Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
I don't see how any of these issues that you bring up have anything to do with what we were discussing. I guess your change of topic is another way of admitting that your position isn;t supportable
When will Kerry release ALL his records as he said he would do?? He hasn't signed form 180. On Imus' show this week he again stated that he had released ALL his records. The NAVY released a statement the next day stating that he had not signed the form and that there were over 30 pages of imformation that are unable to release because of his failure to sign the form 180. It would go a long way to settling the he said/ he said arguments of the SBVT regarding aspects of his service
"Next, he got involved -according to the story- in getting rid of Bush's embarassing National Guard records in 1998. "
Exactly which "story is that????? You're probably referring to the rantings of Burkett. Exactly what tangible proof is there of this story????
About getting rid of Bush's records in 1998. I guess you haven't read the report that ALL Guard records from the TANG are shipped to COLORADO after the end of the enlistment. I guess that sort of puts a crimp in Burketts story HUH????. HE also listed a witness who was present there for the document "scrubbing" who promptly denied everything that Burkett said.
"Barnes earlier testimony that he got Bush in as a presumed favor to the family."
You choose to believe Barnes testimony. Given his history as a convicted fraudster that's a bit hard to understand. Of course he wouldn't be doing that tp advance his career by attempting to help the Kerry candidacy, would he?
"The White House has said repeatedly that all of Bush's Guard records have been disclosed, only to be embarrassed when new documents have turned up.'
The White House doesn't have these docs. They're coming from the DOJ or DOD"
"The long-running story took an unusual turn when CBS uncovered documents purportedly showing that Bush refused orders to take a physical examination in 1972 --"
Don't you realize these documents are poor quality FORGERIES????????????????
I guess you fall in the camp of " well I know that Bush lied and was awol and is in the pocket of the saudis and started a war so haliburton could get even richer. Any facts that you provide that prove otherwise will be ignored and I in turn nedd to produce no facts to support my argument"
I take it you aren't aware that Staudt has come out and said that:
- He was the one who decided on Bush's application and that there was no pressure from anyone to admit him.
He was retired form the Guard for 18 months when the memo stated that he was putting pressure on Killian to "sugar coat" things
So, let's see, Staudt, Hodges and 3 of the experts they hired refuse to document their charges. Rather is left with absolutely no tangible truth to back up any of his assertions.
Bush has answered these same questions in every race that he has run in since 1994, and the charges have all come to nothing. For anybody willing to take the time and look at the documentary facts that are easily available, it is clear that Bush fufilled his obligation to the Guard.
Why in the world would anybody answer charges that are based on fraudulent information.
What exactly are the failures that you talk about?
Are you asserting that Wilson has not been proven to have lied and that he disgraced himself?
If so, you're one of the very few, in light of all the evidence that has come out since
I guess you're not aware that Wilson's story has been discredited and that in point of fact there were efforts to obtain uranium. With all the press Wilson got on the front pages, the articles destroying his credibility ran way in the back of the papers, so I guess that's why you missed them
Using known falsified documents to make a case because you think they reflect what actually happened is the same as a cop planting evidence because he knows that the guy is really guilty.
I have been calling local CBS advertisers and recommending that their advertising dollars might be put to better use on another station.
I would think that Viacom would exert pressure to try and remove some of the stench coming from the CBS newsroom
Chris,
DOOOOD it just keeps raining:
ABC's Brian Ross interviewed the two experts who CBS hired to validate the National Guard documents and reports they ignored concerns they raised prior to the CBS News broadcast. "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply," Emily Will told Ross. "I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," Linda James told Ross. Ross reports 2 experts told ABC News today that even the most advanced typewriter available in 1972 could not have produced the documents. Ross also reported that Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's secretary says she believes the documents are fake but that they express thoughts Killian believed.
In the "Inside Story" on the CBS "Evening News," John Roberts said that CBS "continues to stand by its reporting" on Bush's National Guard records. Roberts derisively said Bush "barely mentioned his service" today while appearing before the Guard association. Roberts closed by saying that Bush's goal is to turn the focus of the debate away from the questions to "those asking them."
NOw even their own investigators are saying that the docs aren't kosher. Still feel comforted by the ethics of you big media. Even ABC is trashing them now.
Saaaaay uncle
TOOOOO funny,
Yesterday Glennon was listed as a repairman, today he's listed as a "technology consultant" He has also stated that he could not make a judgement as to whether the documents were forgeries or not. I think a valid argument, instead of sayinh that the typewriters existed that COULD have typed the letters, would be to produce someone who said that they typed those memos on a typewriter.
OOOOOPS, I guess there's a problem there as Killians sceretary just came out ( she's a Bush hater by the way) and said that she didn't type the memos and that in her opinion they were forged.
Also here's another opinion from one of those non big media types that isn't worth much either:
The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!
Home
Resume
First off, before I start getting a lot of the wrong kind of mail: I am not a fan of George Bush. But I am even less a fan of attempts to commit fraud, and particularly by a complete and utter failure of those we entrust to ensure that if the news is at least accurate. I know it is asking far too much to expect the news to be unbiased. But the people involved should not actually lie to us, or promulgate lies created by hoaxers, through their own incompetence.
There has been a lot of activity on the Internet recently concerning the forged CBS documents. I do not even dignify this statement with the traditional weasel-word “alleged”, because it takes approximately 30 seconds for anyone who is knowledgeable in the history of electronic document production to recognize this whole collection is certainly a forgery, and approximately five minutes to prove to anyone technically competent that the documents are a forgery. I was able to replicate two of the documents within a few minutes. At time I a writing this, CBS is stonewalling. They were hoaxed, pure and simple. CBS failed to exercise anything even approximately like due diligence. I am not sure what sort of "expert" they called in to authenticate the document, but anything I say about his qualifications to judge digital typography is likely to be considered libelous (no matter how true they are) and I would not say them in print in a public forum.
I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is “I was working with laser printers before they had lasers”, which is only a mild stretch of the truth). We published a paper about our work (graphics, printer hardware, printer software, and typesetting) in one of the important professional journals of the time (D.R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L.D. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G. Robertson, and J. Wright, "XCRIBL: A Hardcopy Scan Line Graphics System for Document Generation," Information Processing Letters (1972, pp.246-251)). I have been involved in many aspects of computer typography, including computer music typesetting (1987-1990). I have personally created computer fonts, and helped create programs that created computer fonts. At one time in my life, I was a certified Adobe PostScript developer, and could make laser printers practically stand up and tap dance. I have written about Microsoft Windows font technology in a book I co-authored, and taught courses in it. I therefore assert that I am a qualified expert in computer typography.
187th scanned in from my Word document, original 1200dpi, scanned at 600dpi
187th screen shot from 18-August-1973 memo
111th captured from screen shot of 4-may1972 memo
111th enlarged from CBS justification image
The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
If someone had come forward presenting a “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which used acrylic paints including Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White, art experts would roll of the floor laughing at the clumsiness of the forgery. (Acrylic paints were not known until the 1920s, although some histories date them as late as the late 1940s, and some as late as 1955; Cadmium Yellow was not known until 1840, and Titanium White was not available as an artist's pigment until 1921). Yet somehow a document which could not be created by any of the common office technology of 1972 is touted as “authentic”.
“Apologists” that try to claim these documents are authentic have pointed out that there were technologies for doing electronic typesetting, for doing proportional fonts, and even doing something that resembles superscripting. One document cited as proving that a typewriter could do superscripting is a document which is part of the files released by the White House and the Pentagon. I was able to locate this document, which was said to have been used by CBS as "proof" that superscripting was possible. The excerpt shown here is from page 15 of the document.
Let's look at some comparisons. Realizing that we are working from several times removed from the "original" document supplied to CBS, it is still worth doing some comparisons. On the left I show several images. The first element, the 187th, is from a document I printed on my printer, at 1200dpi and scanned at 600 dpi. It is obviously enlarged here. Note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7". The second image is a screen capture from the 18-August-1973 memo. While some details are lost (perhaps CBS could post some hi-res scans as gif files?), note that the "th" is superscripted, and apparently by the same amount; note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7".
Next, we get the 111th image. The image I show is a screen capture from the CBS document which claims to be a memo dated 04-May-1972. Note the "th" is approximately bisected by the top line of the 1. So this seems to also be in the same position as the position Microsoft Word uses. But when we look at the "th" of the image which is apparently used to justify the fact that a typewriter could do a superscript, we find that it is not a superscript, but in fact a character that appears to be simply raised from the nominal baseline by approximately 10%, but does not exceed the top of the line. This proves that there was a typewriter that had a "th" key, but it looks so different from the previous three examples that it is hard to believe that such a typewriter could have created the same memos.
Now let's look at the comparison of the two 111th in a calibrated fashion. What I did was create a set of equally-spaced vertical lines, then I stretched the CBS justification image so the characters all lined up. Note they are monospaced. The "th" takes up one character position. Then above it, I stretched the image from the 04-May-1972 image (in both cases maintaining the aspect ratio) until the digits lined up. Even in proportional fonts, the digits are always designed to have the same width to simplify doing columns of digits. Note how the "th" is not quite aligned right, and the spacing is not uniform. So we take a typewriter with a monospaced font and a ligature, and claim that it justifies the existence of a memo in variable-pitch font, with a different superscripting mechanism (suspiciously like that of Microsoft Word!)?
.Using arguments like this would be equivalent to someone justifying the “genuine” da Vinci by saying that yellow paint existed, and white paint existed, and ignoring the obvious fact that Cadmium Yellow or Titanium White could not exist. Some have contended that since Times New Roman was a typeface invented “in the 1940s” (according to Linotype, the copyright holder for Times New Roman, it was first used by the New York Times in the edition of 3 October 1932; the original TimesTM font is stated to have been created in 1931 for the London Times; in either case, however, the date is established as being earlier than 1972), it is not unreasonable that it could exist in 1972. Yet I knew most of the sites that, in 1972, had printers and computer-based formatting technology that could have printed a document in proportional-spaced fonts, and these included MIT, Carnegie Mellon (where I did my work), The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (where the personal computer as we know it was invented). I no longer recall how many XGP printers existed, but I believe the number was not much more than a dozen. None of these printers could print more than about 180 dots per inch, a quality somewhat lower than a contemporary fax, yet the image I downloaded from the CBS site appears to have been printed on a printer of much higher resolution. The only other printer I am aware of in the 1970s that could print at reasonable quality was a research prototype I saw at Xerox PARC, called EARS, which could print at 300 dpi. It was not created until 1971, and I remember it has having several large cabinets of extremely expensive computer components controlling it. It was a “hand-built”, one-of-a-kind printer. All other technologies were quite elaborate and clumsy mechanical devices, and although there were some proportional-spaced typewriters (such as the IBM Executive) and print production technologies (such as the VariTyper), none of these would have produced something that was a near-perfect match for Times New Roman under Microsoft Word. Don Knuth’s seminal work on computer font technology (“TEX and Metafont: New Dimensions in Typesetting”) was not printed until 1979, “on experimental printing equipment” at “Xerox Research”. Phototypesetters of the era projected one character at a time onto a film, then moved the template containing the photos of the characters, then exposed the next character. They were exceedingly slow relative to, say, a typewriter, and cost a LOT of money. The resulting film had to be developed, and a printer plate had to be created from this negative. It seems unlikely that this technology would have been used to create private memos. My aunt ran the printing division in a local company in the late 1960s, and I know what technology she was using (it was leading edge for its time). It would not have been available to a military base--at least in the administrative offices--in 1972, nor would it have been practical. It used technology that was a precursor of modern laser printers, but it was all purely optical, using VariTypers, large-scale cameras, and a very primitive form of xerographic technology.
Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width). This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”. I discuss the ABC width mechanism in some detail in a book I wrote in 1997 (“Win32 Programming”, with Brent Rector, Addison-Wesley, 1997, p. 1104). I have attached sample output from a program I used to create illustrations for that book, one of which shows the characters “fr” and one of which shows the C offset of the “f” character is “–2”. ALL technologies I am aware of in 1972 that would have been available for office work (not, say, the sort of production book typesetters that major publishers might have had) could only advance an integral number of units, and could not “tuck in” the characters like Microsoft’s Times New Roman font under Microsoft Word does, by using a negative partial-character offset. Examine carefully the “fr” in the word “from” in the 18-August-1973 memo. The “r” is tucked under the “f” in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this document could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman. The work we did at CMU could not support kerning or pseudo-kerning of text. We knew about kerning, but our software could not support it. I have not examined a New York Times of 1972, but I would be extremely surprised if the font used at that time exhibited any form of kerning (I should point out that Linotype machines—the hot-lead machines—had paired characters such as “fi”, which were actually a single slug. Character sequences like these are called a “ligature” and were a special case of kerning. Common ligatures included fi, fl, ffi, ffl, among others. This was an example of kerning built into the font definition, and Linotype machines had separate keys that dropped these slugs into place. Lead type set by hand also had similar ligatures. The illustration is scanned from The Unicode Standard Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley, 2000, p.804).
Hot lead type could not kern, because of the need to have a Linotype machine drop slugs into a frame, which was then filled with hot lead. Any publishing technology that used hot lead typesetting could not support kerning, except by the aforementioned ligatures. Any technology that used hand-set type could not support kerning without such a high expense that it is unlikely it was ever done. Not even Word supports kerning without selecting a special option (and if selected, the resulting document does not look like the memo). But somehow, magically, the font used by some hypothesized piece of equipment in 1972 works the same was as a font that uses a set of ABC width parameters that did not exist until TrueType fonts existed. Microsoft delivered the first version of TrueType for Windows in April of 1992, and the original TrueType font format was developed by Apple and delivered in May, 1991.
Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes, to replicate one of the experiments reported on the Internet, that is, to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the “authentic” document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible. I was a bit annoyed that the experiment dealing with the 18-August-1973 memo was not compatible, until I changed the font to an 11.5-point font. Then it was a perfect match, including the superscript “th”. In 1972, we expressed fonts in integral pixel sizes, and a fractional pixel size would have been meaningless. Until we got high-resolution printers in the 1990s, I am not aware of any application-level technology that supported fractional point sizes (Adobe PostScript could, but the high-level interfaces to it, to the best of my recollection, only allowed integers to be specified for sizes). I do not believe a typesetting program or typesetting technology that worked in fractional point sizes could have existed in 1972 or 1973. However, this might be an accident of the many levels of transformation from the original (wherever that is) and the photocopying, scanning, document conversion, and re-printing. The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations. In which case, the coincidence of the match is again extremely unlikely unless the document were a forgery.
