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Looking at documents from the DoD web site ( http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records/), as well as those from USA Today (released by the Bush campaign in February 2004, eight months prior to the CBS documents, see http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-02-14-bush-docs.htm), Lt Colonel Killian's signature in the CBS documents clearly does not match these documents. Killian used big, looping Ls in his last name. The capital "J" and capital "K" in the DoD and USA Today documents also clearly differ from the CBS documents.
I do not understand why this was not brought up at the time. Recall Bush released the records in February because of questions regarding both candidates military records.
Regarding the examples below, the superscript "th" in one of the documents is in an otherwise constant spaced document. It is typical of an IBM Selectric typewriter, note the "th" takes one character space.
The proportional spaced document is not a unit document but comes from the Texas Adjutant General's office, at the State Headquarters. It is a promotion congratulatory letter of some type. However, note it does not superscript "147th".
I see nothing which places proportional fonts and superscripts in a 147th FIS document. Nor have I seen anything which explains the change in Killian's signature style.
Hi. I took your advice and in from the Little Green Footballs wiki. That's a very curious date on your posting, since that's just after when I showed how the DoD records acutally do contain a proportionally printed document, the only one in the entire database of Bush's records and strangely and quietly released just a couple of days after CBS backed away from authenticating the memo: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records, "Documents Released on September 24, 2004," page 6 (also note the funky fonts in the documents on pages 3&4). If you're little fuzzy eyed about recognizing proportional spacing, go here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/BushRecordPSClipRuler.jpg
Also, I don't understand why you're using that same murky instance of superscripting, that "Report to 111th F.I.S." when I had already pointed out in the LGF thread that there are much nicer, cleaner examples here: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records, "Part 6," page 45. It's undated, but it's rather obvious that it's not a Word document.
But you are indeed right that "a feature of modern computer word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word automatically changes "th" to superscript characters when following numerals," but if you look at the superscripting in *all* of the memos, you will note some strange discrepencies. A comparison of the superscripting pattern in the memos to what happens when you type them up in Word can be found here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/SScriptsCompared.jpg
Hmmm, not only are only some of the th's following a number not superscripted, but none of the st's. There is a strangely inserted odd space that can explain away some of this, but not others.
Your argument makes no sense. We're not talking about a pile of documents, just 6 memos in total, some very short. If you figure out how to get around Word's auto-superscripting, then why not get rid of all the superscripts instead of just leaving them off and on in such an odd, random pattern (except for the "st's," none of which are superscripted)? The hypothesis is that the forger used a modern PC or Mac to create the memos, so if he or she makes a mistake, like leaving in superscripts, it would only take a few seconds to fix it and print it out, so why leave them? Lack of time, maybe? But obviously the forger would have had to have spent an awful lot of time to have achieved the detailed matchup in the contents and dates of the memos to whose of the DoD records. There was even a reference to "Bath" in a very short memo USA Today had, meaning James Bath, who was also suspended from flying, evidently again by Killian, just one month after Bush was, but this information had been redacted from the DoD records in 2004, and it was only by chance a researcher had already copied seen the pre-redacted version: http://sugarinthegourd.com/redacted.html
And better yet, why not just use one of the many, MANY typewriters still common in offices to type up forms and labels? Was it that the forger was somehow both very, very smart and very, very stupid, including being completely illiterate with using Word (not that Word has been shown to be able to convicingly recreate the memos)?
As far as whether typewriters from the early 70's can do this sort of stuff, for some strange reason, all these typewriter experts ignored IBM Executives, or just mentioned them in passing without any demonstrable tests, despite these models being pretty common all over until being gradually replaced by businesses and agencies with the more reliable Selectric models. Those clunky old Executives could do a few tricks that the sleek Selectrics couldn't do, though. These are from a "Model C" Executive: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/ExecSuperscript2.jpg and http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/ExecSuperScript3.jpg. A sharp eyed person will note that both examples are also proportionally spaced.
But undiscussed by all these so-called typewriter experts is the Diablo Systems daisywheel printer, made since 1969, and evidently common by 1972 when Xerox bought Diablo for $28 million. Diablo's cofounder, David Lee, left Xerox in 1973 to found Qume. Qume also made daisywheel printers that were code and plug-compatible with Diablo's to the point that ribbons and print wheels with interchangeable. It's important to note the the early Diablo printers were strictly for the OEM market, and hence sold under a large variety of names. See http://goldsea.com/Innovators/Digital/digital.html, http://mfelker5.tripod.com/printwheels.htm, http://www.okoffice.com.au/product.asp?pID=44193&cID=879
The Diablo is a big issue because all Diablo models could proportionally print with same spacing shown in the memos, and well as being being fully capable of full super/subscripting (via half line feeds). This is a code set for the Diablo's: http://www.nefec.org/UPM/dblomain.htm And besides having a variety of standard printwheels, evidently it was easy to get customized ones if a special character or two was desired. A PDF file with some reprints of computer-related articles from the 1980's has some backgound on this stuff,starting on page 14: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/atg1.pdf
The only serious dispute for the memos being created on a Diablo has been a claim by some die-hard pro-forgers that, yes, maybe Diablo's could only do all this, but in only 1974+ models. This is apparently related to some patent applications found on the Internet. However these patent apps seem related to a dispute that formed between Xerox and Qume when Qume started selling its Diablo compatible printers in 1973/74, and which eventually resulted in a lawsuit: Qume Corp. v. Xerox Corp., 207 U.S.P.Q. 621 (N.D. Cal. 1979). However all the information available indicates that all Diablo's, from their inception, came with a core code set that included the proportional and super/subscripting commands (they could also function as high-precision plotters.)
Hope this clarifies. And if someone wishes to dispute any of this, please do me the courtesy of providing some relevant countering evidence in kind instead of opinion or links to opinion. Obviously I've tried at least to be very thorough in presenting my case. I'm obviously in a very small minority with my view on the memos, but to paraphrase Anatole France, if fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:39, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Ah yes, Joseph Newcomer, PhD, long on words (and words, and words....), but a wee bit short on actual demonstration. As you might have guessed, I've been to his site and found it a bit lacking in actual scientific methododogy. You do not remember him addressing the Diablo HyType because he never did, as was the case with all these alleged experts that came out of the woodwork back then, like Peter Tytel, the "typewriter expert". I guess we can cut Tytell some slack since a daisywheel printer technically isn't a typewriter. But one can't really do the same Newcomer -- he makes an awful lot of claims about his expertise. From http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm: "I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting." and it just goes on and on from that. Also, he boldly states, "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."
But as I've more than enough demonstrated, by 1972 there were two widely available devices capable of printing proportionally, and in superscript, and with a small font: the IBM Executive typewriter and the Diablo daisywheel printer. Both devices have been obsolete for decades, but would expect any sort of real expert to show due diligence in researching all the devices available around that time that might have possibly created the memos, discover and examine what their capabilities were, try to find print samples and/or specifications, and so on before rendering any sort of conclusion. In Newcomer's case, the Diablo is not mentioned once on his entire site, and the Executive typewriter is not even examined -- and even then, his sample is only a wedding program -- until until about a week, Sept. 18, 2004, after he makes the claim of forgery on or before Sept, 12, 2004. If that doesn't sound very scientific, that's because it's not: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bcb25/scimeth/intro1.htm
I also had seriously considered the Executive. I did some research and got my hands on a copy of a technical manual that the author remembered being created on a Model "C" Executive. It was proportionally spaced and had full super/subscripting in small fonts. But as evidently with you, I found its proportional spacing to not match up with that shown in the memos. I don't think you can say much about the font or typeface since the Executives came with a choice of typefaces.
The point I was making is that there were at least two devices available around 1972 capable of proportional spacing and full super/scripting: the IBM Executive typewriter and the Diablo printer. Considering that the forgery charge initially with the false claim by the likes of "Buckhead" that there were no devices then that could proportionally space, this was not a trivial matter. Think about it -- the whole "there were forged" business got started with some then anonymous blogger making nonsensical (that is if you had bothered to check) claims about typewriters then and even things like Wang word proccessors could or could not do. And then have these self-proclaimed experts like Newcomer coming out of the woodwork discussing Selectrics and Veritypers and also claiming forgery before even looking at an Exexcutive and apparently utterly unaware of the Diablo. Of course our diligent media didn't exactly help to clear up matters... -BC 209.6.203.244 14:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Newcomer actually inadvertently provides strong evidence that Word was NOT used for the memos. Go back to his site here: http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm#12-Sep-04 There are two things to look at: one is the poor matchup character-by-character between his Word-created "from" and a memo "from". If you do further character-by-character matchups, you will find that the Word Times New Roman font is consistently inconsistent with the font used in the memos, especially in terms of height.
And further up the page, he makes an extremely damning admission: "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'". And then a little further down he tries to explain this away with, "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."
Well....
First off, MS Word uses long established character spacing for Roman-style fonts. WordPerfect for DOS used similar spacing with its "CG Times" font, and it was also the default proportional spacing used in Diablo and Qume daisywheel printers (and don't forget that many of the early laser printers has a Diablo mode to "letter quality" printing). So you would expect at least a modest matchup between Word and a Diablo in terms of spacing, but an *exact* match? No, and the letterheads on May 4th and Aug 1st memos prove this. As well as eliminate Word.
There was some research with different "Roman style" fonts, both with Word for Windows and Mac, as well as WordPerfect for DOS, to see how they compare to the font used in the memos: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html#FunWithFonts Note how all the different PC-generated fonts both match and *don't* match the memo font in some aspect, including even Times New Roman, although they all indeed show "similar" spacing as I claimed. I can't return to this until tomorrow, but I would be interested in your opinion since you apparently genuinely looked at this stuff (I am just a troll after all.) -BC 209.6.203.244 14:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
You can demonstrate this on your own if you are handy with a PaintShop type program. First grab the May 4th and Aug 1st memos from here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/08/60II/main641984.shtml
Now replicate one of the letterheads as best you can using Word, print it out and then scan it in. Now then superimpose your Word replica as best you can on either of the letterheads and feel free to resize all you want. You should end up with what you might think is a pretty good match at first sight.
But now try superimposing one of the memo letterheads on the other. You will then find a true dead-on match that is noticeably much, much more accurate than your best efforts with creating a Word replica. You can see one such experiment here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/HeadersCompared.jpg The two upper samples were made from overlaying a Word-recreation of the letterheads over each of the two memo letterheads; the lower sample is from overlaying the two memo letterheards over each other.
But if there was all this claimed distortion and smearing that occurred when the forger tried to make the memos look old, how can that be that the memo letterheads are dead-on copies of each other?
If you believe the forgery scenario, then the May 4th and Aug 1st memos were originally created in Word and then were deliberately distorted to make them look old. But then how come they still end up as perfect matches to each other but not to a fresh Word replica? Where is "The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations" that Newcomer uses as an excuse to for using a very non-standard font size?
All I can say is tsk, tsk... -BC 209.6.203.244 00:14, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Please provide at least one alleged source for the statement "I don't think there's much need to disprove the Diablo HyType, as the first version of this venerable daisy wheel printer appears to have been introduced in 1973 (apparently in the fall), rather than having been in use in, say, the spring of 1972. At least, that's what every source I can find suggests. Do you have any actual evidence that the HyType was available in early 1972?"
Define "actual evidence" -- I already showed that Diablo Systems as an independent company began making daisywheel printers in 1969 and was bought by Xerox in 1972 for $28 million, and that one of the co-founders of Diablo left Xerox in 1973 to form a rival daisywheel printer company called Qume. What do you think Diablo was doing between 1969 and 1972 when Xerox paid all that money for it? When Xerox bought Diablo, they got the HyType I. If that isn't enough proof, I found some ribbon crossreferences for the HyType I ribbon, which was mostly, but not completely replaced at about 1974-75 with the HyType II ribbon, and they link to a bunch of old, forgotten dedicated word processors dating back to at least 1972. If a 1972 word processor uses a Diablo HyType I ribbon, that kind of suggests that perhaps, perchance HyType I's were being used then. The best ribbon crossreference I found is no longer online, but this Swiss one isn't so bad: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband-multistrike/qume-1145-farbband-multistrike-original-schwarz.asp
Note how you won't see either "Diablo" or even "HyType" mentioned -- Diablo Systems was originally strictly an OEM supplier.
Well, I Googled some of the CPT models in that Swiss ribbon crossreference and found this computer timeline mentioning the CPT model 4200 word processor as being introduced in 1972: http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/01HISTORYCD-Chrono1.htm
Since the Swiss ribbon crossreference for the HyType I ribbon lists the CPT 4200.... -BC 209.6.203.244 03:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
My comments about the Executive were related to how it was not examined, along with the Diablo, by any of these alleged experts before they plunged ahead with their forgery charges. I strongly suspect that only reason why all discussions focussed on Selectrics, at least initially, was simply because there were and are Selectrics still in operation all over (primarily for typing up labels and filling in preprinted forms) and hence handy and not requiring much work. Since almost all functioning daisywheel printers and IBM Executives have long ago been scrapped, Selectrics became the default representives of all 1972 office technology. Until Marian Carr Knox mentioned that she used an Olympia typewriter. So then it was Selectrics and Olympia typewriters that represented all 1972 office technology, with a side discussion of Selectic Composer, a typesetting machine that would never have been used to create just memos. Executives made a belated appearance here and there, but Diablo's not at all. All of this represents inexcusably shoddy journalism by the media, and laughably incompetent "research" by all of these alleged experts.
As far as the aging of memos go, your claim that "None of the experts have claimed that they "were deliberately distorted to make them look old" - that is a straw man argument you created, not any kind of reasonable interpretation of your opponents' views" is demonstrably false -- I never said "experts" and many claimed this. Simply Google "Killian memos aged" for proof. And that excerpt off of Newcomer's site I used had this comment, "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," basically claims that the memos were distorted through muliple processes. Indeed the first, original blog post that started the forgery bandwagon states (from www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/posts):
?? This is a complete quote of what I wrote: "If you believe the forgery scenario, then the May 4th and Aug 1st memos were originally created in Word and then were deliberately distorted to make them look old." Did I mention "expert"? No. Was this a central part of the forgery claim? Yes -- from the original Buckhead comment: "I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old." Did I say that Newcomer also claimed this? No, but I pointed out that he justified using an oddboall point size, 11.5, to *supposedly* dupe a memo in Word (he of course didn't show his results, choosing only to just talk about them): "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." And you -- are you an expert? -- I never brought you up in any of this.
"Buckhead": To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts. I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I did not know Hailey had this second report, http://imrl.usu.edu/bush_memo_study/supporting_material/bush_memos.pdf!! This report independently comfirms some of the discrepencies I had long ago noted -- the memos *were* done on an impact device and that they were only "Roman like" and neither Times New Roman and very, VERY unlikely Times Roman as well (Macs use Times Roman and they have the same problems as Windows Word, so your contention that they were done in Times Roman is unconvincing without real life samples). And despite all the prior attacks and criticisms, Hailey still contends that some sort of impact printing device with platen was used. Hmmm, what impact printing device with a platen could print proportionally, I wonder...) To quote the first part of Hailey's conclusions:
I believe the memos were typed for the following reasons:
1. They cannot have been done in Times New Roman, so the argument that they were done digitally has no logical support.
2. The evidence of character damage is no longer in question; the "t," "e," "a," "c," "R," "o," "M," and "N," are all clearly defective, and in each case the character has unique defects. Other characters not discussed also show signs of being defective.
3. I found good evidence that characters interacted with each other, something only possible with a typewriter or other device that produces characters one at a time and involves physical impact.
4. Spacing in the memos is consistent with using a platen and not consistent with Word or similar digital processes: spacing of the heading is not centered; headings do not align; fractional returns are consistent with adjusting with a platen; left edge of several memos appears to have drifted to the right causing characters to penetrate the left margin
I especially liked his bit about the centering bit, because as I had posted earlier, if you go here, http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/HeadersCompared.jpg, you will find the two upper samples were made from overlaying a Word-recreation of the letterheads over each of the two memo letterheads; and the lower sample is from overlaying the two memo letterheards over each other. Note how the upper samples don't align, while the bottom one does so precisely. If there were differences with how the centering was done between some 30 yr old mechanical device and a modern PC/Printer combo, this would be exactly the sort of discrepency you would expect.
I'm going to have to leave this merry little discussion for a while to look into a few more things, including revisting whether "HyType I" was just a low end daisywheel model incapable of the precision needed for proportional printing (this is another reference to the Adam Coleco and note the ribbon type: http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/adam.htm) But I gathered some extremely useful stuff here. Thanks. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:48, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Please note all of the false claims about technology -- either "Buckhead" had no clue or was deliberately lying. But this misinformed nonsense is what got the forgery charges rolling.
Also demonstrably false and/or disengenuously misleading is your claim that, "As for the memos looking similar to each other, they all went through the same set of operations as far as photocopying, faxing, and being scanned into Adobe Acrobat. So it is perfectly reasonable that they would suffer the same kind of overall scaling distortion." If the memos were created in Word and then copied or faxed X amount of times, deliberately or not, if there any distortions at all, they would vary from copy to copy. You create documents A, B, C and so on, and then recopy and refax them enough times to noticeablely distort them from the originals, they're going to distort from each other just as much -- it's either a random process or else there is a defect in one of the devices that would introduce distortion on a particular area on the page. So if you start off with two identical letterheads, run each one through a series of copying/faxing/scanning operations and the final copies are still dead on perfectly aligned with each other, with no discernable ghosting or smearing, that means your equipment introduced no significant distortion.
Now suppose after you do all that, someone hands you an original document with a very similar looking letterhead, and it's claimed that it was created on the same computer/printer combo that you used to create the documents you ran through all that processing on. Now, you're already determined that the processing introduced no significant distortion, so if the letterhead on that new document doesn't match up identically, then it was NOT created on the same computer/printer combo. And that's the case here: the memo letterheads line up with each other perfectly, with not even the slightest bit of discernable ghosting. The same letterhead created on Word will misalign and ghost in some area regardless of how much you adjust the scale and do your darndest to best fit them. There isn't a lot misalignment, but it's definitely there and very, very much like that shown in Charles Johnson's infamous CYA animated gif: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/pictures/Pictures/aug1873-pdf-animate.gif
If you take the non-forgery scenario where the documents were created on a very different device that used the same standard proportional spacing and a Roman-style font, and you then overlayed Word replicas and adjusted the scale and positioning for best fit, you should expect to get a reasonably good match but with some misalignment and ghosting at least. Which is what you would end up with if the memos had been created on daisywheel printer, with proportional mode turned on, and a little "th" character used on one of the extra printwheel spokes (and without an additional extra spoke for an "st").
I'm not sure what that eliminates. Apparently Diablo made different daisywheel models, and the HyType I may actually have been just a low end model. All of the known Diablo code sheets indicate that at the very least most Diablo models can indeed do proportional printing in two ways: with with a simple ESP P command or via a much trickier character mapping using horizontal indexing and control -- see: http://www.nefec.org/upm/dblofrm.htm The web info is really sketchy on pre-Xerox Diablo stuff. What's needed is manuals for the OEM printers Diablo made for the likes of CPT. It can be verified, though, that by 1975, the dedicated word processing market was huge: 1975 Business Week Article Note the number of "Redactron" systems sold, and note also that Redactron models are also listed in the Swiss ribbon crossreference.
Actually it doesn't now. I just found two sites with further interesting info.
This tech document discusses the proportional print characteristics of old devices -- apparently unrelated to Killian stuff -- including Executive typewriters, (which had resolutions of 1/32" to 1/36") and how some daisywheel printers at least were proportionally printing with just the 1/60" resolution, which is the same as the HyType I: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/propint.htm
This is a belated response to that particular comment, but I've started looking more into the mechanics of having a daisywheel with either a 1/60" & 1/120" resolution printing specific proportional typefaces like Times Roman versus Times New Roman versus one that supposedly the Redactron model "Redactor II" used called just "Times". When I went to look up if just plain "Times" is a trademarked font, I found that it was, thereby stongly implying that the Redactor II would actually print it as such. So I thought to see how this "Times" compared to Times Roman and Times New Roman, and went to this site: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/agfa/times/morelikethis.html This conveniently allows you type in text and see how it look in Times Roman, Times, and Times New Roman all at once. Cool. But I noticed something very curious right away: The "Times" and "Times New Roman" matched up rather closely, but not "Times Roman" -- its proportional spacing was a little wider. Hmmmm.... When I looked into that, it looks as though that the widths and such have been a bit conflated in recent decades for "Times Roman" and "Times New Roman", especially so with the introduction of TrueType on both Apple and Windows. But the plain old "Times" evidently has not been. What's especially curious it that the last modified date year for "Times New Roman" is 2000, while for plain old "Times," it's 1974! Yet they seem evidently identical enough to pass for each other, especially if, say, you only had some coarse copies to look at. My, my....
Well, one big truism about Microsoft is that they never innovate, especially when they can copy. Through the 70's and into the 80's up to the first generation of laser printers and 24pin dot matrix printers, the Diablo codeset became *the* standard for letter quality printing, including proportional printing. If there was indeed a "Times" font option for a 70's era word processor using a daisywheel print, that likely was the standard for all later fonts in terms of their spacing. Microsoft came of age when daisywheels were still ruling the office when nice printing is needed. So basically, if anything looks like anything, it would be a Word font resembling an ealier font. But that's surmising until I can get some clearer evidence. So far all the Diablo or Qume created documents I could find with proportional spacing are also right-justified, and it's unclear which proportional spacing type was being used. A centering sample may be more telling since the centering on the memos have the most mismatch to Word recreations. I am awaiting a little package in the mail that might help. We'll see. By the way, I may not be able to legally post any of the CBI stuff (that place with all those archived Redactron documents), but I'm trying to work out something. [PS - I guess I should mention that the first Apple LaserWriters also came with Diablo emulation. -BC 209.6.203.244 12:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
The thing is that you have a word processing system from the mid-70's with a font or typeface called Times -- what was that, and what character spacing did it use? The Myfont site indicates that it's a dead ringer for Times New Roman, at least according to spacing. The fonts *called* Times Roman and Times New Roman use to be different then kind of merged in a muddy way, so what exactly are their current character spacings? And how "approximate" is "approximate"? -- bear in mind that the LGF Word CYA memo recreation, created on a Mac, does not line up nearly as well to the CYA memo as does the letterhead on two of the memos to each other. A Word recreation of either of the letterheads lines up even worse. If the Times Roman of the Mac Word recreations only "approximates" an earlier, mechanical rendition of a Times font, isn't this result *exactly* what you should expect?
I was able to dupe the relative line ending alignments shown in the CYA memo using CG Times Bold based solely as a best fit guess from looking at some sample printouts from those PC Magazine tests. Since mechanical systems like a daisywheel printer scale very little (10-12 point at best), but since Times Roman and its variants were common even during the 60's and 70's, it would be reasonable to expect something called "Times" to look and be spaced like a Times font, no? And if you then kind of enlarge/shrink and align one for the best possible fit to another "copy" then.... -BC 70.90.98.226 19:24, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I actually have a 1985 manual for the Canon LBP-8 A1/A2 laser printer. This uses the same "engine" that Canon supplied to HP and Apple used for their early laser printers. It also came with a Diablo mode which I presume would he identical to Apple's (HP didn't included Diablo compatibility in their version). Not only does the control set include commands for 1/120" horizonal spacing, 1/48" vertical spacing, half-line and reverse-half-line feeds (for full sub/superscripting), and a general proportional print mode, but it had what it calls the "virtual Diablo wheel feature" to select virtual print wheels with different spoke numbers, i.e., Diablo 88 metal, Diablo 92 metal, Xerox 96 metal, and so on. All interesting enough to show what a standard Diablo pinters and their plug-compatibles like Qume had become by the early 80's at least, but, alas, that's too far removed timewise from the target tech date of 1972 to be conclusive. For what it's worth, all references to to Qumes indicate that they at least could print at 1/120" horizontal increments, which is what you would need to print true Times X X at 11 point. That means that the year that the memos could be printed as shown is down to when the first Qumes appeared on the market, around 1973-74. Close, but I really need to see that 1/120" spec in an earlier Diablo model. But I'm working on it... -BC 209.6.203.244 13:43, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
In the meantime, I'm beginning to appreciate the value of a genuine, book-filled library. I was able to dig up 3 books on word processing dated 1974, 1976 and 1977. Unfortunately they were business oriented and did not get nearly enough into the tech details. The good news to me is that they clearly indicate that the word processing market started ramping up in the 60's primarily with IBM, with a flood of competitors coming into the market beginning in 1969 with Redactron and Diablo, and then a bunch more in 1970-1971, and with a fully developed market by 1972 when annual sales hit $1.2 billion. So basically by 1972, word processors were already common to have "word processing" magazines appear. The bad news to me is that there were a LOT more vendors and means of word processing, including connecting via a modem to a mainframe running a word processing program, than I had figured. Yet more stuff with no tech info about to consider. Also Diablo's came in all sorts of odd configurations judging from the pictures I've seen (with of course no indication if they were even HyType's). I'm also coming across more vendor/product names with nothing much more than just a name or maybe a not very informative picture and ribbon crossreference. Also the authors often call the daisywheel printers "typewriters" since many if not most of the early versions came with a keyboard that was meant for terminal access, but which made them look like typewriters.
Hmmm, did I say that one of the books said that Diablo had a word-processing printer on the market in 1969? Nooo... I guess I didn't. You bad. Diablo and Redactron formed as companies in 1969. Whether they had products on the market in 1969 is a different thing. Redactron products started shipping in quantity by 1971, so presumably did Diablo's at the very latest. As far as the books go, they are: "Word Processing" by Thomas Johnston Anderson and William R. Trotter (1974); "Word processing" by Arnold Rosen and Rosemary Fielden (1977); and "Word Processing in the Modern Office" by Paula B. Cecil (1976). While a bit annoyingly short on tech detail, the Rosen/Fielden and Cecil books have a lot of interesting pictures showing that the mid-70's wasn't exactly all that backwards in terms of office tech: microcassette dictating recorders, full page video displays, color copiers, magnetic media, everyone modeming and "telecopying" stuff to each other, connecting to big mainframes. There were also concerned about paper use and thought this would all lead to a paperless office in no time (Hah!! if they knew then...) In house typesetting (proportional printing) is in fact mentioned as a way to "reduce the space required by as musch as 40% over typewritten copy. This in turn reduces other costs. The user also gains--at not additional cost--copy that is not only easier to read but attracts more attention. Other typographic nicecities, such as bold headings and italics, improve all kinds of communications." (from the Rosen/Fielden book.) FYI -BC 209.6.203.244 13:43, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Ah, you right-wingers -- the only thing you hate more than inconvenient facts is context: prefering to take 2 and 3 excerpts out of what someone writes or says, and then use those to construct an utterly bogus paraphrase. Do you guys, like, take a class in that or does it just come naturally. Here's my full quote in context: "The good news to me is that they clearly indicate that the word processing market started ramping up in the 60's primarily with IBM, with a flood of competitors coming into the market beginning in 1969 with Redactron and Diablo, and then a bunch more in 1970-1971, and with a fully developed market by 1972 when annual sales hit $1.2 billion."
