Skepticism and the memo controversy

[Meadmaker]

The $10,000.00 challenge is now over $37,000. If it is so easy to locate a typewriter that can make a memo that matches up, then for the love of Pete, collect it.

Haven't seen this challenge. Where is it? I take it that this is a challenge promising money to anyone who can recreate the memo's on a 1973 typewriter?


Do you have a cite for the model D? Or where you are getting the information about what it can do? I might like the chance to pick up an easy 37 grand, myself.

Just bloggers. I typed "IBM executive" and "Model D". I would do it again and post a link here, but frankly, I think I've switched sides on this issue. Events have overtaken me. I had read the same articles you cited, and found them very persuasive.

I also read the secretary's comments ,available on Drudge, if you want to find them, but I'm sure they will be available everywhere else, too, in the near future.

I would now say that the evidence, unless refuted, constitutes extraordinary proof. More and more reports are coming in of people who have tried, and failed, to recreate the documents. Others are poring in about how CBS rushed in with the story before doing proper checks. People with personal knowledge are saying they are fake.

I'm still willing to listen to CBS and see if they can produce better evidence, but the burden of proof is definitely on them at this point. Of course, it always was, but now the evidence against them is really piling up.

I, for one, am stunned. I'm also disgusted. Forged or not, this line of attack has really turned me off, and I doubt I will vote for Kerry. If they are forged, as appears more likely, that's just more reason to be disgusted. If they are not, it is still personal attacks, character assassination, and irrelevant to today's campaign.

 

[BPSCG]

I, for one, am stunned. I'm also disgusted. Forged or not, this line of attack has really turned me off, and I doubt I will vote for Kerry. If they are forged, as appears more likely, that's just more reason to be disgusted. If they are not, it is still personal attacks, character assassination, and irrelevant to today's campaign.

While I'm convinced they're forged, I'm still open to the possibility that neither Kery nor the DNC is the source for this. A link I posted two posts ago suggests that the DNC may have given it to CBS without checking too hard, expecting that CBS, having a good reputation, would do the research for them. They may not have expected that CBS and in particular, Dan Rather, would look on it as a lottery jackpot ticket and themselves not check it out thoroughly either.

At least, that's the story line I'd be working on if I was Terry McAuliffe.

 

[Meadmaker]

While I'm convinced they're forged, I'm still open to the possibility that neither Kery nor the DNC is the source for this.

Me, too, but the kicker for me was the video you posted a link to on the other thread. (The "Fortunate Son" video.) Like many, I followed this link from the Drudge Report page.

What truly disgusts me is that the DNC is using their time, effort, and money to engage in slimeball character assassination about Bush's service in the Guard. Who cares? I know I don't. If they could prove conclusively that George Bush spent 1973 in a coke induced haze and only got an honorable discharge by giving free snow to everyone in his chain in command, I would say it happened thirty years ago and isn't relevant today.

I dislike Bush because I don't like what he has done in the last four years. 1973 is ancient history.

If they are so out of touch that they think I care about what Bush did in his twenties, I don't want them running the country. Above all, I think that this has been the worst campaign in my memory, and I don't want to reward either side with my vote.


No matter how you slice it, this campaign stinks like yesterday's diaper.

 

[NoZed Avenger]

While I'm convinced they're forged, I'm still open to the possibility that neither Kery nor the DNC is the source for this. A link I posted two posts ago suggests that the DNC may have given it to CBS without checking too hard, expecting that CBS, having a good reputation, would do the research for them. They may not have expected that CBS and in particular, Dan Rather, would look on it as a lottery jackpot ticket and themselves not check it out thoroughly either.

At least, that's the story line I'd be working on if I was Terry McAuliffe.

I tend to agree. I think this *should* be devastating to CBS/Rather's credibility (assuming that the evidence holds), but I do not transfer that to Kerry or the DNC unless there is more to it.

As CBS has refused to say where the documents come from though, I am sure that the speculation will be that either the DNC or the Kerry campaign could be involved -- a perception not helped by the reports that a CBS staffer has already said the memos come from Kerry's people.

That report is unverified and I do not accept it at face value, but it is out there, and I am sure that some people will.

 

[NoZed Avenger]

No matter how you slice it, this campaign stinks like yesterday's diaper.

