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R.I.P. Rathergate
Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly
quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Those of you recalling this and familiar with at least some of the how's and why's of my claims would probably grudgingly admit that I do my homework, if nothing else. Well, I did some more homework recently, and that led to a, um, somewhat interesting and surprising discovery that apparently eliminates even the possibility that the memos could have been forged. But I'm curious to get some feedback and comments first before going much further with it. First, though, I should recap some very lengthy (sorry) but important background info: When the forgery charge started spreading like crazy after the original CBS report, which I never saw and only noticed as a minor news item in the general news (it had virtually coincided with a release of more Bush military records from an AP FOIA lawsuit filed earlier in the year, which made the CBS report seem more a me-too news item), I looked up the PDF's of the memos and noted that they showed the characteristics of an impact printer like a daisywheel or NEC Spinwriter (how I would know this is none of your business). The claims by the pro-forgers were mostly absurd and factless, especially in regards the 70's era office technology (which made it sound like there were only these ancient devices called "Selectrics" which were then replaced later by laser printers and Microsoft Word.) Things got more serious when Charles Johnson of LGF overlaid one of the memos, the "CYA" one, with a Word recreation he made on his MAC, supposedly using just the default settings, and got what he and subsequently the entire right wing blogosphere claimed was a perfect match, ergo the memos were fakes meant to make Bush look bad, and that this was done deliberatly by evil, liberal CBS and Dan Rather in collusion with the Kerry campaign. I took a look at the "perfect" overlay and deconstructed the animated GIF image that Johnson made that alternated between the original and his MAC recreation and found that, surprise, surprise, it wasn't nearly an exact match. The proportional spacing used in Word Times Roman (in the MAC version) and Word Times New Roman (in the Windows version) is very, very close to what's been used by prior word processing systems using any sort of Roman or Times-style font or typeface for at least decades prior, so you would expect some match-up if you resize and line-up to get the best fit. The individual characters, though, did not match up that well and there was some drift in the spacing in the middle of the document that indicated that the memos used proportional spacing that was very similar but not identical to that used by Word. By this point, though, the forgery charge had spilled over from the right wing blogs into the mainstream corporate media, which mostly just repeated the forgery claims and covered CBS's response to them. What "research" and investigation there was into the matter was laughably and disturbingly incompentent and almost as confused as the stuff being bounced around by bloggers, with Selectrics and the Selectric Composer being the focus of any discussion of 70's office tech. Reluctantly I got involved by doing some slightly more serious research, and I started off by showing how the contents and dates of the memos are fully supported, and to a very fine degree, by the DoD records regarding Bush's Air National Guard service kept he http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records/index.html I've also pointed out serious problems with the "created by Word" scenario, first by pointing out how the superscripting pattern shown in the memos -- none of the st's, as in "1st" are superscripted, and only some of the th's, and while some of this can be explained away with an archaic gap, the others can't -- is not a characteristic of any modern Word processor, including Word. This is, however, the characteristic of very old word processing systems where super/subscripting was a manual operation and how the "th" was commonly the only supercripting character available on Daisywheel printer print wheel or even a typewriter like Miriam Knox's Olympia. Indeed the only superscripted characters on the DoD site were also just th's, as in this case: http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/BushBiographySSc.jpg And the other main part of my argument was showing how all the claims of how there was nothing commonly available in the 70's capable of printing the memos as seen was complete and utterly confused BS. Word processing systems were actually common by the mid-70's with a slew of now long forgotten manufacturers making them like Redactron, Lexitron, NBI, etc., and with capablilities not much different than from what we have today: proportional printing, super/subscripting, file storage, interchangeable font/typefaces, automatic centering, right justification, and so on. I have a website for all of this that I initially set up in October of 2004 and have been updating periodically since: http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html My last major update was back in November, after having gone to the Boston Public Library to dig up more info on 70's office tech. Even Google has very little since all that was