Now *you* admit to deliberately trying to twist what I said by yanking things out of context. -BC 70.90.98.226 22:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
You should be very thankful that this isn't Usenet, where I'm a bit less polite and diplomatic when dealing with, um, "folks" like you. Let's put Diablo aside for the time being and look at Redactron, which has a clearer history, and which also was founded by Evelyn Berezin also in 1969. There's brief history of it here. To quote from the article, "Then she had her brainstorm. Wouldn't it be neat, she felt, to have a word processor that would be useful for everyday documents;even ordinary letters? Might not lots of secretaries find a word processor even more useful than their everyday typewriter?....Just a year later, in 1969, she founded Redactron, the first company devoted exclusively to word processors. Starting from scratch, she was able to use the latest technology. That involved 13 MOS chips, some of them designed by General Instrument, some designed by a young company, Standard Microsystems, and some designed by Redactron itself. One of the chips was actually a very simple microprocessor. The daddy of commercial microprocessors, Intel's 4004, was introduced in 1971, the year Redactron's word processor started shipping."
Now, did Redactron get "into the market" in 1969 when it became a company whose sole purpose was to make word processors (aside from, presumably, money), or was it 1971, when its first units shipped? And why are you deliberately trying to be a deliberate, um, buttocks on the matter? Le réalité et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n'est-ce pas? -BC 209.6.203.244 18:30, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I have zero tolerance with the common right-wing tactic to construct bogus "quotes" by taking short excerpts, down to 2-word phrases, out of context, usually in an attempt to cast doubt on credibilty (i.e. "smear") and distract from the matters at hand, which is *exactly* what you did. You took "clearly indicate" and "into the market" out of context from a not very long quote of mine that in full went, "The good news to me is that they clearly indicate that the word processing market started ramping up in the 60's primarily with IBM, with a flood of competitors coming into the market beginning in 1969 with Redactron and Diablo, and then a bunch more in 1970-1971, and with a fully developed market by 1972 when annual sales hit $1.2 billion."
Your excuses for doing this don't fly very far, and again if this was Usenet, as some out there may know, I would *not* be so polite. But this is a Wikipedia discussion and I'm on my best behavior, but I'm not going to let any attempts at tactical smearing slide by at all. And all this stuff I'm doing and have done in regards to the memo business is strictly an annoyingly time-consuming civic service act on my part, and one that I'm only doing because nobody else seems to want to make the effort, even though it is rather important: not only does this say an awful lot about the character of our President, who has very carefully avoided any official comment on the credibility of the memos -- go look here White House Q&A for Dan Bartlett's response to a question from "Stephen, from Colorado Springs, CO"; but it also makes, if anything, a worst comment on the state of free press -- what good is a so-called free press if it more and more only just passes along supposed "news" items, political disagreements, and alleged scientific "controveries" (e.g. "global warming") uncritically with less and less investigation, as well as being easily intimidated by neo-mobs (e.g. the right-wing blogosphere) and having to answer to corporate, profit-minded masters (e.g. Viacom), as was/is both cases with (e.g.) CBS?
I really am a troll and I so would much rather just point out overlooked stuff for people to just look and them to ask themselves, "does this make any sense" especially in regards to widely circulated misinformation. The forgery "hypothesis" for the CBS Killian memos started with grossly misinformed, utter nonsense via bloggers like "Buckhead" about the state of technology in the 1970's and it still to this day remains the only real foundation for the forgery claims, and even that depends on ignoring way too much, logically contrary evidence regarding superscripting, the letterheads, contents and such. But some bits of misinformation get so imbedded that you need more of a crowbar than tweezers to remove. I've tried the tweezers, then the pliers, and now, with this delving in company records like with the CBI stuff, I'm getting at the crowbar level. I got other things a bit more fun I can do, but while I just a troll, for better or worse I'm a responsible one.
Getting back to Diablo, go check the bottom of this page under the "OT" section. And think very carefully about trying to "tactically" distract from the subject matter the next time you're tempted -- I'll only put so much effort into maintaining politeness when it's not that warranted. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:09, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Diablo may have formed as a company in 1969, but that doesn't indicate when they actually entered the market with a commercial product. And yes, it does make a difference: the memos weren't printed with a businesss plan or an engineering prototype. You say that "presumably" products from Diablo started shipping in quantity by 1971 "at the very latest". But that's only your presumption. You've offered no actual evidence to support it. 71.212.31.95 20:18, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, as I have pointed out again and again, there is this nifty Swiss ribbon crossference list of mostly long, LONG forgotten machines that used Diablo ribbons, and a whole bunch of them apparently date back to at least 1972, like the CPT 4200 and the AES 90 (there are a ton more that are apparently from around that time, like the AB Dick Magna 1, the Vydec 1000, the Videotype 1000 and so on, but no hard year dates can be found yet). But I am working on firmer dates and info, unlike others who are apparently a bit more interested in trying to catch me in a misstatement or such. -BC 70.90.98.226 22:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I posted some interesting scans of photocopies I made from the books: 1) A Grumman Aerospace brochure created on all IBM stuff -- Grumman Brochure; 2) a chart of the word processing market during the 60's and 70's -- 70's WP Market; and last but not least, even though it doesn't have anything useful to say about word processors or even the market then. When I saw this in the 1977 book, I thought it was the oddest, weirdest coincidence I'll see for a while, for, um, somewhat obvious reasons.... Very Weird -BC 209.6.203.244 04:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
But the librarian at www.cbi.umn.edu go back to me about the contents of that "Specifications for Redactor II Printer System" document dated 1973, but apparently the system was forthcoming at that point and not yet in producion. That pushes its manufacturing date back at least a year, and it was pointed out that the Business Week had mentioned that it was delayed for a year after it was announced, so we're probably looking at a 1975-76 manufacturing date at the earliest, darn it.
But...the libririan gave me other info that could be useful. Stay tuned.... -BC 209.6.203.244 18:45, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I didn't mention the issues with the font mechanics of using a daisywheel with 1/60" resolution or another with 1/120". I reluctantly agree that 1/60" would not be enough for a non-right justified line. For true 12-point Times text, you would need a resolution of 1/108" by my calculations. The standard Times XX width ratios could be fudged a bit with 1/60", but would be noticeably off on lines of non-justified text compared to a Word created lines of Times. With right justification, depending on the sophistication of the spacing algorithm, it may be passible given the coarse quality of the memo copies, as PC Magazine demonstrated with this comparison of a text created on an IBM Selctric Composer, which apparently had a resolution of 1/72", to a Word recreation: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1644869,00.asp
But a daisywheel with 1/120" resolution can obviously do 12 point Times accurately, but if you want to keep the math simple and deal with integer proportions, the typeface used by the Daisywheel would likely have an equivalent point size of 10.8, which may have been rounded off to 11 point. Which makes more sense since the IBM Selectric Composer, which used comparable typeface sizes, was cited as being in 11 point by this earlier cite of mine: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/propint.htm
But unlike current digitized fonts, which spacing and size is automatically scaled, the type size wasn't tied in with the spacing setting on daisywheels -- if you selected "Times" spacing on your Redactron or whatever word processor, it'll proportionally print whatever printwheel you stick inm even if it's something like a Courier. FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:46, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I was thinking you could fake it a bit with the 1/60" resolution, depending on the sophistication of the computer coding, but realistically and practically, that was only a possibility with right justification, and even that would likely fail with close scrutiny of the high rez copies that Hailey is suppose to have in his possesion. The big question now is whether the HyType I, with its 1/60" resolution, or some immediate forebear prior to the Xerox acquistion, was the only daisywheel mechanism in wide use. If there was indeed 1/120" rez model as at least an option as well at that time included with word processing systems, then the forgery thing is dead. That Swiss ribbon site shows a huge number of Diablo models that I've never heard of, and I suspect that the bulk of those are pre-1980, so it's very, very likely there were indeed 1/120" rez models in common use around 1972. As far as printer control goes, that was not at all a primitive time techwise, and it doesn't exactly take a lot of memory and CPU power to map out character spacings. The CBI library has detailed specs on the Redactron Redactor II, and I'll get copies of that one way or the other, and that should confirm the capabilities. That should push back the date of when the memos could have been created as is to about 1976. While that's not 1972, it's definitely within striking distance now. All I would then need is a good reference to either an earlier Redactron model or one from a competing product with similar capabilities, but from 1972. Bear in mind that having the memos being able to be created on a circa 1972 device would completely fit in with all of the other evidence, including explaining away the superscripting and letterhead discrepencies, as well as the archaic document formatting, and so would thereby completely destroy the forgery hypothesis.
I'm also now getting a pretty good idea of what the office tech was like back then. It's a very intriguing, almost completely forgotten about era. The word processing market evidently took off like crazy in the very early 70's with lots of startup companies with very innovative products, and reached its peak about 1975-1976. But by the late 70's, it had quickly collapsed into a handful of large vendors, like IBM and Wang. There was probably also pressure from the surging PC market at that point from the lower end. I do remember a reference from a while back about how the CP/M-based word processing systems, and even the first IBM-PC based ones, were far less sophisticated and capable than the much more expensive (and apparently high maintenance) dedicated word processors that they replaced. The latter Wangs and IBM Displaywriters were used mostly as fancy electronic typewriters that could store full documents and apparently could do little of the typeset-type stuff that products like the who-ever-heard-of-it Redactor II could do.
Again, research, research.... I might have a cute, fun thing for you typographers to look at later. -BC 209.6.203.244 19:49, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Ummmm....I had already linked a 1972 CPT 4200 [Fixed typo -BC 209.6.203.244]to a Diablo ribbon and showed how a *later* model, a CPT Cassetype 4200 from apparently 1978, used a Selectric mechanism. And Wang wasn't even mentioned as a player in the word processing market in that 1975 Business Week article covering the word processing business then: 1975 Business Week Article And as I said, and as counter-intuitive as it might seem, the earlier word processing systems by the likes of Redactron evidently had much more sophisticated document creation functions than later devices like the Wang. Look at the description of the Redactor II, a machine that came out about 1976, here: Redactor II Description and compare it to what your Wang can do. Again as I said, later word processers like the Wang and the IBM Displaywriter functioned more like big electronic typewriters with full page storage. By contrast, the early word processors looked more to be meant as do-all composition machines.
But this is all surmising and such. What we really need is actual data and specs on those mysterious early 70's daisywheels. Which I'm working on (which means I should spend less times here.) Well, I'm glad at least someone else here is making use of the Internet for research.
What if I do, and I'm certain I will, find a circa 1972 word processor using a Diablo model with 1/120" horizontal resolution -- do I win then or will I still have to do more work? -BC 209.6.203.244 22:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
http://www.bookrags.com/Word_processor http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/compartics/History_of_Word_Processing.pdf
From the "Bookrags" cite: "In the early 1970s Linolex, Lexitron and Vydec introduced pioneering word-processing systems with CRT display editing."
That "History of Word Processing" cite is just dumb: it discusses IBM stuff and then skips over to microcomputers and CP/M. Not very germane to the discussion, is it? (Not very good history, either.)
Since we're citing stuff, here's another one from me: http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/default.aspx Around 1978 I got a Diablo daisy-wheel printer to go with my IMSAI Z80 microcomputer. Not only was it much faster than the Selectric, it had many daisies some of which were proportionally spaced and it was designed to work as a computer printer. I had gotten into microcomputing thinking that by computerizing my house I'd learn something about experimental physics, since a real physicist surely needs to know something about both experiment and theory. To handle the proportional spacing, I wrote a printer driver. My colleague Rick Shoemaker, another microcomputer addict, and I decided we'd write a book called Interfacing Microcomputers to the Real World, and we "typeset" it using my printer driver and a daisy wheel printer. Addison-Wesley published the book, just as it had published Laser Physics, but this time using our nice proportionally spaced camera-ready proofs.
A library near me still had that book, so I popped on over to take a look, he used a Diablo 1345A, which is a HyType II -- not bad, eh?
I now suspect HyType I's are 12xx models, while HyType II's are 13xx. The first model HyType II would then likely be the 1300. In between that and the 1978 1345A used to typeset the book and according to that nifty Swiss ribbon crossreference, there was the Diablo 1300, 1330, 1330 WP, 1334, 1334 WP, 1335, 1335 WP, 1340A, and the 1340 WP. Hmmm....
I may be many things, but confused is not of them (well, at least when it comes to science/geeky/logic stuff...) -BC 209.6.203.244 03:02, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
I photocopied some pages out of that Sargent/Shoemaker book, scanned two of them into PNG/s and posted them here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/Murray.html FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:33, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
What I'm essentially trying to do is move backwards in time towards 1972 by using provable checkpoints in regards to what common office technology was capable in an given year. The Swiss ribbon crossreference indicates there were daisywheel printers in use back in 1972, but without much indication of specific model and capability. That 1977 description of the Redactron Redactor II made it sound very much like it could have created the memos, and that 1973 reference to it suggests it used technology available at least very close to the time of the memos, but that's not exactly hard proof either (although more info is forthcoming on that). Having a book typeset on a Diablo in 1978, with not only the specific model number of the Diablo used, but with actual pages to look at -- c'mon now, that wasn't such a bad catch for a troll, no? Did you catch the clean superscript? That was totally by accident -- I went skimming through the book (it was late, I had a hard time finding a parking spot, and it was an archived book that I had to wait to be retrieved) and I looked first for any Diablo references, and then for any superscripting. I didn't notice any superscripting and was getting antsy to leave, so I just made photocopies of the Diablo references. It wasn't until later when I was looking it over when I saw the little "tm" superscript. Cool.
What this does is bolster the Redactor II as being capable of doing the memos since that lawyer who describes it bought it around 1977, just one year before Sargent said he got his. And the Redactor II is linked to 1973 in some fashion at least. Also bear in mind that his IMSAI/Diablo combo was likely a much less powerful device, at least in regards to word processing, than the Redactron. That "Scroll Systems Retroscroller (tm) Text Output" controller sounds especially very intriguing, but there is no reference to it in Google. Was that a new gizmo then or an old one? All that lost info.... -BC 70.90.98.226 19:52, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Ah, but as I pointed out, 1972 is now within striking distance -- devices capable of replicating the memos were available around 1976 at least, and these were not at all, as had been claimed by the likes of Newcomer and Phinney, vanishingly improbable and/or ultra expensive typesetting machines. They were indeed actually regular office stuff that even lawyers in small firms were buying back then. Even though there is a lot more research and investigating to be done, and even though there is frustratingly hardly any records left of those fascinating early-mid 70's word processing systems, the bits and pieces of evidence that has popped up so far have all been undermining the fundamental assumptions and beliefs of the pro-forgery people, expert or not. And the vast bulk of the external evidence aside from the appearance issue very much points towards to the memos being real and created by some circa 1972 device.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of "evidence". Some people might consider a book proportionally typeset on a Diablo 1345A daisywheel bought in 1978 along with actual pages copied from that book, including a very nice full superscript sample, to be evidence for what you could do word processing-wise in the later 70's at least. After all, wasn't it claimed by certain people that you couldn't do any of this sort of stuff until well into the 80's at least, or that you would need at least very expensive, specialized typesetting equipment that would never, ever be used for creating just memos? Some other people, though, I imagine, might say, "Big whoop, what does that prove? 1978 is still not 1972." And some people might consider a description of a specific word processor model bought apparently in 1977, but referenced in 1973, as having a "proportional Times" print mode option as also being evidence, yet I guess some others might still say something like, "Eh, you still ain't got nuttin'. Thems docs wuz forged, I tell ya, thems wuz forged! Ya wastin' ya time, I tell ya, ya wastin' ya time!"
Also I am but a smartalecky Internet troll, so what can I possibly do to truly undermine all those well-reasoned, expert conclusions? Really, seriously? But, as I said, we shall see, shan't we? ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 21:59, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
While I've been pretty good at going public here rather quickly with stuff I find out about, there were a few things I've kept to myself, mostly because I need to know what they mean. For instance, I was informed that the 1973 document on the Redactor II compares that to three other competing word processing systems, presumably on or about to come on the market at that point, and each used either a Diablo or Qume daisywheel printer: NBI, OCI-Veritext, and the AB Dick Magna I. I'm not too sure to make of this tantalyzing info so far (some people at CBI are trying to get more detail, though). The "NBI" reference is too vague. A Google on "AB Dick Magna I" gets pieces of a pay-to-read reference that starts off as, This unit was an AB Dick Magna I automatic "daisywheel" typewriter that is compatible with IBM Mag Card II equipment. We equipped the Magna I with an... And all I can find out about the "OCI-Veritext" so far is that it used a HyType II(!)/Qume ribbon. Very tantalyzing, but some more detail is absolutely needed. There's a good chance, though, I can push the memo-capable tech back to 1973 within a week. And then....well, we'll see, shan't we? -BC 209.6.203.244 23:26, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I was able to figure out how to access the article without paying for it. It wasn't very informative, though: it's heavily footnoted but very poorly written. It's about a project linking a legal clinic to a big old time-sharing CDC mainframe at Northwestern University in order to test out an experimental computerized system for creating wills and trusts and such. It's vague when they exactly started on the project, but it looks as though it was 1976 and was continued for some years thereafter. The equipment at the clinic was referred to in passing and mostly in the footnotes. The AB Dick Magna I was actually already at the clinic when the project started with no indication of how long it was there. It's described as a "magnetic card-controlled typewriter" in the main article and as an "A.B. Dick Magna I automatic daisywheel typewriter" in the footnote. For the project it was equipped with some sort of communications module an dial-up modem to communicate with the CDC mainframe -- it was essentially converted into a network printer controlled by the experimental legal software running on the CDC. They also purchased and added: an Anderson Jacobson daisywheel printer/terminal with tractor feed; a Teletype 42 comm unit with a built-in dot matrix printer; and two Teleray 1061 video terminals. From the description, the Magna I seems like it used one of the "KSR" Diablo models that had a built-in keyboard, which made it look like a typewriter, and it used IBM-type magnetic cards for document storage. That's something I guess, but not exactly too helpful with proportional printing business. FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 01:28, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Just before heading out the door, I found a passing reference to the OCI-Veritext, but while it doesn't say much about it other than to make it seem more like a smart typewriter, the article it appears in gives some more insights into early word processing tech:
1984 Creative Computing Article -BC
209.6.203.244
00:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
The second indicates that at least some of the Diablo models from the 70's had a HyPlot *option" which doubled the resolution to 1/120"
http://gopher.quux.org:70/Archives/usenet-a-news/FA.printers/81.08.11_ucbvax.2620_fa.printers.txt
The basic question it whether just 1/60" resolution for proportional spacing would be sufficient to dupe the memos at least as well as the Word recreations. Bear in mind that the Word recreations only approxtimate the memos and are not at all identical, most noticeably with the two Killian memos with letterheads. I know that some of the typography experts think a higher resolution would be needed, but even an appoximate match by circa early 70's device should be enough to severely undercut the forgery claim since there really isn't anything else supporting it in a verifiable way. -BC 209.6.203.244 18:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The fundamental problem is that are dealing with technology that was obsolete and scrapped so many years ago that very, very little evidence is remaining for even their ever existing, nevermind nice think manuals filled conveniently with specs and codes. As I think I demonstrated enough, the "created by Word" scenario has too many easily demonstrable discrepencies and issues to be taken seriously, especially so when the contents issue is factored in.
Of course life would be much easier if Bush had simply fessed up to whether the memos were true or not. His not commenting is more support for the memos being genuine.
There is one more test I'm looking at that looks promising: PC Magazine use to have (or maybe they still do) annual printer issues where they tested and rated different printers, and they included print samples. I can get my hands on some early-mid-80's issues that had daisywheel tests that had samples of proportional print mode in addition to Pica and Elite. Since Pica and Elite are fixed pitch, they can be used as a reference for the type of proportional spacing used in the daisywheels, most of which were Diablo compatibles and had identical proportional print modes. If the proportional mode of the Diablo-compatible daisywheel matches the spacing shown in the memos, would that be sufficient to at least kill the forgery charges? It may not completely clear up the origin of the memos, but it would be nice to finally put the always very, very dubious forgery claims to rest. -BC 209.6.203.244 05:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh yeah, I came across this, but I'm not too sure what to think of it yet: https://secure.fixyourownprinter.com/?search=cr&q=HyType But it looks as though the HyType I was indeed the low-end model since the Coleco Adam used it and the Coleco wasn't made until 1983: http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html So I may have been mistaken in thinking that HyType I was the early version of the HyType II -- they may instead have been contemporaneous models, with one being cheap and the other deluxe. My bad. -BC 209.6.203.244 05:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Nooo....if you have been paying attention, what I've done is establish via a printer ribbon cross-reference that there were indeed word processing systems in 1972 that used HyType I daisywheel ribbons. So evidently there were word processing systems using Diablo-manufactured daisywheel printers at the time of the memos. What's murky now is what models they were and what exactly were they capable of. Like I said, at that time Diablo was strictlyan OEM printer supplier to word processor makers like CPT and Redactron, and so any documentation would have been provided by them and would refer to the printer by their model numbers and very likely not Diablo's (think Toyota Matrix versus the Pontiac Vibe, which is also a Matrix). There is some documentation after Xerox took over regarding the HyType I Model 1200, and I had been thinking that the Model 1300 HyType II replaced it a couple of years later, but apparently now the HyType I may have been around in one form or the other until the early 80's. So this to be looked further into. The important thing is that we now have word processing systems in place with some model of Diablo daisywheel printer at the time of the memos. That's something, no? -BC 209.6.203.244 18:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
In other words, some more research needs to be done. Your viewpoint is that of a typographer, but at a computer firm, Adobe Systems, so you are familiar with computer fonts, but not so much with old printers and their capabilities, including type characteristics. By your own admission, you've only recently concluded that the memo fonts are not Times New Roman. Hailey's expertise is in document authentication and the type characteristics of old devices, apparently primarily typewriters. I make no claims to expertise (but nor do I claim I have none), but I have looked carefully at the methodologies that you two and others have use and found some flaws.
You don't provide nearly enough samples to convincingly demonstrate your point that the fonts are Times Roman when individual memo characters are evidently not. You seem sincere, but you should have spent more time doing more word-to-word, character-to-character comparisons between the memmos and Wrod recreations and then demonstrated how this supports your conclusion. Your pdf "samples" are grossly insufficient by any scientific research standard.
Hailey has does far more sampling and had demonstrated his results much more extensively than any of the other supposed experts involved in this, so he get more brownie points towards his expertise level. He seems, though, to have no idea about daisywheel printers -- instead he extensively describes a strange typewriter-like device with a platen that can print proportionally in a font that sort of looks like Times New Roman, but isn't (perhaps he should have looked at these: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/Printwheel3A.jpg and http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/Printwheel2A.jpg.)
And obviously my interest is in debunking this forgery nonsense, and it is nonsense -- you put *all* the pieces on the table -- fonts, contents, DoD docs and so on -- throw out all the easily refuted bogus bits, and then when you put all them all together, forgery is not at all what you end up with. If anything, what you do end up with is far worse. -BC (this really will be my last say on the matter until I have more concrete info to share) 209.6.203.244 16:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
- Thomas Phinney 07:45, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I suggest you do your homework better. You alleged experts have not helped at all to clear up matters here. You, like Newcomer, have offered a lot of opinion but with very little in the way of demonstration to back it up. You claim now that the memos are in Times Roman font (MAC) and not Times New Roman (Windows), but you haven't demonstrated that with any real sampling either. By comparison, I took all 3 instances of the word "Harris" from the "CYA" memo and compared them to a Word-created one -- the characters don't match up that well. In your interview with Creative Pro, http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/21939.html, you make the statement:
"So, every letter is different. The baseline wavers a bit. That's no surprise. We're not looking at an original printed directly from a computer. This is an effect of the image degradation from being scanned twice at low resolution. This is why many of the arguments based on letter shape are pretty dubious.
If you want to test it, type a memo in Times New Roman. Fax it to yourself (make sure the fax guides are loose enough that the paper can twist just ever so slightly). Get it scanned back into a computer, and then drop the resolution to 120 dpi on the final image. It will look a heck of a lot like the CBS memo at this point. Absolutely no need to use a typewriter (or a degraded font) up front!"
But as I pointed out to you, there was a guy did that with a Word-created CYA copy, http://www.poweroftheindividual.org/blog/2004/09/fauhxed-bush-memos.html, and I again took out his 3 instances of "Harris" and compared those to Word-created one. While the three Harris's are much more distorted than the CYA memo ones, they still match up better to their Word origin than the CYA ones. Also in regards to the baseline wavering, the the deliberately distored Word-created one wavers in groups of letters, and *not* individually as show in the CYA memo, which would be the case with an impact printer. And I made the effort to actually demonstrate this: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html#FunWithFonts.
Have fun in Lisbon. ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 21:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Veritas vincit. -BC
209.6.203.244
18:42, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
What's the evidence for your claim that a daisywheel printer with proportional spacing was available to Killian in 1972? 71.212.31.95 05:14, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
That was already covered: this is a Swiss HyType ribbon crossreference listing the CPT model 4200: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband-multistrike/qume-1145-farbband-multistrike-original-schwarz.asp
This is a computer timeline mentioning the CPT model 4200 word processor as being introduced in 1972: http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/01HISTORYCD-Chrono1.htm (That's only one example, but I had referenced a Business Week article from June, 1975 showing that the word processor market was in full bloom by then.) As far as whether this was available to Killian, that's like asking if a 1972 Chevelle was available to him -- that's a pointless question. The thing that started the forgery charge in the first place was the claim by "Buckhead" that there were no such devices in 1972 that could proportionally print, and then Charles Johnson did his little, cute, and highly misleading CYA/Word animation and so "Rathergate" was born, and truth and journalism took a holiday. All the other claims of evidence for forgery have turned out to be utter nonsense, so it's really back to figuring out what device printed out the memos. If the best evidence is that is was indeed a daisywheel, then not only is the forgery claim dead and buried, but it also demonstrates the risk of relying on the very sketchy blogosphere for real information, how deplorably lazy and sloppy the mainstream media has become, and what sort of a man George Bush is, since he could have put this to rest a long time ago, sparing the long, drawn-out, and often vicious smear campaign aimed at Rather, CBS and Mapes, if he had any integrity whatsoever. -BC 209.6.203.244 21:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, but I've produced a ribbon cross-reference showing the CPT 4200 used a HyType ribbon, which does not fit a Selectric -- maybe CPT offered each as an option. We don't know for sure because the bulk of this stuff, including what would have been very helpful manuals, has been long ago obsolete and trashed. As I've mentioned before, it's very murky about what the technology was like back then. All that's known for sure is that the word processing market was in full bloom by 1975 with many venders now long since gone; Diablo was making daisywheel printers from about 1969 and they had to have been selling enough of them to get Xerox to buy the company for $28 million in 1972; there more than a few problems with the "created by Word" scenario; and that the more you look into it, the more the memos don't look like they were forged. -BC 209.6.203.244 23:00, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Gawd...let me type this really slow so you can understand. The CPT 4200 is referenced, along with an awful lot of long forgotten word processors in this ribbon cross-reference for HyType ribbons: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband-multistrike/qume-1145-farbband-multistrike-original-schwarz.asp Go look, it's there. I didn't make this up. Now as far as the CPT 4200 in your link, that now looks to be a different 4200, the model 4200-i. Why? Go here: http://www.tonsoftoner.com/products/cpt/3044128519.htm That uses a Selectric ribbon. So I was right to suggest that the CPT 4200's came with either a Selectric or HyType option, which trashes whatever point you were trying to make. In regards to Mr. Phinney, I can only point out that, unlike Hailey, Phinney has shown very little in the way of demonstrable evidence to support his claims, the current one being that the font shown in the memos is Times Roman (which is what Macs use) and not Times New Roman (which is what Windows uses). It isn't enough to say something like, "I'm an expert, these are my credentials, therefore you must believe this opinion of mine" without going into at least some verifiable and demonstrable detail at how that opinion was reached.
