In Loving Memory...
...of Dan Rather's credibility. Tonight, 60 Minutes tried to bail out on the documents by claiming that although Killian's secretary says they are fake, what really matters is that she says that they accurately reflect the events of the time.
Continue Reading

What British Media?
The BBC is a lovely institution.

The move means that ordinary citizens will now be allowed to keep powerful assault weapons in their homes.

Lifting the ban has been a key aim of the powerful, pro-Republican gun lobby and its demise comes just weeks before the US presidential election.

The 1994 ban covered 19 different types of military assault weapons, including AK-47, Kalashnikov and Uzi rifles, as well as high-capacity ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds.

In order to get the measure through Congress, Mr Clinton agreed to demands for a vote to be held after 10 years to confirm the ban.

However, Republicans, who now control both houses of Congress, refused to schedule such a vote.

One word that doesn't turn up once in this article? "Semiautomatic". It isn't ignorance: They try too hard for that. They go as far as they can to make it sound like we're talking about Vulcan mini-guns mounted on people's Aerostars to anyone who'll listen. "Military-style" "assault weapons", "high capacity cartridges" that let a criminal "spray many people very quickly", they all paint the picture of machine guns without actually commiting to it. (Although sometimes they come right out and say that, too.) How do these morlocks sleep at night?

What we're seeing with Ra^thergate is how technology has reached critical mass so that large elements of the American public can now see and come to grips with the reality that certain Old Media resources are... shall we say... sub-par.

I certainly hope the same coup is looming in Britain.

Update: On that note, get a load of how Britain's "Independent" is spinning Rathergate.

A CBS news report last week featured previously unpublished memos purporting to be from Bush's commander of the day...

But within 24 hours the documents were being challenged - raising suspicions that CBS had fallen victim to a hoax by Bush supporters to discredit critics of the President's military record.

Uh. Yeah. That's what the suspicion is. Right.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

The Famous Signature Experiment
Just to thoroughly bury the signature issue, and salt the earth so that nothing may ever grow there again, I've collected some signatures, all of which will, I swear, eventually culminate in my point.
Continue Reading

Dan Kong

Above: An enraged Dan Rather swats at attacking bloggers.

Disclaimer: Free Will verified this image with photography experts before posting it, and we stand by it's authenticity. I did not add additional planes to this photograph, as planes were, in fact, available at the time, nor did I paste Dan Rather's head onto King Kong's body, as that would be very difficult on a modern computer. This photo is not the only evidence that Dan Rather is, in fact, a gigantic, hairy, ape-like monster hanging off a skyscraper, a claim which is supported by many documents coming from unimpeachable sources. It concerns me deeply that a pajama-wearing rumor-mill consisting entirely of political operatives is focusing on whether or not this photo is a forgery, rather than paying attention to the legitimate issues raised by it.

Is CBS News hiring?
Mister, a pro-Kerry blogger who laments that without the AWB, we'll be able to buy uzis at Wal-Mart, seen leaving a comment here, chooses to mock my comparison of the (seemingly fake) Killian signatures on the memos to real Killian signatures on real memos.

This is a copy of George Bush's signature:


This is another:


However, while I'm not handwriting expert ... I don't know about you, but when I sign my name, I don't spend much time figuring out new and decorative ways to form the letter at the beginning. But apparently Bush does, and also apparently so did Killian.

Curses! Foiled again, right?

I can appreciate his point, but upon following the links, we appear to have a problem: The first signature is not the signature of George W. Bush at all. It's the signature of George H.W. Bush, his father. (For me, seeing "1992" in the date headers and URLs set off a few alarm bells before I even got to the signature. That, and the way that, you know, they were totally different, and stuff. Like the Killian signatures.)

Dan Rather Chooses His Hill To Die On
Apparently, with cartoons, much like with journalism, the amateur stuff can be more accurate than the profesionals.

"I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did."
What in the holy hell went on at CBS?

Two of the document experts hired by CBS News now say the network ignored concerns they raised prior to the broadcast of 60 Minutes II about the disputed National Guard records attributed to Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984.

Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.

"I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter," she said.

Will says she sent the CBS producer an e-mail message about her concerns and strongly urged the network the night before the broadcast not to use the documents.

"I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will said.

But the documents became a key part of the 60 Minutes II broadcast questioning President Bush's National Guard service in 1972. CBS made no mention that any expert disputed the authenticity.

"I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply," Will told ABC News.

A second document examiner hired by CBS News, Linda James of Plano, Texas, also told ABC News she had concerns about the documents and could not authenticate them.