stuff had been long obsolete before there was even a world wide web. The only good references you'll find on Google to the early word processing systems are ribbon cross-reference sites like this: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband...al-schwarz.asp I also went all the way to the Minnesota to rummage through the archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, which maintains a vast archive of tech documents, brochures, obscure magazine & newsletters, and such that are normally never saved by anyone since they are not exactly collectors items even in a world of gonzo collectors. Of particular interest to me was a donated collection that included many internal documents from Redactron, one of the early word processor companies, formed in 1969 and having sold its 10,000th word processor by June of 1975. Some internal memos discussed Xerox and Xerox's at the time recent purchase of Diablo Systems, which had been making custom OEM daisywheel printer mechanisms, and it was indicated that the first Redactron word processors using a daisywheel printer came out at the end of 1972 and started selling in quantity in 1973. This was very, very useful info, because while the earliest memos dated back to 1972, my best working hypothesis for where the memos came from, where they might have been stored all this time, and even why they were printed out the way you see them, has them being created all at once in 1973 at some law firm or JAG office that Killian consulted with out of concern with an USAF inquiry into the long delayed "Not Observed" rating report on Bush that was evidently backdated to May 2nd, 1973. Both Killian and Lt. Col. William Harris signed off on the report, and then apparently only under pressure. The report, though, as described in thr CYA memo, did not actually rate (evaluate) Bush, noting that he was "Not Observed" on all the preformance checkmarks and noted that: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of report. A civilian occupation made it necessary for him to move to Montgomery, Alabama. He cleared this base on 15 May 1972 and has been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status with the 187 Tac Recon Gp., Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama." The USAF has authority over the Air National Guard, so if Killian was indeed the stickler for proper procedure as he's been described, this business with Bush's rating report, covering May 1st, 1972 - April 30th, 1973, very likely put him in a very uncomfortable situation, one in which seeking some sortof legal advice about what best to do would have been very, very prudent. And if anyone out there has ever consulted a lawyer over any sort of dispute, you know that they always ask you to bring along any relevant documentation that you may have on the matter, which they then normally photocopy for their records. And for things like hand notes and memos that may not be that legible and clear, they would often be typed up by a secretary and then likewise filed away. So my scenario has Killian contacting a lawyer, either JAG or one familiar with military issues, about the USAF inquiry over a rating report for a well-connected but duty-shirking pilot he and his co- commander were being pressured over. This puts the memos in question being typed up and filed away off-base sometime during the summer-fall of 1973, which meant that I only had to go back to mid-1973 for a word processing system capable of creating the memos as they appear. Since lawyers were always quick and early adopters of word processors, including the old 60's era IBM Mag systems, any word processing system on the market by June of 1973 would be fair game as a possible creator of the memos, that is if it had the capabilities. The only thing this tentative theory doesn't fully account for is that two of the memos have letterheads that "look" as though they were pre-printed. And a big, BIG complicating factor is that IBM magnetic card and tape systems word processing systems were very common and all over the place since the 60's. While only the early 70's models could natively proportionally print, many systems could read and write the info that IBM media. So you could have something typed and saved to a magnetic card on an IBM system in, say, 1970 and then print it out later in 1973 on a different, more advanced system, either by IBM or a competitor. What would happen if a document was created and saved on a system with no proportional printing capabilities and then later read and printed out on a system that could proportionally print is unknown, although it's likely it would print out with the the default settings on the newer system. As part of my inquiries into 70's tech, I had aquired not only a Diablo-compatible Qume daisywheel printer on eBay (for cheap, as you might imagine) but also a very, very rare HyType I proportional print wheel that works with it (the later word processors that people barely remember, like Wangs and IBM Displaywriters, apparently had simpler formatting capabilities than the earlier mid-70's units and used fixed pitch print wheels exclusively whether they could print proportionally or not.) So the main thrust of my recent efforts have involved tech related stuff. The typographers have insisted that any suspect printer needed 18-unit resolution (a combination of