You might want to consider using this rather useful Internet search site called "Google.com". Perhaps you may have heard of it. Let's say you were curious about, oh say, the ribbon an old CPT mode 4200-i word processor used. You think it might use a Selectric ribbon, but you're not sure. To find out, all you need to do is do a Google search on: CPT 4200-i Selectric and you will get results like http://onlinecomputersareus.stores.yahoo.net/ibmseiirit3.html, http://www.intimecatalog.com/supplies/details/RIBBON_DATAPRODUCTS_DATA_PRODUCTS_R5180.phtml?camp=Froogle&subcamp=DATAPRODUCTSDATA_PRODUCTS_R5180 and so on.
Now that you've confirmed that it was indeed the CPT Model 4200-i that used a Selectric ribbon, the next question may well be, what came first: a model called simply the 4200 (which used a different ribbon type), or one called the 4200-i. Hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 19:55, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
And maybe you should have read the date on the last page of the "Training Manual" for that CPT model: http://compmuseum.org/upload/cpt%204200%20series%20manual.pdf Sorry, but ribbon manufacturing cross-references are very, very specific on models, and all of them have a HyType ribbon listed for the plain CPT 4600, and a Selectric ribbon for the CPT 4600-i.
If you don't like my CPT reference, you're going to hate my Redactron one: http://eet.com/special/special_issues/millennium/milestones/berezin.html According to this, Redactron started selling its first word proccesser in 1971. And According to that June, 1975 Business Week article I referenced earlier, Redactron had at that time sold its 10,000th word processing system. And that same Swiss HyType ribbon reference that has the CPT models also has *12* Redactron models listed.
But this is all still indirect evidence. I think I may have a lead on something slightly more direct, but we'll see. What's more certain is that these always foolish forgery claims are finally going to meet a way, WAY overdue, ignoble ending. -BC 209.6.203.244 22:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Some research in Redactron led to this page: http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/burros/cbi00090-077.html Apparently the company folded up in 1977 after having been purchased by Borroughs a couple of years before then. There is a reference to the "Redactor II" word processor dated 1973, 8 lines down from the "Company Records" section. That wonderful Swiss ribbon crossreference site has the "Redactor II" using a HyType ribbon. 1973 is not 1972, but it's firmer evidence for there being word processing systems using daisywheel printers. By the way, you and others lurking out there my find it interesting to go to the search page on that Swiss ribbon site, http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/suchen.asp, and in the "Druckermodell" search field, put in "Diablo" then click on "Suchen". You should end up with the most comprehensive list of Diablo printer models you'll ever see. Since the Hytype I was also the model 1200 and the HyType II was also the model 1300, that list implies that they were contemporaneous models along with many variations. And logically, if you had a single initial product, you wouldn't put an "I" after it right away at least. In Diablo's case, it would be just the "HyType" if that was its first daisywheel printer. That there were a HyType I and II, and apparently existing at the same time, most likely means that the HyType II was a beefier, more expensive model, and not a sucessor.
But that's just guess work. Getting back to the "Redactor II" model, I also found this http://216.218.211.127/~forums/showthread.php?t=65765&page=13 To quote: "Burroughs bought out Redactor corporation (or at least its computer line from them), and sold a dedicated word processor with a large full letter size screen (portrait, not landscape) with dual floppy disk drives (RAM on a disc instead of linear on tape - HUGE time-saving improvement), for about $13,000. They gave me and another attorney a $3,000 discount if we would turn in a Redactor I so they could literally junk it at the city dump - they did not want to service them even for a $500 per year service contract. My buddy had one, and so we purchased a Redactor II (R-2) (which we promptly renamed R2-D2, of StarWars fame) for a mere $10,000. It used a Qume daisy wheel printer which had blinding speed that blew away the IBM Selectric, and we could attach different wheels for different fonts and sizes ranging from 10 pica to 12 elite to 15 fine print (great for attorneys ), Courier, Letter Gothic, and even "proportional spacing" Times (OMG!) print. It was almost like owning a print shop and having a sophisticated type composer machine. We could do anything...except graphics."
Now, you may note that the "Star Wars" reference puts the purchase at 1977, which also was apparently the last year that any Redactron model was sold. So the Redactor II apparently came out in 1973 with a Qume daisywheel printer (remember Qume was formed in 1973), was sold until 1977, and there is a reference to this system being able to proportionally print in a "Times" font, which is probably either what the Redactron manual said it was or else what the printhead was labeled as.
You go back to here, http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/burros/cbi00090-077.html, and there is this reference: "Redactor II & Printer Specifications, Book 3," 1973. (Box 3, folder 13-14)
That's 1973, and not 1976-77. 1977 is apparently when Redactron went out of business. Also bear in mind that these were not PC's with model changeovers every several months or so -- something that came out in 1973 would be sold for the few years at least, with maybe some incremental enhancements every year or so.
While this doesn't place the system at 1972, it's awfully darn close and says a lot about the office tech around that time, and that "Times" font reference is at least intriguing, no? -BC 209.6.203.244 20:16, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, but a typewriter reference (it sounds like it's talking about the IBM Executive) has absolutely no bearing in a discussion of daisywheel printers. And that 1977 cite was to a particular word processing system evidently introduced in 1973, and the Swiss ribbon crossreference confirms that it did indeed used a daisywheel printer, probably a Qume (the first Qumes at least were meant to be completely plug-compatible with Diablo's.) And as far as "crude" goes, the daisywheel printers then were precision devices, as I had already provided reference for via this pdf file, http://www.tinaja.com/glib/atg1.pdf, beginning on page 14. The only real issue is the question about what the horizontal resolution is for the different models at that time, which can be either 1/120" or 1/60". Some of the "em"-ty headed typographers (sorry...) have claimed that 1/60" is not enough for Times Roman, but we're talking about the memos and their coarse resolution may make this a moot point.
In any case, I guess I should mention that the good people here, http://www.cbi.umn.edu, are apparently going to look for references to daisywheel printers in their considerable collection of Redactron documents they conveniently have archived. I may be a troll, but I am a thorough one. ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 22:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
???? You don't seem to be following the thread very well. Grant it, it's messy, so let me summarize: 1) Daisywheel printers existed from about 1969 and were certainly common enough by 1972; 2) All references indicate that those printers could proportionally print, either via a simple "proportional mode" command (Esc P) or through computer control of the characters mapping and spacing, with the horizontal spacing resolution of these printers was either 1/60" or 1/120" depending on the model (it's murky so far which models outside of the HyType I and a handful of latter models could do which); 3) Qume, a plug-compatible Diablo rival, began making its daisywheel printers around 1973; 4) around that time there were also computer-like devices called "dedicated word processors" that used both daisywheel printers and modified IBM Selectric printers, and the market for these, according to a Business Week article from that year, was flourishing by 1975 with many vendors, manufacturers and products, most of which long since gone and forgotten about; 5) Both Diablo and evidently Qume were primarily OEM suppliers at that time, so the references to the printers they made are mostly masked by the model numbers of the dedicated word processor manufacturers; 6) However, by using a *very* comprehensive ribbon crossreferences like this, http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/suchen.asp, one can link daisywheel printer ribbons to specific word processor models; 7) By Googling those word processor models using daisywheel printer ribbons, one can some dated references to those models, hence establishing a least a rough timeline despite the paucity of info even via Google since we are dealing with long, long obsolete and discarded technology; 8) There is a CPT word processor, the mode "4200" that evidently came out in 1972 and it's only ribbon reference is for a Diablo ribbon. There was another, presumably latter model, the "4200-i" listed as using a Selectric ribbon. This was objected to via a reference to a computer museum claiming that a "CPT Cassetype 4200" in their posession, which used a Selectric printer, was the first CPT word processor. However the training manual for this model, which is on their site in PDF format, is clearly dated as being printed in February, 1978, which is several years after CPT began making word processors. There is a Business Week article from 1977 that states some of the word processor vendors were "trying to sell compatible products into the giant IBM product base", which would suggests, given the date on the training manual, that the "Cassetype 4200" was only meant as a lower lost alternative to IBM's Mag Card Selectric; 9) There was a word processing company called "Redactron" that was started in 1969, was a market leader in 1975 when it sold its 10,000th word processor, was bought by Burroughs in 1976, and then apparently was folded in 1977. There are daisywheel ribbon references to at least 12 Redactron models, one of which is the "Redactor II". There are two other key references to the "Redactor II" found on the web -- one in an archived Redactron document dated 1973, and another from 1977 stating rather specifically that "It used a Qume daisy wheel printer which had blinding speed that blew away the IBM Selectric, and we could attach different wheels for different fonts and sizes ranging from 10 pica to 12 elite to 15 fine print (great for attorneys ), Courier, Letter Gothic, and even "proportional spacing" Times (OMG!) print. It was almost like owning a print shop and having a sophisticated type composer machine. We could do anything...except graphics."; 10) I asked the research librarians at the place where the Redactron files are archived, http://www.cbi.umn.edu, if they could look for dates and references in regards to daisywheel printers in the 1969-1974 time period, and I got a reply that they will.
And that's the status so far. Now are you up to speed? Also, have you ever thought about maybe being part of the solution? -BC 209.6.203.244 13:33, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
You tell me which of these shows more effort and research:
http://imrl.usu.edu/bush_memo_study/supporting_material/bush_memos.pdf or
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/bush/TNR%20vs%20TR.pdf Hailey makes a very strong case for the memos having been created on some sort of impact printer and he concluded that the "Shape and proportion of key characters (e.g., "F,""L," "g," "5") do not fit Times New Roman or any other digital typeface I have yet found."
Sorry for the delayed response -- this is a messy page to follow (I've been sort of guilty of contributing). There was nothing ad hominem about my complaints -- I merely pointed out the difference in the level of research between what Hailey and done, and, um, certain typographers. If the things I cited aren't representative, feel free to correct me. Also, I'm getting a bit curious about how exactly Times Roman and Times New Roman changed over the past several years to explaing the discrepencies that show up here when you type in anything, and what exactly are the true unit spacing proportions these days. I did some manual measurements using the units for Times New Roman located at the bottom this page I cited before, http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/propint.htm, and found that they don't match up with what I found with a test I did in Word -- for instance "f" was wider than "t" and "J" did not all belong in its grouping. Is it because that older Monotype Times New Roman is not at all the same as the current version? Not exactly a trivial point (so to speak) considering that we're dealing with 34 yr old typeset standards. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Really? I was under the impression that they were both experts, one in computer typography and the other in document authentication. No matter -- in science, the guy with the more extensive research and presentation of work and evidence wins. I Googled Phinney's "work" and this is the best I could find: http://www.creativepro.com/printerfriendly/story/21939.html That's hardly at all comparable in quality and depth to Hailey's work. Instead of spinning your wheels with easily dismissable, unsupported opinion, why don't you try some real science instead, like say confirming (or maybe even refuting) some of the stuff in Hailey's report. He gives a nice recipe on page 4 on to show some serious issues with trying to recreate the August 1, 1972 memo in Word. If you have a scanner, it should be easy (print on mylar sheets if you're no comfortable with Photoshop/Paintshop type programs. You do something like that and then you'll have something finally useful to contribute to this discussion. -BC 209.6.203.244 20:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
You may try to argue that this one expert's opinion versus another, but in science, homework counts, especially in showing how you reached your conclusions. Hailey shows his homework in detail, whereas Phinney has not. -BC 66.251.53.50 12:07, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Your Hailey link is broken, it's this: http://english.usu.edu/Document/index.asp?Parent=632 Note the number of peer-reviewed articles he's authored and grants he's received -- that gives him some creds as a genuine researcher. His experience with archiving old documents and his handy stay in the military also give him some more brownie points. You evidently know digital typography, but he knows how old document look. If anything, both skills compliment each other, but since we're dealing with old documents (or ones purportedly old), and since he's obviously has done more research, I have to give him the nod. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, I can totally understand what Hailey was doing. He looked at the memos, saw telltale signs that they were created with an impact device, which he assumed (incorrectly) had to have been a typewriter since what else would be around in 1972 that could do that? He then tried to build his case by artificially copying and pasting typewriter fonts using faux proportional spacing to show how much they end up looking like the memo characters. That was a very naive approach that completely ignored the issue of what device could have printed proportionally like that in 1972.
Bear in mind that when you two look at the memos, your prejudices and/or experiences cause you to "see" different things: his experience is with old documents so he immediately notices all the characteristics of old documents, therefore the memos are old and not forged; your experience is with digital typography and fonts so you immediately notice all the characteristics of current Times Roman spacing like that shown in Word, therefore the memos are new and forged.
I see two guys who apparently mean well, but neither didn't actually take a look at what the level of tech and document creation was back in 1972, thereby kind of blinding both of you to the complete picture. But since the memos look very much like they could have easily been created with on early 70's tech, Hailey wins on a technicality. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, that whole business with Times Roman versus Times New Roman versus "Times" or whatever they had back in the 70's needs to be examined. Saying that they look like they created on a Mac isn't quite sufficient. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Oooo...I'm hurt. I don't pretend to be anything other than a troll, but let me put on this here thinkin' cap I have handy and turn its big ol' knob to 11.... Oh, yeah, when Phinney talks about "18 units-per-em system used by Times Roman", he's talking about digital typefaces that have nothing to do with the memos. The memos are of poor quality, meaning that their inherent coarseness makes such fine unit measurements laughably inappropriate. Also digital typefaces by their very nature are just digitized approximations of traditional typefaces -- they are to real type what MP3 encoding is to analog music. If he or anyone else wanted to really wanted to determine the true typeface used in the memos, a bunch of "A's" should be taken from all the memos and their characteristics averaged out, and then the same done for "B's," "C's," and so on. And then you compare these the defined characteristics of known/standard typefaces. I don't believe he's done anything like that, has he? But Hailey has, so again that gives him more credibility as a researcher and expert. Just pointing out "gosh, that's a narrow "E" -- it just gotta be Times Roman" is *not* sufficient. Sorry.
My head hurts now so I have to take my thinkin' cap off and maybe watch Fox News or somethin' like it to compensate. -BC 209.6.203.244 01:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
That's all nice and good, but there is a slight flaw with this reasoning: the actual memos only "approximately" line up with Word recreations on average when you do a best fit, some worse that others. As you would expect, the shorter memos do better, but then you have, as Hailey clearly demonstrated, a big discrepency with the letterheads. You just can't say, "Well, the alignment spacing here matches up pretty well, but not so much there, hmmm....I'll just disregard that second bit because it doesn't fit in with what I'm thinking." No. Everything has to fit and make sense.
Also think this through: let's suppose Diablos and their compatibles were in common use and in fact dominated the business and government market right up until, say, 3 years ago, and they had a font called "Times" that was very popular. But then cheap laser printers came on the market and businesses rapidly switched over to the point that today that virtually all the daisywheel printers have been scrapped or stuck in a back room. People still like their "Times" font, though, so the PC makers and the laser printer makers made sure there was something "just like it" at least for their customers. Well, that's what essentially happened in mid-80's
And, Duh, I know about the ems and stuff, but were talking about transitioning from a mechanical system that used a well defined font that's been around decades before the first daisywheels to a digital system that creates the font essentially as a picture, one that is suppose look like the same font on paper. Why should they screw that much with an established font? Postscript is no more than a way to describe the font as it should appear on the paper, with characters shaped and sized this way and spaced out that way, and if you want to do kerning, blah, blah, blah, but again, the whole purpose of this is to make the font look the way it's suppose to. If you have a daisywheel printer with a horizontal resolution of 1/120" and you use a printwheel of standard Times characters of about an 11 point size, and the word processing system is set to use "Times" character spacing map for it, there is no reason why the output should not be virtually identical to a digital system that is "suppose" to replicate that same font at that point size. Duh. The only real issue is the variant of the "Times" being used. According to MyFonts, the "Times" font hasn't been changed since 1974, whereas "Times New Roman" was changed in 2000, yet they look virtually identical, certainly enough so that if one created a memo around 1974 with Times and overlaid it with a memo recreated in 1974 with Times New Roman in the same point size, they should match up very well at the very least. Just as is the real-life case with the memos. The centering issue is not directly font-related so you might expect a greater variance there, and indeed you do get that with the memos when compared to their Word recreations.
Important note With all that said, I got some photocopies of a couple of Redactron documents sent to me by CBI. I can't post them, but I can say they are good news/bad news to me. The good news is that they confirm Diablo System was indeed making customizable OEM daisywheel printers in 1972. One is a single handwritten sheet dated 1/14/72 describing approval for a new design that very explicitly had proportional printing. The bad news is that the demo unit for whatever model they're talking about (it's referred to cryptically as "T 2L" ironically enough) wasn't suppose to be ready until October 1972, and apparently mass production wasn't scheduled util April of 1973. Grrrrr....everything described is about a year too late to be useful, darn it. But it doesn't indicate which model they were talking about. There is a second typewritten memo, though, dated Sept. 25, 1972, with some interesting Xerox tibits: there was "pressure" from the primarily the Marketing department to "discontinue OEMing the printer" but with, of course, no indication which printer they were talking about; some curious bullet points that go "a. If Xerox (Diablo) doesn't capture the new-non-mechanical printer market someone else will; b. If so, it might well be even present Diablo people. We agreed that the patents could be gotten around."
Yeah, I know....tantalyzing but not too useful.
Also on the first page are references to print wheels: "They have two new print wheels (Pica = 10 p and Elite = 12 p) in addition to the original Courier 72 which they expect to re-do. I have print samples of both, using a brand new film ribbon (interchangeable with the cloth; available November) They do not expect to tool new fonts (at least for OEM) right now but will do for $10k plus 50X artwork. There have been about 150 ECOS since our printer (Serial #0002) was built. We will buy a new pinter. Ed Lau please order. Comstock indicates around a 60 day delivery."
On the 2nd page of the same documents there are two items of note: "We went through our troubles with our old machine, they were all familiar and there were a few we didn't get. (Including a W printing after CR if the ribbon line was cycled electrically.)"; "Printer shipments to date 300-400."
It's unclear what that "300-400" refers to: printers to date after Xerox acquired Diablo, or total printers to date by Diablo.
While all of this this absolutely confirms that Diablo daisywheel printers were being sold by 1972 at least, things seem like they are all just one year too late for the memos, especially in regards to the proportional spacing. Hmmm....I feel like I'm overlooking something.... At the very least, I have to get more info from those CBI files. So close..... FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 20:48, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Now, now.... I strongly suspected over a week ago that I would be able to show that the memos could be created in 1973, by the time of CYA memo, on common office equipment (as least common in law offices at that time), but 1972 would be hard. The typographers are still doubtful, but I think I have their number. One part of my best-fit scenario is that Killian went to seek legal counsel in regards to what to do about the pressure he and Harris were facing in regards to filling Bush's rating report covering May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973. That was the period where Bush was "Not observed" in Alabama. The official DoD records indicate this completely outside of the infamous CYA memo on the matter. What CYA memo did was add a few details, like: mentioning former base commander, retired General Staudt (what, you didn't know he retired as a general?) wanting to "sugar coat" it; and that Killian would "backdate but won't rate" (the CYA memo is dated Aug. 18, 1973, the rating report was dated May 2nd, 1973, just after the rating period, which would be logical for a backdate since his prior full rating reports were all dated much later in the month -- go to DoD PDF, pages 33-38 as numbered in a PDF reader. The "Not Observed" business and the stonewalling an official Air Force inquiry into the missing rating are on pages 39-44, but out of sequence for some reason). If you are a responsible Air National Guard officer with a no-show pilot under your command who's also the son of some big shot with big connections (Bush's dad was Chairman of the Republican National Committee at that time) and you're being pressured to basically fib on an official evaluation report, what would you do? Get advice maybe? If so, from whom? So the idea that Killian would seek legal advice under those circumstance is hardly a stretch.
Now, it appears that Killian might have had reason to seek counsel in 1972 when he suspended Bush, but there are some key records missing regarding the suspension that should have been included in the DoD records (kudos to Gerald Lechliter: AFM 35-13 PDF) so it's hard to tell. That the suspension was signed off and recorded through normal channels strongly suggest that it was not that big of an issue for Killian since there really was no option -- missing the mandatory physical meant a mandatory suspension, and that would likely have been very hard to get around. The 1973 rating report, though, was a different issue -- that's a judgement call, although I imagine the Air Force (who was the higher authority for all pilots) wouldn't be happy to learn of a completely falsified report. So if Killian was indeed being pressured to rate someone who was not at all observed on duty, making up even a "below average" rating report would still be completely falsifying, and perhaps not exactly good news for Killian and Harris if that was found out later by AF officials. So getting some sort of legal advice or counsel would seem to be the most prudent thing to do for someone in Killian's predicament. Now what do lawyers generally ask you to bring when you go to seek counsel on a specific matter? See where I'm going here, yet? That would explain where those Bush-related would have kept all this time while all of Killian's other memos were destroyed (Knox is on record describing Killian as being a "stickler for rules" and "was having trouble keeping Bush in line")
So conceivably all the memos Killian brought with him would be cleaned up or transcribed for clarity. Bear in mind that the AF guide for such memos indicate that they function as journals of meetings and decisions that could be very useful down the road if there are any questions about why certain orders were given and decisions made (tinyurl dot com slash 7zdmr is a link to an AF writing guide covering this -- check out "Scenario 5). So transcribing a memo for clarity or record keeping would be completetely OK since it's not an "official" record.
What this all means is that *all* of the memos could have been transcribed on the same day in 1973. Obviously this would be very hard to prove, except for one thing: all impact printing devices like typewriters and daisywheel printers tend to have unique wear and strike characteristics especially after they've been used for any length of time. So if one was to have very clean, hi rez copies of the memos, and if there are certain characters that show the same strike and wear throughout all the memos, well....go check page 8 of Hailey's 2nd report: Hailey excerpt. The thing with daisywheel printers is that since they were designed for heavy duty printing, they would evidently wear out their printwheels pretty quickly, but since the printwheels were so easy to replace, it was not big of a deal. If the memos had been printed out a year or do apart, there was a good chance the printwheel would have been changed in the meantime, which would have changed the wear characteristics. But if they were all printed within an hour or even a day or so of each other, then they would have the same characteristics.
But all that stuff is for later. I still have to have to firm up exactly what the 1972 and 1973 word processing systems could and could not do in terms of proportional spacing and in what font (Reactron wasn't the only player in 1972). Not exactly a trivial matter, but I think I can nail that in a week or so. If I can confirm that at least the 1973 word processors can dupe the memos, then Hailey's stuff becomes really important. I want to be done with this murky, complicated mess ideally about a week before the mid-terms for obvious reasons, and they aren't that far off. Ugh. -BC 209.6.203.244 02:11, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
That's not even romotely close to what I said. Might I suggest you try rereading what I posted unintoxicated and without a TV show or movie featuring leaping cars running in the background? -BC 209.6.203.244 16:06, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Transcriptions are not fakes, especially for things like those memos, which are not "official" documents and are instead more more like notes, and the Air Force encourages them to to be written as sort of a journal of decisions, discussions, meetings and such -- see AF Writing Guide Excerpts. I had already explained all this, so your "You're saying you think the 1972 memos were faked in 1973 by a lawyer?" was fully deserving of whatever slapdown I saw fit to deliver. Just be thankful this isn't Usenet, where I'm a teeny bit less polite.
Are you being deliberately dense? Let's say you write up a note to yourself, dated today, that goes, oh: "Oct. 18 2006 -- 1. Mailed check for $5,000 to Dr Okon in Nigeria to help him move $21,320,000, of which I am suppose to receive 20%. 2. Posted something really dumb on the Wikipedia regarding the Killian memos, which are forged of course, because, well, um, everyone says they are"
A year later you find yourself in a lawyer's office and you were asked to bring all documents you have regarding this Dr. Okon and the Nigerian deal. One of the docs is the Oct. 18, 2006 note. It's handwritten and scribbly so the lawyer has that and some other dated notes you made typed up more clearly and then filed away. Nothing is changed during the retyping -- what's being "faked" oh anonymous person of dubious character and even more dubious logic skills? -BC 70.90.98.226 20:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I still need to nail this completely, but apparently there were indeed systems widely available by 1973 at the latest that could dupe the memos as seen. The Redactron docs I got from The Charles Babbage Institute show that daisywheel printers were being made in quantity at least as early as 1972 by Xerox's Diablo unit and that Redactron had at least one proportional printing system scheduled for mass production beginning in April 1973. And Redactron was just one of many vendors coming out with word processing systems right around that time. This info by itself contradicts virtually every single claim by the pro-forgery people in regards to 70's tech. And if you people are completely wrong on points 1,2,3 and 4, chances are awfully good that you're just as wrong on points 5, 6, 7 and so on.
Speaking of points, the typographers here keep talking about needing 18 units/em to do the proportional spacing at shown in the memos, with "em" simply meaning the point size. Essentially what this means is that in order to accurately render a font at a specific size, say 12 points, you would supposedly need a resolution of 1/18th that size. So to do a 12 point font correctly, you need a resolution of 18/12-points, and since a "point" is currently defined as being 1/72", a little bit of math gets you 1/108" as being the horizontal resolution needed to conventionally render 12 point text. Daisywheel printers use to do either 1/60" or 1/120" horizontal increments. 1/120" is too fine for conventional 12 point, but if you use a printwheel with a 10.8 point size fonts characters, the 1/120" resolution would be perfect. 10.8 corresponds awfully close to the 11 point size apparently most commonly used on IBM Selectric Composers, which would make sense since daisywheel printwheel characters in turn corresponded in size to those in the Selectric "golfball" printheads.
What this all means is that the capacity for printing in Times Roman or something awfully close to it, like just plain "Times", was available at the absolute latest by 1974, and most probably by 1973. We'll see.
But I recently got drawn away from the printing issue back to the contents issue by a little phrase in the June 24, 1973 "fake" memo that USA Today used but not CBS: "His recent activity is outside the rating period." That's opened up a whole can of worms once I culled through all the DoD docs to see exactly what was meant by this. For supposedly forged documents, the Killian memos have been awfully handy in figuring out some seemingly odd DoD discrepencies, which again points out how ludicrous the forgery charges have always been.
