Killian Office Memo Not Similar to CBS
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Killian Office Memo Not Similar to CBS
| Sat, 09-11-2004 - 11:16am |
CBS memo: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf
An analysis done on CBS memo: http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf
Memo from military (click 'enlarge' icon): http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/doc25.gif
And some funny comments: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1212833/posts
I want to see how the Sunday morning lib shows will spin this. What I want to know is how the DNC planned to get away with these forgeries knowing that ALL sources are easily verifiable on the internet?

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for CBS... is Dan Rather lying?
NYPost article: "In another challenge to CBS, Killian's boss, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, told ABC News that he regards the documents as a computer "fraud," never saw them in the 1970s and didn't validate them for CBS. A senior CBS official had claimed to the Washington Post that Hodges had validated the documents. During his national news broadcast, Rather claimed "partisan political operatives" are challenging the memos but omitted the fact that Killian's widow and son dispute them...”
The NewYorkPost has a news story that reveals CBS anchor Dan Rather may have caught in their own fraudulent claims. At issue: the Bush memos and CBS’s claim that retired Major Gen. Bobby W. Hodges had validated the memos. The problem: Major Ge. Hodges denies he validated them.
On his CBS News show Friday, Rather there's no "definitive evidence" to refute the authenticity of documents about President Bush's National Guard service — and closed with this:
"If any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it. So far there is none."
Meanwhile, the ‘unimpeachable’ CBS evidence continues to be questioned. CBS/Rather made much about their analysis expert, Marcel Matley. But according to the Post article:
But Matley is primarily a handwriting expert whose expertise in document evaluation has been challenged by the head of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners.
Matley spoke only about a signature and initials purported to be those of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian — "they are his signatures" — though two of the four memos are unsigned.
Another glaring problem: the documents obtained by CBS are not originals. They are only photocopies, and this sends up a big red flag with document experts. Excerpt from Post article:
Allan Haley — a typeface expert at Agfa Monotype — said anyone who claims to definitively authenticate a photocopy "is either guessing or is a fool."
But perhaps the more insulting claim during Rather’s Friday rebuttal was this: Rather said ‘partisan political operatives’ were challenging the memos. Did he mean to include Killian’s widow and son as ‘political operatives’??? Both are hotly contesting the validity of the documents. Killian’s widow says her deceased husband did not type. And Killian’s son says they are not authentic.
http://www.iowapresidentialwatch.com/dailyArchive/SEPT2004/09-11-04.htm
By DEBORAH ORIN and VINCENT MORRIS
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September 11, 2004 -- CBS anchor Dan Rather hung tough last night and insisted there's no "definitive evidence" to refute the authenticity of documents about President Bush's National Guard service — but a growing number of document experts smell a hoax.
"If any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it. So far there is none," Rather insisted.
He produced a man named Marcel Matley as the document vetter.
But Matley is primarily a handwriting expert whose expertise in document evaluation has been challenged by the head of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners.
Matley spoke only about a signature and initials purported to be those of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian — "they are his signatures" — though two of the four memos are unsigned.
Rather also acknowledged CBS has no originals, only photocopies.
Allan Haley — a typeface expert at Agfa Monotype — said anyone who claims to definitively authenticate a photocopy "is either guessing or is a fool."
In another challenge to CBS, Killian's boss, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, told ABC News that he regards the documents as a computer "fraud," never saw them in the 1970s and didn't validate them for CBS.
A senior CBS official had claimed to the Washington Post that Hodges had validated the documents.
During his national news broadcast, Rather claimed "partisan political operatives" are challenging the memos but omitted the fact that Killian's widow and son dispute them.
The memos cast doubt on whether Bush fulfilled his Guard requirements.
Marjorie Connell — widow of Lt. Col. Killian, who died in 1984 — has told ABC the documents are "very suspect" because her late husband didn't type and was a big fan of the young Bush.
A key issue is whether the documents were made on a 1970s-era typewriter or are forgeries done by computer because of their proportional spacing and raised superscripts on ordinal numbers like "111th."
Rather last night pointed to an undisputed document from Bush's National Guard files and claimed it has a superscript, so they were available by 1968.
But that document is in a different typeface and experts say it was made on a different type of machine without proportional spacing so it proves nothing.
"It could be a superscript, it could be a correction with a letter showing through white-out, but in any case it's absolutely irrelevant . . . It doesn't prove a thing," said document expert Bill Flynn.
"It's a completely different technology," added the Phoenix-based Flynn.
Flynn said it's "very unlikely" that the memos are legit, adding that he knows of no typewriter fonts using proportionally spaced Roman type with a raised "th" available in the 1970s.
Rather didn't identify any machine capable of produc^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ing the documents.