horizontal spacing resolution and size of the font) to print a Times or Roman style font as depicted in the memos. Daisywheel printers in the 70's had horizontal resolutions from 1/60" (not quite good enough for 12-point) to 1/120" (perfect), so I've been trying to find out which systems came with printer models that had the better resolution. Even with the research I had already done, this was very difficult. Even the docs at the Charles Babbage Institute were very spotty and incomplete in details like that. But the tech stuff hasn't been all I focused on recently. I've still looking for any more match-ups between the info in the memos and that in the DoD records. Some of the match-ups are obvious, but some are very, very subtle and need some tricky analyzing of the DoD records to discern them. A very good example is the date on the "Not Observed" rating report -- May 2nd, 1973. The CYA memo says that this report was backdated, so is there anyway to tell if this was actually the case? Well, if you look at the dates of all the other rating reports for Bush, they are dated May 26th. Is there anything special about May 26 as opposed to May 2? As it turns out, yes, there is: the rating reports are issued based on the anniverary date of when the pilot in question started his/her service. Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard on May 27, 1968, which made May 26 the annual deadline for submitting rating reports for his service. Which in turn makes the May 2nd date on the "Not Observed" report an anomaly that is best explained as a back- dated entry, just as the CYA memo described it. Even more subtle stuff comes about from one of the two Killian memos that CBS had but never used for their report (USA Today, though, had posted them). This is a very short, one line memo, dated February 2nd, 1972, from Killian to Harris and all it says is, "Update me as soon as possible on flight certifications - specifically Bath and Bush." While it may be very short, it has two bits of interesting info: one in that it mentions Bath, aka James Bath, a then future business partner of Bush who was verbally suspended by Killian exactly one month after Bush and for the exact same listed reasons; and that there was some sort of issue with Bush (and Bath) meeting the requirements for retaining their pilot certification. The mention of James Bath by the memo is mostly interesting because Bath's name is redacted in the current records at the DoD site. But this was not always the case: http://sugarinthegourd.com/redacted.html Very curious stuff, but its main interest to me is that a forger could not have soley relied on current DoD records to create the info in the memos. But the business with the Bath redaction was mentioned briefly in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 so it was hardly an obscure secret. The mention of flight certifications and the rumor that Bush had crashed a jet while drunk one time go me to do what was an especially tedious analysis: enter the all the pertinent info from Bush's flight records on DoD into a spreadsheet or some sort of database program and look for anything to indicate a problem with cerification or even perhaps a lost jet. The raw records themselves don't tell you much because they are a mess: hard to read, out of order, and with some apparently impossible entries. And besides regular F102A flights, there were also entries for runs on simulators and trainers. But I did do it, and ended up with a spreadsheet where I could sort things, add hours, chart, graph, and the usual stuff. While nothing overtly suggesting a crashed jet came up, I did discover a sharp rise in training flights in February, 1972 that matched up perfectly with the date of that brief February 2nd memo. Since that particular analysis, I've using these types of utterly unobvious match-ups between the contents of the memos to obscure info in the DoD records as pointing out how absurd the forgery charges have been from the get-go. Still, though, even among people who agree, however reluctantly, that while all of this may possibly be true, it still doesn't rule out completely that the memos could have been forged with enough time and resources, and that my research actually sort of shows that it conceivably could be done, however difficult and tricky it may be, and that the only real way to prove anything is for CBS or whoever to come up with a chain-of-custody record for the memos that goes back to when they were created. So much for the background, now for the good stuff, finally. As probably all of you reading this know or heard of at least, Google did a major of upgrade of Google Groups recently that had a few snags. In my case, long posts would not be posted on the first attempt despite a message saying that they were; all of my posts from early February to October disappeared, and I the "Option" button to see thread in tree view was not visible on some of my PC's. Out of frustration, I mosied over to the Wizbang blog site to see if there was anything there of interest to get into an inevitable flame war with right winger over. They got on me like ants on an anteater, and with predictable consequences, For the most part that is. The last Wizbang thread I got on started off with a blog posting mocking Ted Koppel, and when I joined in, it quicky got off the main topic, and someone