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11. september 2004
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The Globe misrepresents document expert
The Boston Globe, which has a huge stake in the memo story, is defending the original claims using any and all means.
Philip D. Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe yesterday that after further study, he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.[...]
Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.
This use of his words has made Bouffard furious. INDC Journal has been on top of this story from the start, and has been talking to Bouffard, giving us exclusive blog coverage of top quality.
"What the Boston Globe did now sort of pisses me off, because now I have people calling me and e-mailing me, and calling me names, saying that I changed my mind. I did not change my mind at all!"
"I would appreciate it if you could do whatever it takes to clear this up, through your internet site, or whatever."
"All I'd done is say, 'Hey I want to look into it.' Please correct that damn impression!"
"What I said to them was, I got new information about possible Selectric fonts and (Air Force) documents that indicated a Selectric machine could have been available, and I needed to do more anlalysis and consider it."
"But the more information we get and the more my colleagues look at this, we're more convinced that there are significant differences between the type of the (IBM) Composer that was available and the questionable document."
Read the whole thing.
The dinosaurs are digging in, even as they are standing in a tar pit.
6:21:13 PM 
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Lucky for us, then
Wired:
"A lot of forgeries are done by bungling forgers," said document examiner Manny Gonzales, owner of Alliance Forensic Services in Escondido, California. "They're not all that sharp, most of them."
Heh.
But this raises some important issues. If the dimwit that produced the now infamous memos had been clever enough to use Courier instead of Times New Roman, would we ever find out? How many such frauds have been spread to the public without us ever finding out?
We are expected to trust their journalistic integrity, their anonymous sources and the say-so of alleged experts. I think the last year or so has demonstrated that the dinosaur media doesn't deserve our trust.
3:58:25 PM
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Hodges: 'I was misled by CBS'
I think it would be a good time to panic at CBS, but at ABC News they have the time of their lives taking on the archrival.
HODGES SAID HE WAS MISLED BY CBS: Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."
Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".
Dan Rather and CBS News think they still live in the old media age where they could get away with anything.
2:34:15 PM
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Kerning Kos
Kos is desperately trying to defend the CBS memos, and in the process he demonstrates it's a bloody miracle he's managed to turn on his computer this morning.
The idea is that typewriters of the time which used proportional fonts still didn't have any kind of kerning mechanism. That might be somewhat interesting, except for the fact that by default kerning is not turned on in Microsoft Word, and not used in the Word Document made by Charles Johnson of LGF (I won't link, you can find it yourself. He'll likely just set up a redirect if I do.
First, let's define kerning (which, to people like me who's done DTP and Word processing for decades, will not be an entirely new concept). Here's a good explanation from a simple online glossary:
Kerning: Refers to how letters are spaced in printed text. When kerning is turned on, if you print "LT" the L might be able to violate part of the space below the left arm of T.
Here's a very simple exercise for Kos or anyone else. Open a new Microsoft Word document, and set a large font size 48 or 72. Font face will be Times New Roman. Don't do anything else. Just type, on a line by itself, "Tj"
Tj
Does or does not the leftmost part of the "j" slide in under the top of the "T"? In fact, it does. That is kerning. Now repeat the same exerecise for WordPad or any program that can display fonts on the screen or paper. Even on a web browser, as above.
When Kos says that 'kerning is turned off by default in Word' he demonstrates his massive ignorance. For TrueType, the font system that is predominant on Windows and Macintosh systems and where you find the Times New Roman font, kerning is built into the font. The font itself contains information about pairs of letters that need kerning to look fine, and how much to kern them. Thus, you will see kerning on a document written in Microsoft Word even if you leave alone that "kerning" setting that the genius Kos managed to find when playing around with Word.
Did a typewriter in 1972 have built-in automatic kerning? Let's not get bloody ridiculous. Even if you could dig up some advanced, expensive equipment back then that could with a lot of tweaking recreate these documents, what would be the chance of a simple military memo from a small office being written on it? And match perfectly a document written in Word today? Zilch.
This is like seeing a Boing 747 in a movie supposedly from World War II, and some partisan defenders insisting that really, jet engines existed and were in use back then so it could have been genuine.
Update: PowerLineBlog is right that kerning is the smoking gun. The CBS memos show evidence of kerning, and no typewriter could do that.
12:00:14 PM
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Bias and polls
In this age of unashamed political bias in the media, we can at least take some comfort in the fact that most mainstream media seem to make no attempt at cherrypicking polls that give their favourite an edge.
The left-leaning Washington Post has a Bush landslide:
Among those most likely to vote in November, Bush holds a lead of 52 percent to 43 percent over Kerry, with independent Ralph Nader receiving 2 percent of the hypothetical vote. Among all registered voters, Bush leads Kerry 50 percent to 44 percent.
But right-leaning Fox News, so derided by leftists who are used to having the media on their side, reports only a moderate bounce for Bush.
Two months before Election Day, the poll finds Bush receives the backing of 47 percent of likely voters and Kerry 45 percent. When independent candidate Ralph Nader is included the results are essentially unchanged: Nader three percent, Bush 47 percent and Kerry 43 percent.
In the head-to-head matchup, Bush went from being one point behind Kerry before the convention to being two points ahead today.
If you still wonder how seriously we should trust polling, look at the spread demonstrated by RealClearPolitics, where Bush's advantage over Kerry ranges from 2 to 11 percent points, over a single week.
However, all polls now seem to agree that Bush is ahead, if not always beyond the margin of error.
11:16:34 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2004; 07:23:54.
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