Keep an eye out on the bottom of this page, in the "Not Observed" section, for forthcoming enlightenment. -BC 209.6.203.244 20:34, 22 October 2006 (UTC) -BC Fixed Typos 70.90.98.226 18:07, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm actually being a little bit dense (by my definition of "dense") here -- despite my research, I keep forgetting that office tech was already pretty mature by the early 70's: everyone had things like copiers, dictating equipments, even dial-up terminal access, and *all* the word processors had magnetic storage of some type, tape or card. Things really were not all that different from a modern office if you swap in Mag-Selectrics & dedicated word processors w/daisywheel printers for PC's & Macs w/laser printers, messy copier toner for cartridges, mainframe access instead local server networking, cassette-based dictating machines instead of microcassete-based ones, and so on. Email was definitely missing though. In other words, the memos could have been dictated at one point and printed out at another, and even stored and printed out again at another point, very much like today. This would seemingly make sorting out when things were actually printed more complicated, but it probably doesn't. If you accept the well-supported premise that Bush essentially disappeared in terms of duty and performance when he went to Alabama, which would have put Killian in a very awkward spot given Bush's family connections, then it isn't just the memos that logically fall into place once you figure out the timelines from the DoD docs, aided by the memos. We shall see, though....-BC 209.6.203.244 00:43, 19 October 2006 (UTC) Cleared up -BC 209.6.203.244 12:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Fundamentally, though, any explanation for the memos, supporting that they are forgeries or real, has to be complete. That means that you just can't say, "They were forged" because evidence A, B and C supports this, while ignoring or not logically explaining away evidence D, E and F that doesn't support this. You have to accommodate A-F and beyond in terms of all evidence regardless if you're pro-forgery or anti-forgery. In my case, I'm absolutely sure the forgery claims are nonsensical, but I still have to be complete. So what if there was readily available office equipment back in 1973 or 1972 (I haven't given up that it might still be earlier than 1973) -- how would the memos end up being created on that? It's already been demonstrated that people's memory of the office tech in those is too hazy and fuzzy to be helpful. It looks as though the early WP systems by the likes of Redactron and AB Dick used the Diablo daisywheel printer models with the integrated terminal keyboards, which would make them look exactly like typewriters -- it's likely nobody at the time had a clue about the difference unless he or she had to know. Still, you would think someone like pool secretary like Knox would remember stuff like that. Law firms, though, were already big users of the more expensive and more primitive IBM Mag-Card and Mag-Tape word processors by the late 60's, so they would be, and apparently were, very quick and early adopters of the more advance non-IBM WP systems. when they came out.
The law firm would explain two things: how Killian would have access to one of the new WP systems; and where would those memos be kept all of this time when his on-base stuff was trashed decades ago. That of course leads to the next question: why would Killian seek legal counsel in regards to Bush? Well, even if you don't factor in the memos at all, the DoD docs by themselves clearly indicate that there was a big issue with Bush's OETR rating period ending April 30, 1973: there was Killian and Harris's "Not Observed" report dated May 2nd, 1973, an inquiry by the Air Force on June 29, 1973 with very specific requests for forms to filled out to explain this, and then a big gap before the next DoD docs on the matter, which came out in Nov 12-15, none of which technically satisfied the AF requests, and which were apparently suppose to involve the "Senior Rater," which was Killian, and apparently some info about Alabama, where Bush has been transferred to, but which wasn't even mentioned.
So there was obviously some funky stuff going on then involving Bush not satisfying some sort of duty, and then when you finally add in the August 18, 1973 "CYA" memo, you then go, "Ahh, OK, that explains the screwy DoD stuff." Bush had shirked his duty and his immediate superiors, including of course Killian and Harris, were getting pressured to go easy on him to the point of being essentially asked to falsify a rating report. It costs the Air Force a bunch of money and a lot of time and resources to train a combat pilot, so apparently they kind of take things like OETR's rather seriously and would probably frown on made-up stuff. While Bush was in the "Guard" of sorts, the Air Force evidently was the final authority on pilots like him. So the business with the missing rating report was not a trivial matter, so neither would be falsify the information in one.
OK, so now we have a pretty damn good incentive for Killian to get some advice on what to do. And most if not all lawyers would have asked Killian to bring along as much documentation as he could regarding the situation. Voila! By just using what the normal behavior and procedures would be for someone in Killian's circumstances, we've assembled all the memos at a place that would not only likely have had an up to date word processor, but would have filed away or transcribed copies of the memos to boot, hence also explaining where they would have been all this time, as well as the potential liability for whoever it was that took or copied those files. And all of a sudden, without any tortured bits of logic and ignored evidence, you have a complete explanation. If you try something similar with the pro-forgery hypothesis, you will very quickly have to resort to tortured logic and extremely unlikely circumstances to even begin to make any similar headway for a truly "complete" explanation that accounts for the contents issue, the superscript and letterhead discrepencies, and so on.
Simple, no? -BC 209.6.203.244 21:23, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Nooo....I had come up to speed enough on typography and type design topics way back (I do my homework). And I actually had a feeling that not mentioning spacing in my response would provoke some attempt at a gotcha, but it was not worth the revision. If the memos were created with an impact printer -- a daisywheel -- using a "Roman style" font and Times Roman spacing -- which appears to be awful close to the default spacing of "proportional mode" in Diablo-compatible printers -- then you would need a certain resolultion to say with genuine certainty that these letters and their spacing are without a doubt this particular font. Now if your only experience, as appears to be the case with Phinney, is with digitized fonts and the fine differences between patented fonts like Times Roman versus Times New Roman, and maybe how best to accurately display them and print them out on with current technology, he would be completely out his area of expertise when presented with documents of uneven, coarse resolution using Times Roman-*like* spacing and fonts. His natural instinct would be to look for a best fit for things he knows about -- like digitized Times Roman and Times New Roman fonts. But both of those fonts are based on old typefaces that were characterized and created very differently way back when, including during the 70's. And when you also stir in all these Roman-like fonts that were evidently common at the time, then you really need to do some research and show your work to justify your opinion and conclusion in the face of reasonable skepticism. Neither Phinney, Newcomer, or any other self-proclaimed typography experts claiming forgery has so far come even remotely close to what would be considered a sufficiently detailed scientific examination justifying their claims. It's so far been just one little spotty bit here, another spotty bit there, and lots of confused logic. That's not exactly enough. I personally pulled out repeating words from the memos to look for common characteristics and then compared them to Word recreations and found the same consistent discrepancies that Hailey did. What I did was hardly comprehensive, but it was still far more than what I've seen done by any of the so called typography experts.
Again, I apologize for noticing this comment earlier. True, the typographers here were discussing Times Roman spacing in terms of 18 units/em, and not really something like TrueType at 2048 units/em, but this still excuse not apparently recognizing this meant that many if not most daisywheel printers were then fully capable of *exactly* doing a Times font using 18 units/em by the mid-70's. And the last I checked, the mid-70's were not so far removed from the early 70's so that a 1972/73 system capable of duping the memo spacing was not exactly beyond the realm of possibility. And if you were truly all so knowledgeble about historical devices, you shouldn't depend on an Internet troll to show that there were indeed many devices in the 70's fully Times capable. Sorry if I sound harsh, but there was no good excuse for how this whole "thems wuz forged" Killian memo thing blew up much to Bush's advantage when all there needed was a little bit of research by the news media and all the supposed experts that came out of the woodwork. -BC 209.6.203.244 01:09, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Was I talking about you or was I talking about Phinney in regards to old tech? Or are you Phinney with an anonymous IP? And didn't I mention something about justifying claims with some sort of proof? I'm glad you had a daisywheel printer in the mid-80's, worked at an office in the late 70's and early 80's that had dedicated word processors, and have some copies of the printer review issues of PC Magazine. Now, are you going to do something constructive with this info, or....? By the way, did you see my further up posts about the Redactron "Redactor II" word processor? Neat, eh? -BC 209.6.203.244 00:01, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
And in dealing with a real-life issue of document forensics, the font is still only part of the equation -- Phinney made a fundamental mistake in only discussing the font aspects of Hailey's research but not other key issues Hailey noted and discussed, like the poor centering of the letterheads and the evidence for impact printing and wear. In my case I'm looking at *all* of these aspects together with what the official DoD records support and show, what people who should know what the truth is have said (or mostly not said), combined with some research into what exactly was the capabilities of the word processing technology available at the time the memos were allegedly written. And when you do bother to do all this, the forgery claim becomes laughably inane. The absolute worst thing that the memos can be are faithful transcriptions of handwritten notes made within just a few years of the dates appearing on them. Which even then precludes them from being "forgeries" or fakes in any meaningful way.
So instead of you or anyone else glibly saying that I don't understand stuff like FUnits and em squares, you would be a bit more productive and have slightly greater credibility if you spent less time making clueless comments here and more time producing research and results that actually support and back up even a little bit of your claims. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 15:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, the thing is that if you had focused on your greatest expertise, then you would have identified the spacing apparently used and left it at that. The poor quality of the memos made font identification too murky, and even you didn't really come down on the "Times Roman, not Times New Roman" side until pretty recently. So you didn't address the centering issue, the archaic formatting, the high degree of content matchup with office records, and excused the very odd superscripting with a very, very unlikely explanation -- that didn't stop you from jumping on the pro-forgery bandwagon. I'm sure you meant well, but that was really inappropriate, especially since is very, very clear that you did not know "about every specific machine that was known to be available in 1972" and hence could not have discounted them. I've already located an entire textbook typeset in 1978 using a Diablo printer and showing full proportional printing and superscripting. Indeed any daisywheel printer capable of 1/120" horizontal spacing can dupe the memos as is. Apparently all Qume daisywheels can do this, which pushes the date for memo-capable devices down to about 1973-74. Find one Diablo printer model circa 1972 with the 1/120" spacing ability, and that's it for the forgery nonsense. The memos with the matching letterheads were printed on pre-printed letterhead sheets, likely also created on a daisywheel, as was done commonly in pre-laser printer days. The printwheel, like Knox's Olimpia typewriter, had a small superscript "th" spoke but not an "st" one, and you still had to remember to select it since it was a manual operation, as with Knox's typewriter. The wear characteristics that Hailey noted? There they are. The archaic documant formatting? There you are as well. And of course there is no need for some convoluted and very unlikely explanation for the matchup of the content to official records, because, well again, there they are. Simple and all the other pieces fit. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm working on it ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 16:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
To be more specific, you claim that daisywheel printers based on technology developed at Diablo Systems were "made since 1969" and were "evidently common by 1972". What is your evidence for that? You also appear to be claiming that these devices were capable of the proportional spacing exhibited in the Killian documents. What is your evidence for that? 71.212.31.95 18:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Not a thing likely to show up in a TexANG office. A Pentagon office, maybe. -- htom 06:59, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Talk about missing the obvious. The fired producer of the CBS Killian memos piece, Mary Mapes, wrote a book basically defending herself called "Truth and Duty". I'm not exactly fond of her -- when the right wing blogosphere started atttacking the memos story on the basis of the proportional printing/superscripting shown in the memos, Mapes and her crew basically just folded up without any sort of real counterattack, like, oh, maybe undercutting the charges with a little research into early 70's tech. I really think CBS could have perhaps brought more resources to bear on gathering the necessary info than some random Internet troll. In any case, I had no interest in Mapes's book, but I came across this much more interesting page on her website for the book: http://www.truthandduty.com/documents.htm
In it are descriptions of the memos and her attempt at "meshing" the memos to the DoD docs -- she got some of the matchups but not all -- but most interesting are the links to the PDF documents at the bottom under "SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS". These are Texas Air National Guard docs from about 1969 to the early 70's, but not related to Bush. What I noticed when I went through them all is that 7 of them are proportionally printed! I kid you not. It looks to my eye like they were done on an IBM Executive, but still. Mapes only mentions that one "appears to demonstrate proportional spacing" but says nothing about the rest. All but one are from the Adjutant General's office with the other being from the Governor's office. Go look: Doc1, Doc2, Doc6, Doc7, Doc9 (Resignation), Doc10, and Doc12 FYI -BC 209.6.203.244 23:33, 19 October 2006 (UTC) Fixed typos -BC 209.6.203.244 23:39, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I do not think that this particular phrase means what you think it does, when used in the context of a military fitness report. Notice that the phrase can be found in Kerry's records, too; his fitness report covering 17 Dec 66 to 10 Mar 67, on lines 16, and 17, and 18, and 20. Quoting ... Paragraphs 15 and 16 are not completed as this officer was observed only as a student ...
It's also used on the report covering 22 Mar 67 to 14 Apr 67 and probably others.
Records examined at http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/jkerry/ftnsrpts.pdf
And in some parts of some of the records it's a box to be checked. -- htom 06:55, 16 October 2006 (UTC) -- htom 06:57, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
May 4th, 1972 in regards to when Bush was ordered to take his physical. It's these match-ups that make the forgery alternative explanation ludicrous. But I still need to nail down at least one commonly available word processor from no later than 1973 that can dupe the memos as is to really start driving nails into the forgery coffin. We shall see.... -BC 70.90.98.226 21:49, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually I now don't think I need a 1972 word processor. 1973, yes, but not necessarily one from 1972. The thing is that if I did find particular brand of word processor that was common in 1972 capable of printing the memos as is, that would have been absolutely cutting edge tech for that year and unlikely to be found on an Air Guard base. So there would still be the issue of how Killian would have had access to something like that. Also there is the issue of where did the memos come from. Those types of memos are not archived by the DoD and would have been trashed and/or destroyed at some point unless there was some special reason to save them. From all accounts, Killian was a "stickler" for rules and regulations, and was big on memo writing. So at some point there were all these filed away memos which were trashed or destroyed after he left the service, yet the only ones that crop up 30 yrs later all involve Bush in some way. They had to have been filed away together like that for a reason somewhere off base. As I demonstated down further, the issue with the Bush's 1972-73 rating report was apparently a big deal that stretched out for several months and ended up involving the Adjutant General, who is commander in chief of the Texas National Guard and oversees all activities of the Texas National Guard, the Texas Air National Guard, and the Texas State Guard. The Air Force, while a separate military branch, has authority over the Air National Guard. The Air Force wanted a corrected rating report by the "Senior Rater" -- Killian in Bush's case -- and was not getting it. According to both the "Not observed" rating report and the CYA memo, Bush evidently didn't show up for his duties in Alabama and hence could not be rated.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the issue with the rating report looked very much like the sort of thing that Killian would have been prudent to get legal advice on, since he and Harris apparently were evidently being pressured to write something up that would be tantamount to falsifying an official Air Force record. From my research, law offices were heavy users of word processors since the first IBM Mag Selectrics came out in th 60's and were very quick adopters of the more sophisticated next generation word processors from the likes of Redactron in the early 70's. That's how Killian would have access to one. And what do lawyers usually ask you to bring when you have a particular issue of concern to discuss? One thing logically follows the other. Some of the memos at least may well be transcriptions of notes, both typed and handwritten, made and filed away at the law firm. The evidence for this would be in Hailey's high resolution copies of the memos has has. In his second, much more thorough study of them, he noted some recurring wear characteristics on some of the letters, which would indicate an impact printer. The thing is, though, is that a daisywheel would wear out its printwheels pretty quickly at high use, so in a year's interval, it would be very unlikely that the same printwheel would be in place and having the same wear pattern. Having all the memos transcribed nice and neatly together to be filed away would give the the characters the same wear pattern.
This is a bit of extrapolation, but a logical one given the evidential circumstances. If you accept the premise, supported by the DoD docs, that Bush's 1972-73 rating period was causing a lot of problems for at least Killian, then everything basically comes together if you simply put yourself in his place and figure out what steps you would have taken under those circumstance. -BC 70.90.98.226 14:42, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I thought I would compile the dates the all the rating reports, including who signed when, for a little game of "One of these is not like the others":
Rating period ending April 30, 1971 Harris May 26, 1971; Killian May 27, 1971; Hodges (additional endorsement) May 27, 1971
Rating period ending April 30, 1972 Harris May 26, 1972; Killian May 26, 1972; Hodges (additional endorsement) May 26, 1972
Rating period ending April 30, 1973 Harris May 2, 1973; Killian May 2, 1973; No Hodges FYI -BC 209.6.203.244 03:46, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
The records could simply have been lost or misplaced, you say? Hmmm.... Well, I was lying in this bed this morning thinking about what was the latest I could get up and still get the trash out to the curb in time when something completely different occurred to me.... Important Note #2 In my renewed recent quest for a smoking gun word processor, I neglected to spend more time looking for more matchups by DoD docs to the memos, and anything funky in the DoD docs. And I guess this could lead to overlooking the obvious (well, my idea of "obvious"). When I compiled those rating report sign-off dates above, I puzzled briefly over Harkness's request for the "missing" report -- but isn't a "Not Observed" rating report still a rating report? This morning, though, I thought maybe I ought to compile another collection of who-signed-what's. Let me know what you think:
April 30, 1973 End of Bush's rating period for 1972-73
May 2, 1973 The date on the "Not Observed" rating report
June 24, 1973 (One of the USA Today Killian memos I almost forgot about -BC 209.6.203.244 15:32, 20 October 2006 (UTC)): 1. I got a call from your staff concerning the evaluation of 1 st Lt. Bush due this month. His rater is Lt. Colonel Harris; 2. Neither Lt. Colonel Harris or I feel we can rate 1 st Lt. Bush since he was not training with 111 F.I.S. since April, 1972. His recent activity is outside the rating period; 3. Advise me how we are suppose to handle this.
June 29, 1973 Notice of Missing or Correction of Officer Effectiveness/Training Report. Signed off apparently on July 10, 1973 by Master Sargeant Daniel P. Harkness of the USAF, Selection Boards Branch. It asks about Bush's missing rating report. It notes that, ""Ratings must be entered on this officer in Sections V & VI, An AF Fm 77a should be requested from the training unit so that this officer can be rated in the position he held. This officer should have been reassigned in May 1972 since he no longer is training in his AFSC or with his unit of assignment."
August 18, 1973 The infamous CYA memo where Killian complains of Staudt pressuring Hodges about Bush, about how he didn't "have any feedback from 187th in Alabama" and how Harris took a phone call from "Grp" that day about Bush's missing rating report (the "OETR" aka the "Officer Effectivieness/Training Report"). Killian mentions he'll backdate the report but not rate.
Nov 12, 1973 Major Rufus Martin signs off on an AF Form 77a record saying Bush was "Not rated for the period 1 May 72 through 30 Apr 73 Report for this period not available for administrative reasons."
Nov 13, 1973 The date stamped on a record signed off by Martin "For the commander" that simply says "Basic communication complied with"
Nov 15, 1973 Major Charles K. Shoemake, for "The Adjutant General of Texas" in regards to to Harkness's June 29, 1973 inquiry, signs off a record that also just says "Basic communication complied with"
Is it my imagination or does there seem to be a big gap in paperwork between the CYA memo and the next DoD record on the matter? And where is Alabama in all of this -- weren't they suppose to supply the AF Fm 77a that Harkness referred to since that's where Bush was transferred to, and not Martin and Shoemake? Hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 13:39, 17 October 2006 (UTC) Fixed typos -BC 209.6.203.244 19:35, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Alrighty then....
I took that "fake" June 24, 1973 Killian memo (one of USA Today's) at face value and checked out the validity of this comment in regards to Bush: "His recent activity is outside the rating period." Unsurprisingly (to me at least), this was a dead-on observation, although not so obviously so because there are actually two different yearly periods involving Bush's military service:
Rating Period for Evaluation: May 1 - April 30
Reporting Period for Service and Training Points: May 27 - May 26 (Note that this period is based on Bush's enlistment date of May 27, 1968)
I rummaged through all the DoD records several times over and noted that there are 3 apparently separate types of recordkeeping for Bush's service: The "ARF Statement of Points Earned," which I'll call ARF; The "USAF Reserve Personnel Record Card" that's filled in by hand, and which I'll call AFPRC; and the payroll records, which I'll just call Payroll. I've listed each month from April 1972 to December 1973 and noted the dates of the days with entries. Some records could be missing, but the payroll records cover all of 1972 and 1973. I'm not too sure what to make of payroll entries with 31st dates, since obviously certain months like February, April and June were never 31 days long, even way back in the dark, misty days of the early 70's.
Some things to note: May 1973, was obviously indeed a busy month for Bush, but it really was outside of the rating period as the "forged" memo noted; also that month has a very peculiar entry for the AFPRC -- a lump amount of 41 points for the entire rating period plus 15 gratuitous as well instead of individual daily entries like for the other reporting periods. Go see page 47 of this and compare that to how the points were recorded in prior periods on pages 33-38 and 43-44 (fixed typo 209.6.203.244 12:41, 27 October 2006 (UTC)); and for the entire May 1972 - April 1973 "Not Observed" rating period, there is only a smattering of random entries.
It's kinda obvious that once Bush "cleared" Ellington supposedly for Alabama on May 15, 1972, he really did disappear until at least the end of October, where a couple of days are noted by the ARF, but he really didn't return to serious duty until May, 1973. In addition to working on the Alabama Senate campaign of Winton Blount, which was the reason given by Bush for wanting the transfer, it was a presidential election year so Bush also likely joined his father at the August Republican Convention in Miami. For some strange reason, those few random check-in's didn't quite add up to being "observed" for purposes of an AF Form 77 "Company Grade Officer Effectiveness Report," and unfortunately for Bush, his return to real duty about a full year later in May 1973 was a wee bit too late even though the records show that he put in a pretty full month then.
Now, you can see how this might put Killian in an awkward position: while the the rating period ended at the end of April, he had until at least May 26 to actually fill out the report. And by May 26, Bush had apparently put in some serious make-up time. So what do you do if you're in Killian's position? Evidently for Killian himself, it was simple: all that May activity was nice, but it was still a month too late -- too bad. But apparently some others disagreed with that decision. Rufus Martin on May 26 gave Bush 56 ARF points (41+15), which is just over the minimal of 50, even though that's iffy legally -- you need to put in a full duty year to get 15 gratuitous points. For instance Bush only got 5 gratuitous points for the May 27, 1973 - May 26 1974 period because he left for Harvard in the fall of 1973. I bet the specific pressure put on Killian and Harris was to fold Bush's May activity into the rating report, but that would have been, well, wrong.
Some more surmising on my part, but here are some hard numbers and dates to chew on:
Apr 1972 ARF: AFPRC: 4,6,10-12,15-16; Payroll 4,6,10-12,15-16,31 (corrected 209.6.203.244 12:41, 27 October 2006 (UTC))
May 1972 ARF: AFPRC: 26 (15 Gratuitous Pts added for 5/27/72-5/26/73) Payroll: No pay
Jun 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Jul 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Aug 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Sep 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Oct 1972 ARF: 28-29; AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Nov 1972 ARF: 11-14; AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Dec 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Jan 1973 ARF: 4-6,8-10; AFPRC: Payroll: 4-6,8-10
Feb 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll 31
Mar 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Apr 1973 ARF: 7-8; AFPRC: Payroll: 7-8,31
May 1973 ARF: 1-3,8-10,19-20,22-24,29-31; AFPRC: 26 (41 points + 15 gratuitous added); Payroll: 1-3,8-10,19-20,22-24,29-31
Jun 1973 ARF: 5-7,23-24; AFPRC: Payroll: 5-7,23-24,31
Jul 1973 ARF: 2-3,5,9-12,21-22,23-27,30; AFPRC: Payroll: 2-3,5,9-12,16-19,21-27,30
Aug 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Sep 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: 31
Oct 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Nov 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: 31
Dec 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
-BC 209.6.203.244 04:11, 23 October 2006 (UTC) Fixed Wiki oddity with carriage returns. -BC 70.90.98.226 12:57, 23 October 2006 (UTC) 70.90.98.226 13:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 13:35, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
By the way, the above pretty much confirms that the May 2nd "Not Observed" rating report was indeed backdated just as the CYA memo says it was. While culling for date info, I noted that with the exception of payroll, yearly reports including things like ARF and AFPRC are all dated on or about May 26, which is based on the May 27 - May 26 reporting period for Bush, which in turn makes that May 2nd date for the 1972-1973 rating report extremely odd and out of place -- unless, of course, it was backdated just as the CYA said it was. -BC 70.90.98.226 18:38, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Fixed more typos and did some minor cleanups -BC 209.6.203.244 03:16, 24 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 03:18, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
I suppose I should mention a few notable discrepencies I came across while culling the DoD records aside from Rufus Martin giving all those points to Bush in one lump sum on May 26, 1973. These aren't really directly related to the Killian memos per se, but....well, whoever's out there can decide if they are significant or not.
1) The flight records have two evidently bogus entries at the very end of Bush's last military flights, which ended in 1972: "8/25" and "5/27". Not only are these completely out of sequence from the ones before them, but Bush had "cleared" Ellington for Alabama on 5/15 according to the "Not Observed" rating report and he was suspended from flying on August 1, 1972. See: Last Bush Flights
2) There should have been specific forms and records following up on Bush's flight suspension, but every single one is missing. These are Air Force requirements and not so much Guard. The "AFM 35-13" cited in Bush's suspension very clearly states: "All rated officers on flying status must accomplish a medical examination annually or biannually (flight surgeons) as prescribed by AFM 160-1. Failure to accomplish a required medical examination disqualifies the officer for flying duty and he will be suspended effective the first day of the month following his birthmonth, citing this paragraph as authority. (1) The local commander who has authority to convene a Flying Evaluation Board or forward through command channels a detailed report of the circumstances which resulted in the officer's failure to accomplish a medical examination, along with a recommendation that the suspension be removed. (2) The individual's major command will forward the report along with the command recommendation to USAFMPC/DPMAJD, Randolph AFB TX 78148, for final determination." See: AFM 35-13 and AFM 35-13 Excerpt
Note: I got the AFM 35-13 info from http://www.glcq.com/regs
3) There are literally no DoD records at all regarding Alabama from when Bush was suppose to be there doing "equivalent duty" with the 187th Tactical Recon Group. This Sept. 15, 1972 record shows that Bush was suppose to put in 2 full days on Oct 7-8, 1972 and then again two more on Nov 4-5, but these dates don't show up in the points or the payroll records, indicating Bush also didn't show up. So where is the paperwork regarding this and all other 187th matters? The DoD records indicate that forms and reports get CC'd (or "Cy'd") quite a bit and to different locations, so it's extremely, extremely unlikely that they and all their copies could would have been coincidently lost while other DoD docs for that period are readily found. Indeed it appears that the next time after that Sept. 15, 1972 that "Alabama" even gets mentioned in any official DoD doc is in the backdated "Not Observed" rating report in 1973.
Item #1 is just odd and I have no idea what it could mean (backdating maybe).
Note: this discrepency was also noted, among many others, in an analysis done by the AP, which got the records via FOIA, here: AP Analysis of Bush Flight Records.