William of Occam (or Ockham), a 13th century philosopher, summed it up in what is now paraphrased as “given a choice between two explanations, choose the simpler explanation” (or as he said it, “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”). You cannot assemble a set of assertions about what MIGHT have been possible using a variety of unrelated technologies that existed in 1972, and somehow magically combine them into a single technology that could have existed in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard, used for casual memos, and produced the memos in question that are VIRTUALLY PIXEL-LEVEL IDENTICAL TO THOSE PRODUCED BY MICROSOFT WORD.
There are numerous other clues to indicate an amateur at work. In many cases, there is a space preceding the st or th, in an attempt to prevent Word from automatically superscripting these. Of course, any experienced Word user knows that this automatic superscripting can be instantly undone just by typing Control-Z as soon as it happens, but an amateur would not know this. Many have commented on the anomalies of the curly quotes, another piece of Word automation which would not have been found in documents of the era. I know that our fonts did not have left and right quote marks because of limitations of the character sets, which could only have 95 or 96 printable characters. Most of our contemporaneous printers used 7-bit ASCII fonts, which had no option for specifying curly quotes, nor did our software automatically generate them, as Word does. Not only are these documents forgeries, they are incompetently done forgeries. They make the forger of a da Vinci-with-acrylics look positively sophisticated by comparison.
It does not take a sophisticated expert in forensics or document authentication to spot these obvious forgeries. The forgery is obvious to anyone who knows the history and technology of digital typesetting, not to mention to any intelligent 12-year-old who has access to Microsoft Word.
So we have the following two hypotheses contending for describing the memos
* Attempts to recreate the memos using Microsoft Word and Times New Roman produce images so close that even taking into account the fact that the image we were able to download from the CBS site has been copied, scanned, downloaded, and reprinted, the errors between the "authentic" document and a file created by anyone using Microsoft word are virtually indistinguishable.
* The font existed in 1972; there were technologies in 1972 that could, with elaborate effort, reproduce these memos, and these technologies and the skills to use them were used by someone who, by testimony of his own family, never typed anything, in an office that for all its other documents appears to have used ordinary monospaced typewriters, and therefore this unlikely juxtaposition of technologies and location coincided just long enough to produce these four memos on 04-May-1972, 18-May-1972, 01-August-1972, and 18-August-1973.
Which one do you think is true? Which one would a 13th-century philosopher think made sense? How many totally unlikely other juxtapositions are expected to be true? How could anyone believe these memos are other than incompetent forgeries?
This letter concentrates only on the raw technology of the fonts and printing. It does not address many of the issues others on the Internet have raised, such as the incorrect usage of military titles and abbreviations, incorrect formatting relative to prevailing 1972 military standards, etc. I am not qualified to comment on these. All I can say is that the technology that produced this document was not possible in 1972 in the sort of equipment that would have been available outside publishing houses, and which required substantial training and expertise to use, and it replicates exactly the technologies of Microsoft Word and Microsoft TrueType Fonts.
It is therefore my expert opinion that these documents are modern forgeries.
Update 12-Sep-04
Kerning and pseudo-kerning
ABC dimensions for Times New Roman, characters "y", "space" and "j"
Character layout for Times New Roman
ABC dimensions for Palatino Linotype font under Windows
I have received several comments on the above essay. One of them suggested that it is hard to tell if the "fr" really has the f and r overlapping. So what I did was take my copy of the 18-aug-73 memo, printed at 1200 dpi, and scan it in at 600 dpi and extracted the word "from". I then did a copy-and-paste of the word "from" from the (admittedly poor) CBS image. I placed both of these in Microsoft PowerPoint, stretched them to the same left-to-right length (maintaining aspect ratio!), and drew some lines. Now I admit there is a lot of distortion in the CBS image (if they really want expert opinion, they should post a 600dpi scanned TIFF image of each memo on their site!), yet the results are amazingly close. This verifies my visual inspection. It is unlikely that such coincidence could occur if the fonts were not the same font. Note that even if you might like to believe that the "r" is not tucked under the "f", if it weren't, the subsequent characters would be horizontally misplaced to the right in the CBS memo, yet, relative to even the poor image quality, it is clear the positions correspond.
Another alert reader suggested that the "j" from "my job" shows that the tail of the "j" overlaps the preceding space. So I used my Font Explorer to reveal the parameters of the "j". Note that the "j" has a negative A-offset value, meaning that the character will overlap the preceding character. He also observed that the "y" did not "tuck its tail" under the preceding character, and note that the A-offset for "y" is 0, so this is consistent with his observation. So I did the same comparison, from my scanned image of "my job" and the CBS image of "my job" from the 18-Aug-73 memo. The results are shown below. Of course, to those of us who have already figured out that these are forgeries, this result comes as no surprise at all.
The Font Explorer is a program which comes with our book, and can be downloaded from my site as part of the CD-ROM image that came with the book; it is something like 17MB, so you may not want to download this on a dialup; I have a separate .zip file which is the FontExplorer.exe file itself. (Note to programmers: this was built under Visual Studio 4.2. I have not attempted to recompile it under any later version of Visual Studio, including 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 or 7.1. If you download the source, you're on your own here).
One question that came up was whether this was really Times New Roman, or perhaps Palatino, a font very similar to Times New Roman. I looked in my font list (I have hundreds of fonts installed on my machine), and found a font called "Palatino Linotype". Admittedly, this does not say anything about the font that might be used by a sophisticated typesetter in 1972, but it shows that the hoaxer really did use Times New Roman and not Palatino. Look at the ABC widths for the same characters; note that the "j" in the Palatino font has a 0 A-offset, instead of a –2 A-offset. Several other dimensions, such as y.B and j.C also do not correspond. I decided to not waste time creating, scanning, and otherwise displaying a document done in Palatino simply because the differences should be obvious just from reading the ABC dimension specification.
Another reader sent me a pointer to a higher-resolution scan of the notorious "superscript" image. I went there, and downloaded the image. Shown to the left is the result of adding this (the bottommost of the three images) to my comparison chart. No surprises here, it again emphasizes that the "superscript" did not rise above the top of the line.
One person actually suggested that I was saying that because of this "th", and my assertion that a superscript would indicate a forgery, that I am claiming that all documents released by the Texas Air National Guard must be forgeries. I have never come close to saying that. I merely point out that if a typewriter has a superscript-like entity, as it shown here on the left, it is completely unlike the superscripting of Word, which is coincidentally exactly identical to the superscripting of the forged documents. The "th" in the Texas Air National Guard documents is not a superscript, but a monospaced ligature that fits within the bounding box of the character space. So let me be very pedantic here: the "th" in the released documents is not, I repeat, not, a superscript. It is a single character.
Another correspondent pointed me to a site that claims that Word does automatic kerning. Sorry to disappoint the poster, but what he is reporting on is not kerning in the sense that Word or a typographer means kerning, but the significant fact that the ABC widths contain a negative C-width. He points out that "at" and "ta" actually come out as different widths. This is true, but it is not true kerning, which would rely on the pairwise information of "a" following "t" and "t" following "a"; instead it is the "pseudo-kerning" caused by a negative C-width on the character "a". A negative C-width applies no matter what character follows. For example, noting that "f" has a negative C-width works because most characters that "f" is paired with are "half-height" letters (I forget the actual technical term, but I think it is "minuscule", although according to some typographers this merely means any lowercase letter) and therefore there is no conflict. The only full-height letter "f" is paired with typically is "l", and the effect is to simulate the ligature "fl" that printers use. However, if it were true kerning, the kerning pair "fb" would indicate that the "b" needs to move to the right so as to not be connected to the "f", but since there is no "fb" used in ordinary English prose, this error is "harmless". This can be seen in my comparisons based on the Font Explorer output. Because of the C-width, there is no need to have a kerning pair for "f" and "r" to cause an overlap. Note however that there is a kerning pair for "AV", and the result is easily seen in the Kerning part of the Font Explorer. Note in the lower example that "fb" shows an improper overlap, because not only does the negative C-offset for f cause the next character to "tuck under", but there is no positive kerning value for the pair "fb". Therefore, it is incorrectly rendered with the "f" touching the "b". Microsoft apparently only provides kerning pairs when there is a need to override the built-in font parameters.
I realize this is a fine-point quibble, but my view, and the view of typographers, is that kerning is always a per-character-pair operation, and the C-width parameter is fixed as part of the character definition. In either case, casual technology readily available in offices in 1972 would be incapable of either effect. But when I state the document is not kerned, I mean that pair kerning is not enabled; the only apparent kerning is the overlap generated by the A and C offsets. There are many technical reasons that pseudo-kerning is more desirable than true pair kerning, but that would take at least another page to explain issues such as how print files are created, the costs of doing a download to a printer, the feasibility of doing arbitrary text placement in the printer compared to having the printer use built-in TrueType fonts and pseudo-kern automatically, and so on. Pseudo-kerning is a "good enough" approximation of true kerning that it is good enough for everyday use.
Kerning was possible using hand-set lead type, as one person pointed out, by having fonts where the character actually overhung the edge. The problem with this was that these fonts, extensively used by high-end professional printers (and even today by those who still do hand-set type) were quite expensive, particularly because of the potential for damage to the overhanging part of the character. Such kerning was impossible for hot-lead type processes. But it meant a higher cost to get a set of type (more characters had to exist in the type slugs), more time and care in doing the typesetting (meaningful only when cost was essentially not an object), and even more time in tearing down and re-sorting the type slugs. Most print shops did not bother much with these details. Unfortunately, the only "artisan" printer I know who did hand-set type lives about three hours' drive away, and given the more obvious aspects of the forgery, it is not worth my time to go out and examine his type.
Pseudo-kerning using negative C-width
ABC widths of "t" and "a". Display of "tat". "f" kerning pair info. Note that it pairs only with another "f" or a right single quote (character code 146) where it has a positive kerning value. Showing that "ta" and "at" have slightly different representations. The example shown at the indicated site is correct, but the reasoning is incorrect. No pair kerning is involved.
Turning on kerning, at its effects (1)
The option "Format > Font", choosing the character spacing tab, enabling kerning. ""AV" kerning pair info: the kerning value for "V" following "A" is -2. Upper image: "AV" without kerning. Lower inage: "AV" with kerning turned on.
The effects of kerning when kerning pairs are used in the example
Upper example: a line with kerning turned off. Lower example: the same line with kerning turned on. Note that the right quote has additional space, and the AV show overlap. Note the incorrect overlap of "fb" in both cases. And the illusion that "fl" and "fi" are ligatures.
The angled green line shows the change of position of the right quote when kerning is enabled. The sloped red line shows the displacement of the A, and if there were no kerning, the V would be displaced by the same amount, but in fact the lower V is more to the left than the red lines predict.
Turning on kerning has an effect only if there is a kerning pair. For example, in "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", the Font Explorer gives the information about the kerning pairs as shown below. In the following tables, I use sp to indicate a space character, and rt' to indicate a right curly quote and lt' to indicate a left curly quote (which usually doesn't appear on a Web page). Note that a kerning value of 0 seems to have no effect on the built-in ABC widths.
Kerning data for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ff"
Th none he none e space none space q none qu none ui none ic none
ck none k space none space b none br none ro none ow none wn none
n space none space f none fo none ox none x sp none sp j none ju none
um none mp none ps none s sp none sp o none ov none ve none
er none r sp none sp t none th none he none e sp none sp l none
la none az none zy none y sp none sp d none do none og none
g sp none sp f none ff 0
So based on one poorly-constructed example, the poster claims "Apparently then the whole kerning option objection is a red herring." Unfortunately, his experiment is flawed, and the conclusion meaningless. He did not actually measure any kerning effects, because there were no kerning effects possible given the selection of letter pairs in the example.
Here are the actual kerning pairs for Times New Roman, and their values. These were derived from my Font Explorer. To illustrate the effects of kerning, as I did, a known kerning pair must appear in the font sample. I used two, AV and f rt'.
Kerning Pair Data for Times New Roman Font
sp A -1 sp T 0 sp V 0 sp W 0 sp Y 0 11 0 A sp -1 AT -1
AV -2 AW -1 AY -1 Av -1 Aw -1 Ay -1 A rt' -1 F, -1
F. -1 FA -1 L sp 0 LT -1 LV -1 LW -1 LY -1 L rt' -1
P sp 0 P, -1 P. -1 PA -1 RT -1 RV -1 RW -1 RY -1
Ry -1 T sp 0 T, -1 T- -1 T. -1 T: -1 T; -1 TA -1
TO 0 Ta -1 Tc -1 Te -1 Ti 0 To -1 Tr 0 Ts -1
Tu 0 Tw -1 Ty -1 V sp 0 V, -2 V- -1 V. -2 V: -1
V; -1 VA -2 Va -1 Ve -1 Vi -1 Vo -2 Vr -1 Vu -1
Vy -1 W sp 0 W, -1 W- -1 W. -1 W: 0 W; 0 WA -1
Wa -1 We -1 Wi -1 Wo -1 Wr -1 Wu -1 Wy -1 Y sp 0
Y, -2 Y- -1 Y. -2 Y: -1 Y; -1 YA -1 Ya -1 Ye -1
Yi -1 Yo -1 Yp -1 Yq -1 Yu -1 Yv -1 ff 0 f rt' 1
r, -1 r- 0 r. -1 rg 0 r rt' 0 v, -1 v. -1 y, -1
y. -1 lt' lt' -1 rt' sp -1 rt' s -1 rt' t 0 rt' rt' -1 G, -2 G. -2
St 0
Signatures, and the glories of copy and paste
Another reader pointed out that he was able to forge the signature. Unfortunately, he sent me an example as a Microsoft Word document, and I do not under any circumstances open potentially executable files, including those that can hold macro viruses. Several levels of virus protection and firewalls not withstanding, this is simply my flat-out policy. So I apologize to him on not being able to comment on his work. But I had actually done this Friday night; it took me about 10 minutes. I took the CBS document, printed it, scanned it in (to remove some of the artifacts of the display), extracted the signature with a copy-and paste, did some cleanup to remove the "dirt" from the scan, gave it a transparent background, saved it as a .gif file, and pasted it into my document. Now the result in this case is pretty evidently a forgery, because of the artifacts. But someone with access to an authentic signature and a high-resolution scanner could have done a much more convincing job. For example, here are three scans. The leftmost is the one from the CBS memo, which I printed out and then rescanned (to avoid artifacts of the low-resolution display). The second is the result of copying the signature from that scan, and doing a bit of transparency hacking, then pasting it into my document. The third example is the result of hand-tracing the signature, by holding it against my CRT screen. This was my third attempt at tracing the signature. Any respectable signature analyzer could spot several clues that would indicate it is a fake (such as the irregularities caused by inept tracing, but doing a trace vertically is a bit challenging), but it suggests that anyone with a bit of practice could either extract a high-resolution signature from a real document, or a tracing of a real signature. Without the original document (not a photocopy) it would be impossible to tell a good forgery from a real signature. Note how much the "noise" in the CBS version, not to mention the low resolution, makes it hard to do any analysis; my second image is clearly a fake because the quality of the signature is so much poorer than the quality of the type behind it (whereas in the CBS image, the quality of the signature and the quality of the text are equally poor). But this illustrates that it is within the scope of credibility that an authentic signature could have been pasted onto a fake document (if I had used my real signature in the third example, it might have looked as if I had signed it!) Lacking the original documents, there is nothing the copy can demonstrate that is convincing. (Sometimes I have been required to sign a contract specifically in "blue pen" so that there could be no question about the authenticity of the original signature!)
