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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.
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!!!
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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 . . .
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.
All of this stuff has to do with things that happened 30 years ago. We elected (and re-elected!) Clinton who completely dodged the draft - Apparently we were past this 12 years ago.
A much more important comparison between the two candidates is what they have done in the last 3 years, not what they did 30 years ago.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
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
Actually, it shows the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are more than willing to honor our military and let the small stuff slide. We're even willing to forgive Kerry for lying about his service and for admitting to committed war crimes. It just doesn't bother us because we know the realities of war.
However, the left wants to find any small inconsistency or the smallest lie that Bush told and magnify it. It is important that we have a rock-solid case to defend Bush so that we can keep them focused on the issues, which is where we are focused.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I entirely agree -- whether it's Kerry's service in Vietnam, Bush's in the National Guard, Clinton's deferment or Dean's 4-F, it's ancient history and it's only baby boomer narcissism that anyone thinks any of this matters.
That said...
Kerry has based his entire campaign on his 4 months in Vietnam. Just last week, he responded to Zell Miller's attack on his Senate votes with "I served in Vietnam! You can't criticize me!" I think it's nuts, but if the Democrats claim that his Vietnam stint qualifies him to be president, then it's certainly inbounds for questioning.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Note that the superscript "th", which seems to be causing the most tinfoil-hat theorizing among the folks who think modern typography was invented by Bill Gates, doesn't line up at all between the memo and the Word version. Give it up, folks.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
>it shows the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are more than willing to honor our military and let the small stuff slide. We're even willing to forgive Kerry for lying about his service and for admitting to committed war crimes.
... are ignored whereas an extra martial affair is grounds for Impeachment.
Actually I think this better illustrates the differences. Republicans repeat fabrications questioning a Democratic who served in Vietnam and at the same time ignore what everyone knows is Bush's AWOL (an actual crime).
There is perhaps no better illustration of Rep/Dem differences than how lies about AWOL, WMD, the Geneva Convention,
You have to give Republicans credit for being true to their central plans i.e, "might makes right".
r7
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.
Huh?
Q. Where are the tons of WMDs about which the administration said "We know they have them and we know where they are" ?
A. Saddam was a bad man!
Q. What about those supposed ties from Iraq to al Queda? Didn't the 9/11 commission find there no real ties?
A. Saddam was a bad man!
Q. Speaking of the 9/11 commission, why did Bush fight its existance for so long?
A. Saddam was a bad man!
Q. Given that Afghanistan was the central point of al Queda, why does this administration focus all attention on Iraq?
A. Saddam was a bad man!
Q. Speaking of al Queda, where the hell is Osama bin Laden?
A. Saddam was a bad man!
Q. Uh. Right. Thanks for your time.
A. Saddam was... Oh. You're very welcome. See, us Republicans come right down to the issues!
Having plenty of documentation available from my own military records - allow me to point out that the standard appearance of "TH" is not superscript even in today's word processor age, but capitals - if this were "real" it should have been typed "187TH" something I used to hate dealing with before I learned my way around Word's autocorrect features.
And another thing while I'm on it, gettting out some of the older paperwork while previewing my post - I notice that rarely is "TH" added, I do see it in a few memoranda I have still, but it is always capitalized, or assumed.
For instance I served in the 35th Maintenance Squadron, 35th Logistics Group, 35th Fighter Wing, MIsawa, Airbase, Japan - almost every document from there is formally typed:
35 MXS, 35 LG, 35 FW, MISAWA, AB, JAPAN.
Looks fishy as hell to me considering it's a lot easier to tack on "th" in a Word Processor compared to an old gov't issue Typewriter.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
You fucking asshole. A party which would mock the Purple Heart has no fucking right to claim it has any respect for the military and those that served. You are a fucking asshole who should be ashamed to even hint that you are in some way patriotic.
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.
