Bush documents faked?
 

I'm not a computer guy so I have no idea about this kind of stuff. But CNS seems to think that Bush's documents recently uncovered by 60 minutes may be fakes. I figured I'd toss that one out to the cellar. You all mystify me with your ability to pick out photoshopped images and such - you can be the judge on this issue.

Story Memo

Here is another story from ABC news about the possibility of these being faked. The son of the author claims his father wouldn't have written the memos. I know from my time in the USAF and ANG that personal performance files are absolutely against regulation, but these are reported to have come from exactly that. ABC story

Another memo and another and another

edit: i would like to point out that i have no opinion yet as to whether or not they are faked. i'm no expert in typesetting. i thought some of you would have fun picking it apart though. if they are fakes, it is pretty ballsy though.

Proportional-width fonts date back to 1941, and a military typist would be likely to get a font ball with a "th", "rd", and "st", if such was available.

why would a military typist have access to that type of ball? we certainly didn't when i went in and that was in 1992.

Even in companies where we cut costs on everything - especially capital equipment - in early 1980. Even then used typewriters had balls and proportional fonts (we almost never bought new office equipment). Xerox was giving away electronic typewriters with those abilities because - well Xerox MBAs created the Dallas operation and then had to dump product in early 1980s to maintain production. Bottom line is that typewriters with such abilities were quite common and often obtained for free.

Bottom line: CBS 60 Minutes essentially says that Bush has been lying about his military service - which is why the White House limited reporter access to his service records when the contraversy was first raised. If he was being honest, then why could reporters not study those papers?

Lets not forget why this is being raised again. They promoted lies about Kerry's military record. It is, at this point, quite obvious that questions about Kerry's service were based upon lies. However George Jr clearly had strings being pulled AND still no one can remember him doing his service in Alabama National Guard. For that matter, it is a public fact - not disputed - that George Jr failed to take his physical when ordered to do same. It is also a fact that he lost his flight priviledges directly due to his failure to take the physical. A physical he was required to take.

The only question remaining is why he chose to not follow orders; not take the physical. He's not talking. He hopes you will forget that his military service is tainted - as is most of his pre-40 history. This is an honest and moral man?

in 1992 when i went in we had typewriters with daisy wheel construction that barely ran. do these have proportional font?

Access? They're avalable in stores. If a guy is constantly typing 111th, 123rd, etc, he may well pick one up. As to why a random reserve Lt. Col. would have one in 1972, why would you even bother asking me? All I said is that proportional typewriters had been available for 30 years.

the vagueries of written communication. i meant to ask why would you assume he had one. the military is pretty infamous for giving outdated crap to the troops to work with. any equipment has to come from the supply system and you had better be willing to sell your sister to get anything approaching new. my sections only computer when i got to Luke AFB was one of those old 1 piece systems with the monitor keyboard and big floppy disk all in one shell. i think it was Wordstar or something like that.
anyway - it wouldn't surprise me if and ANG office was using extremely outdated typewriters in the early 70's. that doesn't necessarily mean the documents are faked though.

I would assume he had one because he used it to type the damn memo.

Here's one of Bush's other documents. See page two, second line down, dated 4sep60. A single-symbol superscript "th" in fixed-width font. So both proportional fonts and single-symbol "th"s were in common use at the time, and you find it suspicious that a Lieutenant Colonel might have a proportional typewriter (30 yr old tech) with a "th" symbol (available even on fixed-width fonts) on his desk.

no - i don't find it particularly anything HM. as i have stated, this is not an area in which i have any expertise. i read the articles, on the surface they make sense, but like i said i have no opinion as to the validity, that is why i offered it up to the cellar. many of you have this type of knowledge to pick apart with.

If you open MS Word and type the last memo in the default 12 point Times the typography is identical. I'm just saying.

I find it quite believable that a Lt. Colonel might have picked up one of those IBM balls for his typewriter back then. The Reserves are one thing, Active Duty quite another. An officer in the reserves might well have dipped into his own pocket or known somebody who knew somebody. I was a college student back then, working on the circulation desk of a state university library. I remember that the woman who typed up the catalog cards had one of those fancy IBM balls on her typewriter (invaluable for typing up the old style library cards that went into the card catalogs). She let me use that typewriter to type up a term paper once which is why I remember it - footnotes were a breeze compared to typing them up on my clunky manual that I had back in my dorm. If one of those gizmo's could show up at an underfunded university library, I don't see why the same couldn't have happened in a Lt. Colonel's office.