The original CBS .pdf file, printed out by me at 1200dpi, scanned at 600dpi. The CBS signature, copied, cleaned a little bit, and pasted, then printed and rescanned. 10 minutes. My somewhat inept tracing, scanned, and pasted onto my fake document. Printed, and rescanned to get this image. 20 minutes, most of it spent getting a nice clean signature bitmap.
Update 13-Sep-04
For a picture of a Varityper, take a look at a page I was pointed to by one of my readers: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=12&item=3747314674&rd. Examine carefully the number of controls on this device. This is what I remember from my aunt's print shop. Now in the list of unlikely coincidences, what is the likelihood that this device existed, was used to produce a casual memo, and was used by someone who didn't type, and used so well that it gave a quality not only as good as Microsoft Word, but identical to Microsoft Word?
Someone argued that the issue of the centering could be accounted for by the fact that the memo was typed on preprinted letterhead stationery, so the argument about centering the address precisely is a red herring. In that case, I observe that the font used for the heading and the font used for the body are, just coincidentally, the same font, and that, amazingly enough, the heading is centered (as many others have observed) in exactly the same way relative to the body of the text as Word would have centered text. Had the memo body been typed at a different time than the preprinted heading, why is the vertical spacing between the heading and the body the same as that of Word, and the horizontal alignment the same relative alignment as a Word document? There are far too many coincidences here to be credible.
In one reply, I came up with the "smoking gun" analogy. Imagine you are watching part of a trial on "Law & Order" or some similar drama. The arresting officer has just testified. Witness: "we heard a gunshot. When we entered the room, we found the accused standing over the body, with a smoking gun, and later analysis showed powder traces on his hands. Although the bullet was somewhat distorted when it hit the wall after passing through the victim, our forensic expert says that the probability that it was shot by that gun is 90%". Defense attorney: "Did you actually see my client pull the trigger?" Witness: "No sir, I did not see him actually pull the trigger." Defense attorney: "Therefore, sir, you must admit there is reasonable doubt about my client's guilt, and I ask the jury to acquit". Prosecutor: "the alternative hypothesis, that someone else owned a gun with the same characteristics, came in behind the accused, shot the victim, and the accused shot at this hypothetical intruder in self-defense, is not very likely. Therefore, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the hypothesis that the accused committed the crime, and you must convict". What do you think the verdict is going to be?
I have been used as an expert witness in several computer-related cases, and done deposition under oath in a number of them. I have tried to prepare this report with the same care that I would have prepared my testimony for deposition (no, I have not actually testified in court; the cases I was involved with either were settled out of court, or were settled in trial without need for any additional testimony from me).
(To all those who wrote to me: since you did not give me permission to use your names, I have refrained from doing so. However, if you want credit for your observations that led to this supplement, just send me email granting permission to credit you by name, and I'll be glad to give you explicit credit).
One of the essential tenets of scientific honesty is the ability of a third party to reproduce the work. There have been many excellent examples in the blogs of people comparing images of the documents with images of fakes, showing little if any error between the two; I saw no reason to reproduce those examples, since they are quite well done and quite compelling. I could have reproduced those examples, but I saw no reason to spend time duplicating such efforts. I chose instead to concentrate on the areas of font technology that were either misunderstood or misinterpreted.
I would like to point out that I have done nothing that anyone else on the Internet could not easily reproduce. To create these images, I used Microsoft Paint to first store the captured screen image from the Bush memo images released by CBS (my Internet-access machine does not have Corel Photo-Paint installed on it), then used Corel Photo-Paint to do the extractions. I have a MicroTek ScanMaker 6800 scanner, and I have been using Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to display the CBS images. Obviously, I used Microsoft Word for the document examples. My printer is a Xerox N4025 laser printer, which prints at 1200 or 2400dpi; all the work I did I did at the lower resolution. All scans were at 600dpi. I used Microsoft PowerPoint for some of the images, those that are doing the vertical line comparison. I am using my Font Explorer (to which I gave a link, which includes the complete source to the program), and in fact I am using the version of the program I compiled on 27-Oct-1996. There are some technical caveats in interpreting the output from font explorer because it suffers from certain nonlinearities, a complex problem to explain in a short memo. But it works real well if 10-point font is selected.
>dir i:\win32api\fontexplorer\release\*.exe
Volume in drive I is RAID5
Volume Serial Number is 9C66-A773
Directory of i:\win32api\fontexplorer\release
10/27/1996 02:15 PM 149,504 FontExplorer.exe
1 File(s) 149,504 bytes
Anyone with similar software can reproduce these examples. Adobe Illustrator could easily be used to reproduce these, and anyone who is a Windows programmer can write the Win32 system calls that give the same data that my Font Explorer so nicely displays. Anyone with a scanner could print their own document and rescan it (the reason for scanning the document is that printers, being higher resolution than displays, do not suffer from some of the artifacts of the display trying to approximate the printed image).
Please feel free to quote this material, use any of my images, etc. if you are reposting. I do ask that you provide a link to this page.
The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!
Home
Resume
First off, before I start getting a lot of the wrong kind of mail: I am not a fan of George Bush. But I am even less a fan of attempts to commit fraud, and particularly by a complete and utter failure of those we entrust to ensure that if the news is at least accurate. I know it is asking far too much to expect the news to be unbiased. But the people involved should not actually lie to us, or promulgate lies created by hoaxers, through their own incompetence.
There has been a lot of activity on the Internet recently concerning the forged CBS documents. I do not even dignify this statement with the traditional weasel-word “alleged”, because it takes approximately 30 seconds for anyone who is knowledgeable in the history of electronic document production to recognize this whole collection is certainly a forgery, and approximately five minutes to prove to anyone technically competent that the documents are a forgery. I was able to replicate two of the documents within a few minutes. At time I a writing this, CBS is stonewalling. They were hoaxed, pure and simple. CBS failed to exercise anything even approximately like due diligence. I am not sure what sort of "expert" they called in to authenticate the document, but anything I say about his qualifications to judge digital typography is likely to be considered libelous (no matter how true they are) and I would not say them in print in a public forum.
I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is “I was working with laser printers before they had lasers”, which is only a mild stretch of the truth). We published a paper about our work (graphics, printer hardware, printer software, and typesetting) in one of the important professional journals of the time (D.R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L.D. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G. Robertson, and J. Wright, "XCRIBL: A Hardcopy Scan Line Graphics System for Document Generation," Information Processing Letters (1972, pp.246-251)). I have been involved in many aspects of computer typography, including computer music typesetting (1987-1990). I have personally created computer fonts, and helped create programs that created computer fonts. At one time in my life, I was a certified Adobe PostScript developer, and could make laser printers practically stand up and tap dance. I have written about Microsoft Windows font technology in a book I co-authored, and taught courses in it. I therefore assert that I am a qualified expert in computer typography.
187th scanned in from my Word document, original 1200dpi, scanned at 600dpi
187th screen shot from 18-August-1973 memo
111th captured from screen shot of 4-may1972 memo
111th enlarged from CBS justification image
The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
If someone had come forward presenting a “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which used acrylic paints including Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White, art experts would roll of the floor laughing at the clumsiness of the forgery. (Acrylic paints were not known until the 1920s, although some histories date them as late as the late 1940s, and some as late as 1955; Cadmium Yellow was not known until 1840, and Titanium White was not available as an artist's pigment until 1921). Yet somehow a document which could not be created by any of the common office technology of 1972 is touted as “authentic”.
“Apologists” that try to claim these documents are authentic have pointed out that there were technologies for doing electronic typesetting, for doing proportional fonts, and even doing something that resembles superscripting. One document cited as proving that a typewriter could do superscripting is a document which is part of the files released by the White House and the Pentagon. I was able to locate this document, which was said to have been used by CBS as "proof" that superscripting was possible. The excerpt shown here is from page 15 of the document.
Let's look at some comparisons. Realizing that we are working from several times removed from the "original" document supplied to CBS, it is still worth doing some comparisons. On the left I show several images. The first element, the 187th, is from a document I printed on my printer, at 1200dpi and scanned at 600 dpi. It is obviously enlarged here. Note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7". The second image is a screen capture from the 18-August-1973 memo. While some details are lost (perhaps CBS could post some hi-res scans as gif files?), note that the "th" is superscripted, and apparently by the same amount; note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7".
Next, we get the 111th image. The image I show is a screen capture from the CBS document which claims to be a memo dated 04-May-1972. Note the "th" is approximately bisected by the top line of the 1. So this seems to also be in the same position as the position Microsoft Word uses. But when we look at the "th" of the image which is apparently used to justify the fact that a typewriter could do a superscript, we find that it is not a superscript, but in fact a character that appears to be simply raised from the nominal baseline by approximately 10%, but does not exceed the top of the line. This proves that there was a typewriter that had a "th" key, but it looks so different from the previous three examples that it is hard to believe that such a typewriter could have created the same memos.
Now let's look at the comparison of the two 111th in a calibrated fashion. What I did was create a set of equally-spaced vertical lines, then I stretched the CBS justification image so the characters all lined up. Note they are monospaced. The "th" takes up one character position. Then above it, I stretched the image from the 04-May-1972 image (in both cases maintaining the aspect ratio) until the digits lined up. Even in proportional fonts, the digits are always designed to have the same width to simplify doing columns of digits. Note how the "th" is not quite aligned right, and the spacing is not uniform. So we take a typewriter with a monospaced font and a ligature, and claim that it justifies the existence of a memo in variable-pitch font, with a different superscripting mechanism (suspiciously like that of Microsoft Word!)?
.Using arguments like this would be equivalent to someone justifying the “genuine” da Vinci by saying that yellow paint existed, and white paint existed, and ignoring the obvious fact that Cadmium Yellow or Titanium White could not exist. Some have contended that since Times New Roman was a typeface invented “in the 1940s” (according to Linotype, the copyright holder for Times New Roman, it was first used by the New York Times in the edition of 3 October 1932; the original TimesTM font is stated to have been created in 1931 for the London Times; in either case, however, the date is established as being earlier than 1972), it is not unreasonable that it could exist in 1972. Yet I knew most of the sites that, in 1972, had printers and computer-based formatting technology that could have printed a document in proportional-spaced fonts, and these included MIT, Carnegie Mellon (where I did my work), The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (where the personal computer as we know it was invented). I no longer recall how many XGP printers existed, but I believe the number was not much more than a dozen. None of these printers could print more than about 180 dots per inch, a quality somewhat lower than a contemporary fax, yet the image I downloaded from the CBS site appears to have been printed on a printer of much higher resolution. The only other printer I am aware of in the 1970s that could print at reasonable quality was a research prototype I saw at Xerox PARC, called EARS, which could print at 300 dpi. It was not created until 1971, and I remember it has having several large cabinets of extremely expensive computer components controlling it. It was a “hand-built”, one-of-a-kind printer. All other technologies were quite elaborate and clumsy mechanical devices, and although there were some proportional-spaced typewriters (such as the IBM Executive) and print production technologies (such as the VariTyper), none of these would have produced something that was a near-perfect match for Times New Roman under Microsoft Word. Don Knuth’s seminal work on computer font technology (“TEX and Metafont: New Dimensions in Typesetting”) was not printed until 1979, “on experimental printing equipment” at “Xerox Research”. Phototypesetters of the era projected one character at a time onto a film, then moved the template containing the photos of the characters, then exposed the next character. They were exceedingly slow relative to, say, a typewriter, and cost a LOT of money. The resulting film had to be developed, and a printer plate had to be created from this negative. It seems unlikely that this technology would have been used to create private memos. My aunt ran the printing division in a local company in the late 1960s, and I know what technology she was using (it was leading edge for its time). It would not have been available to a military base--at least in the administrative offices--in 1972, nor would it have been practical. It used technology that was a precursor of modern laser printers, but it was all purely optical, using VariTypers, large-scale cameras, and a very primitive form of xerographic technology.
Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width). This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”. I discuss the ABC width mechanism in some detail in a book I wrote in 1997 (“Win32 Programming”, with Brent Rector, Addison-Wesley, 1997, p. 1104). I have attached sample output from a program I used to create illustrations for that book, one of which shows the characters “fr” and one of which shows the C offset of the “f” character is “–2”. ALL technologies I am aware of in 1972 that would have been available for office work (not, say, the sort of production book typesetters that major publishers might have had) could only advance an integral number of units, and could not “tuck in” the characters like Microsoft’s Times New Roman font under Microsoft Word does, by using a negative partial-character offset. Examine carefully the “fr” in the word “from” in the 18-August-1973 memo. The “r” is tucked under the “f” in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this document could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman. The work we did at CMU could not support kerning or pseudo-kerning of text. We knew about kerning, but our software could not support it. I have not examined a New York Times of 1972, but I would be extremely surprised if the font used at that time exhibited any form of kerning (I should point out that Linotype machines—the hot-lead machines—had paired characters such as “fi”, which were actually a single slug. Character sequences like these are called a “ligature” and were a special case of kerning. Common ligatures included fi, fl, ffi, ffl, among others. This was an example of kerning built into the font definition, and Linotype machines had separate keys that dropped these slugs into place. Lead type set by hand also had similar ligatures. The illustration is scanned from The Unicode Standard Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley, 2000, p.804).
Hot lead type could not kern, because of the need to have a Linotype machine drop slugs into a frame, which was then filled with hot lead. Any publishing technology that used hot lead typesetting could not support kerning, except by the aforementioned ligatures. Any technology that used hand-set type could not support kerning without such a high expense that it is unlikely it was ever done. Not even Word supports kerning without selecting a special option (and if selected, the resulting document does not look like the memo). But somehow, magically, the font used by some hypothesized piece of equipment in 1972 works the same was as a font that uses a set of ABC width parameters that did not exist until TrueType fonts existed. Microsoft delivered the first version of TrueType for Windows in April of 1992, and the original TrueType font format was developed by Apple and delivered in May, 1991.
Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes, to replicate one of the experiments reported on the Internet, that is, to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the “authentic” document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible. I was a bit annoyed that the experiment dealing with the 18-August-1973 memo was not compatible, until I changed the font to an 11.5-point font. Then it was a perfect match, including the superscript “th”. In 1972, we expressed fonts in integral pixel sizes, and a fractional pixel size would have been meaningless. Until we got high-resolution printers in the 1990s, I am not aware of any application-level technology that supported fractional point sizes (Adobe PostScript could, but the high-level interfaces to it, to the best of my recollection, only allowed integers to be specified for sizes). I do not believe a typesetting program or typesetting technology that worked in fractional point sizes could have existed in 1972 or 1973. However, this might be an accident of the many levels of transformation from the original (wherever that is) and the photocopying, scanning, document conversion, and re-printing. The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations. In which case, the coincidence of the match is again extremely unlikely unless the document were a forgery.
William of Occam (or Ockham), a 13th century philosopher, summed it up in what is now paraphrased as “given a choice between two explanations, choose the simpler explanation” (or as he said it, “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”). You cannot assemble a set of assertions about what MIGHT have been possible using a variety of unrelated technologies that existed in 1972, and somehow magically combine them into a single technology that could have existed in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard, used for casual memos, and produced the memos in question that are VIRTUALLY PIXEL-LEVEL IDENTICAL TO THOSE PRODUCED BY MICROSOFT WORD.
There are numerous other clues to indicate an amateur at work. In many cases, there is a space preceding the st or th, in an attempt to prevent Word from automatically superscripting these. Of course, any experienced Word user knows that this automatic superscripting can be instantly undone just by typing Control-Z as soon as it happens, but an amateur would not know this. Many have commented on the anomalies of the curly quotes, another piece of Word automation which would not have been found in documents of the era. I know that our fonts did not have left and right quote marks because of limitations of the character sets, which could only have 95 or 96 printable characters. Most of our contemporaneous printers used 7-bit ASCII fonts, which had no option for specifying curly quotes, nor did our software automatically generate them, as Word does. Not only are these documents forgeries, they are incompetently done forgeries. They make the forger of a da Vinci-with-acrylics look positively sophisticated by comparison.
It does not take a sophisticated expert in forensics or document authentication to spot these obvious forgeries. The forgery is obvious to anyone who knows the history and technology of digital typesetting, not to mention to any intelligent 12-year-old who has access to Microsoft Word.
So we have the following two hypotheses contending for describing the memos
* Attempts to recreate the memos using Microsoft Word and Times New Roman produce images so close that even taking into account the fact that the image we were able to download from the CBS site has been copied, scanned, downloaded, and reprinted, the errors between the "authentic" document and a file created by anyone using Microsoft word are virtually indistinguishable.
* The font existed in 1972; there were technologies in 1972 that could, with elaborate effort, reproduce these memos, and these technologies and the skills to use them were used by someone who, by testimony of his own family, never typed anything, in an office that for all its other documents appears to have used ordinary monospaced typewriters, and therefore this unlikely juxtaposition of technologies and location coincided just long enough to produce these four memos on 04-May-1972, 18-May-1972, 01-August-1972, and 18-August-1973.
Which one do you think is true? Which one would a 13th-century philosopher think made sense? How many totally unlikely other juxtapositions are expected to be true? How could anyone believe these memos are other than incompetent forgeries?
This letter concentrates only on the raw technology of the fonts and printing. It does not address many of the issues others on the Internet have raised, such as the incorrect usage of military titles and abbreviations, incorrect formatting relative to prevailing 1972 military standards, etc. I am not qualified to comment on these. All I can say is that the technology that produced this document was not possible in 1972 in the sort of equipment that would have been available outside publishing houses, and which required substantial training and expertise to use, and it replicates exactly the technologies of Microsoft Word and Microsoft TrueType Fonts.
It is therefore my expert opinion that these documents are modern forgeries.
Update 12-Sep-04
Kerning and pseudo-kerning
ABC dimensions for Times New Roman, characters "y", "space" and "j"
Character layout for Times New Roman
ABC dimensions for Palatino Linotype font under Windows
I have received several comments on the above essay. One of them suggested that it is hard to tell if the "fr" really has the f and r overlapping. So what I did was take my copy of the 18-aug-73 memo, printed at 1200 dpi, and scan it in at 600 dpi and extracted the word "from". I then did a copy-and-paste of the word "from" from the (admittedly poor) CBS image. I placed both of these in Microsoft PowerPoint, stretched them to the same left-to-right length (maintaining aspect ratio!), and drew some lines. Now I admit there is a lot of distortion in the CBS image (if they really want expert opinion, they should post a 600dpi scanned TIFF image of each memo on their site!), yet the results are amazingly close. This verifies my visual inspection. It is unlikely that such coincidence could occur if the fonts were not the same font. Note that even if you might like to believe that the "r" is not tucked under the "f", if it weren't, the subsequent characters would be horizontally misplaced to the right in the CBS memo, yet, relative to even the poor image quality, it is clear the positions correspond.
Another alert reader suggested that the "j" from "my job" shows that the tail of the "j" overlaps the preceding space. So I used my Font Explorer to reveal the parameters of the "j". Note that the "j" has a negative A-offset value, meaning that the character will overlap the preceding character. He also observed that the "y" did not "tuck its tail" under the preceding character, and note that the A-offset for "y" is 0, so this is consistent with his observation. So I did the same comparison, from my scanned image of "my job" and the CBS image of "my job" from the 18-Aug-73 memo. The results are shown below. Of course, to those of us who have already figured out that these are forgeries, this result comes as no surprise at all.
The Font Explorer is a program which comes with our book, and can be downloaded from my site as part of the CD-ROM image that came with the book; it is something like 17MB, so you may not want to download this on a dialup; I have a separate .zip file which is the FontExplorer.exe file itself. (Note to programmers: this was built under Visual Studio 4.2. I have not attempted to recompile it under any later version of Visual Studio, including 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 or 7.1. If you download the source, you're on your own here).
One question that came up was whether this was really Times New Roman, or perhaps Palatino, a font very similar to Times New Roman. I looked in my font list (I have hundreds of fonts installed on my machine), and found a font called "Palatino Linotype". Admittedly, this does not say anything about the font that might be used by a sophisticated typesetter in 1972, but it shows that the hoaxer really did use Times New Roman and not Palatino. Look at the ABC widths for the same characters; note that the "j" in the Palatino font has a 0 A-offset, instead of a –2 A-offset. Several other dimensions, such as y.B and j.C also do not correspond. I decided to not waste time creating, scanning, and otherwise displaying a document done in Palatino simply because the differences should be obvious just from reading the ABC dimension specification.
Another reader sent me a pointer to a higher-resolution scan of the notorious "superscript" image. I went there, and downloaded the image. Shown to the left is the result of adding this (the bottommost of the three images) to my comparison chart. No surprises here, it again emphasizes that the "superscript" did not rise above the top of the line.
One person actually suggested that I was saying that because of this "th", and my assertion that a superscript would indicate a forgery, that I am claiming that all documents released by the Texas Air National Guard must be forgeries. I have never come close to saying that. I merely point out that if a typewriter has a superscript-like entity, as it shown here on the left, it is completely unlike the superscripting of Word, which is coincidentally exactly identical to the superscripting of the forged documents. The "th" in the Texas Air National Guard documents is not a superscript, but a monospaced ligature that fits within the bounding box of the character space. So let me be very pedantic here: the "th" in the released documents is not, I repeat, not, a superscript. It is a single character.
Another correspondent pointed me to a site that claims that Word does automatic kerning. Sorry to disappoint the poster, but what he is reporting on is not kerning in the sense that Word or a typographer means kerning, but the significant fact that the ABC widths contain a negative C-width. He points out that "at" and "ta" actually come out as different widths. This is true, but it is not true kerning, which would rely on the pairwise information of "a" following "t" and "t" following "a"; instead it is the "pseudo-kerning" caused by a negative C-width on the character "a". A negative C-width applies no matter what character follows. For example, noting that "f" has a negative C-width works because most characters that "f" is paired with are "half-height" letters (I forget the actual technical term, but I think it is "minuscule", although according to some typographers this merely means any lowercase letter) and therefore there is no conflict. The only full-height letter "f" is paired with typically is "l", and the effect is to simulate the ligature "fl" that printers use. However, if it were true kerning, the kerning pair "fb" would indicate that the "b" needs to move to the right so as to not be connected to the "f", but since there is no "fb" used in ordinary English prose, this error is "harmless". This can be seen in my comparisons based on the Font Explorer output. Because of the C-width, there is no need to have a kerning pair for "f" and "r" to cause an overlap. Note however that there is a kerning pair for "AV", and the result is easily seen in the Kerning part of the Font Explorer. Note in the lower example that "fb" shows an improper overlap, because not only does the negative C-offset for f cause the next character to "tuck under", but there is no positive kerning value for the pair "fb". Therefore, it is incorrectly rendered with the "f" touching the "b". Microsoft apparently only provides kerning pairs when there is a need to override the built-in font parameters.
I realize this is a fine-point quibble, but my view, and the view of typographers, is that kerning is always a per-character-pair operation, and the C-width parameter is fixed as part of the character definition. In either case, casual technology readily available in offices in 1972 would be incapable of either effect. But when I state the document is not kerned, I mean that pair kerning is not enabled; the only apparent kerning is the overlap generated by the A and C offsets. There are many technical reasons that pseudo-kerning is more desirable than true pair kerning, but that would take at least another page to explain issues such as how print files are created, the costs of doing a download to a printer, the feasibility of doing arbitrary text placement in the printer compared to having the printer use built-in TrueType fonts and pseudo-kern automatically, and so on. Pseudo-kerning is a "good enough" approximation of true kerning that it is good enough for everyday use.
Kerning was possible using hand-set lead type, as one person pointed out, by having fonts where the character actually overhung the edge. The problem with this was that these fonts, extensively used by high-end professional printers (and even today by those who still do hand-set type) were quite expensive, particularly because of the potential for damage to the overhanging part of the character. Such kerning was impossible for hot-lead type processes. But it meant a higher cost to get a set of type (more characters had to exist in the type slugs), more time and care in doing the typesetting (meaningful only when cost was essentially not an object), and even more time in tearing down and re-sorting the type slugs. Most print shops did not bother much with these details. Unfortunately, the only "artisan" printer I know who did hand-set type lives about three hours' drive away, and given the more obvious aspects of the forgery, it is not worth my time to go out and examine his type.
Pseudo-kerning using negative C-width
ABC widths of "t" and "a". Display of "tat". "f" kerning pair info. Note that it pairs only with another "f" or a right single quote (character code 146) where it has a positive kerning value. Showing that "ta" and "at" have slightly different representations. The example shown at the indicated site is correct, but the reasoning is incorrect. No pair kerning is involved.
Turning on kerning, at its effects (1)
The option "Format > Font", choosing the character spacing tab, enabling kerning. ""AV" kerning pair info: the kerning value for "V" following "A" is -2. Upper image: "AV" without kerning. Lower inage: "AV" with kerning turned on.
The effects of kerning when kerning pairs are used in the example
Upper example: a line with kerning turned off. Lower example: the same line with kerning turned on. Note that the right quote has additional space, and the AV show overlap. Note the incorrect overlap of "fb" in both cases. And the illusion that "fl" and "fi" are ligatures.
The angled green line shows the change of position of the right quote when kerning is enabled. The sloped red line shows the displacement of the A, and if there were no kerning, the V would be displaced by the same amount, but in fact the lower V is more to the left than the red lines predict.
Turning on kerning has an effect only if there is a kerning pair. For example, in "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", the Font Explorer gives the information about the kerning pairs as shown below. In the following tables, I use sp to indicate a space character, and rt' to indicate a right curly quote and lt' to indicate a left curly quote (which usually doesn't appear on a Web page). Note that a kerning value of 0 seems to have no effect on the built-in ABC widths.
Kerning data for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ff"
Th none he none e space none space q none qu none ui none ic none
ck none k space none space b none br none ro none ow none wn none
n space none space f none fo none ox none x sp none sp j none ju none
um none mp none ps none s sp none sp o none ov none ve none
er none r sp none sp t none th none he none e sp none sp l none
la none az none zy none y sp none sp d none do none og none
g sp none sp f none ff 0
So based on one poorly-constructed example, the poster claims "Apparently then the whole kerning option objection is a red herring." Unfortunately, his experiment is flawed, and the conclusion meaningless. He did not actually measure any kerning effects, because there were no kerning effects possible given the selection of letter pairs in the example.
Here are the actual kerning pairs for Times New Roman, and their values. These were derived from my Font Explorer. To illustrate the effects of kerning, as I did, a known kerning pair must appear in the font sample. I used two, AV and f rt'.
Kerning Pair Data for Times New Roman Font
sp A -1 sp T 0 sp V 0 sp W 0 sp Y 0 11 0 A sp -1 AT -1
AV -2 AW -1 AY -1 Av -1 Aw -1 Ay -1 A rt' -1 F, -1
F. -1 FA -1 L sp 0 LT -1 LV -1 LW -1 LY -1 L rt' -1
P sp 0 P, -1 P. -1 PA -1 RT -1 RV -1 RW -1 RY -1
Ry -1 T sp 0 T, -1 T- -1 T. -1 T: -1 T; -1 TA -1
TO 0 Ta -1 Tc -1 Te -1 Ti 0 To -1 Tr 0 Ts -1
Tu 0 Tw -1 Ty -1 V sp 0 V, -2 V- -1 V. -2 V: -1
V; -1 VA -2 Va -1 Ve -1 Vi -1 Vo -2 Vr -1 Vu -1
Vy -1 W sp 0 W, -1 W- -1 W. -1 W: 0 W; 0 WA -1
Wa -1 We -1 Wi -1 Wo -1 Wr -1 Wu -1 Wy -1 Y sp 0
Y, -2 Y- -1 Y. -2 Y: -1 Y; -1 YA -1 Ya -1 Ye -1
Yi -1 Yo -1 Yp -1 Yq -1 Yu -1 Yv -1 ff 0 f rt' 1
r, -1 r- 0 r. -1 rg 0 r rt' 0 v, -1 v. -1 y, -1
y. -1 lt' lt' -1 rt' sp -1 rt' s -1 rt' t 0 rt' rt' -1 G, -2 G. -2
St 0
Signatures, and the glories of copy and paste
Another reader pointed out that he was able to forge the signature. Unfortunately, he sent me an example as a Microsoft Word document, and I do not under any circumstances open potentially executable files, including those that can hold macro viruses. Several levels of virus protection and firewalls not withstanding, this is simply my flat-out policy. So I apologize to him on not being able to comment on his work. But I had actually done this Friday night; it took me about 10 minutes. I took the CBS document, printed it, scanned it in (to remove some of the artifacts of the display), extracted the signature with a copy-and paste, did some cleanup to remove the "dirt" from the scan, gave it a transparent background, saved it as a .gif file, and pasted it into my document. Now the result in this case is pretty evidently a forgery, because of the artifacts. But someone with access to an authentic signature and a high-resolution scanner could have done a much more convincing job. For example, here are three scans. The leftmost is the one from the CBS memo, which I printed out and then rescanned (to avoid artifacts of the low-resolution display). The second is the result of copying the signature from that scan, and doing a bit of transparency hacking, then pasting it into my document. The third example is the result of hand-tracing the signature, by holding it against my CRT screen. This was my third attempt at tracing the signature. Any respectable signature analyzer could spot several clues that would indicate it is a fake (such as the irregularities caused by inept tracing, but doing a trace vertically is a bit challenging), but it suggests that anyone with a bit of practice could either extract a high-resolution signature from a real document, or a tracing of a real signature. Without the original document (not a photocopy) it would be impossible to tell a good forgery from a real signature. Note how much the "noise" in the CBS version, not to mention the low resolution, makes it hard to do any analysis; my second image is clearly a fake because the quality of the signature is so much poorer than the quality of the type behind it (whereas in the CBS image, the quality of the signature and the quality of the text are equally poor). But this illustrates that it is within the scope of credibility that an authentic signature could have been pasted onto a fake document (if I had used my real signature in the third example, it might have looked as if I had signed it!) Lacking the original documents, there is nothing the copy can demonstrate that is convincing. (Sometimes I have been required to sign a contract specifically in "blue pen" so that there could be no question about the authenticity of the original signature!)
