From Powerline (via Allah*): Are the CBS National Guard Documents Fake?
Bill INDC contacts a forensics specialist, who thinks they are. The verdict:
Dr. Bouffard called me again, and after further analysis, he says that he’s pretty certain that it’s a fake.
Here’s why:
* He looked through old papers he’s written, and noted that he’s come up against the inconsistency of the “4” several previous times with forgeries that attempt to duplicate old proportional spaced documents with a computer word processing program.
* Regarding the small “th” after the date, Dr. Bouffard told me that it was possible to order specialty keys that would duplicate the automatic miniaturization completed by word processors after a numerical date, but it was certainly not standard, and wouldn’t make a lot of sense in a military setting. “That by itself, while suspicious, is not impossible, but in conjunction with the (font irregularity of the) number four, it is really significant.”
* Dr. Bouffard said that signature analysis isn’t that relevant because the signature could have easily been copied and pasted onto one of the photocopied forgeries from another document.
* He said that he didn’t know who CBS contacted to verify the document’s authenticity, but taht there is really on one other man that may be more qualified to determine authentic typefaces than himself.
I asked him to put a percentage on the chances that this was a fake, and he said that was “hard to put a number on it.” I then suggested “90%?” Again he said it’s “hard to put an exact number, but I’d say it’s at least that high, sure. I pretty much agree that that font is Times New Roman.”
I hesistate to render verdicts, but based on an initial visual analysis by one of the country’s foremost forensic document analysts that specializes in old typefaces, it looks like CBS was duped.
My contribution to this story:
Using the first True Type typewriter font I could find (SFespionage Medium), I created a Word doc that mimics the spacing of the CBS memo. I then added some underlining and speckling in Photoshop, and used the blur and sharpen filters to tweak the underscoring and the text texture. The whole thing took me maybe 10 minutes.
The CBS original is here (via pacetown). My mimicked document is here (click the thumbnail to enlarge):
Granted, my mockup is not perfect, but it should give you some idea of what I could have done had I matched the font precisely.
It’s all been covered better elsewhere. Sally forth, intrepid truth finders.
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LGF has more, including a superimposition of a word doc with one of the memos.
And here’s the CNS report.
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update: Brit Hume is covering the story on FOX News.
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update 2: CBS is standing by its story, claiming that it had experts authenticate the documents.
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update 3: As an experiment, I typed up the memo in Word using 12pt Times New Roman. I printed it out and then began making photocopies. By the 6th generation or so, the document looked remarkably similar to the CBS doc. Sadly, my scanner’s not working, so if anybody would like to replicate the experiment and post the results (here, or on your own site) please do.
update 4 More here and here and here.
Regarding the superscript “th”, it seems the font is much to small to have been done on a typewriter which at the time had to type multiple carbon copies at one time. The bottom copy woud be just a big dot where the “th” would be.
or
I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Check out:
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewPolitics.asp?Page=\Politics\archive\200409\POL20040909d.html
Three typography experts say that certain features of the document couldn’t be produced thirty years ago, even with a word processor, much less a simple typewriter.
And Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs has produced a pixel-for-pixel replica using Microsoft Word.
I wonder if we’ll be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. This is like a line, now, that’s been drawn in the sand. I hope the blogosphere comes out on top.–scott
I think the blogosphere will come out on top, they broke the story. Powerline was linked by Drudge last time I looked. Will they get credit for it? Probably not, the story is bigger than the medium that broke it. It’s certainly worthy of major media follow up however. Unpaid hobbiests in the blogosphere are more capable of serious research than paid journalists working for deep-pocket news organizations.
This is begging for a good Word/photoshop circa ‘72 regarding unlimited subject material.
Jeff, you over-thought it. You didn’t need to use a typewriter font. These memos were typeset in Microsoft Times New Roman.
I’m just glad to see Bill blogging again, consumate cynic that he is…
Fox news has been running the document story all day without a whisper that it “may” be forged. I hope they are doing some checking!
Brit Hulme on Fox just mentioned the possible forgery! BLOGGING ROCKS!! Go Powerline!
The question I have seen asked yet anywhere: cui bono?
With all due respect, David … duh. The Democrats bono. The Kerry campaign bonos. The people who want Bush out of the White House by any means necessary are bonoing all over themselves.
The way I see it, this could have come from three places. One: a random troll. Two: somebody inside the Party or the campaign (BAD). Or three: somebody inside CBS News (VERY VERY BAD). Any one of those parties would have bonoed from passing off forged documents successfully.
Elaboration on this thought is up over on my site. (Hint hint.)