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/28387.htm
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September 10, 2004
The IBM Selectric Composer
For a couple of days now we've been talking about whether the CBS memos could have been produced using the technology available in 1972 and 1973. We've talked about two typewriters mainly, both widely used at that time: the IBM Executive series and the IBM Selectric series.
Though the question has hardly been conclusively answered, the consensus of opinion among interested parties seems to be that neither an Executive nor a Selectric could have produced these memos.
My purpose here is not to debate the relative merits of either of those typewriters; that discussion is happening elsewhere. Rather, I want to take a moment to consider the dark horse candidate, the one piece of equipment that is widely believed to have been capable of producing a document similar to these memos, but that has been dismissed as being so improbable an alternative as to hardly bear talking about.
I'm referring to the IBM Selectric Composer. This machine resembles a sophisticated electric typewriter in most respects, but is in fact a full-fledged cold-type typesetting machine. (Cold type as opposed to hot type, machines like the Linotype that would cast entire lines of type in molten lead as the typesetter worked. Ah, those were the days.)
Whenever the topic has turned to the Selectric Composer, it has been dismissed out-of-hand as being far too expensive an item to find in an office on an Air National Guard base: The machine sold for anywhere from $3,600 to $4,400, and fonts were extra and not cheap. Furthermore, the Composer was widely agreed to be far too complicated and slow a machine to use for typing up memoranda, especially ones that were destined to go into a file and not even be distributed.
Update: Many commenters have pointed out — and I'm trying to read 'em all, I promise! — that I'm talking about $3,600 to $4,400 in unadjusted 1973 dollars here. If you use one of the widely available deflation or purchasing-power calculators, you end up with an equivalent in 2004 dollars of between about $16,000 and about $22,000. Bottom line: despite its fairly innocuous appearance, the Selectric Composer was no ordinary office typewriter. It was a pricey little number.
But the nagging question remained: Could an IBM Selectric Composer have been used to produce these documents?
I found my answer the same place everybody finds everything these days: Google. Typing "IBM Selectric Composer" into that search site took me to the aptly named ibmcomposer.org, which describes itself as "the only site on the Internet completely dedicated to the IBM 'Selectric' Composer line of typesetting machines." The site, which is run by Gerry Kaplan, includes information, scanned user manuals, and photographs of the only working IBM Selectric Composer I've been able to find. And, fortunately for me, it also includes an e-mail address.
When I first heard back from Gerry, I felt a little bad for having bothered him. He'd been fielding calls and letters all day, he told me, including an inquiry from CNN. But he was a trouper, willing — enthusiastic even — to help out.
I asked Gerry, in a fit of hubris, if he wouldn't mind trying to reproduce a sample from one of the CBS memos on his Selectric Composer. Just over an hour later, he emailed me back a sample, typed up on his Composer using the 11-point Press Roman type ball and scanned into his computer.
At first glance, the sample Gerry provided looks pretty darned close. The type is proportionally spaced, just like the type in the CBS memos. Gerry was also able to reproduce the now-infamous superscripted "th," though he had a disclaimer about that.
Superscript didn't come out so good because when you change the escapement lever (from the larger spacing to smaller spacing, and visa versa), sometimes the ball actually slips forward by a small amount, so you can see that the superscript looks disjointed.
But all in all, I thought it looked pretty close. Was it possible that thirty years ago an Air Force Reserve lieutenant colonel typed up a handful of memos on a state-of-the-art typesetting machine?
I was getting ahead of myself. There's a big difference between looking pretty close and actually being pretty close. I knew I wouldn't be able to tell until I got the samples into Adobe Photoshop and superimposed them. I tinted Gerry's sample red for visibility and then overlaid it on top of the original. Here's the result.
The most obvious discrepancy was that the line-spacing — what typographers call leading (rhymes with "shredding") — was off. I e-mailed Gerry about this, and he replied: "Yes, if I had really tried, I could have matched the spacing (leading). The leading on the composer can be finely adjusted. Don't know if it is down to the single point level, but it probably is since you can set the leading according to the font, and the leading dial goes from something like 6pt up to 14pt."
Rather than asking Gerry to cough me up another sample, I simply split the lines of type apart in Photoshop and slid them down to align with the baselines of the corresponding lines of type in the original. Here's the adjusted version.
Much better … and pretty darned close to the original. But not close enough. The letterforms in the IBM's Press Roman typeface are very close to the letterforms in the CBS memo. Not surprising, since they're both based on the original Times New Roman font commissioned by the Times of London in 1931. But as we've seen already, different versions of the same font always exhibit subtle differences, usually in letterspacing. This case is no different.