The original CBS .pdf file, printed out by me at 1200dpi, scanned at 600dpi. The CBS signature, copied, cleaned a little bit, and pasted, then printed and rescanned. 10 minutes. My somewhat inept tracing, scanned, and pasted onto my fake document. Printed, and rescanned to get this image. 20 minutes, most of it spent getting a nice clean signature bitmap.
Update 13-Sep-04
For a picture of a Varityper, take a look at a page I was pointed to by one of my readers: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=12&item=3747314674&rd. Examine carefully the number of controls on this device. This is what I remember from my aunt's print shop. Now in the list of unlikely coincidences, what is the likelihood that this device existed, was used to produce a casual memo, and was used by someone who didn't type, and used so well that it gave a quality not only as good as Microsoft Word, but identical to Microsoft Word?
Someone argued that the issue of the centering could be accounted for by the fact that the memo was typed on preprinted letterhead stationery, so the argument about centering the address precisely is a red herring. In that case, I observe that the font used for the heading and the font used for the body are, just coincidentally, the same font, and that, amazingly enough, the heading is centered (as many others have observed) in exactly the same way relative to the body of the text as Word would have centered text. Had the memo body been typed at a different time than the preprinted heading, why is the vertical spacing between the heading and the body the same as that of Word, and the horizontal alignment the same relative alignment as a Word document? There are far too many coincidences here to be credible.
In one reply, I came up with the "smoking gun" analogy. Imagine you are watching part of a trial on "Law & Order" or some similar drama. The arresting officer has just testified. Witness: "we heard a gunshot. When we entered the room, we found the accused standing over the body, with a smoking gun, and later analysis showed powder traces on his hands. Although the bullet was somewhat distorted when it hit the wall after passing through the victim, our forensic expert says that the probability that it was shot by that gun is 90%". Defense attorney: "Did you actually see my client pull the trigger?" Witness: "No sir, I did not see him actually pull the trigger." Defense attorney: "Therefore, sir, you must admit there is reasonable doubt about my client's guilt, and I ask the jury to acquit". Prosecutor: "the alternative hypothesis, that someone else owned a gun with the same characteristics, came in behind the accused, shot the victim, and the accused shot at this hypothetical intruder in self-defense, is not very likely. Therefore, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the hypothesis that the accused committed the crime, and you must convict". What do you think the verdict is going to be?
I have been used as an expert witness in several computer-related cases, and done deposition under oath in a number of them. I have tried to prepare this report with the same care that I would have prepared my testimony for deposition (no, I have not actually testified in court; the cases I was involved with either were settled out of court, or were settled in trial without need for any additional testimony from me).
(To all those who wrote to me: since you did not give me permission to use your names, I have refrained from doing so. However, if you want credit for your observations that led to this supplement, just send me email granting permission to credit you by name, and I'll be glad to give you explicit credit).
One of the essential tenets of scientific honesty is the ability of a third party to reproduce the work. There have been many excellent examples in the blogs of people comparing images of the documents with images of fakes, showing little if any error between the two; I saw no reason to reproduce those examples, since they are quite well done and quite compelling. I could have reproduced those examples, but I saw no reason to spend time duplicating such efforts. I chose instead to concentrate on the areas of font technology that were either misunderstood or misinterpreted.
I would like to point out that I have done nothing that anyone else on the Internet could not easily reproduce. To create these images, I used Microsoft Paint to first store the captured screen image from the Bush memo images released by CBS (my Internet-access machine does not have Corel Photo-Paint installed on it), then used Corel Photo-Paint to do the extractions. I have a MicroTek ScanMaker 6800 scanner, and I have been using Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to display the CBS images. Obviously, I used Microsoft Word for the document examples. My printer is a Xerox N4025 laser printer, which prints at 1200 or 2400dpi; all the work I did I did at the lower resolution. All scans were at 600dpi. I used Microsoft PowerPoint for some of the images, those that are doing the vertical line comparison. I am using my Font Explorer (to which I gave a link, which includes the complete source to the program), and in fact I am using the version of the program I compiled on 27-Oct-1996. There are some technical caveats in interpreting the output from font explorer because it suffers from certain nonlinearities, a complex problem to explain in a short memo. But it works real well if 10-point font is selected.
>dir i:\win32api\fontexplorer\release\*.exe
Volume in drive I is RAID5
Volume Serial Number is 9C66-A773
Directory of i:\win32api\fontexplorer\release
10/27/1996 02:15 PM 149,504 FontExplorer.exe
1 File(s) 149,504 bytes
Anyone with similar software can reproduce these examples. Adobe Illustrator could easily be used to reproduce these, and anyone who is a Windows programmer can write the Win32 system calls that give the same data that my Font Explorer so nicely displays. Anyone with a scanner could print their own document and rescan it (the reason for scanning the document is that printers, being higher resolution than displays, do not suffer from some of the artifacts of the display trying to approximate the printed image).
Please feel free to quote this material, use any of my images, etc. if you are reposting. I do ask that you provide a link to this page.</
I>
Let's see, he's not hyper partisan, I can't imagine anyone who could be better credentialed, or has more relevant experience.
But, I guess you know better than he does
Look at the CBS news report tonight for an example of hyper partisanism.
Just curious, do yu still stick to the fact that they are not forgeries??? Even the OTHER members of the mainstream press- the washington press, the new york times came out today and dumped on CBS.
BUt, I don't want to confuse you with too many facts
I understand that you feel strongly about this issue. The polls indicate, as kerry's numbers get worse and worse, that it's just not resonating with the voters. Let it be the focus of the campaign form now till nov. 2, I don't think that would scare the RNC at all
Yes, It's automatic if you don' take the physical that you get grounded. He knew he wasn't going to fly, so he didn't take the physical.
Even if there were something sinister, it's a loser for the dems. Wasting time, money and energy on this is sheer desperation
He is a partisan, but the facts he wrote are well documented. I think at some point after the DNC has wasted a lot of firepower on the issue, it will probably be dealt with. This issue has been hashed and rehashed . It was brought up in 2000, no? Bush didn't base his platform on his Guard duty, and it seems delusional to think that this is the issue that will turn the election. Apparently the DNC thinks they have their own little SBVT that will turn this thing around for kerry.- Not gonna happen. The dems are stuck with a horrible candidate that THEY don't even like, who hasn't shown any consistency on any position.
Is it really wise for them to expend all that energy on the issue when the spector of the documents being false hangs over the whole issue. Do they think that if they are found to be false, they will be able to keep the thing alive as a viable issue. Doesn't seem likely to me
The National Guard requires that the physical be done IF the member is to fly again. If the member knows that they are not going to fly again, the physical is irrelevant. It was common practice for people in that position to not take the physical. Byron York at thehill.comn(http://thehill.com/york/090904.aspx) has an article that explains most of the questions that have been brought up- except for the physical. This is really a cynical attack- there's no meat to the allegations
I'm not advocating overthrowing the Saudis even with the knowledge that they are partly complicit. They have to be our friends due to their strategic importance
He never "failed " the physical. H eknew that he wasn't going to continue flying, so there was no need to take the physical, as was standard practice among Guard pilots.
Also, more info on that memo requesting the physical:
The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!
Home
Resume
First off, before I start getting a lot of the wrong kind of mail: I am not a fan of George Bush. But I am even less a fan of attempts to commit fraud, and particularly by a complete and utter failure of those we entrust to ensure that if the news is at least accurate. I know it is asking far too much to expect the news to be unbiased. But the people involved should not actually lie to us, or promulgate lies created by hoaxers, through their own incompetence.
There has been a lot of activity on the Internet recently concerning the forged CBS documents. I do not even dignify this statement with the traditional weasel-word “alleged”, because it takes approximately 30 seconds for anyone who is knowledgeable in the history of electronic document production to recognize this whole collection is certainly a forgery, and approximately five minutes to prove to anyone technically competent that the documents are a forgery. I was able to replicate two of the documents within a few minutes. At time I a writing this, CBS is stonewalling. They were hoaxed, pure and simple. CBS failed to exercise anything even approximately like due diligence. I am not sure what sort of "expert" they called in to authenticate the document, but anything I say about his qualifications to judge digital typography is likely to be considered libelous (no matter how true they are) and I would not say them in print in a public forum.
I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is “I was working with laser printers before they had lasers”, which is only a mild stretch of the truth). We published a paper about our work (graphics, printer hardware, printer software, and typesetting) in one of the important professional journals of the time (D.R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L.D. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G. Robertson, and J. Wright, "XCRIBL: A Hardcopy Scan Line Graphics System for Document Generation," Information Processing Letters (1972, pp.246-251)). I have been involved in many aspects of computer typography, including computer music typesetting (1987-1990). I have personally created computer fonts, and helped create programs that created computer fonts. At one time in my life, I was a certified Adobe PostScript developer, and could make laser printers practically stand up and tap dance. I have written about Microsoft Windows font technology in a book I co-authored, and taught courses in it. I therefore assert that I am a qualified expert in computer typography.
187th scanned in from my Word document, original 1200dpi, scanned at 600dpi
187th screen shot from 18-August-1973 memo
111th captured from screen shot of 4-may1972 memo
111th enlarged from CBS justification image
The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
If someone had come forward presenting a “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which used acrylic paints including Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White, art experts would roll of the floor laughing at the clumsiness of the forgery. (Acrylic paints were not known until the 1920s, although some histories date them as late as the late 1940s, and some as late as 1955; Cadmium Yellow was not known until 1840, and Titanium White was not available as an artist's pigment until 1921). Yet somehow a document which could not be created by any of the common office technology of 1972 is touted as “authentic”.
“Apologists” that try to claim these documents are authentic have pointed out that there were technologies for doing electronic typesetting, for doing proportional fonts, and even doing something that resembles superscripting. One document cited as proving that a typewriter could do superscripting is a document which is part of the files released by the White House and the Pentagon. I was able to locate this document, which was said to have been used by CBS as "proof" that superscripting was possible. The excerpt shown here is from page 15 of the document.
Let's look at some comparisons. Realizing that we are working from several times removed from the "original" document supplied to CBS, it is still worth doing some comparisons. On the left I show several images. The first element, the 187th, is from a document I printed on my printer, at 1200dpi and scanned at 600 dpi. It is obviously enlarged here. Note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7". The second image is a screen capture from the 18-August-1973 memo. While some details are lost (perhaps CBS could post some hi-res scans as gif files?), note that the "th" is superscripted, and apparently by the same amount; note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7".
Next, we get the 111th image. The image I show is a screen capture from the CBS document which claims to be a memo dated 04-May-1972. Note the "th" is approximately bisected by the top line of the 1. So this seems to also be in the same position as the position Microsoft Word uses. But when we look at the "th" of the image which is apparently used to justify the fact that a typewriter could do a superscript, we find that it is not a superscript, but in fact a character that appears to be simply raised from the nominal baseline by approximately 10%, but does not exceed the top of the line. This proves that there was a typewriter that had a "th" key, but it looks so different from the previous three examples that it is hard to believe that such a typewriter could have created the same memos.
Now let's look at the comparison of the two 111th in a calibrated fashion. What I did was create a set of equally-spaced vertical lines, then I stretched the CBS justification image so the characters all lined up. Note they are monospaced. The "th" takes up one character position. Then above it, I stretched the image from the 04-May-1972 image (in both cases maintaining the aspect ratio) until the digits lined up. Even in proportional fonts, the digits are always designed to have the same width to simplify doing columns of digits. Note how the "th" is not quite aligned right, and the spacing is not uniform. So we take a typewriter with a monospaced font and a ligature, and claim that it justifies the existence of a memo in variable-pitch font, with a different superscripting mechanism (suspiciously like that of Microsoft Word!)?
.Using arguments like this would be equivalent to someone justifying the “genuine” da Vinci by saying that yellow paint existed, and white paint existed, and ignoring the obvious fact that Cadmium Yellow or Titanium White could not exist. Some have contended that since Times New Roman was a typeface invented “in the 1940s” (according to Linotype, the copyright holder for Times New Roman, it was first used by the New York Times in the edition of 3 October 1932; the original TimesTM font is stated to have been created in 1931 for the London Times; in either case, however, the date is established as being earlier than 1972), it is not unreasonable that it could exist in 1972. Yet I knew most of the sites that, in 1972, had printers and computer-based formatting technology that could have printed a document in proportional-spaced fonts, and these included MIT, Carnegie Mellon (where I did my work), The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (where the personal computer as we know it was invented). I no longer recall how many XGP printers existed, but I believe the number was not much more than a dozen. None of these printers could print more than about 180 dots per inch, a quality somewhat lower than a contemporary fax, yet the image I downloaded from the CBS site appears to have been printed on a printer of much higher resolution. The only other printer I am aware of in the 1970s that could print at reasonable quality was a research prototype I saw at Xerox PARC, called EARS, which could print at 300 dpi. It was not created until 1971, and I remember it has having several large cabinets of extremely expensive computer components controlling it. It was a “hand-built”, one-of-a-kind printer. All other technologies were quite elaborate and clumsy mechanical devices, and although there were some proportional-spaced typewriters (such as the IBM Executive) and print production technologies (such as the VariTyper), none of these would have produced something that was a near-perfect match for Times New Roman under Microsoft Word. Don Knuth’s seminal work on computer font technology (“TEX and Metafont: New Dimensions in Typesetting”) was not printed until 1979, “on experimental printing equipment” at “Xerox Research”. Phototypesetters of the era projected one character at a time onto a film, then moved the template containing the photos of the characters, then exposed the next character. They were exceedingly slow relative to, say, a typewriter, and cost a LOT of money. The resulting film had to be developed, and a printer plate had to be created from this negative. It seems unlikely that this technology would have been used to create private memos. My aunt ran the printing division in a local company in the late 1960s, and I know what technology she was using (it was leading edge for its time). It would not have been available to a military base--at least in the administrative offices--in 1972, nor would it have been practical. It used technology that was a precursor of modern laser printers, but it was all purely optical, using VariTypers, large-scale cameras, and a very primitive form of xerographic technology.
Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width). This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”. I discuss the ABC width mechanism in some detail in a book I wrote in 1997 (“Win32 Programming”, with Brent Rector, Addison-Wesley, 1997, p. 1104). I have attached sample output from a program I used to create illustrations for that book, one of which shows the characters “fr” and one of which shows the C offset of the “f” character is “–2”. ALL technologies I am aware of in 1972 that would have been available for office work (not, say, the sort of production book typesetters that major publishers might have had) could only advance an integral number of units, and could not “tuck in” the characters like Microsoft’s Times New Roman font under Microsoft Word does, by using a negative partial-character offset. Examine carefully the “fr” in the word “from” in the 18-August-1973 memo. The “r” is tucked under the “f” in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this document could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman. The work we did at CMU could not support kerning or pseudo-kerning of text. We knew about kerning, but our software could not support it. I have not examined a New York Times of 1972, but I would be extremely surprised if the font used at that time exhibited any form of kerning (I should point out that Linotype machines—the hot-lead machines—had paired characters such as “fi”, which were actually a single slug. Character sequences like these are called a “ligature” and were a special case of kerning. Common ligatures included fi, fl, ffi, ffl, among others. This was an example of kerning built into the font definition, and Linotype machines had separate keys that dropped these slugs into place. Lead type set by hand also had similar ligatures. The illustration is scanned from The Unicode Standard Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley, 2000, p.804).
Hot lead type could not kern, because of the need to have a Linotype machine drop slugs into a frame, which was then filled with hot lead. Any publishing technology that used hot lead typesetting could not support kerning, except by the aforementioned ligatures. Any technology that used hand-set type could not support kerning without such a high expense that it is unlikely it was ever done. Not even Word supports kerning without selecting a special option (and if selected, the resulting document does not look like the memo). But somehow, magically, the font used by some hypothesized piece of equipment in 1972 works the same was as a font that uses a set of ABC width parameters that did not exist until TrueType fonts existed. Microsoft delivered the first version of TrueType for Windows in April of 1992, and the original TrueType font format was developed by Apple and delivered in May, 1991.
Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes, to replicate one of the experiments reported on the Internet, that is, to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the “authentic” document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible. I was a bit annoyed that the experiment dealing with the 18-August-1973 memo was not compatible, until I changed the font to an 11.5-point font. Then it was a perfect match, including the superscript “th”. In 1972, we expressed fonts in integral pixel sizes, and a fractional pixel size would have been meaningless. Until we got high-resolution printers in the 1990s, I am not aware of any application-level technology that supported fractional point sizes (Adobe PostScript could, but the high-level interfaces to it, to the best of my recollection, only allowed integers to be specified for sizes). I do not believe a typesetting program or typesetting technology that worked in fractional point sizes could have existed in 1972 or 1973. However, this might be an accident of the many levels of transformation from the original (wherever that is) and the photocopying, scanning, document conversion, and re-printing. The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations. In which case, the coincidence of the match is again extremely unlikely unless the document were a forgery.
William of Occam (or Ockham), a 13th century philosopher, summed it up in what is now paraphrased as “given a choice between two explanations, choose the simpler explanation” (or as he said it, “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”). You cannot assemble a set of assertions about what MIGHT have been possible using a variety of unrelated technologies that existed in 1972, and somehow magically combine them into a single technology that could have existed in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard, used for casual memos, and produced the memos in question that are VIRTUALLY PIXEL-LEVEL IDENTICAL TO THOSE PRODUCED BY MICROSOFT WORD.
There are numerous other clues to indicate an amateur at work. In many cases, there is a space preceding the st or th, in an attempt to prevent Word from automatically superscripting these. Of course, any experienced Word user knows that this automatic superscripting can be instantly undone just by typing Control-Z as soon as it happens, but an amateur would not know this. Many have commented on the anomalies of the curly quotes, another piece of Word automation which would not have been found in documents of the era. I know that our fonts did not have left and right quote marks because of limitations of the character sets, which could only have 95 or 96 printable characters. Most of our contemporaneous printers used 7-bit ASCII fonts, which had no option for specifying curly quotes, nor did our software automatically generate them, as Word does. Not only are these documents forgeries, they are incompetently done forgeries. They make the forger of a da Vinci-with-acrylics look positively sophisticated by comparison.
It does not take a sophisticated expert in forensics or document authentication to spot these obvious forgeries. The forgery is obvious to anyone who knows the history and technology of digital typesetting, not to mention to any intelligent 12-year-old who has access to Microsoft Word.
So we have the following two hypotheses contending for describing the memos
* Attempts to recreate the memos using Microsoft Word and Times New Roman produce images so close that even taking into account the fact that the image we were able to download from the CBS site has been copied, scanned, downloaded, and reprinted, the errors between the "authentic" document and a file created by anyone using Microsoft word are virtually indistinguishable.
* The font existed in 1972; there were technologies in 1972 that could, with elaborate effort, reproduce these memos, and these technologies and the skills to use them were used by someone who, by testimony of his own family, never typed anything, in an office that for all its other documents appears to have used ordinary monospaced typewriters, and therefore this unlikely juxtaposition of technologies and location coincided just long enough to produce these four memos on 04-May-1972, 18-May-1972, 01-August-1972, and 18-August-1973.
Which one do you think is true? Which one would a 13th-century philosopher think made sense? How many totally unlikely other juxtapositions are expected to be true? How could anyone believe these memos are other than incompetent forgeries?
This letter concentrates only on the raw technology of the fonts and printing. It does not address many of the issues others on the Internet have raised, such as the incorrect usage of military titles and abbreviations, incorrect formatting relative to prevailing 1972 military standards, etc. I am not qualified to comment on these. All I can say is that the technology that produced this document was not possible in 1972 in the sort of equipment that would have been available outside publishing houses, and which required substantial training and expertise to use, and it replicates exactly the technologies of Microsoft Word and Microsoft TrueType Fonts.
It is therefore my expert opinion that these documents are modern forgeries.
Please feel free to quote this material, use any of my images, etc. if you are reposting. I do ask that you provide a link to this page.
http://www.flounder.com/bush.htm
the link has some great graphic evidence
Heres another more definitive essay :
The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries!
Home
Resume
First off, before I start getting a lot of the wrong kind of mail: I am not a fan of George Bush. But I am even less a fan of attempts to commit fraud, and particularly by a complete and utter failure of those we entrust to ensure that if the news is at least accurate. I know it is asking far too much to expect the news to be unbiased. But the people involved should not actually lie to us, or promulgate lies created by hoaxers, through their own incompetence.
There has been a lot of activity on the Internet recently concerning the forged CBS documents. I do not even dignify this statement with the traditional weasel-word “alleged”, because it takes approximately 30 seconds for anyone who is knowledgeable in the history of electronic document production to recognize this whole collection is certainly a forgery, and approximately five minutes to prove to anyone technically competent that the documents are a forgery. I was able to replicate two of the documents within a few minutes. At time I a writing this, CBS is stonewalling. They were hoaxed, pure and simple. CBS failed to exercise anything even approximately like due diligence. I am not sure what sort of "expert" they called in to authenticate the document, but anything I say about his qualifications to judge digital typography is likely to be considered libelous (no matter how true they are) and I would not say them in print in a public forum.
I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is “I was working with laser printers before they had lasers”, which is only a mild stretch of the truth). We published a paper about our work (graphics, printer hardware, printer software, and typesetting) in one of the important professional journals of the time (D.R. Reddy, W. Broadley, L.D. Erman, R. Johnsson, J. Newcomer, G. Robertson, and J. Wright, "XCRIBL: A Hardcopy Scan Line Graphics System for Document Generation," Information Processing Letters (1972, pp.246-251)). I have been involved in many aspects of computer typography, including computer music typesetting (1987-1990). I have personally created computer fonts, and helped create programs that created computer fonts. At one time in my life, I was a certified Adobe PostScript developer, and could make laser printers practically stand up and tap dance. I have written about Microsoft Windows font technology in a book I co-authored, and taught courses in it. I therefore assert that I am a qualified expert in computer typography.
187th scanned in from my Word document, original 1200dpi, scanned at 600dpi
187th screen shot from 18-August-1973 memo
111th captured from screen shot of 4-may1972 memo
111th enlarged from CBS justification image
The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
If someone had come forward presenting a “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which used acrylic paints including Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White, art experts would roll of the floor laughing at the clumsiness of the forgery. (Acrylic paints were not known until the 1920s, although some histories date them as late as the late 1940s, and some as late as 1955; Cadmium Yellow was not known until 1840, and Titanium White was not available as an artist's pigment until 1921). Yet somehow a document which could not be created by any of the common office technology of 1972 is touted as “authentic”.
“Apologists” that try to claim these documents are authentic have pointed out that there were technologies for doing electronic typesetting, for doing proportional fonts, and even doing something that resembles superscripting. One document cited as proving that a typewriter could do superscripting is a document which is part of the files released by the White House and the Pentagon. I was able to locate this document, which was said to have been used by CBS as "proof" that superscripting was possible. The excerpt shown here is from page 15 of the document.
Let's look at some comparisons. Realizing that we are working from several times removed from the "original" document supplied to CBS, it is still worth doing some comparisons. On the left I show several images. The first element, the 187th, is from a document I printed on my printer, at 1200dpi and scanned at 600 dpi. It is obviously enlarged here. Note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7". The second image is a screen capture from the 18-August-1973 memo. While some details are lost (perhaps CBS could post some hi-res scans as gif files?), note that the "th" is superscripted, and apparently by the same amount; note the "th" is approximately centered on the top line of the "7".
Next, we get the 111th image. The image I show is a screen capture from the CBS document which claims to be a memo dated 04-May-1972. Note the "th" is approximately bisected by the top line of the 1. So this seems to also be in the same position as the position Microsoft Word uses. But when we look at the "th" of the image which is apparently used to justify the fact that a typewriter could do a superscript, we find that it is not a superscript, but in fact a character that appears to be simply raised from the nominal baseline by approximately 10%, but does not exceed the top of the line. This proves that there was a typewriter that had a "th" key, but it looks so different from the previous three examples that it is hard to believe that such a typewriter could have created the same memos.
Now let's look at the comparison of the two 111th in a calibrated fashion. What I did was create a set of equally-spaced vertical lines, then I stretched the CBS justification image so the characters all lined up. Note they are monospaced. The "th" takes up one character position. Then above it, I stretched the image from the 04-May-1972 image (in both cases maintaining the aspect ratio) until the digits lined up. Even in proportional fonts, the digits are always designed to have the same width to simplify doing columns of digits. Note how the "th" is not quite aligned right, and the spacing is not uniform. So we take a typewriter with a monospaced font and a ligature, and claim that it justifies the existence of a memo in variable-pitch font, with a different superscripting mechanism (suspiciously like that of Microsoft Word!)?
.Using arguments like this would be equivalent to someone justifying the “genuine” da Vinci by saying that yellow paint existed, and white paint existed, and ignoring the obvious fact that Cadmium Yellow or Titanium White could not exist. Some have contended that since Times New Roman was a typeface invented “in the 1940s” (according to Linotype, the copyright holder for Times New Roman, it was first used by the New York Times in the edition of 3 October 1932; the original TimesTM font is stated to have been created in 1931 for the London Times; in either case, however, the date is established as being earlier than 1972), it is not unreasonable that it could exist in 1972. Yet I knew most of the sites that, in 1972, had printers and computer-based formatting technology that could have printed a document in proportional-spaced fonts, and these included MIT, Carnegie Mellon (where I did my work), The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (where the personal computer as we know it was invented). I no longer recall how many XGP printers existed, but I believe the number was not much more than a dozen. None of these printers could print more than about 180 dots per inch, a quality somewhat lower than a contemporary fax, yet the image I downloaded from the CBS site appears to have been printed on a printer of much higher resolution. The only other printer I am aware of in the 1970s that could print at reasonable quality was a research prototype I saw at Xerox PARC, called EARS, which could print at 300 dpi. It was not created until 1971, and I remember it has having several large cabinets of extremely expensive computer components controlling it. It was a “hand-built”, one-of-a-kind printer. All other technologies were quite elaborate and clumsy mechanical devices, and although there were some proportional-spaced typewriters (such as the IBM Executive) and print production technologies (such as the VariTyper), none of these would have produced something that was a near-perfect match for Times New Roman under Microsoft Word. Don Knuth’s seminal work on computer font technology (“TEX and Metafont: New Dimensions in Typesetting”) was not printed until 1979, “on experimental printing equipment” at “Xerox Research”. Phototypesetters of the era projected one character at a time onto a film, then moved the template containing the photos of the characters, then exposed the next character. They were exceedingly slow relative to, say, a typewriter, and cost a LOT of money. The resulting film had to be developed, and a printer plate had to be created from this negative. It seems unlikely that this technology would have been used to create private memos. My aunt ran the printing division in a local company in the late 1960s, and I know what technology she was using (it was leading edge for its time). It would not have been available to a military base--at least in the administrative offices--in 1972, nor would it have been practical. It used technology that was a precursor of modern laser printers, but it was all purely optical, using VariTypers, large-scale cameras, and a very primitive form of xerographic technology.
Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width). This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”. I discuss the ABC width mechanism in some detail in a book I wrote in 1997 (“Win32 Programming”, with Brent Rector, Addison-Wesley, 1997, p. 1104). I have attached sample output from a program I used to create illustrations for that book, one of which shows the characters “fr” and one of which shows the C offset of the “f” character is “–2”. ALL technologies I am aware of in 1972 that would have been available for office work (not, say, the sort of production book typesetters that major publishers might have had) could only advance an integral number of units, and could not “tuck in” the characters like Microsoft’s Times New Roman font under Microsoft Word does, by using a negative partial-character offset. Examine carefully the “fr” in the word “from” in the 18-August-1973 memo. The “r” is tucked under the “f” in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this document could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman. The work we did at CMU could not support kerning or pseudo-kerning of text. We knew about kerning, but our software could not support it. I have not examined a New York Times of 1972, but I would be extremely surprised if the font used at that time exhibited any form of kerning (I should point out that Linotype machines—the hot-lead machines—had paired characters such as “fi”, which were actually a single slug. Character sequences like these are called a “ligature” and were a special case of kerning. Common ligatures included fi, fl, ffi, ffl, among others. This was an example of kerning built into the font definition, and Linotype machines had separate keys that dropped these slugs into place. Lead type set by hand also had similar ligatures. The illustration is scanned from The Unicode Standard Version 3.0, Addison-Wesley, 2000, p.804).