And I guess I should mention there seems to be a tenuous connection between all this and one of the memos, the Feb 2, 1972 USA Today one where Killian simply asks Harris to "Update me as soon as possible on flight certifications. Specifically — Bath and Bush." If you go to Bush's Flight Records, page 9, you'll see a double entry for Feb 10, the first one showing Bush having to make 2 passes in order to land (look towards the end of the line ) -- the first time indicated in all of his records. Also, on line 7, there is either Feb 19 or Feb 09 (it's smeared) date for a T-33 ("TO33A"), a training jet that he should have outgrown, and right after that there's anout-of-sequence entry for an "SMF102A," apparently an F102A simulator. This seems to indicate some sort of new and growing problem with flying, especially when you look at the following month, March, where Bush is not only flies a T-33 several times, but as only the co-pilot in about half of those. Now what would cause Killian back at the beginning of February to be apparently concerned that this sort of stuff would happen? Another hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 05:21, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Items #2 & #3, though, give much support to Bill Burkett's claim that 1997 there was a purge of embarrassing documents from Bush's military files involving Joe Allbaugh (Bush's chief of staff while governor of Texas) and Maj. Gen. Daniel James III, the Adjutant General of Texas from Nov 1995 - June 2002 before Mr. Bush promoted him to head the National Guard in Washington. (General Ross Ayers was the Adjutant General in 1972-73). Go see: Dallas Morning News Piece
All this detective work is intriguing, but it's not really a job an Internet troll should be doing. It's unfortunate that Bush's commanders at the time, William Harris and Jerry Killian, aren't around to answer some obvious questions about Bush's guard duty that Bush himself has overtly avoided. However Bobby Hodges and Rufus Martin are still around, though, and they should have been grilled much more than they have been so far over Bush's Air National Guard history. Bush Sr. was already a big shot at the time and then only several years later ran for President during the Republican primaries before becoming Vice-President to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Of course Bush Jr. became Governor of Texas in 1995 and the US President in 2000. So it's extremely unlikely that Martin and Hodges would have forgotten about Bush when he was a junior officer at their base, especially the time he was suspended from flying, which was apparently not so common a thing judging from the DoD records.
Indeed, Hodges and Martin are on record evidently fibbing to the grossly incompetent Thornburgh-Boccardi report panel when they both told the panel that Bush's flight suspension recorded by the DoD as the "Verbal orders of the Comdr on 1 Aug 72" (see Suspension Notice) was a reference to Hodges, although Hodges says he couldn't specifically remember issuing the verbal order "over 30 years ago." See CBS Panel Report, page 154
This is very much explicit BS since other DoD records clearly show that Killian was the Squadron Commander and therefore Bush's direct superior and the one who would have issued such a verbal order in the chain of command, and that Hodges simply signed off on the order over a month later on Sept, 5, 1972. See Hodges's Suspension Sign-off
Update: Actually, after rereading AFM 35-13, it does very much appear that Hodges and Martin lied to the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel. According to the AFM 35-13, there's apparently at least a 30-day grace period of sorts before written orders are "published," thereby making the suspension official. So the timeline for Bush's suspension is: Aug 1, 1972 - Killian verbally suspends Bush from flying; Sept 5, 1972 - Hodges signs off and "publishes" the order; Sept 19, 1972 -- date stamped on the order apparently by Martin, when the suspension order was forwarded to the Adjunct General (AGTEX/APO); Sept 29, 1972 - Aeronautical Orders Number 87 by the National Guard Bureau officially recording the suspension.
Note: Another apparent discrepency shows up when you look at another pilot who was Bush's friend at the time and future business partner, James Bath, the only other pilot suspended in Aeronautical Orders Number 87 but whose name is redacted (his entry follows Bush's). His suspension is identical to Bush's aside from the date, Sept 1, 1972 -- exactly a month after Bush's. But the date on the order is the 29th, not quite a 30 day grace period, odd considering that it took almost twice the time for Bush's verbal suspension to become official. Hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 00:46, 27 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 04:20, 30 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 14:51, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Therefore it's my very strong feeling that if either Hodges or Martin were to be put under oath and asked about the memos and Bush's real military history, there would be little need for all this tedious detective work into early 1970's tech and all this painfully detailed assembly of supporting DoD evidence. Ya think? -BC 209.6.203.244 17:28, 24 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 22:19, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry for the gap in updates. But I had a little side project to update for election day: http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html
The typographers out there might get a chuckle at what happened when I extrapolated the default proportional spacing for a Diablo-type daisywheel printer from an old PC Magazine print sample. Fun stuff indeed. Enjoy -BC 209.6.203.244 08:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Blogs written by someguy are not reliable sources. Do not use them as such. JBKramer 21:21, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
JBKramer is evidently confused, as WP:RS doesn't apply to the vast majority of links that were removed. Simply put, WP:RS is a policy that defines what sort of citations are acceptable; not links and not mentions. In other words, any facts stated or claims repeated in the article have to be backed up by reliable sources such as newspapers and not blogs (unless there's a very good reason to do so), but there's no restriction on mentioning blogs or linking to them if they're relevant. In this case, it's impossible to argue that the blogs are not relevant, since they were the ones who broke the story and did the initial research. They are primary sources and as such are important, even though their claims are not considered reliable until backed up by reliable tertiary sources. You can't describe this issue with sufficient depth unless you link to the primary sources that started it. — Imp i 09:52, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Au contraire, the subject of this article is both the Killian documents AND their unmasking as forgeries. The blogs were the first to spot the evidence of forgery and continued to drive it until the major news media caught hold of it. Thus they are an intrinsic part of the subject and we are indeed obliged to link to them. — Imp i 14:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Orwellian. http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/4/ htom 14:49, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
My 2 cents (earlier offered in response to authenticity issues):
Thanks, TheronJ 19:22, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
In an article like this where blogs, which seem to be unreliable sources are a main subject of the article and the controversy, need to be included to improve the article and Wikipedia as a whole, it may be prudent to
ignore all rules and add it anyways.--
RWR8189
23:56, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
The blogs are an integral part of the story. Where the events being cited themselves occurred in blog postings, that is the blog is the primary source, only citing independent news media reports is just silly. Removing the blog references has the effect of vandalism to the article (albeit with much better intentions than the usual vandalism, to be sure). -- Tphinney 07:00, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
This dispute is about whether blogs can be cited as reliable sources in this article.
Statements by editors involved in the dispute:
Comments
Why the superscript th in Rathergate? The article doesn't explain and I'm not American, so I don't know myself. It seems odd that there'd be something visually odd in the article with no apparent justification… — OwenBlacker 18:07, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Note: I have removed the original research presented here by User:Callmebc (as another editor on this page asked someone to do). In addition, at 7,000 plus words the essay seems to run against the policy that Wikipedia is not a hosting service. Callmebc is free to post this information on his or her own website and, if he/she can provide valid citations, seek consensus on adding the info to the article's page. But the talk page should not be used for hosting long diatribes like this. Best, -- Alabamaboy 17:39, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Extra Note This: And I just put it back, "Hick boy" -- this is a discussion, and the post uses extensive hyperlinks to documented and existing sources to undermine the forgery charges. I gave everyone ample opportunity to find fault and they've so far failed. If you think I'm wrong anywhere, feel free to take your best Google at it and post your results. In the meantime, keep your crawfishing hands off it. Callmebc 00:18, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I've again removed this information. You can discuss making changes to this article but you can not use this article's talk page to post an entirely different counter-point to the article. That violates several Wikipedia policies, which I mentioned above. Also, please stop the personal attacks or you will be blocked. -- Alabamaboy 17:01, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a number of policies regarding WP:BLP, personal attacks, and civility, all of which you are violating or have violated on this discussion page and in other places. Calling everyone who disagrees with you or has asked you to abide by Wikipedia policy a liar (as you did to me in your comments above) also violates the cornerstone of Wikipedia civility, which is to assume good faith. In addition, my previous concerns about the essay you keep posting here are still valid. I have no axe to grind on this article or talk page except to make sure that the page and these discussions follow Wikipedia policy. If you wish to take me to arbitration over this (as you've threatened to do), feel free to do so. Best, -- Alabamaboy 01:57, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
2 April post, restored by Andyvphil 15:40, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Short and to the point, eh? Did I not just thoroughly squash every single objection...?
I'm also curious about your assertion, 'Whether it was a 1973 Redactron or a phototypesetter that Killean DIDN'T have in his bedroom or office is irrelevant -- the point is that he didn't, in 1972, type the memos Rather produced before the camera.' Where did I say he had a "Redactron or a phototypesetter" in his "bedroom or office"? I don't seem to recall claiming this for some strange reason.
And, [a]lso you wrote, 'The fact that you suggest the Rather memos could instead have been 1973 transcriptions from 1972 originals by the man who didn't type suggests that you've given up on the idea that the Rather memos are the 1972 originals they purport to be. True or false? ' False. Actually I have long maintained that, and this is an exact quote from my web site: 'At the absolute worse, they had to have been accurate transcriptions, and even then they would have had to have been printed out within a year or so of their date for reasons described further down.
Nobody has refuted this. Also I keep pointing out that the Feb. 2nd, 1972 memo, which CBS had but never used, contains information -- concern over Bush's flight certification -- that could only have been even surmised from carefully analyzing Bush's flight records. But it turns out that those flight records were not released until Sept. 7th, 2004 -- and CBS had obtained the memos from Burkett on Sept. 2nd and 5th.
OK, everyone, let's go try to figure out what "Andyvphil" is trying to say here (I'll separate out my stuff he quotes from his):
Short and to the point, eh? Did I not just thoroughly squash every single objection...?
OK, did everyone follow that? He earlier made the comment a 1973 Redactron or a phototypesetter that Killean DIDN'T have in his bedroom or office is irrelevant supposedly in some sort of response to something I never posted, so I called him on it. Somewhere in this, although it's a bit unclear why, Andyvphil "therefore" concludes Killian didn't type them up. Sherlockingly logical, no?
Alrighty then. Because office word processors since the 60's could save to magnetic media for later editing and printing pretty much the same way things are done today, I had to allow for that. I also had to allow for the likely possibility that someone, like say a legal secretary, may have typed up Killian's handwritten notes, which would technically mean that they would be transcriptions in that case. Andyvphil seems to think that if, say, a secretary types up and prints out her boss's notes, or even retypes and cleans up something he had typed up earlier, that's counterfeiting. Hmmm....correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe that's not exactly a universally held belief.
Hmmm...Andyvphil actually says something genuinely interesting here: Maybe they're accurate 1973 transcriptions of 1972 memos, but Killian didn't, in 1972, type the memos Rather produced before the camera! So in a half-ass, still self-denying manner, he's allowing that they could maybe, possibly have been created in 1973 as transcriptions, but which he then claims would still make them "counterfeit". I'm now very curious if this is going to be the main fall back position for the bloggers who had been screaming "Forgeries!" "Fakes!" "Rathergate!" at the top of their virtual lungs the past couple of years. Whatever -- while interesting, the right wing blogger community, despite being the instigators and using false information and outright lies as "evidence," was actually never the greatest villain in all of this and hence not my main target.... Callmebc 14:08, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Look, the bottom line is that: A) nobody has come even close to recreating all of the memos with a modern word processor; B) key formatting artifacts in the memos, like the odd superscripting pattern, are consistent with old office equipment; C) everybody (well, except for one or two exceptions...) was absolutely clueless about how widespread and sophisticated 70's era word processing was. It wasn't even known that IBM's standard office typewriter until the arrival of the Selectrics, a model called the Executive, came with proportional printing, multiple typeface options, and interchangeable typebars with special characters; D) ALL of the so called evidence for forgery, from alleged appearance and formatting issues to terminology to content turns out to be utter BS with any scrutiny; E) one of the memos, the February 2nd, 1972 one, could not have been forged, period, since the *only* information even useable in theory for reconstructing the contents, the flight records, was not made available by the DoD until after CBS had obtained the memos.
And I'll keep repeating this until it seeps into your thick head: there is no way whatsoever to fit all of the available evidence into any forgery scenario under any circumstances -- it is literally impossible Callmebc 23:50, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Please note that it would be highly uncommon for the Air National Guard unit and Killian's secretary to have a $7,000 or $8,000 wordprocessing machine with tape or cartridge memory during the early 1970's that you alledged was the type of machine that could provide the proportional spacing. Also note that Killian's secretary specifically said that she had a standard typewriter, not a wordprocessor. She also said that in her memory, she did not write those memos and it was her belief that they were forged.
Not only was the word processing market booming by 1972, but you can't and never could recreate all of the memos with modern word processing equipment. The "CYA" memo recreation of Charles Johnson that got such a wide circulation involved the simplest and shortest memo and even then there were notable discrepencies. Word recreations fail on the three other memos, most noticeably the two with letterheads. This is all covered further up. Since the average person in 1972 was absolutely computer illiterate, and since most of the word processors at that time looked like typewriters attached to a metal box, TANG could have had some and unless you were one of the operators, nobody would remember them. But I never thought the memos were created on base -- they were likely created in a law or JAG office given how they were grouped and given the sensitive nature of the topic: a son with powerful family connections blowing off his pilot duty along with an official USAF inquiry into the "Not Observed" rating report. That would have put Killian in a very awkward position where legal advice would have been smart and prudent.
Why do you insist that she typed these original documents when she herself says that she did not. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes dug her up (which they failed to do for the original broadcast) only after they were challenged by bloggers. She, the supposed author of the documents, discredited them. She then went on to say that she heard negative things about Bush and that he missed meetings (as she recalled), but says that she did not type those documents, and she would have been the person to do it.
Would Killian have authored them? Would he have a $7K-$8K machine in his own office while his secretary used a standard typewriter and did most of the unit typing? Imagine how fantastic a scenaqrio you are suggesting. Would the LTC have had such a machine in his home office for typing private notes? (Would you?).
Let's return to the real world! Even after extensive research by Rather and Mapes, they say "the documents have not been proven to be forgeries". And they go on to say that, "While the documents may not be originals, at least the story is true". Why did they fail to defend their own investigative report? Mapes has written a book on the topic, and has not "uncovered" this hypothesis that Killian's secretary had a $7K early wordprocessor in her office (because she knows it is not true having spoken directly with the secretary).
The fact that there existed in the world a machine that could produce proportional spacing in the early 1970's is far short of saying the secretary forgot what kind of machine she worked on and forgot that she typed the memos. She denies both! And she is a Bush critic (as her interview on 60 Minutes clearly shows).((unsigned insertion by Reallygone, 18:06 6 April 2007 (UTC)))
The Killian memos have been demonstrably proven to be forgeries. All involved, other than the politically driven Bush-haters, accept widespread acknowledgement of the counterfit nature of the documents presented by Rather and Mapes in an attempt to affect the outcome of the last Presidential election. Excellent work was done by a number of Bloggers to expose the documents as fakes and shed light on the agendas of others who wished it wasn't so.((unsigned insertion by 72.204.236.227, 22:12 6 April 2007 (UTC)))
Missing from the Aftermath section is the "reassignment" of Sr Producer Esther Kartiganer, [4] who sued CBS as a result. [5] No time to add this myself...but the story element is readily Googled. Andyvphil 14:14, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
The section "Initial Skepticism" doesn't explicitly cover the initial lack of skepticism in MSM. See the AP Story [6] with it's repetition of the misidentificaltion of Stoudt as heading TANG. And see [7] (search for "Washington Post"). The significance of this story is that that was overcome, so the initial gullibility/resistance maybe needs to be covered better? Andyvphil 13:09, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
The research may turn up a typewriter that could have possibly performed the task but that is not a conclusive fact and it most certainly does not effect whether or not the documents are forgeries. This was an Air National Guard office. The chance of it having the most sophisticated advanced office equipment of that current year are not only low but highly improbable. The budget for the Air National Guard was going down. They were letting pilots go and they were retiring planes. The documents can't be verified as real and they certainly were not verified as original or real prior to Dan Rather going on TV. However, rather than wait until they were verified which would have been to late for the election, Rather and Maples ran the story anyway. Maples and Rather have never hide the fact that they disliked the republicans and Bush. To say this was anything but a convienant hatchet job is giving it more credit than it is worth. The real underlying story is that a major news outlet ran with an unconfirmed story defaming a canidate just prior to an election. They knew without question that the news they reported would and could effect the election. We had a major news outlet pick a canidate they liked, and they ran a hit piece attacking the one they didn't. They campaigned for a canidate without any restrictions or consequences.
The opinion pieces are the only punishment that they really got. They lost thier jobs, but what happened to CBS? Nothing.
Quek807 20:43, 6 April 2007 (UTC)Shane Hanson
See The Smoking Memo at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12615
Also, try typing up the memo yourself using a modern version of MS word and compare the results to the CBS memo. Then try it with, say, StarOffice under Linux and see what happens.((unsigned insertion by 70.20.186.13, 00:24 7 April 2007 (UTC)))
While there is a lot of focus on proportional fonts and the th superscript, an even more conclusive objection to some of the documents being 1972-era is the kerning. Kerning is the removal of small amount of space between some adjacent letter combinations to provide a more polished look, typical peresent only in typesetting. Kerning is not done with a mechanical typewriter with a proporational font... as to do kerning, you need to know the next letter to be typed. In hot type typesetting like linotype, the typesetter types without regard to waiting for next character to appear on the page, so it would not be confusing to the typesetter that the creation of the type lags behind the typing. Primer on kerning. The presence of kerning is a clear indication that a computer based word processing software program was used in creating the documents (unless someone wants to propose that routine memos in the military were produced on linotype machines). Seriously, don't spend the rest of your life on this. StreamingRadioGuide 20:56, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a webspace provider or a discussion forum. More importantly, Wikipedia is most emphatically not a vehicle for defaming living people. (The rules here forbid saying anything negative about someone unless a proper source has previously said that on the record. Note that these rules now apply to all pages on Wikipedia, not just the articles.) I have just redacted several defamatory statements, replacing them with "[Redacted per WP:BLP". I did not check the comments from 2006. Please redact anything I missed.
We should also try to be polite to each other. Criticising comment is OK; attacking other editors is not.
Another problem is that this page is too long, and should be archived ASAP. (We'd need to copy the "Esther Kartiganer" section onto the new talk page, because we haven't fixed that aspect of the article yet.) CWC 12:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to make a general warning on this page about avoiding personal attacks (such as [9] and [10]). Everyone in this discussion should also realize that Wikipedia's WP:BLP policy does indeed apply to article talk pages, as some people on this page have already stated. Anyone repeatedly violating these policies could be blocked. Best,-- Alabamaboy 17:11, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
It appears now that some of the people who have been attacking me in one way or the other perhaps have been doing so for reasons beyond what was represented: they are apparently supporters, or perhaps even members, of the Little Green Footballs blog site. Since LGF via Charles Johnson was one of the main instigators of the forgery charges, and since some of my cites undercut both Johnson's CYA memo experiment and his credibility, that would create a clear conflict of interest for this Wiki topic and a violation of WP:COI:
A Wikipedia conflict of interest is an incompatibility between the purpose of Wikipedia, to produce a neutral encyclopedia, and the aims of individual editors. These include editing for the sake of promoting oneself, other individuals, causes, organizations, companies, or products, as well as suppressing negative information, and criticizing competitors.
You know who you are -- please recuse yourself from any further editing here unless you intend to follow the official Wikipedia policy for this situation:
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FYI. Callmebc 22:41, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
I have blocked Callmebc from editing for 72 hours for various policy violations. To other editors, my general recommendation about how to handle WP:COI is to declare affiliations in your own user space and exercise personal restraint at relevant articles. The safest route where COI is obvious (such as an article about one's place of employment) is to post material and citations to the talk page and let uninvolved Wikipedians evaluate it for inclusion in the article. Regards, Durova Charge! 07:09, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
Lost in all the recent acrimony on this discussion page is the whole issue of what to do about the main page for the "Killian documents" -- if nothing else, I've demonstrated that there is a vast amount of information highly pertinent to both the memos and the forgery charges that are not referenced in any way. According to the Wikipedia's own "Encylopedia" article:
Works of encyclopedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain. Works vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, depending on the target audience.
And by any defintion of "important accumulated knowledge," the main page is severely lacking. In particular:
1) The forgery charges originated with and centered on [www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/replies?c=47 unsupported claims] regarding the capabilities of 70's and even 80's office technology, but the main page has no references whatsoever indicating what 70's era office technology was really like, despite such information being readily available.
2) The contents issue, aka the "Fake but accurate" charge is also never addressed, despite the DoD maintaining a database of all of Bush's released military records. Actually, it appears that the DoD site is not even mentioned -- a very serious omission.
3) Many of the forgery charges center on format issues, often comparing the memos format to that of official records. However, Official USAF writing guides are available that clearly define the purpose of those memos and their recommended format, but again the Wikipedia main page has no reference to these either.
4) The main page is often wrong, lacking or extremely misleading in important details. Examples: both CBS and USA Today got 6 memos from Burkett -- CBS chose only to use 4 of them; Peter Tytell is a typewriter expert whose family up until 2001 owned a typewriter shop and not a "document expert" per se; there is an invalid passage that goes It was reported that the new Killian memos were inconsistent with his endorsement of Lt Bush's May 1971 performance review, a year prior to the date on the disputed documents. Killian endorsed the rating officer's evaluation of Bush, which in part described him as "an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot" -- this is highly misleading since the relevant performance review (aka a "Rating Report") that covers the time period of the memos is the 1972-1973 "Not Observed" rating report; Charles Johnson's animated overlay "experiment" of the "CYA" is noticeably featured but there is no reference to his inability to duplicate that with any of the other memos or to a similar graphic illustrating what happens when you do attempt that with one of the longer memos; and there is no link to a much more comprehensive interview of Marian by the Drudge Report where she essentially confirms that Staudt was indeed pressuring Killian, as well as no clarity on Knox's actual status -- was she indeed just a "pool clerk/typist" as has been alleged by Killian's son Gary? -- that would be very important in relation to what sort of memos and documents she would be privvy to.
Given all these inadaquacies of the main page in being able to "convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain," it would seem very wise and prudent at this time to place a "WP:CU" "Cleanup" banner at the top of the main page until many if not most of these issues are addressed. Agree or disagree? And please state specifically your justification for either. Callmebc
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Looking at documents from the DoD web site ( http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records/), as well as those from USA Today (released by the Bush campaign in February 2004, eight months prior to the CBS documents, see http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-02-14-bush-docs.htm), Lt Colonel Killian's signature in the CBS documents clearly does not match these documents. Killian used big, looping Ls in his last name. The capital "J" and capital "K" in the DoD and USA Today documents also clearly differ from the CBS documents.
I do not understand why this was not brought up at the time. Recall Bush released the records in February because of questions regarding both candidates military records.
Regarding the examples below, the superscript "th" in one of the documents is in an otherwise constant spaced document. It is typical of an IBM Selectric typewriter, note the "th" takes one character space.
The proportional spaced document is not a unit document but comes from the Texas Adjutant General's office, at the State Headquarters. It is a promotion congratulatory letter of some type. However, note it does not superscript "147th".
I see nothing which places proportional fonts and superscripts in a 147th FIS document. Nor have I seen anything which explains the change in Killian's signature style.
Hi. I took your advice and in from the Little Green Footballs wiki. That's a very curious date on your posting, since that's just after when I showed how the DoD records acutally do contain a proportionally printed document, the only one in the entire database of Bush's records and strangely and quietly released just a couple of days after CBS backed away from authenticating the memo: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records, "Documents Released on September 24, 2004," page 6 (also note the funky fonts in the documents on pages 3&4). If you're little fuzzy eyed about recognizing proportional spacing, go here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/BushRecordPSClipRuler.jpg
Also, I don't understand why you're using that same murky instance of superscripting, that "Report to 111th F.I.S." when I had already pointed out in the LGF thread that there are much nicer, cleaner examples here: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/bush_records, "Part 6," page 45. It's undated, but it's rather obvious that it's not a Word document.
But you are indeed right that "a feature of modern computer word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word automatically changes "th" to superscript characters when following numerals," but if you look at the superscripting in *all* of the memos, you will note some strange discrepencies. A comparison of the superscripting pattern in the memos to what happens when you type them up in Word can be found here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/SScriptsCompared.jpg
Hmmm, not only are only some of the th's following a number not superscripted, but none of the st's. There is a strangely inserted odd space that can explain away some of this, but not others.
Your argument makes no sense. We're not talking about a pile of documents, just 6 memos in total, some very short. If you figure out how to get around Word's auto-superscripting, then why not get rid of all the superscripts instead of just leaving them off and on in such an odd, random pattern (except for the "st's," none of which are superscripted)? The hypothesis is that the forger used a modern PC or Mac to create the memos, so if he or she makes a mistake, like leaving in superscripts, it would only take a few seconds to fix it and print it out, so why leave them? Lack of time, maybe? But obviously the forger would have had to have spent an awful lot of time to have achieved the detailed matchup in the contents and dates of the memos to whose of the DoD records. There was even a reference to "Bath" in a very short memo USA Today had, meaning James Bath, who was also suspended from flying, evidently again by Killian, just one month after Bush was, but this information had been redacted from the DoD records in 2004, and it was only by chance a researcher had already copied seen the pre-redacted version: http://sugarinthegourd.com/redacted.html
And better yet, why not just use one of the many, MANY typewriters still common in offices to type up forms and labels? Was it that the forger was somehow both very, very smart and very, very stupid, including being completely illiterate with using Word (not that Word has been shown to be able to convicingly recreate the memos)?
As far as whether typewriters from the early 70's can do this sort of stuff, for some strange reason, all these typewriter experts ignored IBM Executives, or just mentioned them in passing without any demonstrable tests, despite these models being pretty common all over until being gradually replaced by businesses and agencies with the more reliable Selectric models. Those clunky old Executives could do a few tricks that the sleek Selectrics couldn't do, though. These are from a "Model C" Executive: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/ExecSuperscript2.jpg and http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/ExecSuperScript3.jpg. A sharp eyed person will note that both examples are also proportionally spaced.
But undiscussed by all these so-called typewriter experts is the Diablo Systems daisywheel printer, made since 1969, and evidently common by 1972 when Xerox bought Diablo for $28 million. Diablo's cofounder, David Lee, left Xerox in 1973 to found Qume. Qume also made daisywheel printers that were code and plug-compatible with Diablo's to the point that ribbons and print wheels with interchangeable. It's important to note the the early Diablo printers were strictly for the OEM market, and hence sold under a large variety of names. See http://goldsea.com/Innovators/Digital/digital.html, http://mfelker5.tripod.com/printwheels.htm, http://www.okoffice.com.au/product.asp?pID=44193&cID=879
The Diablo is a big issue because all Diablo models could proportionally print with same spacing shown in the memos, and well as being being fully capable of full super/subscripting (via half line feeds). This is a code set for the Diablo's: http://www.nefec.org/UPM/dblomain.htm And besides having a variety of standard printwheels, evidently it was easy to get customized ones if a special character or two was desired. A PDF file with some reprints of computer-related articles from the 1980's has some backgound on this stuff,starting on page 14: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/atg1.pdf
The only serious dispute for the memos being created on a Diablo has been a claim by some die-hard pro-forgers that, yes, maybe Diablo's could only do all this, but in only 1974+ models. This is apparently related to some patent applications found on the Internet. However these patent apps seem related to a dispute that formed between Xerox and Qume when Qume started selling its Diablo compatible printers in 1973/74, and which eventually resulted in a lawsuit: Qume Corp. v. Xerox Corp., 207 U.S.P.Q. 621 (N.D. Cal. 1979). However all the information available indicates that all Diablo's, from their inception, came with a core code set that included the proportional and super/subscripting commands (they could also function as high-precision plotters.)
