . .
so I couldn't check for myself- but certainly the ONE document that this CNS article refers to, if it is porportionately spaced, would be VERY odd to have been typed in 1974. I didn't even learn about porportional spacing until 1987 myself- with some problems run into with a brand-new handheld scanner at that time when scanning out of a magazine that TYPESET porportional spaced fonts- and I never saw a computer do porportional spacing until my school got a copy of Adobe Print Shope in 1988. NO printer before dot matrix days could do it that I know of, and only one typewriter.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I find it hard to believe I just read that. Technically that is true, but it sounds like "if it turns out the documents are forged, let's still give them the benefit of the doubt that the documents really existed." By the same reasoning, if a reporter makes up a quote and is found out, that still doesn't mean the person didn't say it, so don't reject the quote!
In any investigation, if the documents are fake there is no reason to assume real ones existed.
No- the original was the guard memos released, this is the update, that the guard memos are false.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Exactly- it's on the guy who provided these to CBS now to prove that originals exist.
And the moral of the story is if you're going to forge records from the early 1970s, at least go to the trouble to find early 1970s equipment to do it on.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Excuse me, but this is just stupid. "Just because they are fake doesn't mean they are false". So if I make up something, does that mean it is true?
If these are merely retypings, then the originals must exist somewhere. These are supposed documents written by a dead officer. If the originals don't exist, it was all made up and CBS is untrustworthy as a news source.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
When I first saw this on Little Green Footballs (linked from fark) i dismissed it out of hand, since I knew there were perportional width font keyboard out there, and that the people who made the times-new-roman font could have tried to match some typographic standard.
That said, if it turns out these were made in Word, I think it would be more likely that they had been retyped.
It's also strange that Bush himself re-released the memos after they were made public.
I also have to wonder, where did these come from. Where did they find these things, I'd think that bush's records had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb long ago.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Dupe from about 6 hours ago. The thread discusses the forgery allegations, although Twirlip obviously wants to make it more of a discussion.
I thought I removed this topic section from my preferences just so I could avoid this kind of crap. If I wanted political spin, I'd go to Fox News. Instead, I go to
--
$tar -xvf
This seems to be what US politics is all about.
Democrats:"Here are some documents relating to dubious military service 30 years ago!"
Republicans:"Liars they are forged! Here are some potential reasons to prove it!"
Which is to say, there are two parties, that are essentially identical (yes, yes, they have their differences, but compared to the differences in other countries, they are trivial), that find pleasantly obscure and largely irrelevant issues to have long and involved debates over, which the media (of course) buys into heavily. Don't let them waste your time! Don't get caught up in senseless hype chanting mantras about being AWOL, or faked documents - it mostly doesn't matter!
Take a step back, ignore "the other side" for a moment, and actually consider what is important.
Do you believe in larger government or smaller government? Good, now realise that it doesn't matter whether you vote Republican or Democrat because, regardless of rhetoric, if you look at the records they do an equally good job of growing government and government spending.
Do you believe conservative or liberal social policy? Good, now realise that it doesn't matter whether you vote Republican or Democrat because, regardless of rhetoric, if you look at the records neither side has actually implemented any significant social policy change in the last 20 years.
Stop getting distracted by soap operas over trivialities designed to distract you from the fact that neither side ever gets around to doing much of anything with regard to all their rhetoric. Stop letting yourself get dragged in to caring about petty debates over non issues. Take a look at what you actually believe in from a purely political philosophy point of view, and spend some time looking at what is going to work the best to see those ideas actually get implemented!
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
From http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/:
The conservative blog Powerline has a roiling debate or series of charges that the documents published by CBS last night are forgeries.
The basis of the claim is that the sort of proportional font spacing evidenced in the memoranda wasn't available at the time in question. It only came later with word processors and computers and laser printers. Basically, they say, all people had back then were old fashioned block-type typewriters.
On the face of it, that sounds logical to me. But the editor of the site has now posted the comments of at least one reader who says such machines were actually widely available at the time.
It seems worth noting that the White House accepted the documents as genuine and even began releasing them to other journalists yesterday evening -- though it's not clear to me whether they were releasing their own copies or simply passing on what CBS had given them.
The deeper point is that CBS reported that they had handwriting experts scrutinize these documents to ascertain their authenticity. It seems hard to imagine they'd go to such lengths to have experts analyze them and not check out something so obvious as seeing if they'd been written by a typewriter that was in existence at time. (Hard to imagine or, if true, unimaginably stupid.)
One way or another, I doubt we'll have to speculate about this for very long. This question about what sort of typesets were available in 1973 should be easy enough to settle.
Karma
I'd like to see the output of some high-end typewriters of the era. It's possible that the people who made "Times New Roman" for the PC tried to reproduce the typesetting font, and that typewriter makers in the 70s also perfectly emulated typesetting fonts. Someone needs to find one of those old proportional-width typewriters and compare the output with a freshly printed MS-Word document with the defaults. Until someone does that, the jury is out (at least in my mind)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
1. CBS cooked up an elaborate hoax and suckered the White House into releasing documents which cast the President in an unfair light, but somehow it didn't occur to them not to use MS Word, or...
2. The Bush Jr., a rich kid with a history of substance abuse issues and benefitting from nepotism, got into the guard to avoid Vietnam and then blew off his responsibilities when they became inconvenient.
I think it's a little early for you to get away with saying "the guard memos are false", don't you think? Even Drudge is hedging his language on this one, and we all know what a paragon of journalistic integrity he is.
Question, though: Does anyone, regardless of what they believe about THESE documents, really think Bush honorably completed his service? And don't give me any crap about "he got an honorable discharge and that settles it", either. Sons of privelege tend to have priveleges handed to them.
Bush just doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wouldn't take advantage of such a situation, if he could.
Well, thus endeth the accusations that politics.slashdot is left-wing only.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
Here are a few websites that reference this situation:
UPI: breaking news
littlegreenfootballs.com
AllahPundit here and here and here.
indcjournal.com
cnsnews.com
command-post.org
hftp.blogspot.com
This is getting out of hand.
It reminds me of a guy who walks into a shopping mall, throws a bunch of pennies on the floor, and while everying is on their hands and knees picking up loose change, he's making off with all their shopping bags.
People get off your knees. Have some self respect and decency and don't fall prey to this big inept pseudo-journalistic, National Enquirer-esque troll that really has very little to do with real issues.
Kerry went to Viet Nam. Bush did not. That's all there basically is. Whether Bush was snorting coke and avoided the health exam, or Kerry was shooting Viet Cong puppies in the back are stupid, distractions that people will forever argue. Let's not get side-tracked by these distractions both parties are vomiting during a time where it's important to pay attention to the real issues and who is best for the country.
The possibility also exists that they were manufactured by raiders from Remulak, and with only slightly less probability. CBS has nothing to gain from such a forgery, and everything to lose. Their reputation as a reliable source of news -- "liberal bias" or no -- is quite strong, and for them to make up documents like this would be profoundly stupid, especially since the documents themselves do not really add a whole lot to the case already made in the Ben Barnes interview. If anything, the controversy over these documents has distracted attention from the interview itself, which seems to have settled the question about whether Bush pulled strings to avoid military service. All the documents add to this is evidence that there were others in the military who thought this was wrong and that Bush was skipping out on duty.
Anyway, as I've said elsewhere, I think this is all a distraction from the real issue which is where will these candidates lead us in the future, not what mistakes might they have made thirty years ago.
In any case, there are a few reasons why I don't think they are fake:
1. Zoom in on the PDF scans that are available, and the characters seem to support typewriter more than laser printer. First, it seems that there are different ink-levels that one would expect from a ribbon. Compare like letters in different words and you will see that they are darker in some places, or have extra pixels representing "blobs" hanging off of them (bottom serif on the lowercase "n" is a good one). That may be scanning artifact, but it would indicate typewriter.
2. Everyone is making a big deal about the superscript 'th', but IIRC the IBM "golfball" typewriters had the superscripts as special characters (I'm not the first to point this out either). The connectedness of the "th," the fact that they have the same "ink level," and the fact that the entire "th" is no wider than the widest character seems to indicate to me that they were stroked by a typewriter.
