Thanks to an anonymous poster:

Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software, which wasn't available when the documents were supposedly written in 1972 and 1973.

Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript - a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" - as evidence indicating forgery.

Microsoft Word automatically inserts superscripts in the same style as the two on the memos obtained by CBS, she said.

"I'm virtually certain these were computer-generated," Lines said after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software.

The AP report goes on to state that Lines "booed" when she was informed President Clinton was recovering nicely from his heart surgery.

Update: The Weekly Standard's expert says "fake," too.

I have yet to hear from a document-authentication expert stake his professional reputation on the proposition that these are real.

CBS claims it has an expert who authenticated them, but, oddly enough, that expert's name is kept secret. Expert opinion is not the sort of thing usually kept anonymous or off the record -- unless, of course, you request to be kept off the record, because you dare not pubicly claim that obvious forgeries are genuine.

And Even Peter Jennings' ABCNews:

More than half a dozen document experts contacted by ABC News said they had doubts about the memos' authenticity.

"These documents do not appear to have been the result of technology that was available in 1972 and 1973," said Bill Flynn, one of country's top authorities on document authentication. "The cumulative evidence that's available Â… indicates that these documents were produced on a computer, not a typewriter."

That quote from Instapundit, who really picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue and/or blogging. Good to have him back.

Meanwhile... My very favorite blogger dismisses the clear evidence of forgery, hooting like Madeleine Kahn in Blazing Saddles-- "It's twue! It's twue!"

Posted by: Ace at 06:46 PM | Comments (11)
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Powerline (which is probably still down, and besides, I already linked them three or four times) actually thinks that it's the font kerning which is the strongest proof of forgery.

Basically, kerning is tucking letters closely to one another, sometimes even with one letter inside the space of the next letter. For example, in typeset pages, an f followed by an i will actually have the i directly underneath the topmost curve of the f. Same with capital-T and a lowercase i-- the i will actuall fall beneath the T's top bar. The letters overlap, so to speak.

Well, high-end typewriters may have been able to (with difficulty) create proportional spacing, but they can't kern. Kerning is something professional typesetters -- and your word processing program -- do automatically and easily. But a mechanical device can't figure out that "Gee whiz, I can fit the i under the T, so let me just do that."

That's my take. Here's PowerLine's:

A]nother aspect of the type on [the August 18, 1973 memo] suggests, perhaps proves, forgery.

... The type in the document is KERNED. Kerning is the typsetter's art of spacing various letters in such a manner that they are 'grouped' for better readability. Word processors do this automatically. NO TYPEWRITER CAN PHYSICALLY DO THIS.

To explain: the letter 'O' is curved on the outside. A letter such as 'T' has indented space under its cross bar. On a typewriter if one types an 'O' next to a 'T' then both letters remain separated by their physical space. When you type the same letters on a computer next to each other the are automatically 'kerned' or 'grouped' so that their individual spaces actually overlap. e. g., TO. As one can readily see the curvature of the 'O' nestles neatly under the cross bar of the 'T'. Two good kerning examples in the alleged memo are the word 'my' in the second line where 'm' and 'y' are neatly kerned and also the word 'not' in the fourth line where the 'o' and 't' overlap empty space. A typewriter doesn't 'know' what particular letter is next to another and can't make those types of aesthetic adjustments.

Thanks to Rational Explications for pointing that out.

Posted by: Ace at 04:18 PM | Comments (8)
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Right on Red tips to this Right Wing News' own scoop.

Look, I'm no expert on document-authentication, but should a 1972 memo really contain so many references to Beanie Babies and the Macarena?

Posted by: Ace at 04:07 PM | Comments (2)
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Dan Rather is going to sound pretty silly talking about "committed ideologues relying upon 'faulty intelligence' without thoroughly vetting it due to the fact that the dubious 'evidence' supports their preconceived ideological faith," won't he?

And I think the claim that the alternate electronic media is to be dismissed as amateurish, reckless, and highly-partisan just jumped the shark, too.

It was the mainstream liberal media that "discovered" these documents, and then spent days pimping them. It's the front page big-story on the NY Daily News, for one example; there are hundreds of other papers shamelessly boosting this lie throughout the country.

And it was the blogosphere -- not me, mind you, but other bloggers and posters on fora like FreeRepublic -- that debunked this obvious sham, less than 48 hours after Dan Rather went on television to once again make a buffoon out of himself.

The media world turned upside down. The media world turned upside down.

CBS Denies Incompetence: But the proof's already there.

Dave at Garfield Ridge is unimpressed by Dan Rather's attempts at damage control.

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 PM | Comments (12)
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I usually don't crib someone else's work wholesale. I usually link to the post in question, so the creator of the work can at least get the traffic they deserve.

I'm posting the following myself, in violation of my rule, because there's so much traffic that important sites keep going down, and this is too important.

I got these gifs from Digital Branch. I believe he got them from Little Green Footballs.

Anyway, LGF seems to have provided the smoking gun.