Hope this clarifies. And if someone wishes to dispute any of this, please do me the courtesy of providing some relevant countering evidence in kind instead of opinion or links to opinion. Obviously I've tried at least to be very thorough in presenting my case. I'm obviously in a very small minority with my view on the memos, but to paraphrase Anatole France, if fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:39, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Ah yes, Joseph Newcomer, PhD, long on words (and words, and words....), but a wee bit short on actual demonstration. As you might have guessed, I've been to his site and found it a bit lacking in actual scientific methododogy. You do not remember him addressing the Diablo HyType because he never did, as was the case with all these alleged experts that came out of the woodwork back then, like Peter Tytel, the "typewriter expert". I guess we can cut Tytell some slack since a daisywheel printer technically isn't a typewriter. But one can't really do the same Newcomer -- he makes an awful lot of claims about his expertise. From http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm: "I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting." and it just goes on and on from that. Also, he boldly states, "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."
But as I've more than enough demonstrated, by 1972 there were two widely available devices capable of printing proportionally, and in superscript, and with a small font: the IBM Executive typewriter and the Diablo daisywheel printer. Both devices have been obsolete for decades, but would expect any sort of real expert to show due diligence in researching all the devices available around that time that might have possibly created the memos, discover and examine what their capabilities were, try to find print samples and/or specifications, and so on before rendering any sort of conclusion. In Newcomer's case, the Diablo is not mentioned once on his entire site, and the Executive typewriter is not even examined -- and even then, his sample is only a wedding program -- until until about a week, Sept. 18, 2004, after he makes the claim of forgery on or before Sept, 12, 2004. If that doesn't sound very scientific, that's because it's not: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bcb25/scimeth/intro1.htm
I also had seriously considered the Executive. I did some research and got my hands on a copy of a technical manual that the author remembered being created on a Model "C" Executive. It was proportionally spaced and had full super/subscripting in small fonts. But as evidently with you, I found its proportional spacing to not match up with that shown in the memos. I don't think you can say much about the font or typeface since the Executives came with a choice of typefaces.
The point I was making is that there were at least two devices available around 1972 capable of proportional spacing and full super/scripting: the IBM Executive typewriter and the Diablo printer. Considering that the forgery charge initially with the false claim by the likes of "Buckhead" that there were no devices then that could proportionally space, this was not a trivial matter. Think about it -- the whole "there were forged" business got started with some then anonymous blogger making nonsensical (that is if you had bothered to check) claims about typewriters then and even things like Wang word proccessors could or could not do. And then have these self-proclaimed experts like Newcomer coming out of the woodwork discussing Selectrics and Veritypers and also claiming forgery before even looking at an Exexcutive and apparently utterly unaware of the Diablo. Of course our diligent media didn't exactly help to clear up matters... -BC 209.6.203.244 14:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Newcomer actually inadvertently provides strong evidence that Word was NOT used for the memos. Go back to his site here: http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm#12-Sep-04 There are two things to look at: one is the poor matchup character-by-character between his Word-created "from" and a memo "from". If you do further character-by-character matchups, you will find that the Word Times New Roman font is consistently inconsistent with the font used in the memos, especially in terms of height.
And further up the page, he makes an extremely damning admission: "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'". And then a little further down he tries to explain this away with, "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."
Well....
First off, MS Word uses long established character spacing for Roman-style fonts. WordPerfect for DOS used similar spacing with its "CG Times" font, and it was also the default proportional spacing used in Diablo and Qume daisywheel printers (and don't forget that many of the early laser printers has a Diablo mode to "letter quality" printing). So you would expect at least a modest matchup between Word and a Diablo in terms of spacing, but an *exact* match? No, and the letterheads on May 4th and Aug 1st memos prove this. As well as eliminate Word.
There was some research with different "Roman style" fonts, both with Word for Windows and Mac, as well as WordPerfect for DOS, to see how they compare to the font used in the memos: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html#FunWithFonts Note how all the different PC-generated fonts both match and *don't* match the memo font in some aspect, including even Times New Roman, although they all indeed show "similar" spacing as I claimed. I can't return to this until tomorrow, but I would be interested in your opinion since you apparently genuinely looked at this stuff (I am just a troll after all.) -BC 209.6.203.244 14:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
You can demonstrate this on your own if you are handy with a PaintShop type program. First grab the May 4th and Aug 1st memos from here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/08/60II/main641984.shtml
Now replicate one of the letterheads as best you can using Word, print it out and then scan it in. Now then superimpose your Word replica as best you can on either of the letterheads and feel free to resize all you want. You should end up with what you might think is a pretty good match at first sight.
But now try superimposing one of the memo letterheads on the other. You will then find a true dead-on match that is noticeably much, much more accurate than your best efforts with creating a Word replica. You can see one such experiment here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/HeadersCompared.jpg The two upper samples were made from overlaying a Word-recreation of the letterheads over each of the two memo letterheads; the lower sample is from overlaying the two memo letterheards over each other.
But if there was all this claimed distortion and smearing that occurred when the forger tried to make the memos look old, how can that be that the memo letterheads are dead-on copies of each other?
If you believe the forgery scenario, then the May 4th and Aug 1st memos were originally created in Word and then were deliberately distorted to make them look old. But then how come they still end up as perfect matches to each other but not to a fresh Word replica? Where is "The 11.5-point font could represent a reduction to 96% of the original size in the various transformations" that Newcomer uses as an excuse to for using a very non-standard font size?
All I can say is tsk, tsk... -BC 209.6.203.244 00:14, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Please provide at least one alleged source for the statement "I don't think there's much need to disprove the Diablo HyType, as the first version of this venerable daisy wheel printer appears to have been introduced in 1973 (apparently in the fall), rather than having been in use in, say, the spring of 1972. At least, that's what every source I can find suggests. Do you have any actual evidence that the HyType was available in early 1972?"
Define "actual evidence" -- I already showed that Diablo Systems as an independent company began making daisywheel printers in 1969 and was bought by Xerox in 1972 for $28 million, and that one of the co-founders of Diablo left Xerox in 1973 to form a rival daisywheel printer company called Qume. What do you think Diablo was doing between 1969 and 1972 when Xerox paid all that money for it? When Xerox bought Diablo, they got the HyType I. If that isn't enough proof, I found some ribbon crossreferences for the HyType I ribbon, which was mostly, but not completely replaced at about 1974-75 with the HyType II ribbon, and they link to a bunch of old, forgotten dedicated word processors dating back to at least 1972. If a 1972 word processor uses a Diablo HyType I ribbon, that kind of suggests that perhaps, perchance HyType I's were being used then. The best ribbon crossreference I found is no longer online, but this Swiss one isn't so bad: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband-multistrike/qume-1145-farbband-multistrike-original-schwarz.asp
Note how you won't see either "Diablo" or even "HyType" mentioned -- Diablo Systems was originally strictly an OEM supplier.
Well, I Googled some of the CPT models in that Swiss ribbon crossreference and found this computer timeline mentioning the CPT model 4200 word processor as being introduced in 1972: http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/01HISTORYCD-Chrono1.htm
Since the Swiss ribbon crossreference for the HyType I ribbon lists the CPT 4200.... -BC 209.6.203.244 03:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
My comments about the Executive were related to how it was not examined, along with the Diablo, by any of these alleged experts before they plunged ahead with their forgery charges. I strongly suspect that only reason why all discussions focussed on Selectrics, at least initially, was simply because there were and are Selectrics still in operation all over (primarily for typing up labels and filling in preprinted forms) and hence handy and not requiring much work. Since almost all functioning daisywheel printers and IBM Executives have long ago been scrapped, Selectrics became the default representives of all 1972 office technology. Until Marian Carr Knox mentioned that she used an Olympia typewriter. So then it was Selectrics and Olympia typewriters that represented all 1972 office technology, with a side discussion of Selectic Composer, a typesetting machine that would never have been used to create just memos. Executives made a belated appearance here and there, but Diablo's not at all. All of this represents inexcusably shoddy journalism by the media, and laughably incompetent "research" by all of these alleged experts.
As far as the aging of memos go, your claim that "None of the experts have claimed that they "were deliberately distorted to make them look old" - that is a straw man argument you created, not any kind of reasonable interpretation of your opponents' views" is demonstrably false -- I never said "experts" and many claimed this. Simply Google "Killian memos aged" for proof. And that excerpt off of Newcomer's site I used had this comment, "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," basically claims that the memos were distorted through muliple processes. Indeed the first, original blog post that started the forgery bandwagon states (from www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/posts):
?? This is a complete quote of what I wrote: "If you believe the forgery scenario, then the May 4th and Aug 1st memos were originally created in Word and then were deliberately distorted to make them look old." Did I mention "expert"? No. Was this a central part of the forgery claim? Yes -- from the original Buckhead comment: "I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old." Did I say that Newcomer also claimed this? No, but I pointed out that he justified using an oddboall point size, 11.5, to *supposedly* dupe a memo in Word (he of course didn't show his results, choosing only to just talk about them): "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." And you -- are you an expert? -- I never brought you up in any of this.
"Buckhead": To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts. I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I did not know Hailey had this second report, http://imrl.usu.edu/bush_memo_study/supporting_material/bush_memos.pdf!! This report independently comfirms some of the discrepencies I had long ago noted -- the memos *were* done on an impact device and that they were only "Roman like" and neither Times New Roman and very, VERY unlikely Times Roman as well (Macs use Times Roman and they have the same problems as Windows Word, so your contention that they were done in Times Roman is unconvincing without real life samples). And despite all the prior attacks and criticisms, Hailey still contends that some sort of impact printing device with platen was used. Hmmm, what impact printing device with a platen could print proportionally, I wonder...) To quote the first part of Hailey's conclusions:
I believe the memos were typed for the following reasons:
1. They cannot have been done in Times New Roman, so the argument that they were done digitally has no logical support.
2. The evidence of character damage is no longer in question; the "t," "e," "a," "c," "R," "o," "M," and "N," are all clearly defective, and in each case the character has unique defects. Other characters not discussed also show signs of being defective.
3. I found good evidence that characters interacted with each other, something only possible with a typewriter or other device that produces characters one at a time and involves physical impact.
4. Spacing in the memos is consistent with using a platen and not consistent with Word or similar digital processes: spacing of the heading is not centered; headings do not align; fractional returns are consistent with adjusting with a platen; left edge of several memos appears to have drifted to the right causing characters to penetrate the left margin
I especially liked his bit about the centering bit, because as I had posted earlier, if you go here, http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/HeadersCompared.jpg, you will find the two upper samples were made from overlaying a Word-recreation of the letterheads over each of the two memo letterheads; and the lower sample is from overlaying the two memo letterheards over each other. Note how the upper samples don't align, while the bottom one does so precisely. If there were differences with how the centering was done between some 30 yr old mechanical device and a modern PC/Printer combo, this would be exactly the sort of discrepency you would expect.
I'm going to have to leave this merry little discussion for a while to look into a few more things, including revisting whether "HyType I" was just a low end daisywheel model incapable of the precision needed for proportional printing (this is another reference to the Adam Coleco and note the ribbon type: http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/adam.htm) But I gathered some extremely useful stuff here. Thanks. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:48, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Please note all of the false claims about technology -- either "Buckhead" had no clue or was deliberately lying. But this misinformed nonsense is what got the forgery charges rolling.
Also demonstrably false and/or disengenuously misleading is your claim that, "As for the memos looking similar to each other, they all went through the same set of operations as far as photocopying, faxing, and being scanned into Adobe Acrobat. So it is perfectly reasonable that they would suffer the same kind of overall scaling distortion." If the memos were created in Word and then copied or faxed X amount of times, deliberately or not, if there any distortions at all, they would vary from copy to copy. You create documents A, B, C and so on, and then recopy and refax them enough times to noticeablely distort them from the originals, they're going to distort from each other just as much -- it's either a random process or else there is a defect in one of the devices that would introduce distortion on a particular area on the page. So if you start off with two identical letterheads, run each one through a series of copying/faxing/scanning operations and the final copies are still dead on perfectly aligned with each other, with no discernable ghosting or smearing, that means your equipment introduced no significant distortion.
Now suppose after you do all that, someone hands you an original document with a very similar looking letterhead, and it's claimed that it was created on the same computer/printer combo that you used to create the documents you ran through all that processing on. Now, you're already determined that the processing introduced no significant distortion, so if the letterhead on that new document doesn't match up identically, then it was NOT created on the same computer/printer combo. And that's the case here: the memo letterheads line up with each other perfectly, with not even the slightest bit of discernable ghosting. The same letterhead created on Word will misalign and ghost in some area regardless of how much you adjust the scale and do your darndest to best fit them. There isn't a lot misalignment, but it's definitely there and very, very much like that shown in Charles Johnson's infamous CYA animated gif: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/pictures/Pictures/aug1873-pdf-animate.gif
If you take the non-forgery scenario where the documents were created on a very different device that used the same standard proportional spacing and a Roman-style font, and you then overlayed Word replicas and adjusted the scale and positioning for best fit, you should expect to get a reasonably good match but with some misalignment and ghosting at least. Which is what you would end up with if the memos had been created on daisywheel printer, with proportional mode turned on, and a little "th" character used on one of the extra printwheel spokes (and without an additional extra spoke for an "st").
I'm not sure what that eliminates. Apparently Diablo made different daisywheel models, and the HyType I may actually have been just a low end model. All of the known Diablo code sheets indicate that at the very least most Diablo models can indeed do proportional printing in two ways: with with a simple ESP P command or via a much trickier character mapping using horizontal indexing and control -- see: http://www.nefec.org/upm/dblofrm.htm The web info is really sketchy on pre-Xerox Diablo stuff. What's needed is manuals for the OEM printers Diablo made for the likes of CPT. It can be verified, though, that by 1975, the dedicated word processing market was huge: 1975 Business Week Article Note the number of "Redactron" systems sold, and note also that Redactron models are also listed in the Swiss ribbon crossreference.
Actually it doesn't now. I just found two sites with further interesting info.
This tech document discusses the proportional print characteristics of old devices -- apparently unrelated to Killian stuff -- including Executive typewriters, (which had resolutions of 1/32" to 1/36") and how some daisywheel printers at least were proportionally printing with just the 1/60" resolution, which is the same as the HyType I: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/propint.htm
This is a belated response to that particular comment, but I've started looking more into the mechanics of having a daisywheel with either a 1/60" & 1/120" resolution printing specific proportional typefaces like Times Roman versus Times New Roman versus one that supposedly the Redactron model "Redactor II" used called just "Times". When I went to look up if just plain "Times" is a trademarked font, I found that it was, thereby stongly implying that the Redactor II would actually print it as such. So I thought to see how this "Times" compared to Times Roman and Times New Roman, and went to this site: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/agfa/times/morelikethis.html This conveniently allows you type in text and see how it look in Times Roman, Times, and Times New Roman all at once. Cool. But I noticed something very curious right away: The "Times" and "Times New Roman" matched up rather closely, but not "Times Roman" -- its proportional spacing was a little wider. Hmmmm.... When I looked into that, it looks as though that the widths and such have been a bit conflated in recent decades for "Times Roman" and "Times New Roman", especially so with the introduction of TrueType on both Apple and Windows. But the plain old "Times" evidently has not been. What's especially curious it that the last modified date year for "Times New Roman" is 2000, while for plain old "Times," it's 1974! Yet they seem evidently identical enough to pass for each other, especially if, say, you only had some coarse copies to look at. My, my....
Well, one big truism about Microsoft is that they never innovate, especially when they can copy. Through the 70's and into the 80's up to the first generation of laser printers and 24pin dot matrix printers, the Diablo codeset became *the* standard for letter quality printing, including proportional printing. If there was indeed a "Times" font option for a 70's era word processor using a daisywheel print, that likely was the standard for all later fonts in terms of their spacing. Microsoft came of age when daisywheels were still ruling the office when nice printing is needed. So basically, if anything looks like anything, it would be a Word font resembling an ealier font. But that's surmising until I can get some clearer evidence. So far all the Diablo or Qume created documents I could find with proportional spacing are also right-justified, and it's unclear which proportional spacing type was being used. A centering sample may be more telling since the centering on the memos have the most mismatch to Word recreations. I am awaiting a little package in the mail that might help. We'll see. By the way, I may not be able to legally post any of the CBI stuff (that place with all those archived Redactron documents), but I'm trying to work out something. [PS - I guess I should mention that the first Apple LaserWriters also came with Diablo emulation. -BC 209.6.203.244 12:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
The thing is that you have a word processing system from the mid-70's with a font or typeface called Times -- what was that, and what character spacing did it use? The Myfont site indicates that it's a dead ringer for Times New Roman, at least according to spacing. The fonts *called* Times Roman and Times New Roman use to be different then kind of merged in a muddy way, so what exactly are their current character spacings? And how "approximate" is "approximate"? -- bear in mind that the LGF Word CYA memo recreation, created on a Mac, does not line up nearly as well to the CYA memo as does the letterhead on two of the memos to each other. A Word recreation of either of the letterheads lines up even worse. If the Times Roman of the Mac Word recreations only "approximates" an earlier, mechanical rendition of a Times font, isn't this result *exactly* what you should expect?
I was able to dupe the relative line ending alignments shown in the CYA memo using CG Times Bold based solely as a best fit guess from looking at some sample printouts from those PC Magazine tests. Since mechanical systems like a daisywheel printer scale very little (10-12 point at best), but since Times Roman and its variants were common even during the 60's and 70's, it would be reasonable to expect something called "Times" to look and be spaced like a Times font, no? And if you then kind of enlarge/shrink and align one for the best possible fit to another "copy" then.... -BC 70.90.98.226 19:24, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I actually have a 1985 manual for the Canon LBP-8 A1/A2 laser printer. This uses the same "engine" that Canon supplied to HP and Apple used for their early laser printers. It also came with a Diablo mode which I presume would he identical to Apple's (HP didn't included Diablo compatibility in their version). Not only does the control set include commands for 1/120" horizonal spacing, 1/48" vertical spacing, half-line and reverse-half-line feeds (for full sub/superscripting), and a general proportional print mode, but it had what it calls the "virtual Diablo wheel feature" to select virtual print wheels with different spoke numbers, i.e., Diablo 88 metal, Diablo 92 metal, Xerox 96 metal, and so on. All interesting enough to show what a standard Diablo pinters and their plug-compatibles like Qume had become by the early 80's at least, but, alas, that's too far removed timewise from the target tech date of 1972 to be conclusive. For what it's worth, all references to to Qumes indicate that they at least could print at 1/120" horizontal increments, which is what you would need to print true Times X X at 11 point. That means that the year that the memos could be printed as shown is down to when the first Qumes appeared on the market, around 1973-74. Close, but I really need to see that 1/120" spec in an earlier Diablo model. But I'm working on it... -BC 209.6.203.244 13:43, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
In the meantime, I'm beginning to appreciate the value of a genuine, book-filled library. I was able to dig up 3 books on word processing dated 1974, 1976 and 1977. Unfortunately they were business oriented and did not get nearly enough into the tech details. The good news to me is that they clearly indicate that the word processing market started ramping up in the 60's primarily with IBM, with a flood of competitors coming into the market beginning in 1969 with Redactron and Diablo, and then a bunch more in 1970-1971, and with a fully developed market by 1972 when annual sales hit $1.2 billion. So basically by 1972, word processors were already common to have "word processing" magazines appear. The bad news to me is that there were a LOT more vendors and means of word processing, including connecting via a modem to a mainframe running a word processing program, than I had figured. Yet more stuff with no tech info about to consider. Also Diablo's came in all sorts of odd configurations judging from the pictures I've seen (with of course no indication if they were even HyType's). I'm also coming across more vendor/product names with nothing much more than just a name or maybe a not very informative picture and ribbon crossreference. Also the authors often call the daisywheel printers "typewriters" since many if not most of the early versions came with a keyboard that was meant for terminal access, but which made them look like typewriters.
Hmmm, did I say that one of the books said that Diablo had a word-processing printer on the market in 1969? Nooo... I guess I didn't. You bad. Diablo and Redactron formed as companies in 1969. Whether they had products on the market in 1969 is a different thing. Redactron products started shipping in quantity by 1971, so presumably did Diablo's at the very latest. As far as the books go, they are: "Word Processing" by Thomas Johnston Anderson and William R. Trotter (1974); "Word processing" by Arnold Rosen and Rosemary Fielden (1977); and "Word Processing in the Modern Office" by Paula B. Cecil (1976). While a bit annoyingly short on tech detail, the Rosen/Fielden and Cecil books have a lot of interesting pictures showing that the mid-70's wasn't exactly all that backwards in terms of office tech: microcassette dictating recorders, full page video displays, color copiers, magnetic media, everyone modeming and "telecopying" stuff to each other, connecting to big mainframes. There were also concerned about paper use and thought this would all lead to a paperless office in no time (Hah!! if they knew then...) In house typesetting (proportional printing) is in fact mentioned as a way to "reduce the space required by as musch as 40% over typewritten copy. This in turn reduces other costs. The user also gains--at not additional cost--copy that is not only easier to read but attracts more attention. Other typographic nicecities, such as bold headings and italics, improve all kinds of communications." (from the Rosen/Fielden book.) FYI -BC 209.6.203.244 13:43, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Ah, you right-wingers -- the only thing you hate more than inconvenient facts is context: prefering to take 2 and 3 excerpts out of what someone writes or says, and then use those to construct an utterly bogus paraphrase. Do you guys, like, take a class in that or does it just come naturally. Here's my full quote in context: "The good news to me is that they clearly indicate that the word processing market started ramping up in the 60's primarily with IBM, with a flood of competitors coming into the market beginning in 1969 with Redactron and Diablo, and then a bunch more in 1970-1971, and with a fully developed market by 1972 when annual sales hit $1.2 billion."
Now *you* admit to deliberately trying to twist what I said by yanking things out of context. -BC 70.90.98.226 22:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
You should be very thankful that this isn't Usenet, where I'm a bit less polite and diplomatic when dealing with, um, "folks" like you. Let's put Diablo aside for the time being and look at Redactron, which has a clearer history, and which also was founded by Evelyn Berezin also in 1969. There's brief history of it here. To quote from the article, "Then she had her brainstorm. Wouldn't it be neat, she felt, to have a word processor that would be useful for everyday documents;even ordinary letters? Might not lots of secretaries find a word processor even more useful than their everyday typewriter?....Just a year later, in 1969, she founded Redactron, the first company devoted exclusively to word processors. Starting from scratch, she was able to use the latest technology. That involved 13 MOS chips, some of them designed by General Instrument, some designed by a young company, Standard Microsystems, and some designed by Redactron itself. One of the chips was actually a very simple microprocessor. The daddy of commercial microprocessors, Intel's 4004, was introduced in 1971, the year Redactron's word processor started shipping."
Now, did Redactron get "into the market" in 1969 when it became a company whose sole purpose was to make word processors (aside from, presumably, money), or was it 1971, when its first units shipped? And why are you deliberately trying to be a deliberate, um, buttocks on the matter? Le réalité et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n'est-ce pas? -BC 209.6.203.244 18:30, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I have zero tolerance with the common right-wing tactic to construct bogus "quotes" by taking short excerpts, down to 2-word phrases, out of context, usually in an attempt to cast doubt on credibilty (i.e. "smear") and distract from the matters at hand, which is *exactly* what you did. You took "clearly indicate" and "into the market" out of context from a not very long quote of mine that in full went, "The good news to me is that they clearly indicate that the word processing market started ramping up in the 60's primarily with IBM, with a flood of competitors coming into the market beginning in 1969 with Redactron and Diablo, and then a bunch more in 1970-1971, and with a fully developed market by 1972 when annual sales hit $1.2 billion."
Your excuses for doing this don't fly very far, and again if this was Usenet, as some out there may know, I would *not* be so polite. But this is a Wikipedia discussion and I'm on my best behavior, but I'm not going to let any attempts at tactical smearing slide by at all. And all this stuff I'm doing and have done in regards to the memo business is strictly an annoyingly time-consuming civic service act on my part, and one that I'm only doing because nobody else seems to want to make the effort, even though it is rather important: not only does this say an awful lot about the character of our President, who has very carefully avoided any official comment on the credibility of the memos -- go look here White House Q&A for Dan Bartlett's response to a question from "Stephen, from Colorado Springs, CO"; but it also makes, if anything, a worst comment on the state of free press -- what good is a so-called free press if it more and more only just passes along supposed "news" items, political disagreements, and alleged scientific "controveries" (e.g. "global warming") uncritically with less and less investigation, as well as being easily intimidated by neo-mobs (e.g. the right-wing blogosphere) and having to answer to corporate, profit-minded masters (e.g. Viacom), as was/is both cases with (e.g.) CBS?
I really am a troll and I so would much rather just point out overlooked stuff for people to just look and them to ask themselves, "does this make any sense" especially in regards to widely circulated misinformation. The forgery "hypothesis" for the CBS Killian memos started with grossly misinformed, utter nonsense via bloggers like "Buckhead" about the state of technology in the 1970's and it still to this day remains the only real foundation for the forgery claims, and even that depends on ignoring way too much, logically contrary evidence regarding superscripting, the letterheads, contents and such. But some bits of misinformation get so imbedded that you need more of a crowbar than tweezers to remove. I've tried the tweezers, then the pliers, and now, with this delving in company records like with the CBI stuff, I'm getting at the crowbar level. I got other things a bit more fun I can do, but while I just a troll, for better or worse I'm a responsible one.
Getting back to Diablo, go check the bottom of this page under the "OT" section. And think very carefully about trying to "tactically" distract from the subject matter the next time you're tempted -- I'll only put so much effort into maintaining politeness when it's not that warranted. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:09, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Diablo may have formed as a company in 1969, but that doesn't indicate when they actually entered the market with a commercial product. And yes, it does make a difference: the memos weren't printed with a businesss plan or an engineering prototype. You say that "presumably" products from Diablo started shipping in quantity by 1971 "at the very latest". But that's only your presumption. You've offered no actual evidence to support it. 71.212.31.95 20:18, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, as I have pointed out again and again, there is this nifty Swiss ribbon crossference list of mostly long, LONG forgotten machines that used Diablo ribbons, and a whole bunch of them apparently date back to at least 1972, like the CPT 4200 and the AES 90 (there are a ton more that are apparently from around that time, like the AB Dick Magna 1, the Vydec 1000, the Videotype 1000 and so on, but no hard year dates can be found yet). But I am working on firmer dates and info, unlike others who are apparently a bit more interested in trying to catch me in a misstatement or such. -BC 70.90.98.226 22:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I posted some interesting scans of photocopies I made from the books: 1) A Grumman Aerospace brochure created on all IBM stuff -- Grumman Brochure; 2) a chart of the word processing market during the 60's and 70's -- 70's WP Market; and last but not least, even though it doesn't have anything useful to say about word processors or even the market then. When I saw this in the 1977 book, I thought it was the oddest, weirdest coincidence I'll see for a while, for, um, somewhat obvious reasons.... Very Weird -BC 209.6.203.244 04:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
But the librarian at www.cbi.umn.edu go back to me about the contents of that "Specifications for Redactor II Printer System" document dated 1973, but apparently the system was forthcoming at that point and not yet in producion. That pushes its manufacturing date back at least a year, and it was pointed out that the Business Week had mentioned that it was delayed for a year after it was announced, so we're probably looking at a 1975-76 manufacturing date at the earliest, darn it.