3. If the superscript "th" was a function of Word's Auto Format, why didn't it happen in the "111th" in the letterhead?
4. Some of the letters, notably the lowercase "e", look too imprecise to have been laserwritten. Again, very well could be a scanning artifact.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
You are all overlooking the obvious possibility that the military has had access to modern computers since their time travel experiments in the 1940's. This was clearly typed back in the 60's using a then 20 year old copy of Word 2000. Simple questions call for simple answers.
Well, to me trying to implement is as important as actually implementing in determining how much I think a politician agrees with me.
And I guess it also depends on what your threshold for signifigance is. To me, it is very significant that under Bush's watch mercury compounds have suddenly been downgraded from toxic chemical status to "volatile organic compounds" and that manufacturers have been given the right to violate clean air acts.
I also think it is very significant that the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law with little protest by Clinton.
And on government spending and small vs. big government, I think the real truth is that the two parties have flip-flopped. Or rather, that the Republicans have made such a rapid shift to big government politics over the past 20 years that the Democrats, by not making many changes to their platform during that period of time, suddenly became the small government party.
So I don't think it's really that there is no difference between the two parties. (Hell, look at how many votes fall on partisan lines and try to tell me again that it doesn't matter which side is in power) Instead, I think it's that the disconnect between what each party claims to stand for and what it really does stand for has grown so large that it's getting darn near impossible to remember which party believes in what.
What needs to be done is to find an Executive and type out the memo on it, scan and post it to the net.
The 'd' and 'b' characters are pretty unique and their variation from Times doesn't look like a generational error. I don't see kerning in the memos, either. Word, on the other hand, does a good job kerning the "fe" in "feedback", for example.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
Kerry's military history is so last week. Bush's military history is what we're talking about today. Anyway, this is really intresting. And, btw what do the rest of this guy's personal documents look like are they all written in Times New Roman as well?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And even if the documents are retypings, they went to the trouble of faking the signature on it, which by itself is pretty damn untrustworthy.
Just look at the Discharge Document and other documents from Kerry. These all use either handwriting or fixed width fonts.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
When I first saw powerline's post today, I had to laugh out loud. We don't expect much from the old media anymore, but this is just ridiculous.
My question: Why does CBS rush these clearly faked documents to air when they won't even give the Swift Boat Vet's any time at all?
The same goes for the Today Show, and their running with Kitty's Kelly's (already debunked) book for three days next week?
Any way, hazaaa! for the New Media!!!
And I guess it also depends on what your threshold for signifigance is. To me, it is very significant that under Bush's watch mercury compounds have suddenly been downgraded from toxic chemical status to "volatile organic compounds" and that manufacturers have been given the right to violate clean air acts.
I also think it is very significant that the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law with little protest by Clinton.
Oh, I agree there are differences. My point was not that there aren't differences, but rather that they are, for the most part, fairly insignificant. US voters have become so used to splitting hairs, and debates over irrelevant issues as a means to differentiate that they have lost sight of just how similar these parties are.
Yes, the parties are different but compared to pretty much anywhere else in the world the differences between them are on very minor issues.
I'm most familiar with New Zealand politics, so I'll use that as an easy example. In the last election there were several parties standing. There was a party proposing a flat across the board 20% tax rate. There was a party seeking to institute a new top tax rate of 50%. There was a party seeking complete decriminalisation of marijuana and carbon taxes. And yes, all of those parties currently have seats in the New Zealand parliament (though none has a majority). Yes New Zealand has 2 major parties that are fairly centrist and consume most of the votes - but should either of those parties fall to close to the center they risk rapidly losing their votes to the more fringe parties (as has happened in previous elections) giving much greater sway to more radical points of view. Equally, should the electorate itself ever swing significantly, there are significant parties with credible support and reasonable expectations of receiving significant representation in parliament that people may vote for.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
So maybe it was a Linux user who forged these docucments...
Or, could it be something about the common origin of these type of typesetting equipment, fonts, spacing etc.
Far more likely that it's some kind of conspiracy...
If I have time and can risk my poor server I'll post the image like the above that Abiword generated.
-dameron
Old Media hits bottom, digs.
1 71 0.html
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040909_
Well, I'm a Kerry fan and even with biased eyes it looks like it's probably fake. It's still up in the air, (the last peice of evidence we need is to see the output from one of these fancy IBM typewriters that people claim could have been used, if it looks nothing like this, I'd say they're probably faked)
That said, the damage to the Kerry Campaign if these turn out to be fake will be a lot worse then the damage to the bush campaign if they turn out to be true.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Proportional spacing is one of the claims to this memo being fake. But IBM has been able to type proportionally since 1941. http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1941 .html
--chris
To a situation about to spin out of control makes this a "non left-wing site"?
I think not.
When I see a positive Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter article posted here with the same gusto as a Michael Moore one, then I'll say you're right.
Start looking at IBM selectric typewriters on ebay Then point me to the one that may have made the superscript "th". By the way, it also needed to be available in the early 70's.
The 7 days guy went back in time do to this?
No wait... that can't be right... that'd be longer than 7 days...
Unless he went back 7 days multiple times to age the forgeries!!
I think I've broken my Occams(tm) Razor.
(would somebody care to subscript that tm for me?)
Looking at the Requisitions could certanly prove that that they did have the typewriters (as long as they're in the right font :), but it wouldn't really prove they didn't.
That said, I doubt we'll find any early 70s typewriter that can exactly reproduce the output of MS Words' default settings.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't faithfully retyped copies of originals"
Yeah kind of like those symbols made in wheat fields...even though we know that people put them there that doesn't mean that they weren't just faithful copies of real alien works.
Creative Demolition
CBS has since come out with a new justification for the documents, in which they admit that they didn't have any actual experts check them out, but instead asked some anonymous sources if those memos were the sorts of things the guy might have written.
CBS verified the authenticity of the documents by talking to individuals who had seen the documents at the time they were written. These individuals were close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian and confirm that the documents reflect his opinions at the time the documents were written.
In other words, CBS didn't actually check to see if they were forged. Of course, other documents from the same guy just a little later say that Bush was doing fine and made no mention of the forged memos.
Kerry (now that I think about it) really looks like a Tool for not sticking up for Bush's service record the way Bush has for his. He could at least say something like "I don't know what the deal is with Bush's TANG service history, but I don't think that issue affects his ability to be president" Because honestly, it doesn't.
I've never understood why this was an Issue democrats kept brining up. No undecided voter is going to care at all. If it could be shown that he'd lied about something (as these documents purport) then it would be an issue.
Kerry has really disappointed me as a democrat, and I'm worried we might be stuck with bush for another 4 years due to his idiocy. Wish we'd nominated Edwards.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Dang, I hope you didn't Slashdot Filebox. I need to get to that tonight. :)
-Waldo Jaquith
You're talking about Senator Kerry, right? The guy who hasn't answered a reporter's question for one month and eight days now?
Yes, he has -- he does interviews with local media outlets regularly, often several times daily. I believe what you mean is that he has not personally held a press conference for one month and eight days, which is quite true.
-Waldo Jaquith
UPDATE 12: In the August 18, 1973 memo "discovered" by 60 Minutes, Jerry Killian purportedly writes:
Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job. But wait! Reader Amar Sarwal points out that General Staudt, who thought very highly of Lt. Bush, retired in 1972.
The more I look at these "memos," the more obvious it appears that they are inept forgeries.
Posted by The Big Trunk at 07:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBack (212)
Drudge knows typography experts? Then why the hell is his site - oh, nevermind.
Who cares what people did 30 years? How about we focus on things recent like things within the last 5 years. Its time we get off this stupid subject and focus on current events. The only events that should be called up are those of a serious nature. And these include going AWOL, Lying about medals earned, being a nixon aide, drunk driving, or a being trial medical lawyer. So unless any of the candidates are accused of these serious allegations, we should move on to current events.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
There are a few simple ways to help prove that these are legit:
1) CBS (or someone) has the original documents. Take a close look at the documents I mean under a microscope. Are there physical indentations from typewriter keys, or is the ink smooth like that from a laser printer or ink-jet? Presumably there should be lots of physical differences from different documents. Analyze the paper: is it a particular kind? Chemically analyze the ink: is it inkjet ink? Was it from a typewriter ribbon? Showing that the letters had been hammered in would go a long way to showing the document to be real.
2) Get ahold of the kind of typewriters that could print this kind of thing. If it turns out they are as good a match with word as this document, that would definitely settle the question of wether it was possible to print such a thing.