thought to snipe at me by bringing up my CBS memos website. I posted some summaries of why the memos could not have been forged, and used the flight records analysis as an example to show how absurd the idea was for someone to go through the messy flight records just to forge a one line memo about flight certification. Someone pointed out that since I did it, a forger could do it. I pointed out that without that little Feb 2nd memo, there would be no indication whatsoever suggesting that there was anything in the flight records to indicate that Bush needed extra training time to meet certification. But it was still basically suggested that if someone had analyzed the flight records as I did, looking for whatever, they could had figured out that Bush had a problem meeting certification (what this has to do with Bath....) This is link to the graph I made from the records: http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/MiscS...Flights400.png (The yellow lines are training flights -- note the Feb. surge) But all that rehashing of the fight records gave me a nagging feeling one morning that I might have overlooked something a bit basic, and then it hit me what that might have been. I had to do a teeny bit of research. First I looked up the dates when CBS got the memos. That otherwise worthless, scapegoating Thornburgh- Boccardi panel report has CBS getting 2 of he memos on Sept. 2nd, 2004, and the rest on Sept. 5th. See: http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/htdocs/p...CBS_Report.pdf (Page 8 by the report numbering, page 18 with a PDF reader) I then looked up when the flight records were released by the DoD, and guess what: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politic...-records_x.htm They were released on September 7th, 2004, the result of an FOIA lawsuit filed by the AP earlier in the year, and days after CBS had obtained the memos. The hypothetical forger could not have used the flight records to forge the Feb. 2nd, 1972 memo because there were no flight records to use. And there aren't records or documents anywhere in the DoD even hinting at Bush needing more training. Indeed, the rating report a few months later, for the May 1st, 1971 - April 30, 1972 period is very complementary, starting off: "Lt Bush is an exceptional fighter intercepter pilot and officer." At no point are flight certification issues even vaguely referred to. See: http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/bush_rec...sonnel_pt2.pdf (Pages 36-38 by a PDF reader count) The memos could not have heen forged as is with the information that was available at the time they were handed to CBS. And if the memos could not have been forged, then what is to be concluded? Well, there is this thing in logic called "disjunctive syllogism" that basically goes that if you only have two possible answers, A or B and if you disprove one, say A, then B is your answer. I do believe there is agreement that the Killian memos were either forged or not forged, and not come combination of both. So this is a classic case of "disjunctive syllogism" and if the memos could not have been forged, then the only remaining answer amounts to a defacto authentication of them. As I wrote in the Wizbang post, all of this tedious, geeky sleuthing could have been avoided if certain people who were around at the time of Bush's miiitary service, and in on what was going on at the time, had simply spoken up truthfully and honestly. This includes former base commander, Bobby Hodges, the former personnel officer, Rufus Martin, and of course and most especially, George Bush himself. Bush and his official spokespeople have so far avoided making any comments in regards to whether the memos were forged or not (Laura Bush made one allusion to them as being "probably" forged, but that was just her personal "opnion" and not anything at all officially representing her husband.) Since Bush would have obviously remembered enough of the details to have confirm or refute the memos, his silence was a damning testimony to both his guilt and his craven allowing of Dan Rather, Mary Mapes to be so publicly villified, smeared and mocked. Bush so needs his sorry ass impeached and removed for so, SO many reasons. Ipso facto and that good stuff. -BC |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote:
Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
KK wrote:
On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote: Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". I've seen a lot of blogs that claimed that the documents were forged but no real proof, just repetition. Have you seen actual proof? If so could you provide a link? -- "For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed." - William Topaz McGonagall |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
Cory Bhreckan wrote:
KK wrote: On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote: Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". I've seen a lot of blogs that claimed that the documents were forged but no real proof, just repetition. Have you seen actual proof? If so could you provide a link? Yes, Rather's resignation. |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