Consider the first line of type. The "14" at the end of the line is almost perfectly aligned in both samples. But the word "to" in "report to commander" is significantly offset. So's "AFB." And, of course, the second line is completely out of whack. The third line is quite close, except for the superscript, the one Gerry said looked disjointed because of a slip in the carrier while he was adjusting the escapement lever.
Hey, what about that superscript? How'd he make it? I asked him via e-mail, and he replied:
To make the superscripted th, I first typed "111", then switched the font to the 8pt font, switched the escapement lever to the smaller escapement (horizontal movement), reverse indexed the paper 1/2 line up, typed the "th", indexed 1/2 line down, switched the escapement lever to the wider escapement, then changed the type ball back to the 11pt font. On other tries, I was able to produce the superscripted th much cleaner (where it looked proper), but on the one I sent you, the carrier slipped forward a little bit when I switched the escapement lever to and from the smaller spacing.
Just to be clear, when Gerry says he switched to the 8-point font, he's not talking about pushing a button. He had to remove the 11-point type ball from the machine and replace it with the 8-point type ball, which in a real office would involve digging in the back of a drawer to find the seldom-used thing. Creating that superscript wasn't quick or easy, and when he did it the carrier slipped and the superscript ended up offset. Unlike the perfectly formed and placed superscripts seen in the CBS memos.
So the superscript is slightly off, and the letterspacing is significantly off. What's left? Something I didn't even think to ask about: the centered type.
Another point that is very suspicious is the centered heading. This is a snap to do with fixed spacing (like courier), but the text is centered using proportional spaced text, which means that the typist had to carefully measure the text prior to typing to calculate its exact center point. Typing a superscript, with all its steps, is simple compared to centering text proportionally without digital electronics.
This point was so important to Gerry that he went out of his way to mention it to me again later in the day: centering type is hard on the Selectric Composer. Two of the memos, May 4 and August 1, 1972, feature a three-line centered head. Each of those lines of type had to be centered by measuring it carefully, doing some math, then advancing the carrier to just the right point on the page. The margin for error would be pretty wide because type can be off by a few points in either direction and still look pretty well centered. It wouldn't be objectionable unless you went looking for it. So it wasn't necessary for Lt. Col. Killian — or his typist — to be millimeter-precise.
And yet … he was.
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.
Remarkable.
Can we draw any conclusions from this? Well, there's always room for doubt, no matter how slim, no matter how slight. But in my opinion … yes. Based on the significant differences in letterspacing between the Composer font and the font used in the memos, the iffy nature of the superscript "th," and the unbelievable coincidence of the precisely centered headlines, I'm ready to say that the IBM Selectric Composer was not used to produce these memos.
Update: Gerry, who I swear is going to have his own blog before the end of this, had a suggestion.
Something that I think would be a good test for your website may be to reproduce the centered heading using MS Word and Times New Roman. If you can produce centered text that matches identically to the letterhead, it is, in my opinion, a true hoax. The reason is, because even if they were able to center text with a typesetting machine such as the composer, a PC (and good word processor), will center the text even more precisely, not at the "point" level, but rather on the twip level (1/1440th of an inch or 1/20th of a point).
I live to please. Behold:
This is the composite image from above with the new stuff on top. The bottom layer is the first original memo headers in black. Above that is the second original memo headers in red ink. And on top of that in black is the header I created just now using Microsoft Word's default settings and clicking the "center" button. There's a little slippage because the original scans are not perfectly horizontal while the overlay I put on top is. But beyond that … looks like a dead-on match to me.
What are the odds?
http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/09/the_ibm_selectr.html
Alleged forgeries.
CBS news released these documents.
The White House issued these documents.
The Democratic Party did not.
That’s my understanding.
If you have information proving the Democratic Party issued these documents, please share.
If not, they are unsubstantiated claims on your part.
>> ALL sources are easily verifiable on the internet <<
Unsubstantiated claims are easily made on the Internet.
Precise analysis of documents not in one’s direct possession is impossible.
My comments on your links:
The flash presentation at claims 60 minutes used an "anonymous" handwriting analyst.
In fact, they did a video interview with a handwriting analyst named Marcel Matley.
>> Document and handwriting examiner Marcel Matley analyzed the documents for CBS News. He says he believes they are real. But he is concerned about exactly what is being examined by some of the people questioning the documents, because deterioration occurs each time a document is reproduced. And the documents being analyzed outside of CBS have been photocopied, faxed, scanned and downloaded, and are far removed from the documents CBS started with.<< http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/06/politics/main641481.shtml
link to post with video interview resources:
http://messageboards.ivillage.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=iv-elpoliticsto&msg=4012.4
Their claim that MS word offers “proof of forgery”
MS Word was designed to imitate a typed sheet on a computer screen.