Compare. This is the "1972 document" produced by CBSNews:

This is the same text, but typed up by Charles Johnson using Word 97 four hours ago:

These are the two documents overlaid, one over the other:

They have destroyed themselves.

They have destroyed their credibility.

They have empowered their competitors.

And they have removed the Bush AWOL lie from the national debate entirely. This issue cannot be rescued. Once liberal reporters begin pimping forged documents to vindicate partisan charges, the public tunes out. They've immunized Bush against this issue, forever.

Posted by: Ace at 03:11 PM | Comments (15)
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York just mentioned that some experts think the documents are forgeries, but that one he talked to said he thought it "probably" was produced by a conventional typewriter.

Except.

Except he could not figure out how a typewriter typed a superscripted "th," and said he knew of no typewriters that had such a feature. The expert said he simply could not explain this.

So that, too, would seem to be a reluctant admission that this is a forgery. I mean, you can't really say "I think most of this could have been done on a special high-end typewriter, except for this one thing, which is impossible, ergo a typewriter probably produced most of the document."

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (6)
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A lot of information has been unearthed today. I can't contribute anything new, so at least I'll try my hand at recapping where the forgery-scandal now stands. Most of you probably get all of this, but I'll try to explain mono-spaced fonts and smart ordinals for those who've never played around with their computers' AutoCorrect and fonts.

The documents in question were "discovered" by CBSNews and relied upon for this report suggesting that Bush "discussed his options" for getting out of drilling, that Bush's evaluations were "sugar coated" due to political pressure, and that he was specifically ordered to appear for a medical evaluation, which he did not.

The problem is that these documents, relied upon Dan Rather for making serious charges against Bush, appear to be forgeries.

There are four main reasons to suspect forgery:

1) The font used in the documents appears to be Times New Roman, a newer font not available in 1972 (but usually the standard, default font for most modern word-processing programs).

2) The typing on the documents is variably-spaced, rather than mono-spaced.

Mono-spaced fonts -- the sort normally found on mechanical or electric typewriters -- use the exact same spacing between all letters, no matter how fat or how slender. An "i" gets the same spacing as an "m." That's why typewritten documents look less professional than typeset pages that you might find on a book (or documents produced on a word-processor).

Typesetters and word-processors space characters at a variable width depending on the fatness or slimness of the character. The font you're reading right now, for example, is variably spaced.

One of the few fonts on your computer that is mono-spaced is Courier. A sentence written in this font looks like this:

Pay special attention to both the length of this sentence as well as the specific distances between characters of varying fatness.

On the the other hand, normal computer-created text looks like this:

Pay special attention to both the length of this sentence as well as the specific distances between characters of varying fatness.

Now those are different fonts, of course, but they are the same size or "pitch." The characters are similarly sized; it's the spacing that's different.

You can do this on your own computer; just compare sentences written in mono-spaced Courier to sentences written in Times New Roman. Quite a difference-- a screenplay or manuscript written in Courier (the standard font for both scripts and manuscripts) will be around 25-30% longer than the exact same work written in Times New Roman.

I know. I've done both.

Now, here's the problem: Conventional typewriters always use mono-spacing, no matter what the font, because the mechanics of the thing dictate that the ball moves a set distance after each character. There is no computer algorithm determining the correct distance until the next character, as in a word-processing program.

While there were some typewriters available that did type in proportionally-spaced characters, they were fairly rare, used for high-end documents, expensive, and requiring special training to use. It seems unlikely that a military man would be using such a high-end typewriter to compose routine memos and orders.

3) The documents use "smart quotes." Smart quotes are angled quotes. Your word-processor types in smart-quotes, using a simple program to determine whether a quote should be an opening-quote (slanting from left at the top to right at the bottom) or an ending-quote (slanting from right at the top to left at the bottom).

Dumb quotes just go straight up and down. The quote at the beginning of quoted language looks exactly like the quote at the end of that language.

The quotes and single-quotes in this post seem to be dumb, so you'll have to check your computer to see what I'm talking about.

If you want to see the difference, type a sentence using quotes and contractions. You'll see that the computer usually guesses correctly which quotes and single-quotes (or "pop marks") should be opening and which should be closing.

Now, go into your AutoCorrect feature. Different programs use different terminology, but try using your help feature. Ask the question, "How do I turn off smart quotes"? Follow the directions and type the same sentence again. You'll now see all of your quotes go straight up and down, no matter where they are in the sentence.

Manual typerwriters of course had only dumb-quotes. Standard keyboards only have the one button for both double- and single- quotes; there is simply no place on a conventional keyboard for both opening and closing quotes (and single-quotes).

Now, a typewriter could have been built that had both, but that would seem a custom-job, and furthermore the secretary or person writing a document would always have to decide, consciously, between the opening and closing quote-- no computer program would be figuring that out for him, of course.

So why on earth does "typewritten document" feature not one but two uses of a correctly-angled smart single-quote?