There's this element called "lead", see, and people used to carve backwards letters out of it, arrange them in words and rows and then smear ink on them and smash them on paper. Artisans created unique and interesting font designs to make specific applications of the technology pleasing to the eye, easy to read, and unique.
Times has existed for much longer than 30-40 years. Most of the common fonts you see in use now were created a long time ago and then adapted to new printing systems as technology improved.
It was the font that the New York Times commissioned to make their paper stand out.
...hell, anybody with a copy of Word.
Times of London. Nice try, tho. The New York Times doesn't even use Times. They use Imperial for their body type and a custom-designed Cheltenham for headlines and decks.
And no, if you'd been paying attention you'd know that I'm saying that these memos were typeset in not just any Times but in Microsoft Times New Roman. Positively identified by a forensic documents expert around 3:00 EDT today and subsequently confirmed by
I write in my journal
I see no evidence of Kerning. The spacing looks to me like it is typewritten, not computer typeset.
Having a key for superscript th was certainly not uncommon, having a proportional printing typewriter was not uncommon either, the IBM Executive model had proportional fonts in 1941.
A Lt Colonel is a pretty high rank, they get to have a few office toys. I would not expect a fancy typewriter in the typing pool, but in a senior officer's private office, hell yes. Also I would expect the notes to be either dictated or for the officer to tell the clerk roughly what he wanted and leave the clerk to do all the tedious looking up order numbers etc then hand him a stack of stuff to sign all at once. The signature looks exactly like what you get when you do that.
It will be pretty easy to check this, the Bushies can just release the microfiche and all questions would be answered. Instead they resist release of the microfiche which can only be because there is something damaging there.
It is an established fact that Bush did not show up for his medical, nobody disputes this. If a pilot fails to take their medical it is a big big deal, the senior officer could well be expected to explain why he allowed an expensively trained officer to walk away. Ordering Bush to take the medical is exactly what you would expect his commanding officer to do.
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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.
See how we get from A to B?
First proportional fonts did not exist at all. [oops wrong]
Then Times NEW Roman did not exist [oops wrong]
Then the miliatry could not afford them (bought too many $5000 hammers I guess) [oops wrong]
Then the superscript th was impossible. [oops wrong]
Now we are back to claims that a Lt Colonel could not afford a spare golfball for his selectric.
Fact is that by the 1970s there were lots of companies making replacement golfballs for the selectrics. In fact you had to go to a 3rd party to get the golfball with proportional spacing, at least at first.
The idea that a Lt. Col. could not afford a fancy font for his typewriter is ridiculous. It is exactly the sort of thing where the military top brass play one upmanship. Every piece of correspondence would be written using the same machine.
This is pure denial from the right, they know that the documents prove that Bush is a liar and that he disobeyed a direct order to take his medical exam. The only way they can maintain their belief system is to believe the documents are fake.
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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.
IBM's electric typewriters had proportional fonts as far back as 1945. Even if the base had a typewriter that was nearly 30 years old, it would still be capable of creating proportional fonts.
... well, I was going to say it's in doubt, but after all we've seen today it really isn't, is it? This memo is not authentic. It may be a reproduction of an actual memo, like somebody sat down in front of a PC and re-typed it or something, but it's not the real deal.
That is not correct. IBM made a line of typewriters that used proportional spacing: the IBM Executives. IBM also made a line that had interchangeable type balls that could take different typefaces: the Selectrics.
The Executives could not produce Times New Roman type, or, indeed, any variety of Times. The Selectrics could in theory have produced Times if there had been a Times type ball (there wasn't), but the Selectrics were incapable of doing proportional letterspacing.
In order to produce this memo, the typewriter would have had to do both of those things at once. No typewriter has ever existed that could do both.
Doubters should also remember that today's most popular proportional fonts have been used in typesetting (and on selectrics) since well before TrueType.
Yes, on typesetting machines like the Linotype hot-lead typesetters and the IBM Composer line-setting system. Neither of these would have been found in an office, for both cost tens of thousands of dollars and required special training to use.