But...the libririan gave me other info that could be useful. Stay tuned.... -BC 209.6.203.244 18:45, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I didn't mention the issues with the font mechanics of using a daisywheel with 1/60" resolution or another with 1/120". I reluctantly agree that 1/60" would not be enough for a non-right justified line. For true 12-point Times text, you would need a resolution of 1/108" by my calculations. The standard Times XX width ratios could be fudged a bit with 1/60", but would be noticeably off on lines of non-justified text compared to a Word created lines of Times. With right justification, depending on the sophistication of the spacing algorithm, it may be passible given the coarse quality of the memo copies, as PC Magazine demonstrated with this comparison of a text created on an IBM Selctric Composer, which apparently had a resolution of 1/72", to a Word recreation: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1644869,00.asp
But a daisywheel with 1/120" resolution can obviously do 12 point Times accurately, but if you want to keep the math simple and deal with integer proportions, the typeface used by the Daisywheel would likely have an equivalent point size of 10.8, which may have been rounded off to 11 point. Which makes more sense since the IBM Selectric Composer, which used comparable typeface sizes, was cited as being in 11 point by this earlier cite of mine: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/propint.htm
But unlike current digitized fonts, which spacing and size is automatically scaled, the type size wasn't tied in with the spacing setting on daisywheels -- if you selected "Times" spacing on your Redactron or whatever word processor, it'll proportionally print whatever printwheel you stick inm even if it's something like a Courier. FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:46, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I was thinking you could fake it a bit with the 1/60" resolution, depending on the sophistication of the computer coding, but realistically and practically, that was only a possibility with right justification, and even that would likely fail with close scrutiny of the high rez copies that Hailey is suppose to have in his possesion. The big question now is whether the HyType I, with its 1/60" resolution, or some immediate forebear prior to the Xerox acquistion, was the only daisywheel mechanism in wide use. If there was indeed 1/120" rez model as at least an option as well at that time included with word processing systems, then the forgery thing is dead. That Swiss ribbon site shows a huge number of Diablo models that I've never heard of, and I suspect that the bulk of those are pre-1980, so it's very, very likely there were indeed 1/120" rez models in common use around 1972. As far as printer control goes, that was not at all a primitive time techwise, and it doesn't exactly take a lot of memory and CPU power to map out character spacings. The CBI library has detailed specs on the Redactron Redactor II, and I'll get copies of that one way or the other, and that should confirm the capabilities. That should push back the date of when the memos could have been created as is to about 1976. While that's not 1972, it's definitely within striking distance now. All I would then need is a good reference to either an earlier Redactron model or one from a competing product with similar capabilities, but from 1972. Bear in mind that having the memos being able to be created on a circa 1972 device would completely fit in with all of the other evidence, including explaining away the superscripting and letterhead discrepencies, as well as the archaic document formatting, and so would thereby completely destroy the forgery hypothesis.
I'm also now getting a pretty good idea of what the office tech was like back then. It's a very intriguing, almost completely forgotten about era. The word processing market evidently took off like crazy in the very early 70's with lots of startup companies with very innovative products, and reached its peak about 1975-1976. But by the late 70's, it had quickly collapsed into a handful of large vendors, like IBM and Wang. There was probably also pressure from the surging PC market at that point from the lower end. I do remember a reference from a while back about how the CP/M-based word processing systems, and even the first IBM-PC based ones, were far less sophisticated and capable than the much more expensive (and apparently high maintenance) dedicated word processors that they replaced. The latter Wangs and IBM Displaywriters were used mostly as fancy electronic typewriters that could store full documents and apparently could do little of the typeset-type stuff that products like the who-ever-heard-of-it Redactor II could do.
Again, research, research.... I might have a cute, fun thing for you typographers to look at later. -BC 209.6.203.244 19:49, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Ummmm....I had already linked a 1972 CPT 4200 [Fixed typo -BC 209.6.203.244]to a Diablo ribbon and showed how a *later* model, a CPT Cassetype 4200 from apparently 1978, used a Selectric mechanism. And Wang wasn't even mentioned as a player in the word processing market in that 1975 Business Week article covering the word processing business then: 1975 Business Week Article And as I said, and as counter-intuitive as it might seem, the earlier word processing systems by the likes of Redactron evidently had much more sophisticated document creation functions than later devices like the Wang. Look at the description of the Redactor II, a machine that came out about 1976, here: Redactor II Description and compare it to what your Wang can do. Again as I said, later word processers like the Wang and the IBM Displaywriter functioned more like big electronic typewriters with full page storage. By contrast, the early word processors looked more to be meant as do-all composition machines.
But this is all surmising and such. What we really need is actual data and specs on those mysterious early 70's daisywheels. Which I'm working on (which means I should spend less times here.) Well, I'm glad at least someone else here is making use of the Internet for research.
What if I do, and I'm certain I will, find a circa 1972 word processor using a Diablo model with 1/120" horizontal resolution -- do I win then or will I still have to do more work? -BC 209.6.203.244 22:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
http://www.bookrags.com/Word_processor http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/compartics/History_of_Word_Processing.pdf
From the "Bookrags" cite: "In the early 1970s Linolex, Lexitron and Vydec introduced pioneering word-processing systems with CRT display editing."
That "History of Word Processing" cite is just dumb: it discusses IBM stuff and then skips over to microcomputers and CP/M. Not very germane to the discussion, is it? (Not very good history, either.)
Since we're citing stuff, here's another one from me: http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/default.aspx Around 1978 I got a Diablo daisy-wheel printer to go with my IMSAI Z80 microcomputer. Not only was it much faster than the Selectric, it had many daisies some of which were proportionally spaced and it was designed to work as a computer printer. I had gotten into microcomputing thinking that by computerizing my house I'd learn something about experimental physics, since a real physicist surely needs to know something about both experiment and theory. To handle the proportional spacing, I wrote a printer driver. My colleague Rick Shoemaker, another microcomputer addict, and I decided we'd write a book called Interfacing Microcomputers to the Real World, and we "typeset" it using my printer driver and a daisy wheel printer. Addison-Wesley published the book, just as it had published Laser Physics, but this time using our nice proportionally spaced camera-ready proofs.
A library near me still had that book, so I popped on over to take a look, he used a Diablo 1345A, which is a HyType II -- not bad, eh?
I now suspect HyType I's are 12xx models, while HyType II's are 13xx. The first model HyType II would then likely be the 1300. In between that and the 1978 1345A used to typeset the book and according to that nifty Swiss ribbon crossreference, there was the Diablo 1300, 1330, 1330 WP, 1334, 1334 WP, 1335, 1335 WP, 1340A, and the 1340 WP. Hmmm....
I may be many things, but confused is not of them (well, at least when it comes to science/geeky/logic stuff...) -BC 209.6.203.244 03:02, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
I photocopied some pages out of that Sargent/Shoemaker book, scanned two of them into PNG/s and posted them here: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/Murray.html FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:33, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
What I'm essentially trying to do is move backwards in time towards 1972 by using provable checkpoints in regards to what common office technology was capable in an given year. The Swiss ribbon crossreference indicates there were daisywheel printers in use back in 1972, but without much indication of specific model and capability. That 1977 description of the Redactron Redactor II made it sound very much like it could have created the memos, and that 1973 reference to it suggests it used technology available at least very close to the time of the memos, but that's not exactly hard proof either (although more info is forthcoming on that). Having a book typeset on a Diablo in 1978, with not only the specific model number of the Diablo used, but with actual pages to look at -- c'mon now, that wasn't such a bad catch for a troll, no? Did you catch the clean superscript? That was totally by accident -- I went skimming through the book (it was late, I had a hard time finding a parking spot, and it was an archived book that I had to wait to be retrieved) and I looked first for any Diablo references, and then for any superscripting. I didn't notice any superscripting and was getting antsy to leave, so I just made photocopies of the Diablo references. It wasn't until later when I was looking it over when I saw the little "tm" superscript. Cool.
What this does is bolster the Redactor II as being capable of doing the memos since that lawyer who describes it bought it around 1977, just one year before Sargent said he got his. And the Redactor II is linked to 1973 in some fashion at least. Also bear in mind that his IMSAI/Diablo combo was likely a much less powerful device, at least in regards to word processing, than the Redactron. That "Scroll Systems Retroscroller (tm) Text Output" controller sounds especially very intriguing, but there is no reference to it in Google. Was that a new gizmo then or an old one? All that lost info.... -BC 70.90.98.226 19:52, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Ah, but as I pointed out, 1972 is now within striking distance -- devices capable of replicating the memos were available around 1976 at least, and these were not at all, as had been claimed by the likes of Newcomer and Phinney, vanishingly improbable and/or ultra expensive typesetting machines. They were indeed actually regular office stuff that even lawyers in small firms were buying back then. Even though there is a lot more research and investigating to be done, and even though there is frustratingly hardly any records left of those fascinating early-mid 70's word processing systems, the bits and pieces of evidence that has popped up so far have all been undermining the fundamental assumptions and beliefs of the pro-forgery people, expert or not. And the vast bulk of the external evidence aside from the appearance issue very much points towards to the memos being real and created by some circa 1972 device.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of "evidence". Some people might consider a book proportionally typeset on a Diablo 1345A daisywheel bought in 1978 along with actual pages copied from that book, including a very nice full superscript sample, to be evidence for what you could do word processing-wise in the later 70's at least. After all, wasn't it claimed by certain people that you couldn't do any of this sort of stuff until well into the 80's at least, or that you would need at least very expensive, specialized typesetting equipment that would never, ever be used for creating just memos? Some other people, though, I imagine, might say, "Big whoop, what does that prove? 1978 is still not 1972." And some people might consider a description of a specific word processor model bought apparently in 1977, but referenced in 1973, as having a "proportional Times" print mode option as also being evidence, yet I guess some others might still say something like, "Eh, you still ain't got nuttin'. Thems docs wuz forged, I tell ya, thems wuz forged! Ya wastin' ya time, I tell ya, ya wastin' ya time!"
Also I am but a smartalecky Internet troll, so what can I possibly do to truly undermine all those well-reasoned, expert conclusions? Really, seriously? But, as I said, we shall see, shan't we? ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 21:59, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
While I've been pretty good at going public here rather quickly with stuff I find out about, there were a few things I've kept to myself, mostly because I need to know what they mean. For instance, I was informed that the 1973 document on the Redactor II compares that to three other competing word processing systems, presumably on or about to come on the market at that point, and each used either a Diablo or Qume daisywheel printer: NBI, OCI-Veritext, and the AB Dick Magna I. I'm not too sure to make of this tantalyzing info so far (some people at CBI are trying to get more detail, though). The "NBI" reference is too vague. A Google on "AB Dick Magna I" gets pieces of a pay-to-read reference that starts off as, This unit was an AB Dick Magna I automatic "daisywheel" typewriter that is compatible with IBM Mag Card II equipment. We equipped the Magna I with an... And all I can find out about the "OCI-Veritext" so far is that it used a HyType II(!)/Qume ribbon. Very tantalyzing, but some more detail is absolutely needed. There's a good chance, though, I can push the memo-capable tech back to 1973 within a week. And then....well, we'll see, shan't we? -BC 209.6.203.244 23:26, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I was able to figure out how to access the article without paying for it. It wasn't very informative, though: it's heavily footnoted but very poorly written. It's about a project linking a legal clinic to a big old time-sharing CDC mainframe at Northwestern University in order to test out an experimental computerized system for creating wills and trusts and such. It's vague when they exactly started on the project, but it looks as though it was 1976 and was continued for some years thereafter. The equipment at the clinic was referred to in passing and mostly in the footnotes. The AB Dick Magna I was actually already at the clinic when the project started with no indication of how long it was there. It's described as a "magnetic card-controlled typewriter" in the main article and as an "A.B. Dick Magna I automatic daisywheel typewriter" in the footnote. For the project it was equipped with some sort of communications module an dial-up modem to communicate with the CDC mainframe -- it was essentially converted into a network printer controlled by the experimental legal software running on the CDC. They also purchased and added: an Anderson Jacobson daisywheel printer/terminal with tractor feed; a Teletype 42 comm unit with a built-in dot matrix printer; and two Teleray 1061 video terminals. From the description, the Magna I seems like it used one of the "KSR" Diablo models that had a built-in keyboard, which made it look like a typewriter, and it used IBM-type magnetic cards for document storage. That's something I guess, but not exactly too helpful with proportional printing business. FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 01:28, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Just before heading out the door, I found a passing reference to the OCI-Veritext, but while it doesn't say much about it other than to make it seem more like a smart typewriter, the article it appears in gives some more insights into early word processing tech:
1984 Creative Computing Article -BC
209.6.203.244
00:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
The second indicates that at least some of the Diablo models from the 70's had a HyPlot *option" which doubled the resolution to 1/120"
http://gopher.quux.org:70/Archives/usenet-a-news/FA.printers/81.08.11_ucbvax.2620_fa.printers.txt
The basic question it whether just 1/60" resolution for proportional spacing would be sufficient to dupe the memos at least as well as the Word recreations. Bear in mind that the Word recreations only approxtimate the memos and are not at all identical, most noticeably with the two Killian memos with letterheads. I know that some of the typography experts think a higher resolution would be needed, but even an appoximate match by circa early 70's device should be enough to severely undercut the forgery claim since there really isn't anything else supporting it in a verifiable way. -BC 209.6.203.244 18:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The fundamental problem is that are dealing with technology that was obsolete and scrapped so many years ago that very, very little evidence is remaining for even their ever existing, nevermind nice think manuals filled conveniently with specs and codes. As I think I demonstrated enough, the "created by Word" scenario has too many easily demonstrable discrepencies and issues to be taken seriously, especially so when the contents issue is factored in.
Of course life would be much easier if Bush had simply fessed up to whether the memos were true or not. His not commenting is more support for the memos being genuine.
There is one more test I'm looking at that looks promising: PC Magazine use to have (or maybe they still do) annual printer issues where they tested and rated different printers, and they included print samples. I can get my hands on some early-mid-80's issues that had daisywheel tests that had samples of proportional print mode in addition to Pica and Elite. Since Pica and Elite are fixed pitch, they can be used as a reference for the type of proportional spacing used in the daisywheels, most of which were Diablo compatibles and had identical proportional print modes. If the proportional mode of the Diablo-compatible daisywheel matches the spacing shown in the memos, would that be sufficient to at least kill the forgery charges? It may not completely clear up the origin of the memos, but it would be nice to finally put the always very, very dubious forgery claims to rest. -BC 209.6.203.244 05:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh yeah, I came across this, but I'm not too sure what to think of it yet: https://secure.fixyourownprinter.com/?search=cr&q=HyType But it looks as though the HyType I was indeed the low-end model since the Coleco Adam used it and the Coleco wasn't made until 1983: http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html So I may have been mistaken in thinking that HyType I was the early version of the HyType II -- they may instead have been contemporaneous models, with one being cheap and the other deluxe. My bad. -BC 209.6.203.244 05:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Nooo....if you have been paying attention, what I've done is establish via a printer ribbon cross-reference that there were indeed word processing systems in 1972 that used HyType I daisywheel ribbons. So evidently there were word processing systems using Diablo-manufactured daisywheel printers at the time of the memos. What's murky now is what models they were and what exactly were they capable of. Like I said, at that time Diablo was strictlyan OEM printer supplier to word processor makers like CPT and Redactron, and so any documentation would have been provided by them and would refer to the printer by their model numbers and very likely not Diablo's (think Toyota Matrix versus the Pontiac Vibe, which is also a Matrix). There is some documentation after Xerox took over regarding the HyType I Model 1200, and I had been thinking that the Model 1300 HyType II replaced it a couple of years later, but apparently now the HyType I may have been around in one form or the other until the early 80's. So this to be looked further into. The important thing is that we now have word processing systems in place with some model of Diablo daisywheel printer at the time of the memos. That's something, no? -BC 209.6.203.244 18:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
In other words, some more research needs to be done. Your viewpoint is that of a typographer, but at a computer firm, Adobe Systems, so you are familiar with computer fonts, but not so much with old printers and their capabilities, including type characteristics. By your own admission, you've only recently concluded that the memo fonts are not Times New Roman. Hailey's expertise is in document authentication and the type characteristics of old devices, apparently primarily typewriters. I make no claims to expertise (but nor do I claim I have none), but I have looked carefully at the methodologies that you two and others have use and found some flaws.
You don't provide nearly enough samples to convincingly demonstrate your point that the fonts are Times Roman when individual memo characters are evidently not. You seem sincere, but you should have spent more time doing more word-to-word, character-to-character comparisons between the memmos and Wrod recreations and then demonstrated how this supports your conclusion. Your pdf "samples" are grossly insufficient by any scientific research standard.
Hailey has does far more sampling and had demonstrated his results much more extensively than any of the other supposed experts involved in this, so he get more brownie points towards his expertise level. He seems, though, to have no idea about daisywheel printers -- instead he extensively describes a strange typewriter-like device with a platen that can print proportionally in a font that sort of looks like Times New Roman, but isn't (perhaps he should have looked at these: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/Printwheel3A.jpg and http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/Printwheel2A.jpg.)
And obviously my interest is in debunking this forgery nonsense, and it is nonsense -- you put *all* the pieces on the table -- fonts, contents, DoD docs and so on -- throw out all the easily refuted bogus bits, and then when you put all them all together, forgery is not at all what you end up with. If anything, what you do end up with is far worse. -BC (this really will be my last say on the matter until I have more concrete info to share) 209.6.203.244 16:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
- Thomas Phinney 07:45, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I suggest you do your homework better. You alleged experts have not helped at all to clear up matters here. You, like Newcomer, have offered a lot of opinion but with very little in the way of demonstration to back it up. You claim now that the memos are in Times Roman font (MAC) and not Times New Roman (Windows), but you haven't demonstrated that with any real sampling either. By comparison, I took all 3 instances of the word "Harris" from the "CYA" memo and compared them to a Word-created one -- the characters don't match up that well. In your interview with Creative Pro, http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/21939.html, you make the statement:
"So, every letter is different. The baseline wavers a bit. That's no surprise. We're not looking at an original printed directly from a computer. This is an effect of the image degradation from being scanned twice at low resolution. This is why many of the arguments based on letter shape are pretty dubious.
If you want to test it, type a memo in Times New Roman. Fax it to yourself (make sure the fax guides are loose enough that the paper can twist just ever so slightly). Get it scanned back into a computer, and then drop the resolution to 120 dpi on the final image. It will look a heck of a lot like the CBS memo at this point. Absolutely no need to use a typewriter (or a degraded font) up front!"
But as I pointed out to you, there was a guy did that with a Word-created CYA copy, http://www.poweroftheindividual.org/blog/2004/09/fauhxed-bush-memos.html, and I again took out his 3 instances of "Harris" and compared those to Word-created one. While the three Harris's are much more distorted than the CYA memo ones, they still match up better to their Word origin than the CYA ones. Also in regards to the baseline wavering, the the deliberately distored Word-created one wavers in groups of letters, and *not* individually as show in the CYA memo, which would be the case with an impact printer. And I made the effort to actually demonstrate this: http://www.aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html#FunWithFonts.
Have fun in Lisbon. ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 21:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Veritas vincit. -BC
209.6.203.244
18:42, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
What's the evidence for your claim that a daisywheel printer with proportional spacing was available to Killian in 1972? 71.212.31.95 05:14, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
That was already covered: this is a Swiss HyType ribbon crossreference listing the CPT model 4200: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband-multistrike/qume-1145-farbband-multistrike-original-schwarz.asp
This is a computer timeline mentioning the CPT model 4200 word processor as being introduced in 1972: http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/01HISTORYCD-Chrono1.htm (That's only one example, but I had referenced a Business Week article from June, 1975 showing that the word processor market was in full bloom by then.) As far as whether this was available to Killian, that's like asking if a 1972 Chevelle was available to him -- that's a pointless question. The thing that started the forgery charge in the first place was the claim by "Buckhead" that there were no such devices in 1972 that could proportionally print, and then Charles Johnson did his little, cute, and highly misleading CYA/Word animation and so "Rathergate" was born, and truth and journalism took a holiday. All the other claims of evidence for forgery have turned out to be utter nonsense, so it's really back to figuring out what device printed out the memos. If the best evidence is that is was indeed a daisywheel, then not only is the forgery claim dead and buried, but it also demonstrates the risk of relying on the very sketchy blogosphere for real information, how deplorably lazy and sloppy the mainstream media has become, and what sort of a man George Bush is, since he could have put this to rest a long time ago, sparing the long, drawn-out, and often vicious smear campaign aimed at Rather, CBS and Mapes, if he had any integrity whatsoever. -BC 209.6.203.244 21:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, but I've produced a ribbon cross-reference showing the CPT 4200 used a HyType ribbon, which does not fit a Selectric -- maybe CPT offered each as an option. We don't know for sure because the bulk of this stuff, including what would have been very helpful manuals, has been long ago obsolete and trashed. As I've mentioned before, it's very murky about what the technology was like back then. All that's known for sure is that the word processing market was in full bloom by 1975 with many venders now long since gone; Diablo was making daisywheel printers from about 1969 and they had to have been selling enough of them to get Xerox to buy the company for $28 million in 1972; there more than a few problems with the "created by Word" scenario; and that the more you look into it, the more the memos don't look like they were forged. -BC 209.6.203.244 23:00, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Gawd...let me type this really slow so you can understand. The CPT 4200 is referenced, along with an awful lot of long forgotten word processors in this ribbon cross-reference for HyType ribbons: http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/sp/farbband-multistrike/qume-1145-farbband-multistrike-original-schwarz.asp Go look, it's there. I didn't make this up. Now as far as the CPT 4200 in your link, that now looks to be a different 4200, the model 4200-i. Why? Go here: http://www.tonsoftoner.com/products/cpt/3044128519.htm That uses a Selectric ribbon. So I was right to suggest that the CPT 4200's came with either a Selectric or HyType option, which trashes whatever point you were trying to make. In regards to Mr. Phinney, I can only point out that, unlike Hailey, Phinney has shown very little in the way of demonstrable evidence to support his claims, the current one being that the font shown in the memos is Times Roman (which is what Macs use) and not Times New Roman (which is what Windows uses). It isn't enough to say something like, "I'm an expert, these are my credentials, therefore you must believe this opinion of mine" without going into at least some verifiable and demonstrable detail at how that opinion was reached.
You might want to consider using this rather useful Internet search site called "Google.com". Perhaps you may have heard of it. Let's say you were curious about, oh say, the ribbon an old CPT mode 4200-i word processor used. You think it might use a Selectric ribbon, but you're not sure. To find out, all you need to do is do a Google search on: CPT 4200-i Selectric and you will get results like http://onlinecomputersareus.stores.yahoo.net/ibmseiirit3.html, http://www.intimecatalog.com/supplies/details/RIBBON_DATAPRODUCTS_DATA_PRODUCTS_R5180.phtml?camp=Froogle&subcamp=DATAPRODUCTSDATA_PRODUCTS_R5180 and so on.
Now that you've confirmed that it was indeed the CPT Model 4200-i that used a Selectric ribbon, the next question may well be, what came first: a model called simply the 4200 (which used a different ribbon type), or one called the 4200-i. Hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 19:55, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
And maybe you should have read the date on the last page of the "Training Manual" for that CPT model: http://compmuseum.org/upload/cpt%204200%20series%20manual.pdf Sorry, but ribbon manufacturing cross-references are very, very specific on models, and all of them have a HyType ribbon listed for the plain CPT 4600, and a Selectric ribbon for the CPT 4600-i.
If you don't like my CPT reference, you're going to hate my Redactron one: http://eet.com/special/special_issues/millennium/milestones/berezin.html According to this, Redactron started selling its first word proccesser in 1971. And According to that June, 1975 Business Week article I referenced earlier, Redactron had at that time sold its 10,000th word processing system. And that same Swiss HyType ribbon reference that has the CPT models also has *12* Redactron models listed.
But this is all still indirect evidence. I think I may have a lead on something slightly more direct, but we'll see. What's more certain is that these always foolish forgery claims are finally going to meet a way, WAY overdue, ignoble ending. -BC 209.6.203.244 22:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Some research in Redactron led to this page: http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/burros/cbi00090-077.html Apparently the company folded up in 1977 after having been purchased by Borroughs a couple of years before then. There is a reference to the "Redactor II" word processor dated 1973, 8 lines down from the "Company Records" section. That wonderful Swiss ribbon crossreference site has the "Redactor II" using a HyType ribbon. 1973 is not 1972, but it's firmer evidence for there being word processing systems using daisywheel printers. By the way, you and others lurking out there my find it interesting to go to the search page on that Swiss ribbon site, http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/suchen.asp, and in the "Druckermodell" search field, put in "Diablo" then click on "Suchen". You should end up with the most comprehensive list of Diablo printer models you'll ever see. Since the Hytype I was also the model 1200 and the HyType II was also the model 1300, that list implies that they were contemporaneous models along with many variations. And logically, if you had a single initial product, you wouldn't put an "I" after it right away at least. In Diablo's case, it would be just the "HyType" if that was its first daisywheel printer. That there were a HyType I and II, and apparently existing at the same time, most likely means that the HyType II was a beefier, more expensive model, and not a sucessor.
But that's just guess work. Getting back to the "Redactor II" model, I also found this http://216.218.211.127/~forums/showthread.php?t=65765&page=13 To quote: "Burroughs bought out Redactor corporation (or at least its computer line from them), and sold a dedicated word processor with a large full letter size screen (portrait, not landscape) with dual floppy disk drives (RAM on a disc instead of linear on tape - HUGE time-saving improvement), for about $13,000. They gave me and another attorney a $3,000 discount if we would turn in a Redactor I so they could literally junk it at the city dump - they did not want to service them even for a $500 per year service contract. My buddy had one, and so we purchased a Redactor II (R-2) (which we promptly renamed R2-D2, of StarWars fame) for a mere $10,000. It used a Qume daisy wheel printer which had blinding speed that blew away the IBM Selectric, and we could attach different wheels for different fonts and sizes ranging from 10 pica to 12 elite to 15 fine print (great for attorneys ), Courier, Letter Gothic, and even "proportional spacing" Times (OMG!) print. It was almost like owning a print shop and having a sophisticated type composer machine. We could do anything...except graphics."
Now, you may note that the "Star Wars" reference puts the purchase at 1977, which also was apparently the last year that any Redactron model was sold. So the Redactor II apparently came out in 1973 with a Qume daisywheel printer (remember Qume was formed in 1973), was sold until 1977, and there is a reference to this system being able to proportionally print in a "Times" font, which is probably either what the Redactron manual said it was or else what the printhead was labeled as.