3) Look at army requisition histories (if they exist) if there was a record of the kind of typewriter used being at the base, it would really help. Of course they might just say "5 typewriters" or something.
The steps to show it's a fake are similar, excepting step three. If it could be shown that the typewriters that could do proportionally spaced fonts didn't look exactly like MS words default settings, it would pretty much kill this.
Ultimately, I think this could do a lot more damage to Kerry's campaign if it turns out to be false then it would to bush's campaign if it turned out to be true.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air, I listened to long-time Austin reporter Wayne Slater talk about his book (soon a movie) "Bush's Brain", about Karl Rove and the power behind the president. Rove is a master of dirty tricks, and damned proud of it. I see his hand at work.
His methods, dating back to Bush's election as Texas' Governor, are to get dirty deeds done in ways that can't possibly be traced back to him or his candidate. Things like the whisper campaign against Ann Richards here in Texas, the "McCain is crazy" rumors in the primaries, and the Steamboat Veterans (whatever) for Truth fiasco now.
What could be better than creating an obvious forgery about Bush's service, and slipping it into some CBS exec's inbox? It fits Rove's pattern perfectly: the president will have a chance to look persecuted, everyone will be angry at whoever was evil enough to try to set up Bush. There will be enough of us liberals who fall into the "we got him!" trap to keep Rove's fingerprints off the whole thing.
I also think Rove is behind the supposedly-unexpected appearance of demonstrators at Bush's appearances... listen to the Fresh Air interview with Slater, especially the part where he sets up a nearly identical disruption of his opponent's event in the early '70s.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The Pentagon investigation into Kerry's medals is simply a Search for Truth and has nothing to do with election-year politics.
It hits both sides.
It's disgusting from both sides.
It ducks the real issues from both sides.
The press allows it to happen, even fosters it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
for copying their fonts, porportional spacing, and superscript "th"!
Does Photoshop have a "create fake typewritten document" feature?
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
These are purportedly memos between National Guard officials; even assuming they were genuine, Bush would never have gotten a chance to see them and therefore couldn't testify to their authenticity. All he'd be able to say is that he performed his duty and was discharged honorably -- which is what he's been saying all along.
I agree that it's pretty supicious, but the details of the letters are a little diffrent, even though the overall layout is the same. Take a close look at the serifs on the '1' characters.
That said, on a visual examination, It definetly looks more fake then legit.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Seperate the channels and look at the "Word" output (red channel) and it appears the words have been moved horizontally to line them up with the original fax. Notice that the first letter in each word lines up much better than the last one, and that the spaces seem to be different sizes between the words (compare "Harris gave" to "gave me" for instance). In addition the blue channel is not the same resolution as the pdf file, it appears to have been scaled down by a non-integer, which blurs and thickens the original letters. Also they put red*blue into the green channel to make it look more consistent.
However I have to say that zooming in on the original PDF documents does reveal some strange artifacts. They seem to have been a 3 or 4 level image, with very even gray fringes around the letters. The "th" is also questionable, though there certainly were symbol balls for the Selectric I'm not really certain if it included a small th that looks so exactly scaled. I would also question if anybody would really title the thing "CYA". Because of these doubts it is rather foolish of somebody to make bogus tests when there may be real proof coming, it will only discredit you.
""Last night, CBS News released a set of memos dated 1972 and 1973 that are purported to raise questions about President Bush's National Guard service."
30 years ago. Ugh. That's soooOOoo relevent today. This is why I hate politics. Anything is an issue, anything is fair game. Anybody who's basing their votes on this issue seriously needs to reconsider their priorities.
"Derp de derp."
I'm not saying this is the only possible explanation, but this is what I thought of when I looked at the Bush documents in PDF format that can be seen on the Washington Post web site. The documents brought back strong memories of working with those machines.
Typeface and font used in the letters. -- Much is being made of the proportional font used in the letters. People are saying the proportional spacing is an indication of forgery, because the letters look like Microsoft Word documents.
However, I've often had the experience of walking into a military office and being shocked by the office equipment there. There are numerous ways that people in the military get things that they don't really need. For example, a general may requisition something and then discover that his secretary doesn't want to learn how to use it. So, then it is available to an office of lower rank.
The fonts are consistent with those sold with a kind of upscale IBM Selectric typewriter that was actually a low-cost typesetting machine. (Typesetting was what it was called before everyone could do it on a personal computer.) These machines had a one-use carbon ribbon. The impression of each character was clearer than the clearest laser printer.
I'm a bit confused about the model numbers of the typewriter. It could have been called a Selectric costing then about $2,500, I believe. I seem to remember that they had another name for the more upscale, true typesetting machines. (I wrote computer manuals which I typed on a Selectric and were prepared on those machines.)
There were usually some odd symbols and characters like "th" on the type balls used by the Selectric family of typesetting machines. That's because of the design of the balls. Whereever there was room, there were characters, partly to assure that the balls would be balanced, I suppose, and partly just because there was room.
There's a funny side to the self-consistency in my guess about the machine used to prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing computer user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it. (Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because the letters are not all level with the baseline. That's what would happen when the Selectric or other typing machine from the same family was not adjusted.
The funny self-consistency is this. It's easy to guess that they got the machine from the general's office after some civilian secretary there decided that the new machine was too complicated to learn. But, since an office of lower rank was not allowed to have such a machine, they did not have the maintenance contract. That could be why the baseline of the type is so messy.
Someone said that the letters were forgeries because they were obviously done with Microsoft Word. It is impossible to simulate the variation of baseline with Microsoft Word; Word is too basic a tool, it is not able to do many of the functions of real typesetting. People who are sensitive to the beauty of type certainly don't use MS Word.
I use Ventura Publisher. It is possible t
When admins are turfers . . .
Both had proportional fonts. The sample PDF from CBS looks more like the Executive from 1964-5 as used IN THE MILITARY. The Selectric was the ball-using model and had a lighter touch on the paper.
It was not uncommon for Officers to use Selectrics or Executives obtained through normal supply channels while NCO company clerks and reporters like me pounded on manuals, with no proportional spacing.
I wish these Republican spreaders of FUD would make it more believable -- at least lift it to the level of the crap that came out of SCO recently.
I'll go for simply *less effective*, at the moment.
I completely agree with you that ground-up reform is needed. IMHO, if the framers of the Constitution were around today, they'd have some sort of Bill of Responsibilities tucked in there with the Bill of Rights. They'd be explicit about the Right to Privacy. Plus they'd not just try to enforce separation of Church and State, they'd try and enforce separation of Church and Corporation. More likely, 'Persistent Legal Entities' composed of people (corporations, etc) would be defined in the constitution, and their rights with respect to people and the government would be clearly defined, too.
But for the moment, neither Left Wing nor Right Wing should have the effectiveness the Bush Administration has now, especially considering that the populace is pretty much split 50-50. As a matter of fact, the fact that one half is running its agenda roughshod over the other half is a large part of what the current tense climate is all about, IMHO.
As for a 'less effective' government during the War on Terror, it's OK. The machinery of government is quite capabable of running well without advocacy at the helm. Real Leadership is not needed right now. Todd Beamer and the others on the fourth flight didn't need to be told what to do. They *knew* what they had to do, and they did it. I suspect that the rest of us would do the same, in the same circumstances. Nobody in the US wants terrorists to Win, though we do differ on how it should be done. The institutions are in place, and they know how to do their jobs.
Besides, I really don't think Kerry would be an ineffective leader. Though I don't believe he could push any personal agenda like Bush can, having majorities in both Chambers, he could potentially do a better job against Terrorism, because he'd have to work with a hostile Congress, and measure his actions carefully. There might well be *less* partisan bickering under a Kerry Presidency.
If you're heading in the wrong direction, you've got to either stop or turn before you can start going the right way.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
See this analysis. There were IBM Selectrics that had proportional spacing.
Most people now know nothing of typesetting, because their computers do a better job than the $40,000 to $1,100,000 typesetters ever did. However, those who know about typesetting know that Microsoft Word and the old Selectrics are imitating the same font. Both are trying to look like typesetting.
Times Roman, for example, was designed for the London Times in the 1770s, for example.
IBM put some quirky symbols on the Selectric type balls because there was room for more than just the standard characters. I don't specifically remember which symbols, and there were many balls with many selections of characters.