The original goal of MS Word was to duplicate the output of a typewriter. Fonts, spacing, tab stops, points, etc. were standardized, and faithfully duplicated by MS, as far as they could. Lesser used symbols and styles, such as a superscript "th", would be less likely to match up. Unsurprisingly, it is the "th" that matches Word's output the least.

According to this. no IBM Selectric (the "ball" typewriter) was ever introduced with proportional fonts.

anything is possible. but being a member of the ANG i can tell you that a Lt Col doesn't exactly turn any heads as far as getting special treatment from the supply system. The ANG isn't the highest priority for funding with that type of thing. the money goes towards replacement parts and jet fuel. soft supply needs fall by the wayside. he very well may have dug into his own pocket to by a different ball for his type writer, but i would be surprised.

Oh yeah, the expert in the first article Lookout cited was upset by the lack of a letter head. I have many of my Dad's old military documents from about the same time and going by them, I'd say the military (at least the army) was not all that excited about letter heads. Some of my Dad's stuff has letter heads, some doesn't. All of it is quite real, however.

Page 1 of the Washington Post: Some Question Authenticity of Papers on Bush

It turns out Little Green Footballs was the one to point out the MS Word similarity. (Fox News picked that up, which is where I saw it.) LGF points out that the superscript th differences on screen disappear when you print the document. LGF overlays a modern MS Word doc over the memo and it matches exactly, even the vertical spacing and curly-q single-quote marks.

I'm convinced. These documents were not written in 1972.

I heard on this mornings news that FOX is having some sort of experts examine the fonts, so it's wait and see for me.

IBM Selectric Composer, with proportional fonts and replaceable balls. I don't know if they happened to make a ball with "th" between 1966 and 1972, but it seems likely.

Proportional fonts and 'th' superscripts were certainly available, but exact equivalence to the modern MS Word "Times New Roman" font would seem to be a smoking gun. The venerable Selectric certainly never had that, and the modern "Times New Roman" font is a TrueType reconstruction designed for computers.

The one thing I don't understand, is why not pull some more records that would have come out of that same Lt. Colonels office around the same time as the Bush documents and compare them all? Maybe there's privacy laws or something, but couldn't people's names and serial numbers just be blacked out and compare the rest of the documents? Also, there must be lots of guys still running around today who would have copies of their old paperwork that came out of that office, just like I have copies of my Dad's old documents. Why don't any of them go back and check their documents for the things they're talking about on the Bush papers and come forward with them either way?

Jerry Killian's widow and son don't believe they are real, saying that Killian was actually a supporter for Lt Bush. But that is just speculation and 30 year old memories. The ABC team does have some good points about the technical analysis of the memo.

Today's story

If you're going to link to LGF, I might as well link to a lefty blog's take as well:

<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603">TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong</a>

Not posting this as gospel, merely for comparison purposes.

The funniest thing I've read regarding the authenticity. This may or may not be true. I know nothing about the military's inner workings.

on every piece of paperwork i've been involved with it is name and rank, so that does stand out a bit; but it could have just been an officer with poor customs and courtesy discipline.

Except for the order to Bush to get a physical (which does use the rank), these are mostly "notes to self", not official memos.

VSP, that's why I found it so interesting. It turns out that Charles @ LGF has a solid background in typography, and was the first one to point out the MS Word comparison. This is why both sides are required to understand an issue. The original complaints came from a righty blog and the righty Weekly Standard before they got to the WaPo. So I read Atrios and Josh Marshall and Kos and all their comments sections to get an idea of the other side before coming to a... well, a very educated guess on it.

HM, his widow said he never kept notes. The only half-decent actual explanation I can think of is that these were re-typed notes after the fact for archival purposes. But if they are notes and not serious memos, that explanation would not fly.

I can respect that. I'm not willing to pass judgement on the memos yet myself, but I'm too used to arguing with people who consider one side of the political spectrum to be Ultimate Truth and the other to be Vicious Slanderous Lies.