On 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, in a place far, far away, "BC"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that: I took a look at the "perfect" overlay and deconstructed the animated GIF image that Johnson made that alternated between the original and his MAC recreation and found that, surprise, surprise, it wasn't nearly an exact match. The proportional spacing used in Word Times Roman (in the MAC version) and Word Times New Roman (in the Windows version) is very, very close to what's been used by prior word processing systems using any sort of Roman or Times-style font or typeface for at least decades prior, so you would expect some match-up if you resize and line-up to get the best fit. The individual characters, though, did not match up that well and there was some drift in the spacing in the middle of the document that indicated that the memos used proportional spacing that was very similar but not identical to that used by Word. The Occam's Razor explanation for that is that the faked (not forged) documents had been faxed (perhaps more than once). Make as good a duplicate of them as out-of-the-box default Word does using a typerwiter that would have been plausibly used at an Air National Guard base by a secretary in the early seventies, and get back to us. massive snip Also, get a life. |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:56:27 GMT, in a place far, far away, Cory
Bhreckan made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that: KK wrote: On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote: Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". I've seen a lot of blogs that claimed that the documents were forged but no real proof, just repetition. Have you seen actual proof? If so could you provide a link? They weren't forged. They were faked. ("Forged" implies that they were copies of something that already existed--at this point, it's almost cosmically certain that no real such memos ever did.) |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
On Mar 18, 4:00 pm, CC56 wrote:
Cory Bhreckan wrote: KK wrote: On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote: Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". I've seen a lot of blogs that claimed that the documents were forged but no real proof, just repetition. Have you seen actual proof? If so could you provide a link? Yes, Rather's resignation. Yeah the whole sorted issue was that CBS had gutted the research department who would have noticed the forgeries and Rather made do with what he had to work with. I seriously doubt that CBS or Rather were the instigators of the documents but they were the ones responsible for presenting the story without suitable research. It is interesting that "no one" wants to admit to where George Jr. was during this time....he certainly was not where he was supposed to be Considering his past history of alcoholism and drug use, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that his substance abuse was responsible for his absence. Poor little rich boy...he's lucky that he has a rich and powerful daddy in a sub par IQ Red State. It is also surprising and sad that the public would allow someone like this to be elected to the White House. Considering that everything he does seems to turn to crap, I consider the public should not be surprised by the results. TMT |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
CC56 wrote:
Cory Bhreckan wrote: KK wrote: On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote: Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". I've seen a lot of blogs that claimed that the documents were forged but no real proof, just repetition. Have you seen actual proof? If so could you provide a link? Yes, Rather's resignation. How is this proof? Please explain. I have seen no authoritative investigation that established the documents as forgeries. If you have access to any please share them with the rest of us. -- "For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed." - William Topaz McGonagall |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:00:52 -0400, in a place far, far away, CC56
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that: Cory Bhreckan wrote: KK wrote: On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:58:07 -0700, BC wrote: Some of you folks might rememberl my periodic, seemingly quixotic claim that the Killian memos were not forged. Not "seemingly". I've seen a lot of blogs that claimed that the documents were forged but no real proof, just repetition. Have you seen actual proof? If so could you provide a link? Yes, Rather's resignation. He didn't resign. He was fired, while attempting to let him keep whatever dignity he had left. |
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R.I.P. Rathergate
On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:18:18 +0000, Cory Bhreckan wrote:
How is this proof? Please explain. I have seen no authoritative investigation that established the documents as forgeries. If you have access to any please share them with the rest of us. The way to prove that they're not forgeries is to authenticate them as genuine. Since they've been disavowed by CBS, and the people who allegedly provided them to CBS have serious political motivations, there's no reason to think that they're genuine. A legitimate trail of posession or an original (non-faxed, non-copied) would go a long way towards making your point. |
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