The old one-use carbon ribbons used in the Selectrics made a more clean impression than a laser printer, and impression quite like letter press, which is still the standard in fine-looking type.
you suck, fucking republican slimebag
If it's a fake, does anyone believe Kerry either knew about it or endorsed it? (Yeah, I heard Kerry typed it, himself! Right!)
So we have xx options:
1: It's real, and there's some explanation for the fonts.
2: It's fake, and some overzealous Democrats did it.
3: It's fake, and someone in the Kerry campaign did it.
4: It's OBVIOUSLY fake, and some overzealous Republicans did it, meaning for it to get exposed.
5: It's OBVIOUSLY fake, and someone in the Bush campaign did it, meaning for it to get exposed.
Let's face it, as others have said, this was all 30 years ago. The only options above that are REALLY meaningful are (3) and (5), because those indicate corruption TODAY directly connected to one campaign or the other. These are the LEAST likely possibilities, IMHO.
The next possiblity is (1), and that makes *some* difference. I won't rank it's likelihood.
The most likely possibilities are (2) and (4), and neither of those makes a whit of difference, at all. There are nutcases in the finges of both parties, and neither Bush nor Kerry should be held responsible for them.
The real effect is that this makes so much noise that the real issues get submerged - again.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
RatherBiased.com, an anti-Dan Rather blog has an interesting discussion with two guys who run web sites legacy typewriter web sites. They seem pretty convinced the CBS papers were not typed up on a 70's typewriter.
The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be identical.
Someone was discussing this later in the story, and I looked it up. The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932.
Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be exactly identical.
History of the development of MS Times new Roman.
There is not enough difference to be able to see it in a blurry copy, I think.
http://www.scrappleface.com/
1972 Email Casts Doubt on Bush Guard Service by Scott Ott (2004-09-09) -- CBS reporter Dan Rather today released the text of a recently discovered email from then-Lt. George W. Bush's Air National Guard commanding officer which casts more doubt upon the military service of the man who would become the 43rd President of the United States.
The revelation of the email comes just hours after questions were raised about the authenticity of typewritten memos from the same officer, shown yesterday by Mr. Rather on 60 Minutes.
According to the previously unseen email message sent in May 1972 by squadron commander Jerry Killian, Lt. Bush phoned Col. Killian because "his internet connection was on the fritz and he couldn't IM me."
Lt. Bush apparently wanted to talk about "how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November."
According to Col. Killian's email, the young Bush wanted to go to Alabama to work as webmaster for a Republican candidate's website.
Mr. Rather said the authenticity of the 32-year-old email has been confirmed by several Nigerian officials who specialize in electronic funds transfer by email.
Another thought: The IBM Composer could do proportional spacing, also, and also was very complicated mechanically.
I, for one, am willing to bet that these documents (at least the CYA one; what about the others? Anyone re-type those, especially the ones with _signatures_?) are done in Word. It's _way_ too big of a coincidence that they line up exactly like this.
However, there is plenty of other evidence, based on the documents that the White House released earlier, that show that Bush did not complete his service legally, and even that the Air Force pointed this out to his ANG unit.
Now, I know tons of people here are saying "So what, this happened 30 years ago", and that it doesn't matter anymore. However, lying about it over and over and over again, _does_ matter.
And, as for this kind of trivial issue is distracting us from the bigger issues, you'd be right if this wasn't part of a larger pattern of contemptuous lying from Bush to the public. Basically, the guy lies about anything so that he can just do whatever the fuck he wanted to in the first place:
1) Didn't want to go to ANG duty, but still want to be elected? Lie about your service.
2) Want to secure Iraq's oil supply, but populace won't support outright imperialism? Lie about your reasons (and scare the crap out of them).
3) Want to get credit for cracking down on terrorists, but didn't do squat to actually prevent September 11th? Lie about what info you had earlier in 2001.
Bush is a pathological liar, and a danger to this country. He will say whatever needs to be said to push through his agenda. And, that makes it important to stop him, and makes this issue non-trivial.
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM machines and MS Word try to be identical. The differences between MS Times New Roman and the 1932 Times New Roman are very small.
Times Roman was designed in the 1770s for the Times of London.
TSIA
This comment seems right to me. I know I have seen the machines used to type letters. I cannot remember the exact model name.
Why are you so ugly to everyone?
Ain't funny, except that last bit. The parent post (#10206868) is Insightful, because it points out that a lot of supposed evidence on one side outweighs a little of supposed evidence on the other, and to still hold onto the other is almost folly (of course, it's all "supposed", but all things being equal ...)
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
CBS's reputation is at stake...
...
Bwaahahahahahahahahaha
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Drudge
and ABC News now have stories about it.
From the ABC News article:
CBS seriously screwed up on this one.
http://slashdot.org/~Futurepower(R)
For someone who didn't start posting until the 6th of September of this year, all of your posts are very anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and anti-government (blame the Republicans).
You are nothing more than a troll.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
A lot has been made of the fact that the text is proportionally spaced. Some have pointed out that a few typewriters has this ability.
Fine.
But what about kerning?
"In typography, kerning refers to adjusting the space between characters, especially by placing two characters closer together than normal. Kerning makes certain combinations of letters, such as WA, MW, TA, and VA, look better. "
There is kerning in the memo with SUBJECT: CYA. It happens between the 'f' and 'e' characters of "interference" and "feedback".
The trouble is that kerning requires remembering the previous character.
As advanced as typewriters might have been in 1973, I doubt any had memory.
Read the page you linked too:
Futurepower(R)'s Latest 24 of 1976 Comments
You expect us to belive Futurepower(R) has posted almost 2000 comments in four days? That's pretty impressive. Of course, by your mesure I've posted 4,400 comments in just three days.
Or it could be that you're just an idiot who dosn't know that slashdot only displays the last 25 or so comments on the user page.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Linkey linkey
If that doesn't work, it'll be here
Wow, it took a blogger to take them down, what does this tell you about the media. No wonder Brokaw wants to get rid of internet news, they catch their lies.
I'm not a republican but this makes me really pissed.
Latewire
and yes, a politicians silence is a tacit admission of agreement.
In the early 70's?!?!
You must be smoking something, or just be too young to know when such tests were first used.
We had a typewriter that did this - an old mechanical one. The letter placement can happen automatically if the individuals tend to print to the left or right of the given strike space.
Nothing really fancy.
..........FULL STOP.
www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1941 .html
Not to odd at all it seems
..........FULL STOP.
It's a win-win for Bush even if they are forged. The media will spin it easily to support Bush. Maybe the terrorists manufactured it to hurt the Bush campaign, yes, thats it.. the terrorists..! I dont really see FoxNews/MSNBC/etc reporting that someone within the Bush campaign has released forged documents, either its the terrorists or the "anti-Bush" people. You wont see this on FoxNews: http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/view_24920
They were given to the WH by CBS.
at this link :
:
DailyKOS
Please read it closely.
I quote
We're going to make this simple.
First, of course, in order to do this, he first had to reduce the document so that the margins were the same, since the original PDF distributed by CBS is quite a bit larger. Then he superimposed the two documents, such that the margins on all sides lined up.
What he then discovered is that Times New Roman typeface is, when viewed on a computer monitor, really, really similar to Times New Roman typeface. Or rather, really really similar to a typeface that is similar to Times New Roman typeface.
Um, OK then.
Is it possible to check the equipment inventories for the ANG unit where this was supposedly typed? The military tends to keep better track of equipment than it does of personell, so they might be able to answer to the existence of a proportional font Selectric.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
One thing you should know is that I introduced some confusion into the discussion by not knowing what the IBM model is called. Most Selectrics did not have the capability of proportional spacing. I don't remember the name of those IBM machines that did.
There seem to me to be several facts that are important:
1) The one superscript TH in the documents is an anomaly whether the document is real or a forgery. Why was it used in only one place?
2) The whole thing that got me started doing an analysis of this was that I thought immediately that I recognized the shift in baseline that can most easily be seen in characters that are repeated, like ll and tt. That cannot be done with Microsoft Word. It is a characteristic of out-of-adjustment IBM machines.
3) There were third-party suppliers of type balls for these machines. Some definitely produced weird characters like TH. Whether I have seen TH, I don't know. I only remember saying to an owner of one of the machines, "Why is that character there?"
4) I don't agree with people who say they can tell that the font is Microsoft Times New Roman, rather than Times New Roman, which was designed in 1932. That argument was introduced when Bush supporters first began to realize that Times New Roman was not a Microsoft invention.