Nope, still phonies
 

The lefty blog screwed up. According to their own source, Monotype revamped Times New Roman metrics in the 1980s to better match Linotype Times Roman. So if IBM indeed used the Monotype Times Roman in a 1970s era typewriter (as they assert), it would NOT match the Microsoft Word font, which is based on the "New" Times New Roman.

The 4 is closed-top in Word and in the memo; I have no idea what they are talking about there.

If he kept them at work, I'm not sure why she would be aware of them.

Depends on what it is about. Again using my Dad's old military papers as a reference: Almost all of them used name and rank, but there was one which was a transcript of a military inquiry held because an officer who had been a friend of my Dad's had been messing around with a German luger which the officer thought was unloaded and had ended up shooting himself in the hand (what a dummy!). My Dad had been present when this incident occurred and several times the document just referred to him as "Wilson" when talking about his statements.

Equipment records
 

Although they were probably destroyed eons ago, equipment records of what was in the admin. offices at TXANG would be the definative way to account for this controversy. From those we could easily tell what's up. Most office equipment was always tagged even back in the early seventies, and even in units like the TXANG, for simple accounting purposes. If we could find out what they were using then, and then ascertain the specifications of that particular model, then there would be some way of finding out exactly what the authenticity of those documents are. Aside from that the debate will continue to rage, personally I think it's falling into minutia. It makes me sick to believe that people can't just except that those Nat. Guard positions were highly coveted and were frequently, if not always given to the priveleged, ie. George Bush. If the documents are forgeries, which they very well may be, it really makes no difference to me, I know why George Bush was there, I don't need a smoking gun document, or Lt. Governor to tell me.

- Walrus

No offense intended here, but FOX is hardly a paragon of journalistic objectivity.

I've been using typewriters and computers since the 1970s. Up until the late 80s, everything I used outputted either to a dot matrix printer, or to an impact printer of some type, the later ones using a daisy wheel or daisy thimble. None of these had superscripted "th's". There were some Macs at the company I worked for in the late 80s that did have Microsoft Word and PageMaker that outputted to a laser printer, but that was the first time I had access to that kind of printing. IBM Selectric II Ball typewriters did not have a times roman type font, as I recall. You pretty much had two choices, Courier and Letter Gothic, with the Letter Gothic being a more common ball used on the IBM Typewriters. There was ONE proportional spacing typewriter I used, with a standard bar-style keyset which was a colossal pain in the ass to use, because you had to remember how many backspaces to use for an M-Space, or an N-Space, and oh yea, "i" and "." had their own sizing as well. Superscripting was handled on this beast in the "old fashioned" way ... rolling the platen up half-a-line to hand type in the numbers. The secretaries hated this thing, and so I ended up using it as it had been dumped into my office. You get the hang of it after a while.

I await the independent documents review.

Walrus, you are absolutely right. I LIVED through those times. I knew the guy sitting on either side of me in my classes stood a good chance of getting drafted and sent to 'Nam once his college deferment was over. A person couldn't get into the National Guard for love or money back in those days. It was an easy out from the draft, available to only a priviledged few. The rest of the young men of my generation had three choices: except the draft, go to jail, or go to Canada.

Bottom line, Bush took the rich boy's out. He didn't have the guts to serve in the military proper and risk being sent to war. If he didn't want to go to war, he should at least have had the courage to make his feelings public and join the protesters in the streets. He did neither. The man is a coward in my book, and a few details of his National Guard service either way don't make up for the fact that he used the Guard to shirk any responsibility and stand up for what he believed in on one side or the other. I respect BOTH the young men who protested in the streets and the young men who went to war more than I respect Bush.

But here's another reason why it's hard to digest. If you asked Kerry whether, knowing what he knows now, he would still sign up and go to Vietnam, he should say NO given his final belief that it was unjust and unnecessary. Therefore, avoiding the war was not only the cowardly thing to do but, in the end, according to Kerry's standards, the moral thing to do.

It remains impossible to understand how an entire Republican party is now left defending draft dodging and an entire Democratic party is celebrating volunteering for Vietnam. You would have thought it against their DNA.

