After reading all the blogs and watching the chat room screaming and yelling today, I'm just laughing about the absolute certainty on both sides that the Killian memos are either forgeries or not forgeries. The fact is that everyone is speculating at this time. If they are forged documents, that should be quite easy to tell for those who actually determine such things. CBS says they had them exhaustively authenticated, and at some point I'm sure the types of authentication that they did will be revealed. It's not too hard to surmise.
If the arguments about IBM selectrics not being able to type like that are true, then it should be very easy to tell that they're forgeries. Go to the files from that office at the same time and see what other such memos looked like at the time. If none of them show a proportional font, or superscript, then they're almost certainly a forgery. But if other memos from that era look similar, then you've got a hard time making the case that they are. You can also do paper and ink tests, and I'm sure all of that has already been done by CBS and can be redone by independent authentication experts. But none of that type of information is currently available to the public, which means that all those people out there screaming "ARE NOT"..."ARE TOO"... at each other are jumping to a conclusion on far too little. They don't have a clue, and neither do the rest of us. So let's all just wait to see some real evidence before drawing partisan lines on it. If the tables were turned, all the partisans would, as usual, be taking the opposite position just as obstinately as they do their current one.
Postscript: Immediately after finishing this, I went to Timothy Sandefur's blog and saw this note, asking if I was going to comment. Obviously I just did. My only further response is that I think it is far too early to refer to the "revelation that the memos are fake". At this point it is an allegation, not a revelation. The only authentication experts who have weighed in at this point haven't seen the documents themselves, or documents from the time to compare them to. That is hardly a compelling case, especially since CBS claims that they did have them authenticated by experts who actually got to handle the originals. That information needs to be released, of course, so that everyone can see what kinds of tests were done and how credible the authentication was. But the arguments being made so far look far more like conclusionary overreach than rational analysis.
Bush supporters are making a huge deal out of the fact that Killian's family says they don't think they're authentic, but of what relevance is that? That's not the sort of thing you'd discuss with your family, and his son would have no more access to his private memos in his work than would his mailman or his barber. And again, there are compelling arguments on the other side - CBS says they confirmed everything in those memos with Bobby Hodges, Killian's superior who was mentioned in the memos as being pressured. If that's the case, and Hodges confirms that or the conversations were recorded, then the allegations in the memos are independently confirmed even if the memos themselves were faked.
Again, it simply is ludicrous for anyone on either side to be making bold claims at this point. The question of whether they are authentic is still entirely open, and so should be the minds of everyone who cares about accuracy and truth over partisan wishes. If they turn out to be forgeries, I'll certainly be happy to admit to having jumped the gun on the issue.
Post-Postscript: Thanks to Adam Marczyk for the link to the discussion on Daily Kos, which is a long, evidence-based conversation about typewriters and type fonts in use at the time. This is the sort of sober analysis that is helpful. Pretending that it's an open and shut case on either side at this point is simply an overreaction and an overstatement.
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This is the stupidest distraction I've ever seen, and that includes SVFT. There's a war going on, in case no one has noticed lately.
It would not seem totally unlikely to me that the Republicans, seeing fairly conclusive unimpeachable evidence that Bush was AWOL, would seed forgeries themselves in order to be able to dispose of all the authentic documents as "lies, all lies."
What we really need to know is, where does this stuff come from? Since the press seem to have forgotten completely how to vet a source, like.
Whether or not they are forgeries is kind of irrelevant. There is a wealth of information indicating that W did not fulfill his requirements, and a wealth of information indicating someone pulled some levers to get him out of the service honorably. There is a lack of witnesses who should have seen Bush in Alabama, and those potential witnesses who have spoken up say that they never saw W. You could make a very good case without any of the Killian documents.
Well said, Paige. Incidentally, Daily Kos has an evidence-based discussion of whether there existed a typewriter in the 1970s that could have produced the debated features of the document.