5) The machine that produced the letters may have been an IBM Composer, and not have been called a "Selectric". These are both different from the IBM Executive typewriter.
6) I was a big user of typesetting in those days, and I was supersensitive to typesetting issues then. I was very envious of those who had the top-level IBM machines. I noticed that you would see them in unlikely places. Sometimes they would be bought and the secretary would refuse to learn how to use them, so they would be used by someone else, who obviously could not have afforded them.
The IBM Selectric Composer was first marketed in 1966. Here's a link to the manual for that typewriter. It does everything required to make those documents...
e r% 20Operating%20Instructions.pdf
r ia ls/process/type_basics/type_families.htm
o J: https://web1.ssg.gunter.af.mil/ho/documents/chrono logies/Air%2520Force%2520Data%2520Systems%2520Desi gn%2520Center%25201969.doc+selectric+military&hl=e n
http://ibmcomposer.org/docs/Electronic%20Compos
-The font to produce those documents for IBM Selectric Composers was called "Aldine Roman." A smaple of that font is available at this link (scroll down)...
http://graphicdesign.sfcc.spokane.cc.wa.us/tuto
-Now, go to page 168 of the manual linked above(173 of the pdf), you'll see that Aldine Roman is available in three sizes: 8, 10, and 12. The superscript "th" is made with the 8-point size element font ball.
-The Air Force tested IBM Selectrics in 1969. Here's the link (scroll down)
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:PZnx1vdH-6
The reason the military purchased IBM Selectrics was because 1) It had the ability to "punch through" 6-10 carbon copies. Ask anyone who was in the military at that time about all the carbon copies of documents one had to produce 2) IBM offered the military one time use ribbons that a person could not pull the ribbon and read the documents that had been typed from the ribbon. The ribbons could be either safely thrown away in lower security situations, or burned to destroy in high security work environments.
What I find a more interesting story is the reaction of a large percentage of the Slashdot readers.
Faced with a real possibility that these documents are indeed fakes, they grasp at almost anything to believe they are not.
That I find very frightening on either side.
That's ironic, because I believe that when this system got messed up, and started remembering whatever it wanted to, this was actually called "Kerrying"
-Styopa
Genius that the WhiteHouse is refusing to speak up on the issue. This way the liberal Left cannot accuse the Administration of trying to "discredit viable information." They're letting the bloggers of the world find the problem, and now they're going to let CBS wallow in their own filth they call news.
How come the source hasn't been identifiedd to the public? No tinfoil, but it's not unlike news organizations to fabricate some stories. Remember the "big newspaper" that fired people a while back?
The claim is that these documents were the result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The question to ask is whether the news media, and the Pentagon, can prove that these documents were, in fact, sent out in response to a FOIA request.
That should be pretty simple to do. There is a ream of documentation generated for every one of those requests.
If they can prove these documents are the result of an FOIA request then we have two possibilities.
1) the documents are genuine no matter how weird they look, or 2) they were forged by someone in the US military.
If someone in the US military is forging documents to discredit the President, then Bush, and all the rest of the citizens of the US have a whole lot more to worry about than just who wins the election.
On the other hand, Bush's white house aids are handing out these doucments. That certainly implies that Bush knows they are true. That is a public admission that Bush knows he is a deserter.
Stonewolf
www.stonewolf.net
The 'th' prints at a different height than it displays on the screen. Go ahead and try it. The printed copy matches up. Apparently Word, in this respect, isn't precisely WYSIWYG.
I can't believe folks are defending this. Sure, it's probably damaging to the good guys. The bad guys'll have a field day gloating. But, kids, wishing doesn't make it so.
I'm just amazed that a forgery of this type would be so, so incompetently done. The least they could have done would be to, say, look at the already-released documents and make new ones to match them. This has just gotta be embarassing. And CBS calls themselves a news organization? Pfeh!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
One interesting thing I've noticed about the memo in question is that in some places (most obviously at "took the call" and "obviously", first line of either point) there are vertical alignment errors that occur in the middle of a word, but appear to respect character boundaries and do not skew the rest of the document.
:)
(samples posted at http://www.geocities.com/mektronik/, with additional red alignments)
This is typical of mechanical typewriters, but difficult to imagine happening on any sort of printer (since they usually print horizontally, and also since if they did print vertically they would skew the entire document), or any sort of photocopier (for the same reasons).
My feeling is that if someone went to the effort to fake typewriter-like vertical misalignment then they wouldn't be caught using the default settings of Microsoft Word.
It seems plausible that the Word match could be because Word is setup to a sort of industry standard, but the "th" part is more compelling (although there do seem to be some typewriters that had such keys).
The biggest give-away is the spots on the paper that are in a straight line -- that's how you know it was done with a printer. At least, the May 4th and August 18th ones.
I can't believe that any "document expert" could miss this--60 Minutes II was bamboozled, at least about the authenticity of those two documents.
I'd be interested to see what an analysis of the other two gives, though.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why would a forger go through the hassle of making an MS word document look like it was typed (through photoshop or whatever) instead of just USING A TYPEWRITER? It's not like a typewriter is hard to find.
It just doesn't make sense to me. If I wanted to forge a memo dated at 1973, wouldn't I use the tools available at the time to do it? Using MS-Word to do this is a bit like using an inkjet printer to produce the shroud of Turin.
That leaves three possibilities.
1)The document is genuine
2)The document was forged by an idiot.
3)The document was crafted this way so it would be exposed as a forgery.
I'm not sure which is more likely.
The copies that the White House released apparently were copies of the documents that CBS sent to the White House for comment.
The only source for these documents has been CBS.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
It does not. Character Spacing is horizontal. Baseline shift is vertical.
Thus proving that the document does NOT use Kerning. In word Kerning is turned off by default. If you turn Kerning on the aledged match goes away completely.
It is not surprising that two systems that are both trying to emulate the same hot metal original font would look very similar. Several former IBM typewriter repair guys have stated that they replaced strikebars often and replacement keys were easy to get.
Occams razore would seem to suggest that every single one of the objections raized by the repugnants having been dismissed they still continue to repeat them. Don't forget that when we started most of you guys were swearing blind that NO TYPEWRITER EVER DID PROPORTIONAL FONT then when that was disproved seagued seamlessly into NO TYPEWRITER EVER HAD A TH KEY then when that was disproved tried to claim that PISSANT Lt. Col.s DON't HAVE EXPENSIVE OFFICE EQUIPMENT only it wasn't expensive and military officers are notorious for buying things they should not for their personal use then we got down to KERNING! only the word document that is claimed to match perfectly has kerning turned off which is the default in word.
Lets really use occams razor. Has anyone seen Bush at the Alabama guard? Only one and he claims to have seen Bush on a day Bush himself agrees he was not there, a fact supported by other evidence. So nobody saw Bush in Alabama, he certainly did not report for duty in Texas, he certainly did not fulfil his medical. Killians memos are exactly what you would expect someone to write in his position, exactly.
Your "leader" has been caught in a lie sir, a dishonorable lie.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Everything else was released via FOIA request. These were not. In other words, a 'source' provided the documents.
Daily Kos: TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong
Abstract: Somebody did some actual research into the typewriters available in 1973 and found that the document isn't a hoax.
Turns out Football Guy did a bit of resizing/shrinking/nudging to get things to line up...regardless, of course the Times New Roman font looks the same as a 1973 typewriter font - where do you think MS/Apple/Adobe/whoever got their font designs from?!
Of course, as the linked article points out, the various characters in the document look similar to MS Word Times New Roman, but many are distinctly _different_.
One by one, each of the "hoax" claims are being refuted on their face. In 1973, proportinal fonts existed, superscript th existed, etc. etc. etc.
As always it's "villify what you can't deny." Unfortunately, once again the "liberal" media is getting bamboozled by some rightwing bloggers - anyone remember Kerry's "Intern Scandal?" (Drudge: "Developing...")
Meanwhile, the Right Wing Press (NY Post, Washington Times), which dismissed the relevancy of blogs when they were driving Dean's candidacy, is now lauding the "wonderful blogonaughts."
What a joke.
They weren't typewriters. They were low cost typesetting machines. The word breaks and line spacing are identical because they are both imitating typesetting machines, and Times New Roman, a famous font since 1932.
