September 09, 2004, 04:53 PM
CBS' “new” Bush guard memos a hoax?
UPDATE: NEW PROOF OF FORGERY - SCROLL TO END
Four supposedly “new” memos highlighted along side the Ben Barnes charade on last night's 60 Minutes may have been forged according to reports by CNS News. The memos, dating from 1972 through 1974, allegedly document George W. Bush's refusal to follow an order in the Texas Air National Guard, or so claims the Associated Press. They have since been circulated by Democrat operatives to bolster long standing allegations against the President's service record during the Vietnam era.
Earlier today investigative work done by the Powerline Blog and the conservative organization Free Republic produced evidence suggesting that the CBS documents were forged on a modern computer word processor. While their findings are suggestive of document fraud in their own rights, a new piece of evidence has emerged following a forensic experiment on the Little Green Footballs blog suggesting the documents were fabricated with near certainty.
The case against the CBS memos' authenticity boils down to four major discrepancies in addition to the Little Green Footballs blog discovery.
FIRST, all four of the CBS memos are written in what is known as a proportionally spaced font such as Times New Roman and other common computerized texts. Word processors were few and far between at the time of the alleged Bush memos though, which are said to have come from a typewriter. Historically, typewriters use mono-spaced fonts that more closely resemble the Courier option that is common to computers. Typewriters that could produce proportionally spaced documents did exist in 1972, but they were expensive and unlikely to be found in a low level administrative office of the Texas National Guard.
SECOND, several of the CBS documents attach superscript suffixes to numerical listings in their texts (e.g. the “th” found at the end of 111 in the term “111th”). Superscript lettering reduces the font size of the suffix and elevates it above the line of text. While common on word processor documents and in professionally printed material, superscript of this sort was virtually impossible to obtain from the common typewriter. Popular word processing programs like Microsoft Word, however, have default settings that automatically superscript numerical suffixes.
THIRD, the signature of Jerry B. Killian on the CBS memo is virtually incomparable with known copies of Killian's signature on authentic Bush guard records.
FOURTH, the first of the CBS memos, dated in 1972, contains a crossed out though clearly visible address for George W. Bush listing his residence as an apartment on Longmont Street in Houston. Bush lived on Longmont Street in 1968 according to his known guard documents at the time, however by 1972 he had changed addresses at least twice and was living in an apartment on Westheimer.
FORENSIC EVIDENCE: In addition to this evidence, Little Green Footballs blog has produced a forensic demonstration of forgery based, whether advertently or not, on the time-honored document authentication technique of pantograph replication. Before the copy machine and the typewriter there was the pantograph, a writing mechanism based upon the geometric characteristics of the parallelogram that could create a one-to-one or scaled second copy of a document on a second sheet of paper as the original was being written. The pantographed copy matched the written original in all respects including errors, stray marks, and the exact handwriting itself. The technique was common prior to the 19th century. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is believed to have produced the draft copies of the Declaration of Independence by pantograph while he recorded the original.
Forensic historians long ago developed a method for detecting pantographed documents by superimposing a projection of the suspected copy onto the known original to confirm that they originated from the same source. When two copies of a common origin are placed on top of one another the texts match up with near perfection including spacings, letter characteristics, and stray ink marks proving the pantograph. Since a common word processing program such as MS Word will not vary in its output from computer to computer so long as both are set on the manufacturer defaults, a modern day form of pantograph replication should indicate whether a suspect document and a test copy from a word processor originate from the same program. Little Green Footballs blog attempted this experiment by entering the CBS memo's text under default settings into a word processor. The superimposed images reveal that the test computer print and the supposedly original CBS memo are virtually identical in font, alignment, size, and format thus suggesting that the memo originated from a modern computer and not a typewriter (see the overlapped images for yourself here).
The verdict is not in yet on the documents, but with each passing hour and each new piece of evidence a forgery becomes more and more apparent.
UPDATE: NEW PROOF OF FORGERY
Following the Little Green Footballs blog lead, CB decided to test the pantograph replication technique on another of the CBS documents to see if it held true. Using Microsoft Word on its factory default settings with 12 point Times New Roman font we copied the address line of CBS memo #1 and overlapped the two for comparison.
As you can see the test worked and, in doing so, inadvertantly uncovered more proof that the document is a forgery. The new evidence revolves around the fact that Microsoft Word auto-formats its text using the centering function. When the text alignment for “center” is selected each subsequent line will be precisely centered underneath the previous one with each word of the text readjusting to meet this alignment as new letters are entered into the line. Since typewriters mechanically stamp letters onto a sheet of paper one at a time, it is physically impossible to create a mechanical typewriter document that perfectly aligns two or more centered rows of text on top of each other. The address bar on CBS Memo #1 is perfectly centered and perfectly aligned, thus it had to have come from a computer word processor and not a typewriter. The replication experiment in Microsoft Word with an identical match further validates this origin.
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