Bipartisan Consensus!



Oh, and in my last message, I did forget that the DNC jumped up and ran with this story (very, very quickly come to think of it) -- so yeah, there may be more fallout than I originally thought.

 

[NoZed Avenger]

I missed this from ABC yesterday:


http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation/bush_guard_documents_040914-1.html

Sept. 14, 2004 — Two of the document experts hired by CBS News say the network ignored concerns they raised prior to the broadcast of a report citing documents that questioned George W. Bush's service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War.

The authenticity of the documents in the report by CBS News' 60 Minutes II has been widely questioned. The documents were allegedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984.

Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.

"I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter," she said.

Will says she sent the CBS producer an e-mail message about her concerns and strongly urged the network the night before the broadcast not to use the documents.

"I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will said.

But the documents became a key part of the 60 Minutes II broadcast questioning President Bush's National Guard service in 1972. CBS made no mention that any expert disputed the authenticity.

* * *

A second document examiner hired by CBS News, Linda James of Plano, Texas, also told ABC News she had concerns about the documents and could not authenticate them. She said she expressed her concerns to CBS before the 60 Minutes II broadcast.

"I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," James said. "And that's why I have come forth to talk about it because I don't want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents."

A third examiner hired by CBS for its story, Marcel Matley, appeared on CBS Evening News last Friday and was described as saying the document was real.

According to The Washington Post, Matley said he examined only the signature attributed to Killian and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

This *should* bury CBS' (or at least Rather's) credibility -- especially given his defense of the memos without any *hint* that CBS had been told this.

No WONDER CBS did not reveal the names of the experts who looked at their memos.

I mean . . . Dayamn. Just . . . . Dayamn.

Rather's credibilkity just went up in flames like a Vietnamese monk. . . Will his reputation survive this? Can he and CBS just ignore it and wait for the public to forget it?

 

[LW]

So then I wasn't so sure that the 1973 documents were fake, just by looking at them. I haven't seen a convincing case yet, either way, but I still am pretty darn suspicious that the documents are phonies.

I finally went through the trouble to look the pdfs of the memos. The only thing that I can really say is:

Three
Line
Centered
Text.

This subject was mentioned in some of the linked articles, and I just had to check it myself to see that it is really true.

I won't believe for a minute that someone managed to create two sets of identically centered lines using a typewriter. And lines whose alignment is identical to the one produced by Word....

I have read quite a lot of old typewritten military documents. Sure, it is a different army and a different decade (military history is one of my hobbies and I've spent numerous days in Finnish Military Archives going trough unit diaries and other clerical records) but I haven't come across a single case of two-line centering. In fact, one line centerings in those documents are done by hitting tabulator enough times to get the title roughly in the middle.

But, matching Word centering in 1972... That's a quite strong contender for the million dollar prize.

 

[BPSCG]

I finally went through the trouble to look the pdfs of the memos. The only thing that I can really say is:

Three
Line
Centered
Text.

This subject was mentioned in some of the linked articles, and I just had to check it myself to see that it is really true.

I won't believe for a minute that someone managed to create two sets of identically centered lines using a typewriter. And lines whose alignment is identical to the one produced by Word....

Centering text really wan't all that hard with manual typewriters. All you had to do was know how many characters per line you had your margins set at. Say it was 80. Then all you had to do was count the number of characters you wanted to center, divide by two, then backspace back that number from the halfway point between your left margin and right margin; typewriters often had some kind of ruler to help you with that, or alternatively, you could set a tab at the halfway point. Then start typing. Of course, that assumed you were comfortable around a typewriter, which Killian was not

You'd be off by one letter if the text you were typing had an odd number of characters, but you'd still get nice results. If the forged memos had an odd number of characters but were still centered, that would be just one more nail in a coffin that, as far as I'm concerned, has already been welded shut.

 

[epepke]

My first reaction, upon seeing the documents, is that they were not only a forgery, but an obvious one at that.

...

So then I wasn't so sure that the 1973 documents were fake, just by looking at them. I haven't seen a convincing case yet, either way, but I still am pretty darn suspicious that the documents are phonies.

This was my progression, too. First I assumed that they were obvious forgeries, then wasn't so sure.