Hot lead type could not kern, because of the need to have a Linotype machine drop slugs into a frame, which was then filled with hot lead. Any publishing technology that used hot lead typesetting could not support kerning, except by the aforementioned ligatures. Any technology that used hand-set type could not support kerning without such a high expense that it is unlikely it was ever done. Not even Word supports kerning without selecting a special option (and if selected, the resulting document does not look like the memo). But somehow, magically, the font used by some hypothesized piece of equipment in 1972 works the same was as a font that uses a set of ABC width parameters that did not exist until TrueType fonts existed. Microsoft delivered the first version of TrueType for Windows in April of 1992, and the original TrueType font format was developed by Apple and delivered in May, 1991.
Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes, to replicate one of the experiments reported on the Internet, that is, to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the “authentic” document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible. I was a bit annoyed that the experiment dealing with the 18-August-1973 memo was not compatible, until I changed the font to an 11.5-point font. Then it was a perfect match, including the superscript “th”. In 1972, we expressed fonts in integral pixel sizes, and a fractional pixel size would have been meaningless. Until we got high-resolution printers in the 1990s, I am not aware of any application-level technology that supported fractional point sizes (Adobe PostScript could, but the high-level interfaces to it, to the best of my recollection, only allowed integers to be specified for sizes). I do not believe a typesetting program or typesetting technology that worked in fractional point sizes could have existed in 1972 or 1973. However, this might be an accident of the many levels of transformation from the original (wherever that is) and the photocopying, scanning, document conversion, and re-printing. The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations. In which case, the coincidence of the match is again extremely unlikely unless the document were a forgery.
William of Occam (or Ockham), a 13th century philosopher, summed it up in what is now paraphrased as “given a choice between two explanations, choose the simpler explanation” (or as he said it, “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”). You cannot assemble a set of assertions about what MIGHT have been possible using a variety of unrelated technologies that existed in 1972, and somehow magically combine them into a single technology that could have existed in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard, used for casual memos, and produced the memos in question that are VIRTUALLY PIXEL-LEVEL IDENTICAL TO THOSE PRODUCED BY MICROSOFT WORD.
There are numerous other clues to indicate an amateur at work. In many cases, there is a space preceding the st or th, in an attempt to prevent Word from automatically superscripting these. Of course, any experienced Word user knows that this automatic superscripting can be instantly undone just by typing Control-Z as soon as it happens, but an amateur would not know this. Many have commented on the anomalies of the curly quotes, another piece of Word automation which would not have been found in documents of the era. I know that our fonts did not have left and right quote marks because of limitations of the character sets, which could only have 95 or 96 printable characters. Most of our contemporaneous printers used 7-bit ASCII fonts, which had no option for specifying curly quotes, nor did our software automatically generate them, as Word does. Not only are these documents forgeries, they are incompetently done forgeries. They make the forger of a da Vinci-with-acrylics look positively sophisticated by comparison.
It does not take a sophisticated expert in forensics or document authentication to spot these obvious forgeries. The forgery is obvious to anyone who knows the history and technology of digital typesetting, not to mention to any intelligent 12-year-old who has access to Microsoft Word.
So we have the following two hypotheses contending for describing the memos
* Attempts to recreate the memos using Microsoft Word and Times New Roman produce images so close that even taking into account the fact that the image we were able to download from the CBS site has been copied, scanned, downloaded, and reprinted, the errors between the "authentic" document and a file created by anyone using Microsoft word are virtually indistinguishable.
* The font existed in 1972; there were technologies in 1972 that could, with elaborate effort, reproduce these memos, and these technologies and the skills to use them were used by someone who, by testimony of his own family, never typed anything, in an office that for all its other documents appears to have used ordinary monospaced typewriters, and therefore this unlikely juxtaposition of technologies and location coincided just long enough to produce these four memos on 04-May-1972, 18-May-1972, 01-August-1972, and 18-August-1973.
Which one do you think is true? Which one would a 13th-century philosopher think made sense? How many totally unlikely other juxtapositions are expected to be true? How could anyone believe these memos are other than incompetent forgeries?
This letter concentrates only on the raw technology of the fonts and printing. It does not address many of the issues others on the Internet have raised, such as the incorrect usage of military titles and abbreviations, incorrect formatting relative to prevailing 1972 military standards, etc. I am not qualified to comment on these. All I can say is that the technology that produced this document was not possible in 1972 in the sort of equipment that would have been available outside publishing houses, and which required substantial training and expertise to use, and it replicates exactly the technologies of Microsoft Word and Microsoft TrueType Fonts.
It is therefore my expert opinion that these documents are modern forgeries.
Please feel free to quote this material, use any of my images, etc. if you are reposting. I do ask that you provide a link to this page.
http://www.flounder.com/bush.htm
the link has some great graphic evidence
I agree that the Saudis have been complicit in the rise in terrorism through their sponsorship of wahabism and the madrahas(sp) that they have built all over the world. It's coming back to bite them now. they have appeased the wahabis to try and stifle popular unrest over their corrupt regime. I think the whole world knows they are atleast complicit in that they did actually help spread the movement worldwise.
A Multinational force to remove the Saudi government will never happen. The implications of any action there like you said due to the oil question are really scary. Allowing that supply to fall into the hands of the religious fanatics would be chaos
How would you deal with the Saudis regarding terrorism?
There were a number of issues that weren't adressed:
From qando website:
A compendium of the Evidence
Posted by Dale Franks
The blogosphere has been all over the CBS documents, but all the information is parceled out in penny packets all over the place. At the request of a reader, I thought I'd try to consolidate them into a single post. This is not canonical, of course, just the stuff I know about.
Typographical Arguments
1. The use of superscripted "th" in unit names, e.g. 187th. This was a highly unusual feature, available only on extremely expensive typewriters at the time.
2. The use of proportional fonts was, similarly, restricted to a small number of high-end typewriters.
3. The text of the memos appear to use letter kerning, a physical impossibility for any typewriter at the time.
4. Apostrophes in the documents use curled serifs. Typewriters used straight hash marks for both quotation marks and apostrophes.
5. The font appears indistinguishable from the Times New Roman computer font. While the Times Roman and Times fonts were rare, but available, in some typewriters at the time, the letters in Times Roman and Times took up more horizontal space than Times New Roman does. Times New Roman is exclusively a computer font.
6. Reproductions of the memos in Microsoft Word using 12pt TNR and the default Word page setup are indistinguishable from the memos when superimposed.
7. The typed squadron letterhead is centered on the page, an extremely difficult operation to perform manually.
8. Several highly reputable forensic document specialists have publicly stated their opinions that the documents were most likely computer generated, and hence, are forgeries.
Stylistic Arguments
1. The memos do not use the proper USAF letterhead, in required use since 1948. Instead they are typed. In general, typed letterhead is restricted to computer-generated orders, which were usually printed by teletype, chain printer or daisy-wheel printer, the latter looking like a typed letter. Manually typed correspondence is supposed to use official USAF letterhead. However, even special orders, which used a typed letterhead, were required to use ALL CAPS in the letterhead.
2. The typed Letterhead gives the address as "Houston, Texas". The standard formulation for addresses at USAF installations should require the address to read "Ellington AFB, Texas".
3. Killian's signature block should read:
RICHARD B. KILLIAN, Lt Col, TexANG
Commander
This is the required USAF formulation for a signature block.
4. The rank abbreviations are applied inconsistently and incorrectly, for example the use of periods in USAF rank abbreviations is incorrect. The modern formulation for rank abbreviations for the lieutenant grades in the USAF is 2Lt and 1Lt. In 1973, it may well have been 2nd Lt and 1st Lt, but that certainly wasn't correct in 1984, when I entered active duty, so I find the rank abbreviation questionable, and, in any event, they would not have included periods. Lt Col Killian's abbreviations are pretty much universally incorrect in the memos.
5. The unit name abbreviations use periods. This is incorrect. USAF unit abbreviations use only capital letters with no periods. For example, 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron would be abbreviated as 111th FIS, not 111th F.I.S.
6. The Formulation used in the memos, i.e., "MEMORANDOM FOR 1st Lt. Bush..." is incorrect. A memo would be written on plain (non-letterhead) paper, with the top line reading "MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD".
7. An order from a superior, directing a junior to perform a specific task would not be in the memorandum format as presented. Instead, it would use the USAF standard internal memo format, as follows:
FROM: Lt Col Killian, Richard B.
SUBJECT: Annual Physical Examination (Flight)
TO: 1Lt Bush, George W.
Documents that are titled as MEMORANDUM are used only for file purposes, and not for communications.
8. The memos use the formulation "...in accordance with (IAW)..." The abbreviation IAW is a universal abbreviation in the USAF, hence it is not spelled out, rather it is used for no other reason than to eliminate the word "in accordance with" from official communications. There are several such universal abbreviation, such as NLT for "no later than".
9. The title of one of the memos is CYA, a popular euphemism for covering one's...ahem...posterior. It is doubtful that any serving officer would use such a colloquialism in any document that might come under official scrutiny.
Personal Arguments
1. The records purport to be from Lt Col Killian's "personal files", yet, they were not obtained from his family, but through some unknown 3rd party. It is an odd kind of "personal file" when the family of a deceased person is unaware of the file's existence and it is not in their possession.
2. Both Lt Col Killian's wife and son, as well as the EAFB personnel officer do not find the memos credible.
3. Keeping such derogatory personal memos , while at the same time, writing glowing OERs for Mr. Bush would be unwise for any officer. At best, it would raise serious questions about why his private judgments differed so radically from his official ones, should they ever come to light. At worst, they would raise questions about whether Lt Col Killian falsified official documents. As Lt Col Killian's son, himself a retired USAF officer, has said, nothing good can come of keeping such files.
The reasons above constitute a very reasonable basis for serious questions about the legitimacy of the memos distributed by CBS. In light oif them, it seems to me that CBS has a positive duty to disclose as much information about the provenance and authenticity of the memos as possible. So far, their response has been, "We think they're true, so do not question us!" That is an understandable reaction, and, indeed, it's much the same as that of the German magazine Stern, when it claimed to have found Adolph Hitler's diaries in the 1980s.
It is not a helpful response, however, and it indicates that CBS is, at this point, far more interested in performing CYA operations than it is in getting to the bottom of these questions.
I would disagree that they did nothing. The 9/11 commision said that there was plenty of blame to go around, but put heavy emphasis on the clinton administraion as well. The first attempt on the WTD was in 93, followed by the embassey bombing, the Cole, etc.
If you think that is true, what do you think the reason is?
,,,,,,,,,,,What's totally unacceptable is to tell the American people that the mere act of voting for your opponent opens the door to a terrorist attack. For Mr. Cheney to suggest that is flat wrong. There was a time in this country when elected officials knew how to separate the position from the person. The American people, we're sure, would like to return to it..............
When I frist heard the statement as quoted in the MSM I thought that it was out of line. =When the end of the quote was added:
"United States might then fall back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that "these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts."
I agreed with what he said. Clinton had the opportunity to get bin laden a few times as offered by sudan, but refused because there was no "legal precedent at that time to do so. He wasn't saying that if he were elected there would be no further attacks- that would not be a defensible position and would set him up for scorn if there were to be an event- as I think is likely before the elections. The previous administration did view the terrorism problem as more of a problem to be dealt with legally. I think that he was saying that kerry's position ( as much as it can be determined with any certainty) would have a differentcore motivating belief. Kerrys insistence on having international apporval of our actions is a telling sign of that.
I do agree with the need for a realistic immigration policy. His pandering to Mexico, in light of the threats we are under can't be justified
doobe doobe do
What about kerrys refusal to even do an interview for 5 weeks now, since the swifties first appeared. I would think that if he was secure in his position he would welcome the chance to clear the air. His reluctance to do so implies concern over having to answer questions about that period. There is much talk about his intelligence, but I think most of that is because of the Brahmin accent. If you look at his statements analytically- he is his own worst enemy. He can't even recite the talking points without riffing on his own and saying something the requires spin control- case in point::
OH, THAT CLEARS UP EVERYTHING [09/08 02:47 PM]
Kerry, Monday:
"It's the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Kerry, yesterday:
" More than 1,000 of America's sons and daughters have now given their lives on behalf of their country, on behalf of freedom in the war on terror."
Kerry Spokesman David Wade, today:
"Kerry was referring to U.S. soldiers fighting in parts of Iraq that have now become a breeding ground for terrorists."
Oh, okay. All 1,000+ died "fighting in parts of Iraq that have now become a breeding ground for terrorists," but other than that, it's the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. That clears up everything.
<<<<<<<<<<There is huge cash available and a dwindling supply of shares....<<<<<<<<<<
That only deals with the supply side. Demand is a different factor and I think the weak point in your analysis. You assume a constant demand for equities in the mid to long term apart from market maker manipulation/scalping.
Just doesn't work out that way in the real world. Every downtick is not market maker obfuscation/stealth accumulation. Sometimes it's due to an aversion to equities in general or that equity in particular
<<<<<<<Why should denounce them given Bush's refusal to denounce the Swift Boat ads?>>>>>>>>
I guess irony is an advanced skill, you must have missed that lesson.
Bush Guard Service, The True Story
Written by Gordon Bloyer
Thursday, August 26, 2004
This is the only place that you will get the full and true story of President Bush’s Air National Guard service. There are no UNANSWERED questions. There are no missing records. He did not miss any meetings. The truth is known. You can find everything in this article, in other publications but none of the others are complete. You have to put them all together to get the full story. It is a shame that our national "objective" media refuse to do their job and put the whole story together.
First, in answer to the charge that Bush was AWOL or missed meetings, George Bush was NEVER assigned to the Alabama Guard. This is a myth promoted by the "objective" media. Here is what really happened. Here is what the head of the Alabama Guard said.
Turnipseed states Bush was never ordered to report to the Alabama Air National Guard. He points out that Bush never transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama Air National Guard. He remained in the Texas Guard during his stay in Alabama. This was confirmed by the Texas Guard. And Turnipseed added that Bush was never under his command or any other officer in the Alabama Guard.
Turnipseed added that Bush was informed of the drill schedule of the Alabama Guard as a courtesy so he could get credit for drills while in Alabama for his service record in the Texas Guard. There was no compulsory attendance. This was also confirmed by the Texas Guard.
This was reported in the Chicago Sun-Times and has never been picked up by any other news organization. Turnipseed then also added.
For Bush to be "AWOL" or "away without leave," he would have had to have been assigned to a unit and under its command.