Similarities (if any) between MS Word and any document in itself is proof of nothing.
Memo from military - I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with this post.
Perhaps since it doesn't look like the documents presented by CBS, you consider this proof of something. Please explain further.
Freerepublic is a partisan site.
It’s not surprising many there are pushing a forgery theory.
My thoughts on this at this point.
I’ve seen no conclusive proof CBS forged these documents.
The burden of proof for me is on those claiming that CBS issued forged documents.
I’ve yet to see conclusive proof of their claims.
I am still open to any objective proof offered.
I can't tell you where that information came from, news reports typically don't disclose their sources, as CBS seems to have choosen to do for now. But, that is being put out there for what it's worth.
The White House issued these documents.>
The White House released them after they were given to the White HOuse by CBS. As far as I know CBS has not identified where the documents originally came from except to say they were in Killian's personal files, a claim disputed by Killian's wife and son who say they have not given CBS any of Killian's "personal files".
I've not seen those claims made in any independent news reports I've seen so far.
If you can find a link to where you read this, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks for your reply
That's my understanding at this point as well.
I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear enough in my initial post in this thread.
Here's the ad for the IBM Executive (which many of the freepers seem not to have seen as they still insist that proportional type proves it's a forgery.)
http://www.etypewriters.com/1954-b-2.JPG
Here's a picture to show it's just a plain-old typewriter:
http://www.etypewriters.com/d-exec.jpg
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about IBM electric typewriters:
"The IBM Electric typewriters were a series of electric typewriters that IBM manufactured, starting in the late 1940s. They used the conventional moving carriage and hammer mechanism. Each model came in both Standard and Executive versions; the Executive differed in having a multiple escapement mechanism and four widths for letters, producing a near typeset quality result."
Here's an interview with a guy who's repaired typewriters in NYC for the past 40 years, talking about Executive:
"War Room got some additional insight from Paul Schweitzer, a typewriter expert/repairman in New York City, after he examined the documents as printed from the CBS News web site. (Schweitzer says he was called by a CBS employee with questions about superscripts and all the arcane details of 70s-era typewriters an hour after we called him this morning.)
After looking at the copies of the memos, Schweitzer says, they appear to him to be typewritten, particularly because there are instances of one letter appearing higher or lower than one next to it, something that does not happen with computer- or word processor-generated documents. The letters in the word "Alabama" on the May 19, 1972 memo, for example, were not perfectly aligned. "When it's off alignment that's an indication it could be a typewriter," he said.
Schweitzer's best guess about the machine: The memos "very strongly and very possibly could have been typed on an IBM Executive. But could I say 100 percent for sure that this is it, no I can't," Schweitzer said. The IBM Executive, widely available in the early 70s, had proportional spacing and a type style variation -- Bold Face 2 type -- that very closely resembles, in Schweitzer's view, the font used in the memos.
The comma used in this type style had a little curl in it, and while neither the Executive brochure nor a type chart Schweitzer had showed an example of an apostrophe in this font, Schweitzer said the apostrophe in a type style is typically matches the comma. (This print ad for the Executive, though, shows curly quotes.) You wouldn't have, for example, a curly comma in Bold Face 2, but a hash mark of an apostrophe. Some of the right-wing bloggers and Fox News, etc., claim that if the memos were authentic and of the era, the apostrophes would have been hash marks, not curlicues. But that's just not true -- curly was definitely happening in punctuatiion at that time. Only the "9" in the Bold Face 2 type troubled Schweitzer, because it appeared to curl under more than the 9's in the memos.
As for the superscripted "th," Schweitzer thinks the only way to have created the smaller, raised "th" on an Executive would have been to have a key made for that purpose. You could superscript on the Executive, as we pointed out earlier, but the "th" would have been normal sized, Schweitzer said, not the smaller type as seen in the memos. "It is possible that particular typewriter had that symbol installed on another key," although he thought it would be unusual.
This is all the opinion of one man, of course, albeit one with 45 years of experience fixing typewriters. And Schweitzer also pointed out that there are other brands of typewriters -- including foreign ones -- that could have been used by Killian at the time.
We're awaiting CBS' own analysis and defense of its work on the evening news. Of course, this may be a case that is never definitively put to rest for those doubting the memos' authenticity -- and those looking for ways to discredit CBS and its sources. But one thing is clear -- forgery has not been proven, by anyone. It was possible for Killian to have produced those documents just as similar documents were created in that era."
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room//index.html
This would also explain why the header has a th sitting on the baseline, and the body copy has a superscript th. Another anomoly which you would have to go out of your way to do if you were forging this on a modern wordprocessor. And why would you do it?
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