It's not called line spacing. In typesetting it is called leading, or, more recently, ledding, because originally they used pieces of lead to make the line space.
Here's the latest revision of my remarks:
When I saw the Bush documents, I laughed because they are obviously genuine. They have a defect that I learned to recognize: Baseline shift of repeated characters. A long time ago, I talked to an IBM service technician and he explained why it happens in machines like the IBM Selectric and IBM composer.
For an explanation of how this was and is connected with humor, see below.
I examined the documents in PDF format that can be seen on the Washington Post web site.
Typeface and font used in the letters. -- Much is being made of the proportional font used in the letters. People are saying the proportional spacing is an indication of forgery, because the letters look like Microsoft Word documents.
However, I've often had the experience of walking into a military office and being shocked by the office equipment there. There are numerous ways that people in the military get things that they don't really need. For example, a general may requisition something and then discover that his secretary doesn't want to learn how to use it. So, then it is available to an office of lower rank.
The fonts are consistent with those sold with a kind of upscale IBM Selectric typewriter that was actually a low-cost typesetting machine. (Typesetting was what it was called before everyone could do it on a personal computer.) These machines had a one-use carbon ribbon. The impression of each character was clearer than the clearest printer.
I'm a bit confused about the model numbers of the typewriter. It could have been called a Selectric costing then about $2,500, I believe. I seem to remember that they had another name for the more upscale, true typesetting machines, apparently IBM Composer. (Back then I wrote computer manuals which were prepared on those upscale machines.) The more expensive machines, the IBM Composers, used much bigger type balls than the Selectrics, but they were all designed around the same basic idea.
There were usually some odd symbols and characters like "th" on the type balls used by the Selectric family of typesetting machines. That's because of the design of the balls. Whereever there was room, there were characters, partly to assure that the balls would be balanced, I suppose, and partly just because there was room.
There's a funny side to the self-consistency in my guess about the machine used to prepare the memos. Back then anyone writing and publishing computer user manuals really struggled with the publishing. Whenever something needed to look professional, we had it typeset. To do that, we did what is called "spec type". On one occasion I spent 11 hours specifying typesetting values for one particularly complicated page.
After you have spent many, many hours worrying about the look of type, you begin to be extremely sensitive to everything about it. (Either that, or you wouldn't be successful.)
Looking at the letters discussing preferential treatment for George W. Bush brings back strong memories. The Selectric was an unbelievably complicated machine that needed frequent service because it depended on everything being adjusted to extremely fine tolerances.
Anyone familiar with this can see something funny about the letters immediately. It's obvious to me. Whoever had the typing machine did not have the maintenance contract. It's easy to know this because the letters are not all level with the baseline.
It's so funny to watch liberals argue against logic!
Thanks for the quality entertainment.
By the way, just because you're a typesetter now doesn't mean that you know anything at all about how it was done in 1972.
What makes you think that an OFFICE MEMO would be typed in this fashion? Military orders are given in letters, sent through the mail, you idiot. They are never, ever given in a "memo."
Hell, what makes you think that a military order is even given in an office memo to begin with? The person who forged these memos doesn't even know how the military works!
Here's the last link again...
o no logies/Air%20Force%20Data%20Systems%20Design%20Cen ter%201969.doc
6 03
1 34
https://web1.ssg.gunter.af.mil/ho/documents/chr
Also, here's two threads elsewhere where the whole "forgery" issues has been dealt with in great detail and disposed of....
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/35559/9
Kerning, the spacing between letters in a propotional font, is something a typewriter of that era is not capable of. It has no idea what letter came before it, and therefore can't space the letters the way computers can today. Doesn't matter WHAT font style it's in. Typewriters of that era are simply not able to do that.
That's the smoking gun in all this, and that's what proves those documents are fake.
Case Closed.
The old "just because they can't prove it doesn't mean it didn't happen" is the forte of children and people with an adjenda. It has very little if any relation to actual attempts to discover the truth.
By your logic the Swifties are telling the truth because the Navy records could possibly be in error but even though they are claimed to be an accurate account they aren't "just because"
Un-uh.
If the documents are fake (and I believe so, mainly because the kerning cannot be explained away) there is more reason to believe that similar ones NEVER existed. Worse it makes any factual documents covering the same or similar subjects highly suspect. That is the real result of this train of thought.
The story of the "Boy who cried wolf" is an ideal summary of your thinking and the real result.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Since no one has figured out how to bash Microsoft on this and this is slashdot, let me take a stab...
.......
The way to explain all this similarity is that Microsoft must have based Normal.dot (the default document) on a 1970's era IBM Selectric typewriter. It's irrefutable. Retype those documents from the 70's in Word, and guess what? Word replicates the typewriter letter for letter, word for word, and line for line. Do you smell an IBM vs. MS lawsuit here?
I am also betting Microsoft must of hired this guy named Jerry Killian when they were programming the automatic word wrap feature. If you compare the ends of lines on a modern Word document, they end just were Mr. Killian would have ended them. I hope his family is getting royalties for this.
Yet another example of Microsoft rehashing old technology. Losers.
Now that's more like it!
What part of the year 1966 do you not understand, Boise?
e r% 20Operating%20Instructions.pdf
http://ibmcomposer.org/docs/Electronic%20Compos
That is the link for the pdf of the manual for the IBM Typewriter made in 1966 that could type those documents
The font has been in existance since 1931.
The said typewiter not only produced the superscript "th" in these 4 documents, it produced the same superscript "th" in several of the documents in George W. Bush's Texas National Guard records released many months ago by the White House when the whole Bush National Guard controversy started. Same superscript "th"... same font... Same proportional type.
Dan Rather showed this on the CBS Evening News broadcast tonight.
Kerning, the spacing between letters in a propotional font, is something a typewriter of that era is not capable of. It has no idea what letter came before it, and therefore can't space the letters the way computers can today. Doesn't matter WHAT font style it's in. Typewriters of that era are simply not able to do that.
That's the smoking gun in all this, and that's what proves those documents are fake.
Gee, that's sure some "smoking gun" you've got there, since IBM introduced proportional spacing typewriters in 1941.
"Case Closed," indeed.
Where did the Bush Administration get their copies of the "forgeries" that they released themselves the same day? Oh, from the Kerry campaign. You've got it all figured out.
If you look at the issues, the scandal wasn't that the White House forged the documents themselves. It was that they used the documents nevertheless, despite knowing they were forgeries to make a case for war. In a State of the Union speech Dubya hid behind Britain, saying that they had evidence Saddam was seeking to buy yellowcake Uranium. At the time the WH had investigated and knew the documents the British were citing were forgeries.
Also at the time, the British Foreign Secretary stated there was other evidence beyond the documents that confirmed their evidence, but refused to release it. Our recent enquiry has shown this to be a lie. GCHQ gathered intel from mobile phone conversations about an Iraqi trading mission to Niger. No yellowcake was mentioned in that evidence. But the British put the two together and called it two independent pieces of evidence on the purchase of yellowcake, and the US, knowing that it was false, hid behind their allies stance for their own ends.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
I seldom use Microsoft Word. Office 2000 does not have that feature, that I can see. The control over baseline shift would need to be very fine, and Word has not had fine control, at least up to and including Office 2000. (We are completely converting to Open Office.)
Could you try it yourself? I presume you have a more recent version of Microsoft Office. Focus on the way the doubled letters, like ll and tt, are sometimes, but not always, at a different height. I had a conversation about that with an IBM service technician. The effect is connected with the inertia of the type ball and the fact that the play in the mechanism is affected by where the ball was before it typed a letter. In the word "tell", the look of type from a poorly adjusted machine would be affected by the fact that the first L was typed after an E, and the second L was typed after an L.
But that's a little beside the point. Someone who knew that shifting the baseline would make one person out of a thousand realize that the documents were genuine, would be smart enough to do the job with other software. I've never used Quark Express, but, from conversations with typesetters I know it has extremely fine control.
I'm really happy with what I've said. My revised comments are copied below. I'm just someone who remembers the old machines because he so much wanted one. But my comments are corroborated by a document expert:
See the article in the Boston Globe, Authenticity backed on Bush documents:
"Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.
"In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.
"As for the raised "th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM.
" 'You can't just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer,' Bouffard said."
The document expert is missing a point, however. The type balls were VERY expensive, and very brittle. There were people who offered to repair broken type balls, and those people had the ability to put unusual characters on the ball. That was one of the services they offered.