To Jeff’s point – by any means necessary – it appears we’ve arrived at that destination. Between Kitty’s bit o’fiction and these obviously forged documents discrediting Bush, I think the Moby option is now in full swing.
“You target his natural constituencies,” says the Grammy-nominated techno-wizard. “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.
“Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”
Without anything else to discuss and loathe to bring up Kerry’s Senate voting record, the left is reduced to manufacturing dirt on Bush, as Moby admonished his groupies above. These items surely won’t be the last, either.
But the blogosphere is suddenly shining as brightly as Drudge did during the Lewinsky scandal. The MSM drops the ball and the blogosphere does all the heavy lifting. So here’s to hoping that credit is given where due and that blog readership continues to increase.
…I have not seen…
I hear a lot of grasping at straws here. Who wants to take me up on a $100 bet that these docs are proven to be valid (by all but the most wacko conspiracy theorists) within a day or two. I hope it takes longer. The lnoger this is in the press the better for Kerry.
Just my two cents.
I’ll take that bet, Mason.
Probably not a good sign, Mason, that you hear things while you’re reading… But nice try.
I wish Mason would take me up on my offer. I could use the hundred bucks …
longtime-reader, seldom poster. but i just want to get a little reflected glory on this one. i was the Farker who submitted the LGF link to Fark, which then put it on the front page and the subsequent link flood stressed LGF’s servers.
this is fun. but remember, no conspiracy theories yet. if this were a Law and Order episode, the sassy, red-headed ME would be telling Briscoe and Green that their suicide may just be a murder victim instead. we still have 50 minutes to go to find the perp and discover why.
Ah, so you’re why I couldn’t get to LGF earlier, eh?
Not to tout my blog again (oh hell, why not?)but I just blogged about Lies in the media this morning. http://www.Rightwingsparkle.blogspot.com
Jeff Harrell: sure, at first glance, the question answers itself. But at this point these seem like such amazingly inept forgeries that I am not sure that is the case. I’m a firm believer in the maxim that one should not ascribe to malevolence that which can be explained by stupidity, but this goes beyond that. It now seems beyond any reasonable doubt that these documents were created in a word processor, almost certainly MS Word. Is it possible that they could have been transcribed from the typewritten originals in a time window that makes this plausible? I don’t know enough about military record-keeping procedures to know this. On the face of it it seems unlikely. But if not, then whoever created these documents was either a cretin, or a very clever person.
So my question remains: who benefits from this? Is this a crude attempt to harm Bush by reinvigorating his TANG service, or is it a double bluff, intended to put the kibosh on it? The question of ‘who benefits?’ is separate from the question ‘whom did the forger intend to benefit?’ I think we can stipulate that these documents are suspect, and if this breaks out into the MSM then with all due respect, Jeff H., the answer to the first question is…duh. George W. Bush.
’cui bono,? How about GWB? If you want to be conspirational or just being devious. Karl Rove does all this to entrap Dan Rather who is GWB’s father’s nemesis. GWB spends all his presidency fighting his father’s enemies. Or wait, Karl Rove does this with the Fox News Network. By discrediting a major network, etc etc. Fox News even reports the memo as if it were authentic to cover their track. The possibility is endless.
”The longer this is in the press the better for Kerry.”
Yeah, man. That’ll do it.
From what I can observe, the press is just one nanometer from dumping Kerry big time. Y’know, to save their credibility. Snort, guffaw, chortle.
Is it possible that they could have been transcribed from the typewritten originals in a time window that makes this plausible?
No, because the man who is alleged to have signed two of the memos and initialed the other two died in 1984, years before the software necessary to compose these documents existed.
As to the rest of your comment … yeah. You’re right. It never occurred to me that you might be wondering who benefits from the bust, not from the forgeries themselves.
But it doesn’t pass the plausibility test for me. If somebody in the White House or the campaign forged these documents and released them in a complex attempt to make the Bush-detractors look bad, wouldn’t they have been better served by making good forgeries and then demonstrating that they’re forgeries later? This just seems far too implausible, far to likely to backfire. And the consequences of a backfire would be off the charts.
That’s exactly what I mean, Jeff. I am genuinely perplexed at this point. For every argument in favour of this being a smear job, there’s a counter-argument, and likewise for the agent provocateur theory. This is without doubt the weirdest thing that’s happened so far this election cycle.
Something just occurred to me while I was mixing my second martini of the night (us VRWC types have to maintain appearances). If this was an attempt to smear Bush, then the perpetrator was an old media, non-tech-savvy person. Simply to know the meaning of words like ‘kerning’ and ‘leading’, let alone their significance, requires a level of geekiness that that the average person doesn’t have. But if we go with the idea that these ‘memos’ were planted in order to be discovered and exposed as fraudulent, then the perpetrator must be a new media, tech savvy person. Under this scenario, lumbering old media dinosaur CBS was simply the delivery boy. The blogosphere was the intended recipient.