"I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," James said. "And that's why I have come forth to talk about it because I don't want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents."

That's on top of Marcel Matley going to the WaPo to point out that in spite of what Dan Rather claimed, he never said the documents were real. So who exactly did tell CBS they were real?

Perhaps Dan Rather should be made the official "Liberal Information Minister".

Update: I didn't know it at the time, but I wasn't the first one to have this idea.

Catch Me In 60 Seconds
Even Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., the subject of the film "Catch Me If You Can" and possibly the world's foremost expert on forgery, says they're forgeries. Not even good ones, Dan. Give it up.

Dan Rather to commit hari-kari to preserve journalist honor!
The New York Post:

When I first wrote about this on Thursday, in a column that appeared on Friday, it seemed likely but not certain they were phony. We called the column "CBS' Big Blunder?" with a question mark just to be careful.

There's no need to pull any punches now. I'm going to be blunt here: Anybody who spends an hour reviewing the evidence and the expert testimony knows they're forgeries.

The discrediting has gone on now for five straight days. The conclusion isn't just overwhelming, it's inarguable.

The documents aren't just forgeries, they're bad, blatant, ludicrous forgeries. They're forgeries so easily detected that in the space of a few hours after CBS released computer photographs of them on the Internet, they had already been pegged and deconstructed.

Meanwhile, Newsday writes on "the day CBS got blogged down".

There is still a way out for Dan and his accursed crew. It's quite simple really. All they have to do is run down to Electronics Boutique, buy a copy of Microsoft Forger, do the forgeries right this time, and put them up on the website instead of the old ones. Then, when asked about the first set of memos, they can simply say "What? Those aren't out memos! These are our memos!"

It's ridiculous, but certainly far less ridiculous than the defenses we've been hearing for the last 4 days.

CBS News: Digging Themselves In Deeper
You may remember this from the CBS Evening News' defense of the "memos" on Friday:

Document and handwriting examiner Marcel Matley analyzed the documents for CBS News. He says he believes they are real, but is concerned about exactly what is being examined by some of the people questioning the documents. Because deterioration occurs each time a document is reproduced and the documents being analyzed outside of CBS have been photocopied, faxed, scanned and downloaded and are far removed from the documents CBS started with which were also photocopies....Matley finds the signatures to be some of the most compelling evidence.

They then showed Matley pointing at the signatures and saying "we can conclude they are his signatures". Rather comes straight out and says that Matley believes they are real, and then seems to imply that because they are photocopied, nobody else should try to determine if they're real or not.

I don't know what Matley told CBS, but as Kevin points out, that doesn't appear to be what he told the Washington Post.

The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

"There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals.

According to Matley in the WaPo, he can't say the documents are real because they are copies. The Washington Post has previously reported that Matley said a "60 Minutes" executive had told him not to give interviews. Can't imagine why.

Internet Killed the Video Star
Here's some more of that Ra^thergate humor for you, from American Liberty Journal. (Click to enlarge.)The funniest part? I talked to Chris about this, and he made it look just like the "memos" by using Photoshop's "photocopy" filter. Haaah!

CBS: Frigging Insane?
From 101-280:

The model in question will even produce a rudimentary superscripting if you're willing to stop and open the machine to change the mechanical font ball a couple of times during document production.

...but it's possible, in the sense of "does not violate laws of physics", that a high-end device designed for camera-ready page layout might have found its way to a National Guard base in Texas, where a now-dead lieutenant-colonel who (according to his family) couldn't type might have used it to create terse, secret, yet professionally and laboriously desktop-published memos for secret files that remained secret long after he died until six weeks ago and whose source is still a secret. And rather than using hyphens to break words the way I was taught in typing class, he kept his words unbroken but happened to end every single one of his lines at exactly the same point as Microsoft Word's "word wrap" feature.

My advice to anyone still defending these things is to stop jabbering about real kerning vs. TrueType font hinting and just run the hell away and get out of the blast radius. (In the area of professional politics, "run the hell away" would include not sending official campaign emails based on the fake memos.)

I'd feel like I was beating a very dead horse at this point, except that CBS is still dragging it behind a truck and calling it dressage.

In short, any idiot can apparently open their copy of Word and fax pretty much any old thing into CBS with a Photoshopped signature on it, and CBS will rush it onto the air as long as it fits their general angle. (Note that this is the charitable theory, according to which CBS didn't simply fabricate the documents themselves.) If the forger had bothered even to select the Courier font in Word and turn off "smart quotes", we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

Here's an example of what CBS currently considers journalism:

...the owner of the company that distributes this typing style told CBS News that it has been available since 1931.