This statement in the article from the man's son is completely credible to me: 'Also suspicious is Killian's son, Gary D. Killian of Houston. "I still contend that my father would not have written these documents. I know the type of man he was -- if he felt he was being pressured, he'd confront it head on, not write a memo about it," Killian, 51, said in a telephone interview. His father died in 1984.'
Back then people often didn't type their own memos. It was very common that someone unusual would have one of the Composers because people who didn't understand them but had power and money would order them, and find that their secretaries would refuse to use them, because they were more complicated. Why would powerful people order them? Because back then a
Sorry, but that typewriter wasn't in common use in the military at that time and isn't capable of kerning, and certainly not with all the gadgets you'd have to add to get the superscripting. Good shot though.
Regarding the White House comment... What, you're saying that the White House had the documents beforehand? Nope. The White House got their copies from CBS news, which they in turn released:
From the White House press briefing yesterday:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09
This whole story is quickly unraveling all around CBS, and no amount of tin-foil hat conspiracy theories is going to help them. Sure will be interesting to see where they got these documents from in the first place.
Yep. Smoking Gun.
Even more experts are coming out saying their fake:
h tm l
http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/000838.php
Oh my! Here's more evidence you'd probably believe:
http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/001832.
Kerry's toast. hahahahahaha
Practically all the evidence points to this document being a pathetic forgery.
Dan Rather has so far not been able to produce ONE IOTA of credible evidence to come anywhere near close to proving the authenticity of this sorry piece of tabloid rubbish.
Meanwhile, there are literally HUNDREDS of pieces of evidence proving that this document is completely fake.
This piece of trash was obviously produced by the Rather/Kerry campaign, with Terry McAuliffe, James Caraville and Paul
Begala coordinating this sleazy trick, in a ham handed, sorry attempt to try and put some life into John Kerry's rapidly sinking campaign.
Funny thing is, with this pathetic forgery, they may have actually sent President Bush even higher in the opinion poll ratings, as Americans cotton on with horror, that john Kerry is a serial forger, liar and producer of fake documents, including his totally fake "Silver Star with a combat "V"".
Anyone who has been in the army knows that they never give out Silver Star with a combat "V"'s.
Ole Kerry made that up all by himself, just like he made up this phony,funny piece of Microsoft Word document about President Bush's National Guard Service.
Bottom line: PRESIDENT BUSH IS GOING TO WIN BIG!
It won't even be close. Its over John.
In this document:
http://d2d.ali-aba.org/_files/thumbs/components
Even CBS' own expert contradicts himself!
Poll: Bush Bounce Persists
, 18 471,695528,00.html
Sept. 7-Sept. 9
Bush 52% Kerry 41%
Even more damaging to Kerry is that Bush now has a 6 point lead on handling of the economy, 50% - 44%. Just one month ago, Kerry had the edge, 51% - 42%.
Bush has also taken commanding leads over Kerry on handing of the following issues:
War on terrorism: Bush is up 23 percentage points over Kerry, 58% - 35%, compared to an 8 point lead in early August.
Situation in Iraq: Bush is up 20 points over Kerry, 57% - 37%, compared to a 2 point edge in early August.
Commander in Chief: Bush is up 20 points over Kerry, 57% - 37%, compared to a tie in early August.
Bush's ratings on three key questions tied to electability have risen in recent weeks, but Bush still gets tentative scores on two of the three.
Job rating: Bush is now at 56% approve - 41% disapprove, solidly above the 50% historical threshold for re-electing incumbents. A month ago, he was up only 5 points, with his favorability just at 50%.
Deserves re-election?: Bush has cracked the 50% mark for the first time in recent Poll history, with 52% saying he deserves re-election, while 45% saying it's time for someone new. Just a month ago, Bush was down by 12 points on deserving re-election.
WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
BUSH ROCKS!
Take that and suck on it Dan Rather/John Kerry
http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0
Forging documents and signatures to smear someone has to be illegal. You would think Bush would waste no time sicking the dogs on this (if he believed it wasn't true)
and he typed his stuff (graduated in early 60's) on a typewriter that supported all types of symbols. Clearly this wasn't a common typewriter but, my father can't type so it couldn't have been too difficult to use.
Obviously the technology was available. Several companies made typewriters in those days, maybe the typewriter came from an obscure company.
from Bush's service have the superscript and were never questioned. 60 Minutes releases memos and within 24 hours, document experts are coming out of the woodwork attacking the document.
It's also interesting that the supposedly typewritten documents from 1973 line up absolutely perfect with the default settings of Microsoft Word 2003, superscript and all.
Word does not kern, by default. If you type out this memo in word and the turn the kerning on (it's an option in the format menu), you will end up with a document that looks completely different than what CBS has released.
The kerning issue should be put to bed, along with the proportionally spaced fonts, the superscripted 'th' and and the 13 point line spacing.
Well, one group tried to use technology to forge bogus documents and the other used technology to debunk the BS. Nice to see technology revealing the truth. It's also refreshing to see so many Slashdotters who are not foaming at the mouth Liberals that believe everything the media tells them!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Explaination as to why one "th" is normally typed out, not automagiced as per Word's wont
The conspiracy theorist would surmise, "the forger realized his mistake in one place and fixed it, but missed another."
The pragmatist would ask, "you expect Microsoft products to work predictably and reliably?" and then pee himself laughing.
And then there are the people who think this is all Carl Rove's doing and it's just a plot to discredit the DNC - they probably have a theory as to why Carl did it this way - some secret code that only other Illuminati would understand.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
PC Mag matches a Word document with a none IBM Selectric produced document..
. as p
I guess its not that interesting after all..
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1644869,00
Actually it is interesting. He's not using the Selectric on default settings. He also didn't demonstrate how the typist was able to manually indent the typewriter's carriage precisely enough (for the address lines that were centered) to not only match Microsoft Word's default margins in proportion to the rest of the document, but achieve text centering that matched pixel-perfect the default settings of Microsoft Word 2000/XP/2003 (and not 97/earlier).
Check http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12123 3&threshold=-1&commentsort=1&tid=224&mode=thread&c id=10214295
To see how "pixel perfect" a match it is..
He's not using the Selectric on default settings
-- I'm not sure why that matters.
He also didn't demonstrate how the typist was able to manually indent the typewriter's carriage precisely enough (for the address lines that were centered) to not only match Microsoft Word's default margins in proportion to the rest of the document
-- The Selectric Composer was designed for desktop
publishing type applications. Centering text, setting margins, etc were very possible. Review the manual linked to on the PC Mag site and you will see that the Selectric had some remarkable functions.
-- Microsft default margins are not that exotic. The character sizes are based on standard character sizes used by typewriters.
match Microsoft Word's default margins in proportion to the rest of the document, but achieve text centering that matched pixel-perfect the default settings of Microsoft Word 2000/XP/2003 (and not 97/earlier).
-- You've been through the document at a pixel level to verify that it is 'pixel-perfect' ?
Remeber the online copies are scans of copies..
the second link was incorrect. Here is the right one.
Only a partisan will say "these documents are fake" or "these documents are real".
It's now clear that these documents COULD have been produced by some equipment (IBM Selectric Composer) that was available at the time.
Were they?
I think the odds that these documents are real are pretty low. I think it's quite unlikely that whoever typed these took the trouble to type them on a $20K machine designed to produce camera-ready copy for publishing, and which required the typist to have training on this machine, and to type each line twice.
But I won't say it's impossible -- stranger things have happened.
I think it's quite likely that CBS News' story is crumbling around their ears. Their main source, Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges (former superior to the supposed author of the documents), now says CBS misled him in their original story, and he believes the documents are fake.
A really good way to resolve this issue would be to examine the original documents. However, it's pretty clear CBS News does not even have originals. So, this story will probably wither and die. CBS News will stick to their guns but the cloud around this story will never go away.
a group Boycott CBS dot Com has filed suit to:the Federal Election Commission urging immediate action to hold CBS/Viacom in violation of federal election law. Not a lawyer so no idea if it is important just interesting...
He does it so well... I can't add to it.
This discussion is becoming surprising for me. Many experts are being consulted, but I seem to be the only person who has actual experience with the Selectric Composer. It has been a weird experience, slowly realizing I seem to be the world authority on a few tiny details.