This is making my head spin (and I haven’t even touched that second martini yet).
Well, while it’s true that there are scenarios for both sides, I think it’s FAR more crazy to imagine Karl Rove concocting BAD forgeries that he HOPES the media will pass on and that will ONLY THEN, LATER be found to be fakes by the oh-so-smart American public.
It just seems farfetched to me. Karl isn’t that dumb or that crazy.
It seems far more likely to me that somebody with a grudge â€â€Ã‚ Ben Barnes or somebody else entirely â€â€Ã‚ concocted these things and that CBS was insufficiently skeptical.
I still REALLY want Mason to take up me on that bet, though. I could use the money.
Less than an hour ago, the AP, under the byline of Terence Hunt, their White House correspondent, posted a piece about these documents. It never mentions any possibility of forgery. See it here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040910/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_national_guard&cid=544&ncid=716
Terence Hunt probably gets paid pretty well for this sort of thing, which is one of life’s larger conundrums (conundra?)
Less than an hour ago, the AP, under the byline of Terence Hunt
Mike’s brother? I love that guy!
David, see every hangover remedy known to man on Jeff’s Sat. Sept 4th post.
Ok, this could be what happened. Lee Atwater,the smartest sneakest political advisor EVER, came back to life with the signature of the Lt. Col. that he got sneakin past St. Peter. He whips together this note, makes it look all authentic, KNOWING how smart all the bloggers are and knowing they will figure it out. Thus making the democrats look soooo bad and CBS look even worse, that Bush wins in a landslide and CBS dies a well deserved death.
Its a heavenly plan.
Jeff, you really need a smiley with a halo.
Just tried to link on the post of Silicon Valley Jim twice and link stated “document not found”
This post?
Looking at your site, there’s no way that these fonts are around today. I think this whole site is a forgery!
I have the reconstructed Word document for one of the “memos” as well as detailed instructions on how to produce it.
It looks better when you print it than when you look at it in Word because Word’s font renderer differs from PostScript. My site has a distilled version of the reconstructed document that looks exactly as it would look sent to the printer.
It’ll be amusing to see how this is spun by the folks who are (still!) sure that the memos are genuine.
Laurence – Can’t find the post now, but didn’t Jeff once admit that this entire blog was transcribed from notes written in 1978 on beer stained napkins?
Not aboutthe documents but about Ben Barnes. Someone mentioned that they had not heard of him. The following website address can give you the whole dirty mess that he was involved in our state.
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/SS/mgs1.html
This is my first time trekking into the blogosphere. The comments about MS Word being used to create the docs intrigued me. Though I’m a Bush supporter, I’m never one to believe all of what read on the Internet. That said, in about 20 minutes, I created an exact duplicate of the document ordering Bush in for his physical exam. On my PC, MS Word Times New Roman 11 point font worked perfectly. The PDF prints on 8.5×11 paper at 58% size which is odd.
One other thing, a search of the USPS site shows the ZIP code on the documene (77027) is wrong. They list 77056—this may simply mean a postal zone was split and a new code added, but it’s another anomaly.
Rock on. I don’t see how CBS spins their way out of this.
This is my first time trekking into the blogosphere. The comments about MS Word being used to create the docs intrigued me. Though I’m a Bush supporter, I’m never one to believe all of what read on the Internet. That said, in about 20 minutes, I created an exact duplicate of the document ordering Bush in for his physical exam. On my PC, MS Word Times New Roman 11 point font worked perfectly. The PDF prints on 8.5×11 paper at 58% size which is odd.
One other thing, a search of the USPS site shows the ZIP code on the documene (77027) is wrong. They list 77056—this may simply mean a postal zone was split and a new code added, but it’s another anomaly.
Rock on. I don’t see how CBS spins their way out of this.
This is my first time trekking into the blogosphere. The comments about MS Word being used to create the docs intrigued me. Though I’m a Bush supporter, I’m never one to believe all of what read on the Internet. That said, in about 20 minutes, I created an exact duplicate of the document ordering Bush in for his physical exam. On my PC, MS Word Times New Roman 11 point font worked perfectly. The PDF prints on 8.5×11 paper at 58% size which is odd.
One other thing, a search of the USPS site shows the ZIP code on the documene (77027) is wrong. They list 77056—this may simply mean a postal zone was split and a new code added, but it’s another anomaly.
Rock on. I don’t see how CBS spins their way out of this.