At least Kerry had the guts to go and find out. I still consider "dodging the draft" to have been the moral response to the Vietnam War. Hiding out, however, was not a very couragous or responsible response. If one is unwilling to participate in the military when his country is going through a time of war, than that person should speak out and act to help effect change. Hiding under a rock when your country is in crisis as the US was during the Vietnam era is not the action one would expect of a future leader of our nation.

Viet Nam era, XXX was in the guard, somebody pulled strings, end of story.
That happens to be Bush's story too. I don't need any documents to know he wouldn't have been in the guard without pull. This is a non-issue for me. :confused:

If XXX is Joe, the Accountant, whose father knew someone who knew someone, yeah, so what? Joe's actions during that era are between him and his conscience. But if XXX becomes the leader of the United States and orders young men off to fight in a war that, once again, many Americans question whether we should be fighting, that's very different. For me, anyhow, it puts Bush's integrity as a leader into serious question. "You guys go do what I didn't have the guts to do myself." A good leader leads by example, and Bush's example is piss poor.

I keep having this recurring dream where Jenna and Laura are asking me to put on my shades, and what's in the secret sauce

I gotta go with Marichiko on that one.. my father dodged the draft.. I wanted to join the military.. (heh bad feet they wouldn't have me :)) ) although there has been some talk about re-instating the draft... in 'the war on terrorism' a conventional ground force can't win it... we all know that.

Don't forget the war Bush was avoiding was morally wrong, while the Bush crusade is Gods will. ;)

Guts don't have much to do with it.

Kerry signed up for the Naval Reserves, which ordinarily would have kept him out of Vietnam. He spent his first year of service on a boat off the coast of California. Getting activated to go to Vietnam appears to have come as a bit of a surprise ...

He spent four months of a one year tour IN Vietnam.

What did you think of Clinton, then?

Military service became a "nonissue" for his campaign, and is apparently the ONLY issue for this one.

Kerry the anti-war protestor has positioned himself as Kerry the War Hero for the purpose of campaigning. Apparently this has been a tactic of his for as long as he's been running.

Frankly, I think it's stupid.

This election is not about the Vietnam War, but that war is one hell of a lot of smoke and mirrors that's keeping a much of the electorate from looking at the issues.

I keep having this recurring dream where Jenna and Laura are asking me to put on my shades, and what's in the secret sauce

Surely you mean Jenna and Barbara, NBN? Laura is their mother.

Oh, silly me! How could I have forgotten that point! :smack:

Honestly? Not much. I didn't even vote for him.


Well, my memory brown-out started sometime around the Clinton era, but I don't seem to recall Clinton getting us into any engagements where 1,000 plus and counting of our young men have been killed. Correct me if I've forgetten about some other war that occurred during Clinton's tenure in the White House.


There were many anti-war protestors who had gone to 'Nam and seen it for the dirty little war it was and came back to join the rest of us in the streets. My friend who fought honorably in the First Gulf War is disgusted by this current round now going on. I don't see what's so out of the ordinary about Kerry's stance. And BTW, the naval reserves were very different from the National Guard. Men who joined the reserves in the 60's knew damn well they stood a good chance of being called up for active service.

He into the MILF thing. ;)

I may be wrong but I thought Kerry, after some time in the reserves, volunteered for active duty. :confused:

in re: Clinton ...

Bosnia and Somalia spring immediately to mind.

Edited to add:

Looks like the Brookings Institute already did the math for me, at least in part.

There you go. I had completely forgotten about Bosnia. Still I don't think either Bosnia or Somalia were of quite the same magnitude as the Gulf. Will check out your Brookings Institute link. Thanks.

Just now checked the figures and what I found was 0 Bosnia, 43 Somalia. These figures do not come from some leftie web site, but one that claims to be Republican/ Libertarian:
http://www.insultsunpunished.com/arc...lties-in-iraq/

I think you're compairing apples with oranges, Wolf. In my humble opinion.

clinton liked to send "peace keeping forces" all over the world so that nobody realized we were shooting at people. if it ended up in the news and didn't poll well he pulled us out. a lot of haitians and skinnies ended up dead in our "non combat" operations.

The forgery story continues and it's fascinating. I am now utterly 100% convinced of the fakery.