I certainly could not have afforded a machine that cost half as much as a new car. But, many years ago, I wrote computer user manuals and published them by having them typeset by a woman who owned a Selectric Composer, and copied on a Xerox machine. Her work was much less expensive than traditional typsetting. She did work for maybe a hundred customers. She would go to people's offices to pick up work.
Consider this quote: "Two letterheads typed three months apart can be superimposed on each other so perfectly that no difference at all can be seen. It's the same deal as before: the red in front was superimposed over the black behind it. You just can't see the black copy because the red copy is perfectly aligned with it. These letterheads weren't centered to within a couple of points of each other. They were centered exactly the same. Three months apart."
The answer is easy. There must be hundreds of thousands of people who know the answer to this question, if they would just think about it, even though they never saw a Selectric Composer. Typewriters had memory back then. You would type repeated text into memory and then just press a button whenever you wanted it played back. Obviously, you would do this with a letterhead, because it was difficult to make a letterhead look just right. If you knew you would be typing numerous items for an organization, you would enter the organization's letterhead first.
The Selectric Composers could vary the letter and line spacing, so don't look for an exact match unless you have one of the machines and are willing to experiment. Also, third parties both sold and repaired type balls for the machines.
One of the documents released by the White House also had a superscripted "th". Why did typists superscript the "th" sometimes and not others? I don't know; maybe just to show they could. Maybe they were experimenting to learn more about their machines. I do know that I had a conversation about that very issue with my typesetter concerning the Selectric Composer. It went something like this: "How did you do that?" [Some answer] "But why did you do that?" She laughed and gave some explanation that did not make a lot of sense to me.
It is useful to keep in mind that Microsoft Word and the IBM Selectric Composer, and all typesetters available then and now, try to imitate as much as possible the Times New Roman typeface, which was designed in 1932. The look close to the same because the designers intentionally made them the same.
It's interesting to note how much the arguments of those who assume the documents are forgeries have eroded.
What do we know with certainty? Here are some facts about which everyone agrees:
1) Something was wrong with George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard.
2) George W. Bush was an active alcoholic back then. How do we know that? He told us.
The forger was dumb, but the forger was smart? The forger was so dumb he did not think to switch to Courier as he was using Microsoft Word to type the documents? But, he was smart enough to vary the baseline in exactly the way a Selectric Composer would when it was not adjusted?
Yeah, well, all this brilliant sluething about0 .html
typewriters, fonts, and what could do what would
be all nice and well, except....here's another
Bush military document from that era also with the
same superscripting, and in this case obtained
more conventionally under FOIA:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/bushrec/doc1
Look in the upper section after "Pilot Trainee,
111"
Sorry, but best evidence is best evidence.
Killian's former secretary says she certainly didn't write these docs, but that her boss:
;)
"He did have complaints about Bush. Bush missed his physical and went off to Alabama with none of the paperwork, I remember Killian talking about that," Knox said. "But it wasn't in memo file."
But since Bush seems to be blind to the truth, it isn't surprising his followers are
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It is ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the Bush documents that some machine that a critic has chosen cannot do typesetting. Just choose another machine that can.
Decades ago, it sometimes happened that I would go to some company that did both typesetting and typing to pick up my typing, and be handed, not pages of typing, but pages of typesetting film. The first time that happened I was scared, because if the company thought that had I ordered typesetting, the cost would be very high. I said something like, "I wanted this typed, not typeset." As proof I said something like, "It's just an informal business letter." The woman behind the counter laughed and said something like, "I was at the typesetter when someone handed me your job, and I was too lazy to get up and go over to the typewriter." "But what about the cost?" "I'm only charging you $4."
The woman thought she was doing me a favor (while wasting her company's typesetting film), but she wasn't. Sure the letter looked wonderful, but typesetting was so psychologically powerful back then that the fact that a letter was typeset would distract the reader from the message. (It should be obvious that I copied the letter from the typesetting film to a piece of paper.)
NOTHING about what you see when you print a document typed in Times New Roman in Microsoft Word has ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Corporation.
On the computer I am using to type this, Times New Roman is supplied to me as the file times.ttf, dated 08/29/2002, 05:00 AM. If you look at the file with a tool that can view binary, you will see this message, and a lot of other heavy-duty legal language:
"This typeface is the property of Monotype Typography and its use by you is covered under the terms of a license agreement. You have obtained this typeface software either directly from Monotype or together with software distributed by one of Monotype's licensees."
Microsoft Word ONLY follows the information in this file. You can prove this to yourself by downloading and installing a copy of Open Office from www.OpenOffice.org. Open Office is better in important ways than Microsoft Office, and it is free, as in "You don't pay anything." Type anything you want in both Microsoft Office and Open Office, using the same font, and notice that it looks identical.
Open Office did not automatically superscript the "th". I didn't like that superscripting thirty years ago, and I don't like it now. Only a company like Microsoft, that doesn't really pay attention to anything it does, would make the superscripting of "th" automatic. In 1972 it had already been decades since that was in fashion, although it persisted on some machines, and was used by novices. Even when it was "in fashion" that was only because there was a period when typesetters liked to show off what they could do.
To superscript the "th" in Open Office, I selected the "th" and chose Format/ Character/ Position/ Superscript. The output was identical to the output of the version of Microsoft Word in Office 2000.
This is not surprising, since all of the information is stored in Monotype's font file, and none of the information is stored in the word processor. What chance would there be that Monotype would choose to license a file to Microsoft that would corrupt the most famous font in the world, that Monotype owned?
People thought Times Roman was a work of art in the 1770s when the first version was designed for the London Times. I have spent hours in the rare book room of Oxford University Library, Oxford, England, examining type faces used in books printed as early as the 1620s. (A graduate of Oxford signed an application for me to get a library card.) It is only when you see what went before that you can fully appreciate that Times Roman was an advancement in western civilization.
People thought version 2 of Times Roman, Times New Roman, was an even better work of art when it was designed in 1932.
All of this should indicate that no one should
You said, "However, it is not at all irrelevant that the only typewriter that anybody has suggested to be the origin of the message does not produce text with matching line lengths."
I guess you did not read what I wrote. You seem not to have read even the first sentence that I wrote. Why do you continue to talk about typewriters? All typewriters are completely irrelevant.
I had seen that web site before. It's weird. Here is an example quote:
"One question that came up was whether this was really Times New Roman, or perhaps Palatino, a font very similar to Times New Roman. I looked in my font list (I have hundreds of fonts installed on my machine), and found a font called "Palatino Linotype". Admittedly, this does not say anything about the font that might be used by a sophisticated typesetter in 1972, but it shows that the hoaxer really did use Times New Roman and not Palatino."
I found Palatino and Palatino Linotype on the machine I'm using to type this. The font used in the memos was definitely not Palatino.
The font used to make the memos was definitely not Times New Roman. It's weird that anyone could think that the fonts used in the memos are that font. Only someone who knows nothing about fonts, or someone who is mis-communicating, would say that.
The emphasis on line lengths seems to be because that's the only thing that matches. The fonts are only somewhat similar. Within the lines, there are many cases of spacing mismatches.
His analysis drifts. He begins talking about office machines. By the time he reaches the paragraph above, he is talking about "a sophisticated typesetter in 1972".
I assume, but have not tested on machines of that vintage, of course, that someone typeset the memos, instead of typing them. Maybe they were training a new typesetter. Maybe they were experimenting. Since it happened to me several times that I took typing to someone, and they gave me typesetting instead, I suppose it could happen to someone else.
I thought every base had a printing office. A large enough base, or one with special responsibilities, would have a typesetter, I suppose. I haven't thought about that in many years, of course. Certainly there was a steady stream of typeset documents. Not all of them came from headquarters, I think. I have no idea of the size of Ellington in 1972.
My guess is that you didn't read and understand everything he said. You are linking to him because he seems authoritative. Is that true?
Anyone who claims that Palatino is "very similar to Times New Roman", would probably say that Garamond was very similar, also. In some sense, hundreds of fonts are very similar to each other.
I have more than 5,000 fonts, and many people do. Everyone I've known who has an interest in typography has had thousands of fonts. Only a few hundred are installed, because Windows becomes unstable with more than that. Everyone I've known with an interest in typography has a program that lets them move any font from uninstalled to installed by dragging and dropping.
If I ever saw a post that should be modded up funny, yours would be it.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.