Yes, we know -- the font family (or, to use CBS's made-up terminology, "typing style") is called Times because a version of it was used to print the Times of London, using rows of metal type on a printing press the size of a truck, which I'm guessing the Texas Air National Guard didn't have around the office either. But hey, printing press, typewriter, what's the difference, right?

As of this writing, the official position of CBS, an organization to which we grant a broadcast license and an exemption from campaign finance restrictions due to their pivotal role in a well-informed democracy, amounts to "la la la la I can't hear you la la la".

Hehe.

The Passion of the Dan
Dan Rather just ran yet another pathetic defense of the documents, I'll have a fisking just as soon as I dig up a good transcript.

Update: Found it.

Besides checking on john kerry's service record, CBS has been checking president bush's service in the national guard, including whether or not he did or did not fulfill his commitment. We're gathering information, asking questions and probing.

The blogosphere is asking questions and probing. The controversy at this point is not about Bush's service, it's about CBS's reporting.

CBS is also addressing questions about documents used to corroborate some of the information in our reporting. Documents used to corroborate some of the information in our reporting. Some of these questions come from people who are not active political partisans.

Perhaps, at least, they admit that unlike Atrios and Oliver Willis, major conservative bloggers typically aren't on the payroll at the GOP or assorted 527's? First, an "expert":

Everything in those documents that people are saying can't be done, as you said, 32 years ago, is totally false. Not true. Like I said, proportion al spacing was available, super scripts was available as a custom feature. Proportional spacing between lines was available. You could order it any way you like.

I believe this "expert" was Bill Glennon, thoroughly trounded by Tim Blair here. No one is saying that proportional spacing couldn't be done. In fact, it's widely been established that over a half dozen models could do it. That, however, is not many, and it was typically a fairly high-end feature. The same goes for superscript, which the expert himself admits was available only as a custom feature. No one is saying these things couldn't be done: Only that they were unusual. CBS is deliberately misrepresenting the nature of the debate, and the wording ("as you said", etc) indicates that this "expert" isn't even in on the debate, he's just responding to the misleading questions that CBS asked him to create useful soundbites. "So, Bill, people are saying that superscript wasn't available in 1972, 32 years ago. What do you think?" "Well, like you said..."

Rather: Richard katz, a software designer found other indications in the documents. He noticed the lower case l is used in documents instead of the actual numeral one. That would be difficult to reproduce on the computer today.

l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1 ("l"s and "1"s in Times New Roman!)

If you were doing this a week ago or a month ago on a normal laser jet printer, it wouldn't work. The font wouldn't be available to you.

l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1 (It works when you print it, too!)

Rather: Katz noted the documents have the superscript th and a regular sized th. That would be common on a typewriter, not a computer.

Richard Katz: There is one document from may of 1972 which contains a normal th at the top. To produce that in microsoft word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the th setting off or back over them and type them again.

T^hi^s t^ak^es ^al^l o^f a^bo^ut ^a s^ec^on^d aⁿd ^a h^al^f. Perhaps CBS is hedging it's bets on the notion that their audience is computer illiterate?

Rather: CBS news relied on an analysis of the contents of the documents themselves to determine the contents authenticity. It is in line with is known about the service and dates...

"Cover your ass, Dan! Tell them we tried to authenticate it, and it seemed believable, so maybe they'll at least think we were honestly duped when it hits the fan!"

CBS news asked the white house today to answer a number of questions...In reply, a White House spokesman told CBS's John Roberts: "As you know, we have repeatedly addressed these issues, including during the interview you conducted on behalf of Mr. Rather last Wednesday."

When is CBS going to answer the general public's questions, and do I have to extend the boycott to include CBS Evening News, if Ra^ther is going to continue to use it as a platform to spout this lunacy?

One phrase was conspicuously absent this evening: "Times New Roman". Why is this point missing from tonight's "defense" and many of the major news accounts of this controversy? It's absolutely and indisputably damning, that's why.

Straight ahead on the "CBS evening news," they're supposed to inspect your bags, not steal from them. He got caught red handed.

I covered this way back on Saturday. Try and keep up, Dan.

The call is coming from inside the house!
This is really lame.

Meanwhile, over the weekend journalists from around the country were attempting to track down the original source of the documents. "We're having a hard time tracking how we got the documents," says the CBS News producer. "There are at least two people in this building who have insisted we got copies of these memos from the Kerry campaign by way of an additional source. We do not have the originals, and our sources have indicated to us that we will not be getting the originals. How that is possible I don't know."