Furthermore, Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, mentioned in the memos and involved in the back-and-forth, has confirmed that Killian expressed to him the same sentiments contained in the memos.
Yes, that's what CBS says. Nobody else has been able to talk to him because he's stopped answering his phone. (Understandably.) Furthermore, CBS acknowledges that MG Hodges never actually saw these memos. They were read aloud to him over the phone. So he has no input into the authenticity of the documents at all either way.
Regarding the superscripted 'th' argument, this document from Bush's official records also contains a superscripted 'th':
And there ends the similarities between that document and these. That document damns more than it forgives, friend. Compare the typography.
The White House even admits the authenticity of the documents, so why is this even an issue?
No, the White House declined to say anything about them at all. They received them from CBS News, looked 'em over, declined to comment, then emailed them out to other reporters this morning.
Because people don't want to realize that Bush disobeyed a DIRECT ORDER from his superior officers.
Um. There is no evidence that any such order was given apart from this memo, and the authenticity of this memo is
People don't want to believe an extraordinary claim unless there's extraordinary proof. And in this case, not only is there no extraordinary proof, but the proof that was offered is itself false! It has negative truth value, if you will. The fact that this memo is a forgery (along with the other three) sucks credibility away from the claim.
Because people don't want to think that the plane Bush flew continued to be used regularly through 1975, despite Bush and Bartlett's claims that it was "being phased out"
Um. You're not paying attention. When Bush moved to Alabama, there were no open slots on the flight-line. Because Bush's plane was being phased out -- no need for scare-quotes, you see -- and he was in his last year of service, the Air National Guard opted not to re-train him. He let his flight OK lapse because he had no reason not to. This was not unusual at all.
He didn't disobey a direct order because there was no such order. Okay?
The best line I've heard lately, courtesy of Kevin Drum
Sigh. If you've taken to quoting Kevin Drum, there's little hope for you left.
I write in my journal
Except that isn't the same font. The spacing is completely different (monospaced rather than proportional), the 4 is also a different type ("open" in your link, "closed" in the CBS scan).
you're a fucking liar.
Perhaps you should have compared the two fonts properly before making that claim.
None of these used the Times New Roman Font- and these were typeseting machines, not office typewriters.
In the late 1960s the Selectric Executive had such capabilities, but it wasn't until the early 1980s that Microsoft invented Times New Roman, with the closed top 4.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
At this point, CNN is reporting that the documents are very likely forged, including the opinion of a guy who is specifically an expert on IBM Composers.
a rd.ap/index.html
6 7-2004Sep9.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/10/bush.gu
Dr Phil Bouffard, one of the top experts in the field, is nearly conclusively certain that they're forged.
http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/000851.php
MSNBC is reporting experts in several areas who say they're forged.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5963843/
The Washington Post has a number of experts who strongly believe the documents were forged.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A99
And you've got Kos.
Read the stories. Think for yourself.
And for crying out loud learn to post a link. There's even a little crib in the edit window on Slashdot, for God's sake.
In this document:
http://d2d.ali-aba.org/_files/thumbs/components
Even CBS' own expert contradicts himself!
No he hasn't. The Dem *Convention* focused on his war record to counter the FUD about the Dems always being weaker than the Reps at protecting the country, yadda, yadda. Its bullshit, but a lot of people believe it, so he has to counter that. After the Convention, Kerry has done everything he can to steer the talk to things he believes Bush is weak on. Its Bush's attack dogs that want Vietnam to stay on the table, because as long as thats what we're talking about, we aren't talking about Bush's own screwups and stupidity.
The only people who claim he's talked only about Vietnam, just so happen to say that so they can criticise him. The height of hypocrisy: The conservatives say he only talks about Vietnam, when in reality its the conservatives who keep Vietnam on the front burner by constantly making this criticism. So excuse me if I don't buy this crap anymore.