And here is Power Line's explanation, which I find quite convincing.
But...can it really have come to this? Font styles and the dating of typewriter technology? Amazing.
My point is not that the documents are not forgeries. They may well be. But there are good arguments on both sides, and the primary argument made by those who claim it's a forgery is a very poor one. They're making a huge deal out of the fact that they can make a Word document that looks just like it. Well no kidding. As Kos points out, they've discovered that if you use the same font and the same font size, you can make a document look just like another document. This is hardly a surprise.
I had an old co-worker who liked to fake things like credit card bills for her clients (she got fired for it eventually), and she could make a perfect copy of a Visa bill, complete with color logo and everything, but with the numbers changed slightly to favor her client. That she could do that didn't prove the bill she was copying was a forgery, it proved that HER copy was a forgery. All they have shown is that it's possible to make forged copies OF those documents with modern computers, not that the documents themselves ARE forged.
The only relevant question is not whether those documents can be forged by modern computers, but whether technology used in 1972 could have made the document that they are trying to duplicate. As I said, IF it's true that they are forgeries, it shouldn't be hard to get solid evidence of it, but it does require looking at the original document and comparing it to other originals from the same office and time frame. But what has been offered on various blogs to this point hardly amounts to anything solid. They haven't seen the originals, they haven't compared it to any other documents from that office (except that one of the original claims for forgery was that they didn't have superscript at the time and that argument turns out to be completely false, as other documents from that same office have a superscripted "th"), and their ability to make duplicates of it is completely irrelevant.
It's interesting that the Bush supporters seem to be unwilling to address the apparent fact that Bush was MInA (Missing In non-Action) during the Vietnam War.
On the other hand, it is somewhat sad that the issue of who served or didn't serve during the VW seems to have taken on a life of its own. It seems to me that Kerry raised the issue of his service as a reaction to the Bush campaign's assertion that he wasn't patriotic or that he would not be butch enough to pursue the War On (Some) Terrorism. Kerry's response was all well-and-good, but it seems to that it has become the focus of his campaign. He really does need to suggest what he would do differently in Iraq--the here and now--from Bush's apparent policies. Kerry's failure to articulate a differentiation doesn't bode well.
Indeed, no one can tell from these scans if the documents are forged or not. The resolution is just too poor to find the kind of details which would prove typewriter v. word processor. Anyone who thinks they can is folling themselves and, it is clear, others.
In the end it can be argued that the whole mess is of benefit to both Bush and Kerry, as it polarises things and allows them to spend much less time discussing their actual current policies.
I rarely talk about my family online. I get enough threats and angry e-mails for myself, delving into evolution or atheism or gay marriage. I don't want to drag them into it collaterally.
But, well I happen to have access to some unusual expertise here.
My father worked for Big Blue for thirty years and was one of the original production design engineers for the IBM Selectric, from the original model through the automated versions which preceded the PC (Which of course knocked the Selectric right off the market).
Growing up, my garage looked like a museum of Selectric typewriters and typewriter parts. Like an old infantry veteran and his qeapon, m Dad can probably identify a model of Selectric with one distinctive part while blindfolded. His particular job was designing the production facilities which produced the metal ball which made the IBM Selectic such a fast typewriter.
Anyway, to get to the gist of it, I've talked about the documents and Selectric with my father, who incidentally supports Bush (Barely), but whomay also be biased about what Selectrics can and can't do. Afterall, the IBM Selectric put food on our family table and clothes on our backs for 30 years. So his initial reaction could be something likke "That type writer could do ANYTHING!"
Nor has he done an in depth analysis. But, anecdotally, he has old me flat out a Selectric could have written those documents, and that either it almost certainly was a Selectric or someone with extensive, and I mean really extensive, background faking it. Why anyone who wanted to fake a letter written with an 1970 era Selectric would NOT use an actual Selectric in the first place I can't imagine. But that's what the wingnuts would have us believe.