What are the rest of the people in the building insisting? That they found them cooling off in Dan Rather's laser printer while he was at lunch? If it did come from some Rove-level evil genius...*snicker*...in the Kerry campaign, how hilarious would that be? Meanwhile, yet another source seems a little less than, shall we say, independant:

A principal source for the CBS story about President Bush's National Guard duty was Bill Burkett, a disgruntled former Guard officer who lives in Baird, Texas, who says he was present at Guard headquarters in Austin in 1997 when a top aide to then Governor Bush ordered records sanitized to protect the Boss, Newsweek reports in the current issue.

Other Guard officials disputed Burkett's account and the Bush aide involved, Joe Allbaugh, called it "absolute garbage." Burkett may have a motive to make trouble for the powers that be. In 1998, he grew gravely ill on a Guard mission to Panama, causing him to be hospitalized, and he suffered two nervous breakdowns. He unsuccessfully sued for medical expenses.

Free Will: Delivering more informative news than CBS since January, 2003.

Boycott 60 Minutes II Advertisers
As promised, I've collected the sponsor and contact info for 60 Minutes II (listed below). I actually bothered to record 60 Minutes tonight, but since the Sunday edition is actually a different show with different staffers, I've opted not to include them in this information. The information provided is only for the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes featuring Dan Ra^ther. (It's all part of a day's work for the pajama-wearing right-wing nut professional rumor mill.) Credit to Free Republic for collecting much of this information.

As outlined before (with a few amendments), the goal here is for 60 Minutes II to embrace a little bit of journalistic ethics and do one of two things:

A. Dan Rather devotes an edition of 60 Minutes II to the witnesses, family members, independent journalists and experts who uncovered the details of this forgery, and allows them to make their case in full. Rather must fully and thoroughly rebut each allegation with the support of independent experts and witnesses, which is to be quoted verbatim, preferably with actual video clips of their statements. (If CBS, 60 Minutes II, and Dan Rather seriously believe in the legitimacy of their documents, than in the interest of their reputation for leadership in investigative journalism, they should be prepared to devote their time to getting to the bottom of this, in public, in front of their audience, who depend on them for the whole story.)

B. Dan Rather appears on 60 Minutes II and retracts the claims and the memos; apologizes, on the air, on behalf of the entire staff of 60 Minutes II to: the audience of 60 Minutes for misleading them (both about the memos and in the outright lies about the nature of the controversy over the forgery); 60 Minutes II sponsors; CBS; the independant internet journalists they've called childish names and generally treated with condescension and disrespect; Major General Hodges for misleading him and misrepresenting his statement in their interview; Colonel Killian's widow, son and any others who found their protests ignored when they indicated that these were forgeries during production; and the President of the United States, George W. Bush for their shameless and fraudulent attacks. Rather must reveal the source of the forged memos and, if appropriate, reveal the people responsible at 60 Minutes II (and their roles) that caused this to happen.

Any 60 Minutes II sponsors who wish to be removed from the list need only contact me via email and provide me with a telephone number where I can confirm that they have removed their advertising from 60 Minutes II. This list will be updated every week, and sponsors who respond will get special reference here as no longer being part of the list. Here's all the relevant contact info:

60 Minutes II
Media Relations: Kelli Edwards - (212) 975-6795 - KEE@cbsnews.com
CBS News Comments - (212) 975-3248 (leave a voicemail)

60 Minutes II Sponsors (9/8):
(Note: Links take you to contact information pages for each sponsor. Please let them know that you are appalled by 60 Minutes II's behavior, and that you are taking part in the boycott.)
Allegra
Home Depot - Executives - Investor Relations
Kleenex
Vioxx
Splenda
Kia
Zelnorm
Sprint
UPS
Campbell's Soup
Morgan Stanley
Cingular Wireless
Pepcid Antacids
Estee Lauder
Infinite

CBS Sponsors (New for 9/15):
Cadillac
AFLAC
St. Joseph's Aspirin
Arm & Hammer Cat Litter
Wellbutrin XL & Levitra - GlaxoSmithKlein
Visine - Pfizer
Quilted Northern
LL Bean
UBS Investments
Werther's Original - Storck Candies
Citibank
Kohl's
Scrubbing Bubbles
Lincoln

You guys know what to do from here. Make sure to pass this list on to interested parties with the handy "Email This!" link under the post. (For readers who aren't familiar with the controversy, just visit the Old Media Vs. Reality category and check out the surrounding days for details and evidence.)