4) Finally, the same document features a superscripted, small-size "th" following the number 187, as in 187th. Once again, this is a "smart feature" which computer word-processors do automatically, but which manual or electric typewriters do not.

Your word-processing program looks for instances where you write "st," "nd," "rd," or "th" after a number, as in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (or 187th). When your program finds such an instance, it realizes it's an ordinal number, and puts the two-character "st" or "th" into smaller-font, superscripted (above the line). (Note that Moveable Type, which you're reading right now, does not use smart ordinals, so you'll have to compare on your own computer.)

Again, this is a computer word-processor feature-- not a typewriter feature. I typed on regular typewriters as a kid, and I have never seen special buttons for these special double-characters. Furthermore, even if these characters were available on some special typewriter, the user would have to consciously train himself to strike the special key rather than just writing 187th with the normal keys.

It actually gets a little worse. The easy (and stupid) way to defeat your computer's determination to put "st" into a small-font superscript is to insert a space between the number and the st; your computer then won't read the two as part as one ordinal, and will just leave the characters as "1 st."

In this document, that appears to be precisely what the forger did to avoid that suspiciously superscripted st. Compare the "st" there to "th" here.

Is it mere coincidence that these "typewritten documents" seem to superscript or not superscript ordinals just as modern computer word-processor would?

We are therefore confronted with documents that have four characteristics not associated with standard typewriters -- a modern Times New Roman font, proportional spacing, smart quotes, and smart ordinals.

However, all four characteristics are available, by default, on computer word processors.

The evidence strongly suggests that these "1972" memos were in fact written sometime in the late ninteties or even in the past year.

Add to this one bit of circumstantial evidence: The Dan Rather Factor.

In his legendary book on the 1972 presidential campaign The Boys on the Bus, author Timothy Crouse relayed how many of Rather's rivals on the White House beat resented him for his gung-ho approach to the facts.

"Rather often adhered to the 'informed sources' or 'the White House announced today' formulas, but he was famous in the trade for the times when he bypassed these formulas and 'winged it' on a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted that Nixon was about to veto an education bill."

Windows 65?: Right on Red wants to know where Mr. Killian got his cool-ass time-travelling word-processor.

Ooops, I forgot about this: Check out "the typewritten document from 1972" and the same text written on MS Word half an hour ago. And then check out one overlaid on the other.

Forgive my blasphemy, but Oh My God.

They have destroyed themselves.

They have destroyed themselves.

Posted by: Ace at 02:01 PM | Comments (14)
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If you're just hearing about this now, you might want to check out this re-print of PowerLine's post on CommandPost. PowerLine is down right now due to the Drudgelanche (worse even than an Instalanche), but you can find one of the major posts that got the ball rolling there.

Giving credit where credit's due: this all started, as far as I know, on FreeRepublic. Last night I saw a post that read "Let's do some investigating on these docs," which I laughed at-- the same "let's research" crap is all the rage on lunatic lefty sites like TableTalk or DU.

And yet-- by this morning, post 47 to this thread was sending people off scrambling to talk to forged-document experts.

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (22)
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...there's also an election campaign going on, in case anyone's forgotten. The conservatively-biased, pro-Republican FoxNews OpinionDynamics poll gives Bush a small bounce and lead, smaller than any other bounce/lead except for that found by Zogby, and shows him moving from a 45-45 tie to 47-44.

And Bush is now only behind by four points in very-liberal New Jersey.

Posted by: Ace at 12:29 PM | Comments (1)
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In the space of a couple of hours, I have gone from thinking this story was a fantasy dreamed up by over-eager Bush partisans to being 99.9% sure that it's 100% true.

If the documents are forgeries -- which, by the way, they are -- Dan Rather will not be able to survive this. His liberal bias is too well-documented for him to survive a scandal that directly implicates that liberal bias.

Thus, I am proud to begin the Dan Rather Retirement Watch. If you like, you can take your best guess as to the date upon which he decides to "spend more time with his family."

I say he's gone by mid-November. They will allow him to report through the elections as a courtesy and out of respect for his long liberal service, and then he's bye-bye.

See ya, Dan! Maybe you can call up George Bush Senior and chat about being "in the grandfather business."

And Don't Miss RatherBiased! RatherBiased has been trying to put Dan Rather out of commission for years. I think now they've done their job a little too well and they've now put themselves out of business.

In addition to quoting a bunch of experts, they drag up this tasty quote:

In his legendary book on the 1972 presidential campaign The Boys on the Bus, author Timothy Crouse relayed how many of Rather's rivals on the White House beat resented him for his gung-ho approach to the facts.

"Rather often adhered to the 'informed sources' or 'the White House announced today' formulas, but he was famous in the trade for the times when he bypassed these formulas and 'winged it' on a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted that Nixon was about to veto an education bill."

But I trust that, like an NGO, they'll find some new problem to take on, now that they've pretty much solved their original problem.

Maybe literacy or African AIDS or something.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (29)
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