For the liberals reading this, go back and read it again. You see, Bush did NOT miss any meetings. The whole argument is nonsense. He got permission from his commanding officer to go to Alabama and attend meetings as a courtesy so he could attend when he could. Another part of this attack is that no one saw Bush at the meetings he did attend. It was reported that Turnipseed never saw Bush. Read what was reported about that.
Turnipseed reversed gear after retired Lt. Col. John "Bill" Calhoun went public to say that not only did he remember Bush in Alabama, but that it was Turnipseed himself that introduced the two. Oops. And really...the media is completely asleep at the switch on this one. How many people that you saw a few times do you remember from 30 years ago?
Why didn’t fellow pilots see Bush in Alabama? The planes being flown by the Alabama Guard were not the same as the F102 that Bush was trained on. Why would pilots see him if he was not flying? That is why Lt. Col. Calhoun came forward to say that was Bush was in his office for study and drill time. Remember he was not assigned to the unit, he did NOT have to be there.
The following is from a letter by Col. William Campenni Ret. published in the Washington Times.
There was one big exception to this abusive use of the Guard to avoid the draft, and that was for those who wanted to fly, as pilots or crew members. Because of the training required, signing up for this duty meant up to 2½½ years of active duty for training alone, plus a high probability of mobilization. A fighter-pilot candidate selected by the Guard (such as Lt. Bush and me) would be spending the next two years on active duty going through basic training (six weeks), flight training (one year), survival training (two weeks) and combat crew training for his aircraft (six to nine months), followed by local checkout (up to three more months) before he was even deemed combat-ready. Because the draft was just two years, you sure weren't getting out of duty being an Air Guard pilot. If the unit to which you were going back was an F-100, you were mobilized for Vietnam. Avoiding service? Yeah, tell that to those guys. The Bush critics do not comprehend the dangers of fighter aviation at any time or place, in Vietnam or at home, when they say other such pilots were risking their lives or even dying while Lt. Bush was in Texas. Our Texas ANG unit lost several planes right there in Houston during Lt. Bush's tenure, with fatalities. Just strapping on one of those obsolescing F-102s was risking one's life.
Here is some information that the "objective" media avoids telling you. John Kerry joined the Navy Reserve, he did not JOIN the Navy. The Reserve was just like the National Guard. Kerry did NOT know he would be sent to Vietnam.
George Bush joined the Guard for a SIX-year term. If you are drafted, you only have to serve TWO years. Bush probably did not need to pull strings to get into a jet fighter unit. Jets required a greater time commitment than normal Guard postings. Pilots from the unit that he joined were being sent to Vietnam. All the publications that have researched this have concluded that there is NO evidence that he used any influence to get into the Guard. The liberal publications will say that there is no evidence, but it is still suspicious. That is a good journalistic standard? So, do you get it, Bush joined a unit that at the time was serving in Vietnam.
The following is research from aerospaceweb.org ........
Nevertheless, we have established that the F-102 was serving in combat in Vietnam at the time Bush enlisted to become an F-102 pilot. In fact, pilots from the 147th FIG of the Texas ANG were routinely rotated to Vietnam for combat duty under a program called "Palace Alert" from 1968 to 1970. Palace Alert was an Air Force program that sent qualified F-102 pilots from the ANG to bases in Europe or southeast Asia for periods of three to six months for frontline duty. Fred Bradley, a friend of Bush's who was also serving in the Texas ANG, reported that he and Bush inquired about participating in the Palace Alert program. However, the two were told by a superior, MAJ Maurice Udell, that they were not yet qualified since they were still in training and did not have the 500 hours of flight experience required. Furthermore, ANG veteran COL William Campenni, who was a fellow pilot in the 111th FIS at the time, told the Washington Times that Palace Alert was winding down and not accepting new applicants.
As he was completing training and being certified as a qualified F-102 pilot, Bush's squadron was a likely candidate to be rotated to Vietnam. However, the F-102 was built for a type of air combat that wasn't seen during that conflict, and the plane was withdrawn from southeast Asia in December 1969. The F-102 was instead returned to its primary role of providing air defense for the United States. In addition, the mission of Ellington AFB, where Bush was stationed, was also changing from air defense alert to training all F-102 pilots in the US for Air National Guard duty. Lt. Bush remained in the ANG as a certified F-102 pilot who participated in frequent drills and alerts through April of 1972. ... By this time, the 147th Fighter Wing was also beginning to transition from the F-102 to the F-101F, an updated version of the F-101B used primarily for air defense patrols. Furthermore, the war in Vietnam was nearing its end and the US was withdrawing its forces from the theater. Air Force personnel returning to the US created a glut of active-duty pilots, and there were not enough aircraft available to accommodate all of the qualified USAF and ANG pilots. Since USAF personnel had priority for the billets available, many of the Air National Guard pilots whose enlistments were nearly complete requested early release. The ANG was eager to fulfill these requests because there was not enough time to retrain F-102 pilots to operate new aircraft before their enlistments were up anyway. Bush was one of those forced out by the transition, and he was honorably discharged as a first lieutenant in October 1973, eight months before his six-year enlistment was complete. Bush had approximately 600 flight hours by the time he completed his military service.
The folks at aerospaceweb concluded.........
While Bush did not see combat in Vietnam, it is also obvious he was not seeking a way to avoid the risk of being sent to Vietnam. At the time he was training to be an F102 pilot, ANG units and that aircraft type were based in Vietnam.
In conclusion, there is no evidence Bush got special treatment to join the Guard. He did NOT miss any meetings, he was not assigned to the Alabama Guard. The reason the so called "objective" media holds on to this myth is that it lets them keep asking, where was Bush? The issue of his being grounded is also answered because he would no longer be flying since his plane was obsolete and he did not have enough Guard time left to train in a new jet. You don’t need to report for a physical if you are not flying. Duh!
Kerry joined the Navy Reserve and did not expect to go to Vietnam. When Kerry did go to Vietnam the swift boats were not during river patrols. They were doing coastal patrols and were not in much danger. That is when he volunteered to join the Swiftee’s. The assignment of those boats was changed after he was accepted for the duty. Surprise, he got action and the rest is disputed history.
The information in this article was published in "George Magazine", "New York Times", "Washington Times", "Chicago Sun-Times", "Washington Post" and aerospaceweb.org.
About the Writer: Gordon Bloyer has been called a Renaissance man by Ronn Owens of KGO radio in San Francisco. Rush Limbaugh read from a letter by Gordon on his national radio show. President Ronald Reagan invited Gordon to the White House to thank him for his support. He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows. The Gordon Bloyer Show can be seen at http://gordonbloyershow.com .
LOL
Will KERRY denounce these ads as smear tactics and demand they be taken off the air (hint: nfw )
Doesn't he realize that he is just keeping the debate topical and his post was activities can only harm him?
The point is, who wrote the citation for that award??? It WASN"T Thurlow. It might have been Kerry or someone else. But, we won't know until kerry signs form 180 to release his military files.
Bush has done so, why won't kerry??????
I agree, the flap about the medals goes to the character issue, but aren't crucial. His activities after he returned however deserve full scrutiny:
His meeting with the enemy in paris while still a member of the naval reserve
his attendance at a meeting in kansas where the assasination of 6 senators was discussed- he voted against it, but remained a member of the group for months after and did not report it to any authority- this info is taken from fbi files and is not conjecture
His groups making of audiotapes that were played in hanoi prisoner camps to break the will of the prisoners
For Kerrys first purple heart, he went to his oommanding officer the next day and requested a purple heart. That in itself is considered bad form. The CO turned him down as there was no enemy fire (as the kerry people have admitted) and the wound was self inflicted. Somehow 3 months later he was awarded a purple heart. How did that happen? We don't know because kerry refuses to sign form 180 releasing his records . Bush signed the form after the flap over his reserve stint.
Why won't kerry release his records? He has released SOME of the records, but refuses to sign form 180
Clelenad came under attack because he, at the urging of tom daschle, held up the funding of the homeland security act because they wanted to pay back their union supporters by making all the new security hires union positions. It was a shameless act of putting political interests before national security and deserved to be brought to attention. The fact that he bravely fought for his country and suffered for it does not insulate him from valid criticism.
Politics is a blood sport. Look at all the attacks from democrats comparing bush to hitler- coming from gore and recently john glenn. Bush hasn't whined about them. Kerry only makes himself look weak by complaining of all fact based attacks as questioning his patriotism.
It's funny that the time to move on mantra never applies to the press when a new "bush was awol 35 years ago" story comes out
<<<<<<<<<< Works on POW/MIA stuff and is considered a traitor for doing so.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No, he's being considered a traitor for the following:
Testifying before congress alleging that daily atrocities were commited in vietnam and that they were the official policy of the us at the highest level of command
The testimony of the people at the winter soldier meeting has been largley discredited. The other leader of the group, claimed to have witnessed atrocities on a daily basis in vietnam- the only problem was that he never actually was even in vietnam. a number of the other people who testified were found to have never have been there. Many testified under the name of other soldiers
While still a member of the navy national guard, he went and had secret mettings with our enemy, the north vietnamese, on 3 occasions. His group also made audiotapes that were broadcast as propaganda in the north vietnamese prisoner camps.
He was present at meeting where the assasination of 6 us senators was discussed. He voted against it, but remained a member of the group and did not report it to the apporpriate authorities.
His activities tarnished the image of the vietnam vet and has caused them much personal anguish. There is no doubt that atrocities occured, but no where to near the extent that was promoted by kerry.
>>>>>>>>>Instead of demonizing these mid-eastern people we need to construct a rational foriegn policy that recognizing them as human being (not haters of america) and helps them overcome their regional problems. We are all the same species and all descended from the "Bushmen" of Africa so lets recognize our origins.<<<<<<
>>>> misrepresenting the causes of this Islamic terrorism <<<<<<<<<<
To what do you lay the cause of islamic terrorism? Many (michael Moore included) feel that the us deserved what happened on 9/11.
I'm fully aware of the mistakes that the us has made in the past in the mideast. The point is that any government is going to use all measn at it's disposal to acheive results favorable to itself in dworld politics. What would we want for the poeple of the area.
Do we want more Irans where youg girls are stoned for having premarital sex. Where women are regarded as barely human and to be avoided except for procreation. Or, would we want to support a democracy, with voting rights for all, a market based economy, and a strong history of equal rights and respect for women.
That nation is Isreal. Would you abondon all support for Isreal. A big part of the islamic radical policy i the annihilation of the state of isreal. Should we support that "social dynamic" Isreal os of great strategic importance to us. One, for it's location. It is the only democracy in the area. Shouldn't that be spmething that we should support
The intifada was a creation of arafat, not sharon. Clinton got them to the table and there was a framework for a settlement. Arafat responded by initiating the second wave of the infitada. They will never be satisfied until the state of isreal doesn't exist
What is it that is causing their regional problems? Are we the source of their problems- I don't think so. Would we be happy to help them transition to a modern society with greater opportunity- absolutely.
The nazis wanted to kill the jews also. Just substitute nazis for islamic radical and judge your response accordingly. There were social conditions in germany that fostered the rise of hitler. Were we wrong to ignore those and come to the aid of our allies to fight and destroy them?
The demo. convention where kerry had the opportunity to present his vision to the country:
John Kerry reporting for duty
His Band of brothers
His home movies of reenactments of battle scenes
His " no man left behind " claim of his rescue of Rassmen where he stated that the other boats had fled and he was the only boat that stayed. His campaign has since acknowledged that this was a lie and that his boat in fact was the only one that fled
He spent 26 SECONDS discussing his 19 years in the senate
Many democratic advisors are publically ststing that he made a grave error by concentrating his entire campaign on his vietnam service
I am not being disingenious here, but what else could he have run on?? What has he acheived as a legislator?
<<<<<<<The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are very unstable.
>>>>>>>>
This may be true as they are both transitioning from dictatorships to representative democracies. Don't you think we are better off without the taliban running terrorist training camps in afghanistan? Yes, Iraq is more unstable at this particlar point in time, but the previous "security" was because of the sadistic rule of sadaam. I would view that as a positive.
I think you're implying that our current anti terrorist stance has caused a resusgence in terrorism. 9/11 was how many years in the making? They first tried in 1992. This is not a new fight. OUr recognition of it and our reslove to fight it is new Your absolutely right to link the horror in russia to al queda. They purposely picked a catholic part of the country to commit their atrocity. They would lave to do the same thing to our children.
I think it comes down to how to deal with the islamic radical threat- appeasement or confrontation. Just think back to WWII and how chamberlain sought to appease the nazis.. Churchill sought to confront them and was labeled a fool and a warmongerer.
France is trumpeting it's antiwar status as a reason the release their hostages in Iraq- they just don't get it. They don't realize that they're a target as much as we are
Fed,
excuse me if I'm slow here, but what is the connection between the two?
thanks
eddy
Again,
Refuse to deal with the facts, attack the candidate and his family. By the way, some of Teresa's money is going to support palistinean terror groups, but maybe you feel they are making our world better.
The info quoted comes from FBI FILES OBTAINED THROUGH THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT. Are you saying that the FBI in the 70's was part of the republican smear campaign. As a matter of fact I am not a republican. I get my info from doing research and reading various blogs- from the right and left.
It's the blind refusal to deal with contrary info and dsimiss it off hand that makes debate impossible and leads to ad hominem attacks
I agree completely, but Kerry made his eervice in Vietnam the center of his campaign. He made the mistake of thinking that in doing sohe would not have to deal with the repurcussions of his post was activities. He could have put the whole thing to rest with an apology, but that is something he will never do. The image of him going to paris, while still a member of the naval reserve and negotiating with the north vietnamese, and making anti wart audiotapes that were played in the prisoner camps, will not help him much in the character department.
His refusal to apologize is keeping the issue relevant
It's snowing NUANCE again.
The resolution was very clear in the authority that it gave Bush. I believ thwat in the 15 months leading up to the war, (including a UN resoltion) all reasonable avenues were explored.
Obviously you disagree and feel that Kerry could have gotten sadaam to change course or brought france and germany into the fold.
Another point, how do you view Kerry's vote againt the first gulf war, where there was clear pucture:
An invasion of a soverign nation, a un resoltion backing war, a coaltion of what 140 countires including many arab states. Do you think his position was justifiable?
How about his vote in favor of our involvement in the Bosnian situation? There was imminent threat to our security there. It was done on humanitarian terms. Could that sme ethic not apply to the dictatorship of sadaam?
There would be an obvious strategic advantage to us having a presence in that area of the world- assuming the the new Iraqi govt. is agreeable. I believe our true enemy is Iran. I am NOT advocating military efforts in Iran, but it is clear that they are the driving force and main supporters for the radical islamist movement, So, yes I thjink it would be a good idea