Now, it all seems very strange to me. Neither the assertion of "forgeries" nor "not forgeries" makes sense. People have argued about how the "not forgeries" does not make sense, so let's talk about how "forgeries" does not make sense, either.

Assuming these are forgeries, it would have had to work like this: Someone would have had to take well known information, recognizable as accurate to the inovolved parties, about which memos did exist. Then they would have had to construct memos that were as implausible as could possibly be imagined (nobody would have doubted a memo in Courier), but still using information that is largely unquestioned.

It reminds me of Philip K. Dick's concept of fake fakes. It's like going into the Amazon rain forest and finding a fake tree that is made of plastic but is designed to look like all the other trees.

 

[LW]

You'd be off by one letter if the text you were typing had an odd number of characters, but you'd still get nice results. If the forged memos had an odd number of characters but were still centered, that would be just one more nail in a coffin that, as far as I'm concerned, has already been welded shut.

The memos use proportional font on the centered part. Centering proportional font is not as easy as counting characters but you have to either physically measure the length of the final text or calculate the number of width-units using the font definition. Also, the three lines are not vertically aligned at the midpoint, so they are not done by putting the mid-character of each line to the center of the paper.

Would it be impossible to do those lines on a high-end typewriter? Probably not, but I don't believe that anybody would go through the insane amount of work necessary to do so when a left-justified address would have been perfectly adequate.

 

[BPSCG]

It reminds me of Philip K. Dick's concept of fake fakes. It's like going into the Amazon rain forest and finding a fake tree that is made of plastic but is designed to look like all the other trees.

The work of a Republican mole in the DNC? Create something designed to be caught, show it around a little bit, then suggest "maybe we should send this to CBS, see what they think...?"

 

[crimresearch]

Wasn't there a call around here somewhere to apply Occam's razor?

The longer the flap over typeface minutiae, and Dan Rather's so called 'virginity'...errr, I mean 'integrity', goes on, the harder I'm looking for the man behind the curtain.

And if this is an elaborate distraction, what is it that we were supposed to be paying attention to before the slight of hand started?

 

[Brown]

Now, it all seems very strange to me. Neither the assertion of "forgeries" nor "not forgeries" makes sense. People have argued about how the "not forgeries" does not make sense, so let's talk about how "forgeries" does not make sense, either.

Assuming these are forgeries, it would have had to work like this: Someone would have had to take well known information, recognizable as accurate to the inovolved parties, about which memos did exist. Then they would have had to construct memos that were as implausible as could possibly be imagined (nobody would have doubted a memo in Courier), but still using information that is largely unquestioned.

What's very puzzling about this is that, if the documents are fake, someone still went to quite a bit of work to produce them. Why, then, would the forger be so bone-headed as to have them written on a modern day word processor? It's not that hard to get one's hands on a 1970s era typewriter.

Maybe I've watched too much "Mission: Impossible," but I'm starting to wonder whether the documents were faked AND that the fakery was intended to be discovered. If that is the case, then the source of the documents would almost certainly not be the Kerry camp.

If the documents are fake and are intended to be exposed as such, then there is no way that Kerry could benefit from them. Bush, on the other hand, could derive quite a bit of gain. He could get sympathy, for one thing, by suggesting that the Kerry camp doesn't play fair. Even better, he could potentially humilate Dan Rather and the CBS News department, who have waged their credibility on the documents' authenticity.

 

[epepke]

What's very puzzling about this is that, if the documents are fake, someone still went to quite a bit of work to produce them. Why, then, would the forger be so bone-headed as to have them written on a modern day word processor? It's not that hard to get one's hands on a 1970s era typewriter.

I agree. Or just use Courier. It would have been fairly trivial to do so.

There's another thing that's troubled me about this. Standard photocopiers perform a 3% reduction in size, but this is not well known. Certainly it's more arcane knowledge than the fact that the vast majority of 1970s typewriters were fixed-pitch.

What does this say about the near-pixel matching? If someone had matched these with a Word document, it should be easy to determine the number of times that the doc had been photocopied.

Maybe I've watched too much "Mission: Impossible," but I'm starting to wonder whether the documents were faked AND that the fakery was intended to be discovered. If that is the case, then the source of the documents would almost certainly not be the Kerry camp.