This explanation from a pioneer in desktop publishing goes into great detail about fonts and pseudo-kerning to explain why the memos were definitely (and obviously, to the expert eye) produced on a Windows-based computer. And then he points out Occam's razor and how deadly it is in this case...

The hoax itself says nothing about the politics involved, nothing about Bush, Kerry or either of their campaigns. It says a TON about CBS News, Dan Rather, and the nature of the collective wisdom of the Internet. CBS claimed the documents to be honest from day one, and faced with evidence they were bogus, a CBS News exec attacked the bloggers.
The top people at CBS News do not even understand the process. 10,000 guys in pajamas are far smarter than '60 Minutes'. It's not the bloggers themselves that have the ability to fact-check things; it's the collective wisdom of the Internet, in which if you bring together a community and let them communicate well, you will find a tremendous amount of expertise.

So today James Lileks uses this image to open his daily Bleat. And I think, but I'm not sure, that the typeface he uses is an IBM Selectric Composer's proportional font, perhaps even the one closest to, but not exactly, Times New Roman.

http://cellar.org/2004/pajamableat.jpg

This only distracts and delegitimizes
 

In reference to this controversy, ie. the 60 minutes II debacle, the talk of forgery only helps the Bush camp legitimize his service even more. With the prospect of these documents being fakes, it takes away from the fact that he skipped service in Vietnam. Now it makes him look almost vindicated if these documents turn out to be forgeries. No matter that the Maj. General in charge of the unit at the time said he at least filled the minimum of his duties at the time in question, that in and of itself is an indictment of his service. He was given a cushy assignment during a standing draft, and still did the least he could do, and we're not even sure of that. The point stands, his daddy got him in someplace that would keep him out of harm's way, and an honorable discharge means nothing, if the possiblity exisits that patronage, and favortism played a part in the writing of these reports. Concocting, poorly created forgeries is a foolish move, if in fact they are forgeries, it's a point for Bush, if not two. I regret to say that with only a small number of weeks remaning in this election, the major issues, barring fear, have been left to the wayside, and we as voters, bloggers, and Americans are also to blame.
Let us fight to discuss that which ails this great land.

-Walrus

If an honorable discharge can be questionned, than so can medals. Either both are allowed, or neither.

We're correcting one of its main ails, the mainstream media as arbiters of what is news and not and what is forgery and not.

In agreement undertoad, to some extent
 

An honorable discharge from the Air national guard based upon administrative reports is a little different than a collection of reports in issuance of a medal. Conflicting accounts of combat are a little different than evaluation reports and summaries filed by a handful of military desk jockeys, but your right, you can call some of Kerry's medals into question, undobutely, at least it's a question of his valour in combat as oppossed to his attendence to flight trainings and logging air time.

- Walrus

PS: Questioning the mainstream media on the forgery issue is semantics. The issue should be acknowledged as parlor games, sumarily dismissed once a full review is done, and the dialouge needs to focus on briging these so called leaders, including the mainstream media, to task for today's real problems. Your right we should be questioning the media, but having a row about forgeries is doing nothing but shifting attention.

Well said, Walrus, and I could not agree with you more. :beer: We have two facts: Kerry served in the active duty military and went to Vietnam. Bush took the rich boy's out and hid out in the National Guard for the duration. These are the two things we should be looking at when considering the character of the two men. Our nation faces many difficult issues. These are what we should be discussing, not some trivial details about type fonts.

And the first month was in-country swiftboat training. Then three PH's, a bronze and silver star with the mythical "V", all amazingly awarded while incurring no hospital time, then an administrative release...all in three months! This guy thinks he's slicker than Willie, but Willie's not going to let Kerry grab control of the DNC and their cash. And besides, Bush will be releasing Bin Laden's captured or deceased butt to the public shortly before the election. Kerry can't win....*Excuses self and chases after windblown tinfoil hat*

come on now. be fair. it was 4 months and 12 days IIRC.

I didn't count the first training month...but I'll give him the extra 12 days...just for you.

you did forget to mention that when he volunteered for swift boat duty ("one of the most dangerous duties in viet nam" *ted kennedy's voice*) that swift boats were on routine coastal duties with little chance of taking fire. the mission was changed while he was at B school, or whatever the navy calls it.