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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.
The White House only released the documents that they had. Those documents were obtained from CBS.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
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.
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
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
Wow, so anything not denied is automatically true... What a creative way of blending logic and innuendo! A fresh new take on guilty until proven innocent.
Kudos on your succint statement of a principle worthy of any of the more heinous repressive regimes of our age.
CBS did consult documents experts
CBS News claims that they consulted one document expert, who remains unidentified. While Dr. Philip Bouffard, widely recognized expert in the field of forensic document identification, is quoted on INDC Journal as saying that he's "90% sure" these documents are forgeries.
Your main point is correct: If these documents are outside forgeries, then CBS News deserves merely to be tortured for their negligence, not burned at the stake.
But the possibility exists that these forgeries were manufactured by CBS News. And that possibility is way too scary to dismiss out of hand.
I write in my journal
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.
CBS has nothing to gain from such a forgery
You don't know the value of an exclusive. The ad revenues for last night's "60 Minutes II" were over the top.
for them to make up documents like this would be profoundly stupid
It was profoundly stupid for Dan Rather to get into a shouting match with the sitting vice president of the United States on live television, too. But he did it, in 1988.
especially since the documents themselves do not really add a whole lot to the case already made in the Ben Barnes interview
Ah, but that's where you have to have been paying attention. Ben Barnes made these exact same claims in 1999, when then-Governor Bush was running for president. His claim was widely debunked. It never even really broke as a story because it never held water to begin with. He alleged that he pulled strings while he was Lt. Gov. of Texas, for instance, but when Bush was trying to get into the TANG Barnes was in Switzerland as UN general envoy to Geneva. That kind of thing.
The reason Barnes is in the news today is because he's got this shit-hot new documentary evidence. Except the evidence turns out to be forged.
the interview itself, which seems to have settled the question about whether Bush pulled strings to avoid military service
Except that Barnes has nothing at all to back up his claims except a set of forged memos with a dead lieutenant colonel's name on them.
Barnes was outed as a liar by both the pundits and the press in 1999. He's back with forged documents. What do you think?
Anyway, as I've said elsewhere, I think this is all a distraction
Agreed. Blame the Democrats who decided to spam the press with the National Guard story again when their candidate took a nosedive in the polls.
I write in my journal
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
The IBM Executive had proportional fonts in 1942, it was the workhorse typewriter for much of business for that exact reason. A Lt Colonel is exactly the type of person who would want correspondence to be written in an impressive typeface. The clerk would use the same machine to write all memos regardless of importance.
There were many variations of the typefaces. A business would be very likely to want special characters such as $ and yen, pounds etc. A law firm would have different requirements and so on.
Since these were mechanical machines it was quite easy to change individual striking levers to add special characters of the customers choice. Eva Braun used an earlier IBM typewriter with a special symbol for the SS with the lightning bolt glyphs.
Superscript th was not an unusual requirement. Even if the machine started as stock it was the type of upgrade that happened regularly in the field. The striking pins have to be accessible because every so often a machine will jam.
The arguments about Word documents mean absolutely nothing. The alignment of the two documents does not look all that good to me, the resolution of the images is way less than the difference I would expect.
When self proclaimed 'experts' start making categorical claims such as proportional spacing typewriters did not exist at the time and those claims are proved false it is time to discount their expertise.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
and ABC News now have stories about it.
From the ABC News article:
CBS seriously screwed up on this one.
That would be the cretin you want to get elected to the Whitehouse.
;-) How many people from IBM have you talked to today?
It's two words: White House.
Several people are claiming that they used Selectric golfballs with proportional pitch.
Impossible. The pitch on a Selectric isn't controlled by the type ball. It's controlled by the motor drive. The type ball just rotates and elevates to strike a letter on the paper. There's nothing about it that controls how far the type head advances on each letter strike.
but I certainly don't see how you claim to know the exact capabilities of every typewriter owned by the US military.
I've had sixteen hours now to work on this story.
IBM sold selectric golfballs with the th superscript at the time.
Yes. They were custom items that were machined to order and that cost a fortune. And they also could not produce variable-pitch type, nor could they produce Times New Roman type.
There is no reason why they could not have offered their IBM Executive series machines with a similar option.
Yes, there is: the Executive machines didn't use interchangeable type balls. They used a lever-arm mechanism. Either all Executive typewriters would have had the "th" glyph or none of them would have. None did. IBM never made one with that glyph.
And no, the typeface is not MICROSOFT anything, Microsoft has never designed a typeface ever. The Microsoft fonts are from Monospace corp.
LOL. You mean "Monotype?" Heh. When TrueType came along in the early 1990s (or was it late 1980s?) Microsoft licensed the name and the letter forms from Monotype, now Agfa Monotype. Microsoft implemented the font, which means they determined the letterspacing, kerning pairs and so on.
The CTO of Agfa Monotype, incidentally, is on the record saying that it was highly unusual for anyone to use proportional-pitch type in the 1970's. The technology just wasn't there.
The 'expert' you refer to is not regarded as such outside the US republican party.
Sorry, but that's simply not true. He's so influential in the industry of forensic document analysis that other researchers write papers about him.
There is only one google hit for Bouffard and typewriter that relates to a forensic case and that is a crank case involving UFOs.
Your Google-fu is lacking.
I write in my journal
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.
"He let his flight status lapse because he knew he wouldn't be flying any more and because a physical examination is not a fun thing to do with your day."
He didn't take his physical because this is when the Guard instituted drug testing as part of it. Its ridiculous to suggest he'd risk landing in Vietnam just because taking the physical was not fun.
Its no secret was a frequent cocaine user during this period. He would have been nailed for drug use if he hadn't so he refused. He did and he should have been remanded to regular service for the insubordination and would have if he didn't have connections.
You did know W. was busted in Texas for cocaine possession. Again thanks to family connections he got off with six months of community service at PUSH. I assure you he didn't do community service for poor black folks out of the goodness of his heart. If he'd been poor or black he would have gotten a felony conviction and it would have ended his political career. America and the world would be a better place too.
I imagine the new documents are forged. I wish they'd sneaked by. The problem we have here is the Bush family and their very skilled and ruthless operatives went around destroying all the evidence of his pathetic excuse for a life, including gaining unsupervised and illegal access to his guard file when they destroyed all the really embarrasing documents. As a result there is no proof that he isn't fit to be President, though he isn't, so he has the Teflon coating.
"George W. Bush was born on third base and he thinks he hit a triple" Ann Richards
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
George W. Bush, December 2000
@de_machina