This seems like tinfoil-hat stuff, but again, I don't see a simple explanation. I don't see an easy way to make Occam happy with this one.

Once, a long time ago, I went to a Japanese restaurant. The menu looked like it was made with a typewriter. However, if you looked closely, it had clearly been hand-painted in such a way as to look as if a typewriter had done it. This has the same sort of flavor. Corplinx notwithstanding, I get the feeling that there's something here that we're all missing. I don't know what it is.

 

[Eleatic Stranger]

This seems like tinfoil-hat stuff, but again, I don't see a simple explanation. I don't see an easy way to make Occam happy with this one.

Though it does seem impressively intricate if it turns out to be a plan by Rove, he does have a history of rather impressive dirty tricks. This doesn't prove anything with regards to the current issue, but I think it would make Occam a little more at ease with the whole thing if it turns out to be true.

 

[crimresearch]

Occam's Razor does NOT mean to look for the most far fetched and 'impressively intricate' conspiracy theory you can find.

What was the last thing on the table, that wasn't being explained away, before all of these distractions came up?

 

[Brown]

Occam's Razor does NOT mean to look for the most far fetched and 'impressively intricate' conspiracy theory you can find.

Quite true. It also does not require one to accept the simplest explanation, namely, that the documents are what they purport to be.

When evaluating claims of fakery, it is often interesting to ask, "If a person is going to go to such trouble to make a fake, and if the fakery is as obvious as you say, why did the hoaxer make such an obvious blunder?" Sometimes it turns out that the blunder isn't really a blunder at all.

Take the "We Didn't Go To The Moon" business. Some folks assert in earnest that there were no manned missions to the Moon, but that it was all a government conspiracy. The pictures from the lunar surface, they said, were "obvious" fakes because they didn't have stars, or the right kind of shadows, and so on.

Well if someone is going to go to a lot of trouble to fake something like this, why would they make the bone-headed mistake of not putting stars in the background or assuring that the shadows were correct? How could the conspirators be so stupid as to overlook such dead giveaways?

Well, as you can read in Phil Plait's book and on his web site, there were no such obvious blunders in the photos. The "obvious" signs of fakery actually had legitimate explanations easily understandable by any educated person.

 

[BPSCG]

When evaluating claims of fakery, it is often interesting to ask, "If a person is going to go to such trouble to make a fake, and if the fakery is as obvious as you say, why did the hoaxer make such an obvious blunder?" Sometimes it turns out that the blunder isn't really a blunder at all.

My Republican-mole-in-the-DNC hypothesis looks better all the time...

 

[aerocontrols]

My Republican-mole-in-the-DNC hypothesis looks better all the time...

I just got off the phone with Karl Rove.


He tells me that if he had a mole in the DNC like you describe, he would have much better uses for him. Uses that wouldn't get his mole exposed.

Me and Karl are good buddies, so you can take that to the bank.

MattJ

 

[crimresearch]

Quite true. It also does not require one to accept the simplest explanation, namely, that the documents are what they purport to be.

When evaluating claims of fakery, it is often interesting to ask, "If a person is going to go to such trouble to make a fake, and if the fakery is as obvious as you say, why did the hoaxer make such an obvious blunder?" Sometimes it turns out that the blunder isn't really a blunder at all.

Take the "We Didn't Go To The Moon" business. Some folks assert in earnest that there were no manned missions to the Moon, but that it was all a government conspiracy. The pictures from the lunar surface, they said, were "obvious" fakes because they didn't have stars, or the right kind of shadows, and so on.

Well if someone is going to go to a lot of trouble to fake something like this, why would they make the bone-headed mistake of not putting stars in the background or assuring that the shadows were correct? How could the conspirators be so stupid as to overlook such dead giveaways?

Well, as you can read in Phil Plait's book and on his web site, there were no such obvious blunders in the photos. The "obvious" signs of fakery actually had legitimate explanations easily understandable by any educated person.

Thanks for bringing an even bigger load of misdirection to the table...where did I ever say that I thought the documents were not forgeries?


But I learned a long time ago, that some folks just can't stand the feel of wool being pulled off of their eyes. I certainly won't waste my time trying to get you to apply skeptical analysis.