Can you tell the difference?
Liberal retard Atrios links merrily to this piece implying that these images prove the IBM Composer could've produced the memos:


The image is the left is from Microsoft Word, and the image on the right is from an IBM Composer. Ohmigawd! They look just alike, right? Glenn Reynolds suggests that they might be more useful if they were larger, which is true. However, that's really not needed.


Nevermind the insanity of suggesting that Killian, a non-typer, would've used a multi-thousand-dollar typesetting machine to write up a memo. As you can see when the images are superimposed (or had they even bothered to put them on top of each other instead of side-by-side), the TNR-like font from the IBM Composer is a great deal wider than the font used in Microsoft Word. As Dr. Bouffard has pointed out repeatedly, the old versions of the Times Roman font family were significantly wider, as is this one.

As it happens, the font used in Microsoft Word, Times New Roman, as well as the default spacing, flawlessly matches the font and spacing used in the memos. What an incredible coincidence, right Atrios?!

What might be more amusing is for Mendelson (or Atrios) to compare the results from the Composer to the memos, something which has already been done. Of course, they aren't going to do that, because that would be redundant: They did it in Microsoft Word, and that's where the memos came from!

As has been previously mentioned, a $10,500 reward is available to anyone who can reproduce these memos on any typewriter available in 1972. Why doesn't Mendelson claim the reward? Well, because no matter how similar they appear when laid side by side, it's a simple fact that he can't reproduce the memos with an IBM Composer, or anything else. Times New Roman, a specific member of the Times Roman font family, is a font designed by Microsoft, and unique to word processing software. Of course, far be it from Atrios, or Mendelson, to try to flesh out their arguments. I don't blame them: They don't stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.

Update: I see that Little Green Footballs scooped me on this. Darn it.

Dan Rather To Be Placed on Suicide Watch
Here's another example of how the documents were clearly made in MS Word.

In other news, for some reason, USA Today is showing 6 memos, with the 2 new ones (oh yeah, real new) showing the same typeface, spacing, etc. It also appears that some versions of the "documents from Killian's personal file" have different markings and different parts blacked out.

Allah also points out that the 6 documents appear to have been typed on weekends, weekdays, and pretty much everydays! "Couldn't they give the poor guy a day off now and then? Sheesh."

An attempt to reproduce the documents using an IBM Composer. Not only do the documents not match, but read what he had to go through to get the superscript "th". Definitely not a task for a non-typist like Colonel Killian.

Plus, a study in kerning and another inside glimpse into the media!

Perhaps Dan Rather should drop in on this website for some pointers! As promised, this blog will tonight feature a list of 60 Minutes sponsors. Stay tuned.

Lies and Damn Lies
The Boston Globe has lied to cover for Dan Rather, as INDC reports, willfully misrepresenting Dr. Bouffard's position in their story. Dr. Bouffard isn't too happy about it, either. INDC has some quotes from Dr. Bouffard, both on the forgeries and on the Boston Globe's putrid backstabbing and skullduggery. Ladies and gentlemen, the blogosphere is now at war with big media. How fitting for today.

Update: INDC also notes CBS is now using the misquotes as part of their defense, and Instapundit notes they even got Bouffard's name wrong, despite almost certainly reading it straight from the BoGlo report. I love this:

"Saturday's issue of the Boston Globe reports that one document expert, Phillip Broussard, who had expressed suspicions about the documents, said 'he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.'"

Good Lord. Has it always been this bad and we're just now seeing it, or are they just really sweating now and blurting out whatever mindnumbing absurdity they can come up with?

Would you like to...
I'll say one thing about Ra^thergate: It's brought out some laugh-out-loud humor.

We've got to break free...
...from your lies, you're so self-satisfied, we don't need you.

"Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not, I don't see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill," Rather said. "My colleagues and I at '60 Minutes' made great efforts to authenticate these documents and to corroborate the story as best we could. ... I think the public is smart enough to see from whom some of this criticism is coming and draw judgments about what the motivations are."

The professional rumor mill? I didn't realize I was making money at this. Jim Treacher:

...I've seen one or two episodes of Law & Order in my day ...[I]sn't the burden of proof on the accuser? It is? Okay. And isn't this crewcutted septuagenarian fadebrain the one who made the really big serious accusation? He is? Check. So...isn't he sort of, you know, under the obligation to verify his claims? And not in a position to sit back and demand that everybody else prove to his satisfaction that it's not clearly bullshit? ...I mean, if these memos were scribbled in burnt sienna crayon on the back of a Denny's placemat and somebody had the unmitigated gall to say something about it, would that be part of the 'professional rumor mill'? I'm just asking here, no big deal."

God knows, we want to break free.