You go back to here, http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/burros/cbi00090-077.html, and there is this reference: "Redactor II & Printer Specifications, Book 3," 1973. (Box 3, folder 13-14)
That's 1973, and not 1976-77. 1977 is apparently when Redactron went out of business. Also bear in mind that these were not PC's with model changeovers every several months or so -- something that came out in 1973 would be sold for the few years at least, with maybe some incremental enhancements every year or so.
While this doesn't place the system at 1972, it's awfully darn close and says a lot about the office tech around that time, and that "Times" font reference is at least intriguing, no? -BC 209.6.203.244 20:16, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, but a typewriter reference (it sounds like it's talking about the IBM Executive) has absolutely no bearing in a discussion of daisywheel printers. And that 1977 cite was to a particular word processing system evidently introduced in 1973, and the Swiss ribbon crossreference confirms that it did indeed used a daisywheel printer, probably a Qume (the first Qumes at least were meant to be completely plug-compatible with Diablo's.) And as far as "crude" goes, the daisywheel printers then were precision devices, as I had already provided reference for via this pdf file, http://www.tinaja.com/glib/atg1.pdf, beginning on page 14. The only real issue is the question about what the horizontal resolution is for the different models at that time, which can be either 1/120" or 1/60". Some of the "em"-ty headed typographers (sorry...) have claimed that 1/60" is not enough for Times Roman, but we're talking about the memos and their coarse resolution may make this a moot point.
In any case, I guess I should mention that the good people here, http://www.cbi.umn.edu, are apparently going to look for references to daisywheel printers in their considerable collection of Redactron documents they conveniently have archived. I may be a troll, but I am a thorough one. ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 22:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
???? You don't seem to be following the thread very well. Grant it, it's messy, so let me summarize: 1) Daisywheel printers existed from about 1969 and were certainly common enough by 1972; 2) All references indicate that those printers could proportionally print, either via a simple "proportional mode" command (Esc P) or through computer control of the characters mapping and spacing, with the horizontal spacing resolution of these printers was either 1/60" or 1/120" depending on the model (it's murky so far which models outside of the HyType I and a handful of latter models could do which); 3) Qume, a plug-compatible Diablo rival, began making its daisywheel printers around 1973; 4) around that time there were also computer-like devices called "dedicated word processors" that used both daisywheel printers and modified IBM Selectric printers, and the market for these, according to a Business Week article from that year, was flourishing by 1975 with many vendors, manufacturers and products, most of which long since gone and forgotten about; 5) Both Diablo and evidently Qume were primarily OEM suppliers at that time, so the references to the printers they made are mostly masked by the model numbers of the dedicated word processor manufacturers; 6) However, by using a *very* comprehensive ribbon crossreferences like this, http://onlineshop.jpd.ch/suchen.asp, one can link daisywheel printer ribbons to specific word processor models; 7) By Googling those word processor models using daisywheel printer ribbons, one can some dated references to those models, hence establishing a least a rough timeline despite the paucity of info even via Google since we are dealing with long, long obsolete and discarded technology; 8) There is a CPT word processor, the mode "4200" that evidently came out in 1972 and it's only ribbon reference is for a Diablo ribbon. There was another, presumably latter model, the "4200-i" listed as using a Selectric ribbon. This was objected to via a reference to a computer museum claiming that a "CPT Cassetype 4200" in their posession, which used a Selectric printer, was the first CPT word processor. However the training manual for this model, which is on their site in PDF format, is clearly dated as being printed in February, 1978, which is several years after CPT began making word processors. There is a Business Week article from 1977 that states some of the word processor vendors were "trying to sell compatible products into the giant IBM product base", which would suggests, given the date on the training manual, that the "Cassetype 4200" was only meant as a lower lost alternative to IBM's Mag Card Selectric; 9) There was a word processing company called "Redactron" that was started in 1969, was a market leader in 1975 when it sold its 10,000th word processor, was bought by Burroughs in 1976, and then apparently was folded in 1977. There are daisywheel ribbon references to at least 12 Redactron models, one of which is the "Redactor II". There are two other key references to the "Redactor II" found on the web -- one in an archived Redactron document dated 1973, and another from 1977 stating rather specifically that "It used a Qume daisy wheel printer which had blinding speed that blew away the IBM Selectric, and we could attach different wheels for different fonts and sizes ranging from 10 pica to 12 elite to 15 fine print (great for attorneys ), Courier, Letter Gothic, and even "proportional spacing" Times (OMG!) print. It was almost like owning a print shop and having a sophisticated type composer machine. We could do anything...except graphics."; 10) I asked the research librarians at the place where the Redactron files are archived, http://www.cbi.umn.edu, if they could look for dates and references in regards to daisywheel printers in the 1969-1974 time period, and I got a reply that they will.
And that's the status so far. Now are you up to speed? Also, have you ever thought about maybe being part of the solution? -BC 209.6.203.244 13:33, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
You tell me which of these shows more effort and research:
http://imrl.usu.edu/bush_memo_study/supporting_material/bush_memos.pdf or
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/bush/TNR%20vs%20TR.pdf Hailey makes a very strong case for the memos having been created on some sort of impact printer and he concluded that the "Shape and proportion of key characters (e.g., "F,""L," "g," "5") do not fit Times New Roman or any other digital typeface I have yet found."
Sorry for the delayed response -- this is a messy page to follow (I've been sort of guilty of contributing). There was nothing ad hominem about my complaints -- I merely pointed out the difference in the level of research between what Hailey and done, and, um, certain typographers. If the things I cited aren't representative, feel free to correct me. Also, I'm getting a bit curious about how exactly Times Roman and Times New Roman changed over the past several years to explaing the discrepencies that show up here when you type in anything, and what exactly are the true unit spacing proportions these days. I did some manual measurements using the units for Times New Roman located at the bottom this page I cited before, http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/propint.htm, and found that they don't match up with what I found with a test I did in Word -- for instance "f" was wider than "t" and "J" did not all belong in its grouping. Is it because that older Monotype Times New Roman is not at all the same as the current version? Not exactly a trivial point (so to speak) considering that we're dealing with 34 yr old typeset standards. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Really? I was under the impression that they were both experts, one in computer typography and the other in document authentication. No matter -- in science, the guy with the more extensive research and presentation of work and evidence wins. I Googled Phinney's "work" and this is the best I could find: http://www.creativepro.com/printerfriendly/story/21939.html That's hardly at all comparable in quality and depth to Hailey's work. Instead of spinning your wheels with easily dismissable, unsupported opinion, why don't you try some real science instead, like say confirming (or maybe even refuting) some of the stuff in Hailey's report. He gives a nice recipe on page 4 on to show some serious issues with trying to recreate the August 1, 1972 memo in Word. If you have a scanner, it should be easy (print on mylar sheets if you're no comfortable with Photoshop/Paintshop type programs. You do something like that and then you'll have something finally useful to contribute to this discussion. -BC 209.6.203.244 20:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
You may try to argue that this one expert's opinion versus another, but in science, homework counts, especially in showing how you reached your conclusions. Hailey shows his homework in detail, whereas Phinney has not. -BC 66.251.53.50 12:07, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Your Hailey link is broken, it's this: http://english.usu.edu/Document/index.asp?Parent=632 Note the number of peer-reviewed articles he's authored and grants he's received -- that gives him some creds as a genuine researcher. His experience with archiving old documents and his handy stay in the military also give him some more brownie points. You evidently know digital typography, but he knows how old document look. If anything, both skills compliment each other, but since we're dealing with old documents (or ones purportedly old), and since he's obviously has done more research, I have to give him the nod. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, I can totally understand what Hailey was doing. He looked at the memos, saw telltale signs that they were created with an impact device, which he assumed (incorrectly) had to have been a typewriter since what else would be around in 1972 that could do that? He then tried to build his case by artificially copying and pasting typewriter fonts using faux proportional spacing to show how much they end up looking like the memo characters. That was a very naive approach that completely ignored the issue of what device could have printed proportionally like that in 1972.
Bear in mind that when you two look at the memos, your prejudices and/or experiences cause you to "see" different things: his experience is with old documents so he immediately notices all the characteristics of old documents, therefore the memos are old and not forged; your experience is with digital typography and fonts so you immediately notice all the characteristics of current Times Roman spacing like that shown in Word, therefore the memos are new and forged.
I see two guys who apparently mean well, but neither didn't actually take a look at what the level of tech and document creation was back in 1972, thereby kind of blinding both of you to the complete picture. But since the memos look very much like they could have easily been created with on early 70's tech, Hailey wins on a technicality. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, that whole business with Times Roman versus Times New Roman versus "Times" or whatever they had back in the 70's needs to be examined. Saying that they look like they created on a Mac isn't quite sufficient. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:01, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Oooo...I'm hurt. I don't pretend to be anything other than a troll, but let me put on this here thinkin' cap I have handy and turn its big ol' knob to 11.... Oh, yeah, when Phinney talks about "18 units-per-em system used by Times Roman", he's talking about digital typefaces that have nothing to do with the memos. The memos are of poor quality, meaning that their inherent coarseness makes such fine unit measurements laughably inappropriate. Also digital typefaces by their very nature are just digitized approximations of traditional typefaces -- they are to real type what MP3 encoding is to analog music. If he or anyone else wanted to really wanted to determine the true typeface used in the memos, a bunch of "A's" should be taken from all the memos and their characteristics averaged out, and then the same done for "B's," "C's," and so on. And then you compare these the defined characteristics of known/standard typefaces. I don't believe he's done anything like that, has he? But Hailey has, so again that gives him more credibility as a researcher and expert. Just pointing out "gosh, that's a narrow "E" -- it just gotta be Times Roman" is *not* sufficient. Sorry.
My head hurts now so I have to take my thinkin' cap off and maybe watch Fox News or somethin' like it to compensate. -BC 209.6.203.244 01:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
That's all nice and good, but there is a slight flaw with this reasoning: the actual memos only "approximately" line up with Word recreations on average when you do a best fit, some worse that others. As you would expect, the shorter memos do better, but then you have, as Hailey clearly demonstrated, a big discrepency with the letterheads. You just can't say, "Well, the alignment spacing here matches up pretty well, but not so much there, hmmm....I'll just disregard that second bit because it doesn't fit in with what I'm thinking." No. Everything has to fit and make sense.
Also think this through: let's suppose Diablos and their compatibles were in common use and in fact dominated the business and government market right up until, say, 3 years ago, and they had a font called "Times" that was very popular. But then cheap laser printers came on the market and businesses rapidly switched over to the point that today that virtually all the daisywheel printers have been scrapped or stuck in a back room. People still like their "Times" font, though, so the PC makers and the laser printer makers made sure there was something "just like it" at least for their customers. Well, that's what essentially happened in mid-80's
And, Duh, I know about the ems and stuff, but were talking about transitioning from a mechanical system that used a well defined font that's been around decades before the first daisywheels to a digital system that creates the font essentially as a picture, one that is suppose look like the same font on paper. Why should they screw that much with an established font? Postscript is no more than a way to describe the font as it should appear on the paper, with characters shaped and sized this way and spaced out that way, and if you want to do kerning, blah, blah, blah, but again, the whole purpose of this is to make the font look the way it's suppose to. If you have a daisywheel printer with a horizontal resolution of 1/120" and you use a printwheel of standard Times characters of about an 11 point size, and the word processing system is set to use "Times" character spacing map for it, there is no reason why the output should not be virtually identical to a digital system that is "suppose" to replicate that same font at that point size. Duh. The only real issue is the variant of the "Times" being used. According to MyFonts, the "Times" font hasn't been changed since 1974, whereas "Times New Roman" was changed in 2000, yet they look virtually identical, certainly enough so that if one created a memo around 1974 with Times and overlaid it with a memo recreated in 1974 with Times New Roman in the same point size, they should match up very well at the very least. Just as is the real-life case with the memos. The centering issue is not directly font-related so you might expect a greater variance there, and indeed you do get that with the memos when compared to their Word recreations.
Important note With all that said, I got some photocopies of a couple of Redactron documents sent to me by CBI. I can't post them, but I can say they are good news/bad news to me. The good news is that they confirm Diablo System was indeed making customizable OEM daisywheel printers in 1972. One is a single handwritten sheet dated 1/14/72 describing approval for a new design that very explicitly had proportional printing. The bad news is that the demo unit for whatever model they're talking about (it's referred to cryptically as "T 2L" ironically enough) wasn't suppose to be ready until October 1972, and apparently mass production wasn't scheduled util April of 1973. Grrrrr....everything described is about a year too late to be useful, darn it. But it doesn't indicate which model they were talking about. There is a second typewritten memo, though, dated Sept. 25, 1972, with some interesting Xerox tibits: there was "pressure" from the primarily the Marketing department to "discontinue OEMing the printer" but with, of course, no indication which printer they were talking about; some curious bullet points that go "a. If Xerox (Diablo) doesn't capture the new-non-mechanical printer market someone else will; b. If so, it might well be even present Diablo people. We agreed that the patents could be gotten around."
Yeah, I know....tantalyzing but not too useful.
Also on the first page are references to print wheels: "They have two new print wheels (Pica = 10 p and Elite = 12 p) in addition to the original Courier 72 which they expect to re-do. I have print samples of both, using a brand new film ribbon (interchangeable with the cloth; available November) They do not expect to tool new fonts (at least for OEM) right now but will do for $10k plus 50X artwork. There have been about 150 ECOS since our printer (Serial #0002) was built. We will buy a new pinter. Ed Lau please order. Comstock indicates around a 60 day delivery."
On the 2nd page of the same documents there are two items of note: "We went through our troubles with our old machine, they were all familiar and there were a few we didn't get. (Including a W printing after CR if the ribbon line was cycled electrically.)"; "Printer shipments to date 300-400."
It's unclear what that "300-400" refers to: printers to date after Xerox acquired Diablo, or total printers to date by Diablo.
While all of this this absolutely confirms that Diablo daisywheel printers were being sold by 1972 at least, things seem like they are all just one year too late for the memos, especially in regards to the proportional spacing. Hmmm....I feel like I'm overlooking something.... At the very least, I have to get more info from those CBI files. So close..... FYI. -BC 209.6.203.244 20:48, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Now, now.... I strongly suspected over a week ago that I would be able to show that the memos could be created in 1973, by the time of CYA memo, on common office equipment (as least common in law offices at that time), but 1972 would be hard. The typographers are still doubtful, but I think I have their number. One part of my best-fit scenario is that Killian went to seek legal counsel in regards to what to do about the pressure he and Harris were facing in regards to filling Bush's rating report covering May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973. That was the period where Bush was "Not observed" in Alabama. The official DoD records indicate this completely outside of the infamous CYA memo on the matter. What CYA memo did was add a few details, like: mentioning former base commander, retired General Staudt (what, you didn't know he retired as a general?) wanting to "sugar coat" it; and that Killian would "backdate but won't rate" (the CYA memo is dated Aug. 18, 1973, the rating report was dated May 2nd, 1973, just after the rating period, which would be logical for a backdate since his prior full rating reports were all dated much later in the month -- go to DoD PDF, pages 33-38 as numbered in a PDF reader. The "Not Observed" business and the stonewalling an official Air Force inquiry into the missing rating are on pages 39-44, but out of sequence for some reason). If you are a responsible Air National Guard officer with a no-show pilot under your command who's also the son of some big shot with big connections (Bush's dad was Chairman of the Republican National Committee at that time) and you're being pressured to basically fib on an official evaluation report, what would you do? Get advice maybe? If so, from whom? So the idea that Killian would seek legal advice under those circumstance is hardly a stretch.
Now, it appears that Killian might have had reason to seek counsel in 1972 when he suspended Bush, but there are some key records missing regarding the suspension that should have been included in the DoD records (kudos to Gerald Lechliter: AFM 35-13 PDF) so it's hard to tell. That the suspension was signed off and recorded through normal channels strongly suggest that it was not that big of an issue for Killian since there really was no option -- missing the mandatory physical meant a mandatory suspension, and that would likely have been very hard to get around. The 1973 rating report, though, was a different issue -- that's a judgement call, although I imagine the Air Force (who was the higher authority for all pilots) wouldn't be happy to learn of a completely falsified report. So if Killian was indeed being pressured to rate someone who was not at all observed on duty, making up even a "below average" rating report would still be completely falsifying, and perhaps not exactly good news for Killian and Harris if that was found out later by AF officials. So getting some sort of legal advice or counsel would seem to be the most prudent thing to do for someone in Killian's predicament. Now what do lawyers generally ask you to bring when you go to seek counsel on a specific matter? See where I'm going here, yet? That would explain where those Bush-related would have kept all this time while all of Killian's other memos were destroyed (Knox is on record describing Killian as being a "stickler for rules" and "was having trouble keeping Bush in line")
So conceivably all the memos Killian brought with him would be cleaned up or transcribed for clarity. Bear in mind that the AF guide for such memos indicate that they function as journals of meetings and decisions that could be very useful down the road if there are any questions about why certain orders were given and decisions made (tinyurl dot com slash 7zdmr is a link to an AF writing guide covering this -- check out "Scenario 5). So transcribing a memo for clarity or record keeping would be completetely OK since it's not an "official" record.
What this all means is that *all* of the memos could have been transcribed on the same day in 1973. Obviously this would be very hard to prove, except for one thing: all impact printing devices like typewriters and daisywheel printers tend to have unique wear and strike characteristics especially after they've been used for any length of time. So if one was to have very clean, hi rez copies of the memos, and if there are certain characters that show the same strike and wear throughout all the memos, well....go check page 8 of Hailey's 2nd report: Hailey excerpt. The thing with daisywheel printers is that since they were designed for heavy duty printing, they would evidently wear out their printwheels pretty quickly, but since the printwheels were so easy to replace, it was not big of a deal. If the memos had been printed out a year or do apart, there was a good chance the printwheel would have been changed in the meantime, which would have changed the wear characteristics. But if they were all printed within an hour or even a day or so of each other, then they would have the same characteristics.
But all that stuff is for later. I still have to have to firm up exactly what the 1972 and 1973 word processing systems could and could not do in terms of proportional spacing and in what font (Reactron wasn't the only player in 1972). Not exactly a trivial matter, but I think I can nail that in a week or so. If I can confirm that at least the 1973 word processors can dupe the memos, then Hailey's stuff becomes really important. I want to be done with this murky, complicated mess ideally about a week before the mid-terms for obvious reasons, and they aren't that far off. Ugh. -BC 209.6.203.244 02:11, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
That's not even romotely close to what I said. Might I suggest you try rereading what I posted unintoxicated and without a TV show or movie featuring leaping cars running in the background? -BC 209.6.203.244 16:06, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Transcriptions are not fakes, especially for things like those memos, which are not "official" documents and are instead more more like notes, and the Air Force encourages them to to be written as sort of a journal of decisions, discussions, meetings and such -- see AF Writing Guide Excerpts. I had already explained all this, so your "You're saying you think the 1972 memos were faked in 1973 by a lawyer?" was fully deserving of whatever slapdown I saw fit to deliver. Just be thankful this isn't Usenet, where I'm a teeny bit less polite.
Are you being deliberately dense? Let's say you write up a note to yourself, dated today, that goes, oh: "Oct. 18 2006 -- 1. Mailed check for $5,000 to Dr Okon in Nigeria to help him move $21,320,000, of which I am suppose to receive 20%. 2. Posted something really dumb on the Wikipedia regarding the Killian memos, which are forged of course, because, well, um, everyone says they are"
A year later you find yourself in a lawyer's office and you were asked to bring all documents you have regarding this Dr. Okon and the Nigerian deal. One of the docs is the Oct. 18, 2006 note. It's handwritten and scribbly so the lawyer has that and some other dated notes you made typed up more clearly and then filed away. Nothing is changed during the retyping -- what's being "faked" oh anonymous person of dubious character and even more dubious logic skills? -BC 70.90.98.226 20:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I still need to nail this completely, but apparently there were indeed systems widely available by 1973 at the latest that could dupe the memos as seen. The Redactron docs I got from The Charles Babbage Institute show that daisywheel printers were being made in quantity at least as early as 1972 by Xerox's Diablo unit and that Redactron had at least one proportional printing system scheduled for mass production beginning in April 1973. And Redactron was just one of many vendors coming out with word processing systems right around that time. This info by itself contradicts virtually every single claim by the pro-forgery people in regards to 70's tech. And if you people are completely wrong on points 1,2,3 and 4, chances are awfully good that you're just as wrong on points 5, 6, 7 and so on.
Speaking of points, the typographers here keep talking about needing 18 units/em to do the proportional spacing at shown in the memos, with "em" simply meaning the point size. Essentially what this means is that in order to accurately render a font at a specific size, say 12 points, you would supposedly need a resolution of 1/18th that size. So to do a 12 point font correctly, you need a resolution of 18/12-points, and since a "point" is currently defined as being 1/72", a little bit of math gets you 1/108" as being the horizontal resolution needed to conventionally render 12 point text. Daisywheel printers use to do either 1/60" or 1/120" horizontal increments. 1/120" is too fine for conventional 12 point, but if you use a printwheel with a 10.8 point size fonts characters, the 1/120" resolution would be perfect. 10.8 corresponds awfully close to the 11 point size apparently most commonly used on IBM Selectric Composers, which would make sense since daisywheel printwheel characters in turn corresponded in size to those in the Selectric "golfball" printheads.
What this all means is that the capacity for printing in Times Roman or something awfully close to it, like just plain "Times", was available at the absolute latest by 1974, and most probably by 1973. We'll see.
But I recently got drawn away from the printing issue back to the contents issue by a little phrase in the June 24, 1973 "fake" memo that USA Today used but not CBS: "His recent activity is outside the rating period." That's opened up a whole can of worms once I culled through all the DoD docs to see exactly what was meant by this. For supposedly forged documents, the Killian memos have been awfully handy in figuring out some seemingly odd DoD discrepencies, which again points out how ludicrous the forgery charges have always been.
Keep an eye out on the bottom of this page, in the "Not Observed" section, for forthcoming enlightenment. -BC 209.6.203.244 20:34, 22 October 2006 (UTC) -BC Fixed Typos 70.90.98.226 18:07, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm actually being a little bit dense (by my definition of "dense") here -- despite my research, I keep forgetting that office tech was already pretty mature by the early 70's: everyone had things like copiers, dictating equipments, even dial-up terminal access, and *all* the word processors had magnetic storage of some type, tape or card. Things really were not all that different from a modern office if you swap in Mag-Selectrics & dedicated word processors w/daisywheel printers for PC's & Macs w/laser printers, messy copier toner for cartridges, mainframe access instead local server networking, cassette-based dictating machines instead of microcassete-based ones, and so on. Email was definitely missing though. In other words, the memos could have been dictated at one point and printed out at another, and even stored and printed out again at another point, very much like today. This would seemingly make sorting out when things were actually printed more complicated, but it probably doesn't. If you accept the well-supported premise that Bush essentially disappeared in terms of duty and performance when he went to Alabama, which would have put Killian in a very awkward spot given Bush's family connections, then it isn't just the memos that logically fall into place once you figure out the timelines from the DoD docs, aided by the memos. We shall see, though....-BC 209.6.203.244 00:43, 19 October 2006 (UTC) Cleared up -BC 209.6.203.244 12:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Fundamentally, though, any explanation for the memos, supporting that they are forgeries or real, has to be complete. That means that you just can't say, "They were forged" because evidence A, B and C supports this, while ignoring or not logically explaining away evidence D, E and F that doesn't support this. You have to accommodate A-F and beyond in terms of all evidence regardless if you're pro-forgery or anti-forgery. In my case, I'm absolutely sure the forgery claims are nonsensical, but I still have to be complete. So what if there was readily available office equipment back in 1973 or 1972 (I haven't given up that it might still be earlier than 1973) -- how would the memos end up being created on that? It's already been demonstrated that people's memory of the office tech in those is too hazy and fuzzy to be helpful. It looks as though the early WP systems by the likes of Redactron and AB Dick used the Diablo daisywheel printer models with the integrated terminal keyboards, which would make them look exactly like typewriters -- it's likely nobody at the time had a clue about the difference unless he or she had to know. Still, you would think someone like pool secretary like Knox would remember stuff like that. Law firms, though, were already big users of the more expensive and more primitive IBM Mag-Card and Mag-Tape word processors by the late 60's, so they would be, and apparently were, very quick and early adopters of the more advance non-IBM WP systems. when they came out.
The law firm would explain two things: how Killian would have access to one of the new WP systems; and where would those memos be kept all of this time when his on-base stuff was trashed decades ago. That of course leads to the next question: why would Killian seek legal counsel in regards to Bush? Well, even if you don't factor in the memos at all, the DoD docs by themselves clearly indicate that there was a big issue with Bush's OETR rating period ending April 30, 1973: there was Killian and Harris's "Not Observed" report dated May 2nd, 1973, an inquiry by the Air Force on June 29, 1973 with very specific requests for forms to filled out to explain this, and then a big gap before the next DoD docs on the matter, which came out in Nov 12-15, none of which technically satisfied the AF requests, and which were apparently suppose to involve the "Senior Rater," which was Killian, and apparently some info about Alabama, where Bush has been transferred to, but which wasn't even mentioned.
So there was obviously some funky stuff going on then involving Bush not satisfying some sort of duty, and then when you finally add in the August 18, 1973 "CYA" memo, you then go, "Ahh, OK, that explains the screwy DoD stuff." Bush had shirked his duty and his immediate superiors, including of course Killian and Harris, were getting pressured to go easy on him to the point of being essentially asked to falsify a rating report. It costs the Air Force a bunch of money and a lot of time and resources to train a combat pilot, so apparently they kind of take things like OETR's rather seriously and would probably frown on made-up stuff. While Bush was in the "Guard" of sorts, the Air Force evidently was the final authority on pilots like him. So the business with the missing rating report was not a trivial matter, so neither would be falsify the information in one.
OK, so now we have a pretty damn good incentive for Killian to get some advice on what to do. And most if not all lawyers would have asked Killian to bring along as much documentation as he could regarding the situation. Voila! By just using what the normal behavior and procedures would be for someone in Killian's circumstances, we've assembled all the memos at a place that would not only likely have had an up to date word processor, but would have filed away or transcribed copies of the memos to boot, hence also explaining where they would have been all this time, as well as the potential liability for whoever it was that took or copied those files. And all of a sudden, without any tortured bits of logic and ignored evidence, you have a complete explanation. If you try something similar with the pro-forgery hypothesis, you will very quickly have to resort to tortured logic and extremely unlikely circumstances to even begin to make any similar headway for a truly "complete" explanation that accounts for the contents issue, the superscript and letterhead discrepencies, and so on.
Simple, no? -BC 209.6.203.244 21:23, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Nooo....I had come up to speed enough on typography and type design topics way back (I do my homework). And I actually had a feeling that not mentioning spacing in my response would provoke some attempt at a gotcha, but it was not worth the revision. If the memos were created with an impact printer -- a daisywheel -- using a "Roman style" font and Times Roman spacing -- which appears to be awful close to the default spacing of "proportional mode" in Diablo-compatible printers -- then you would need a certain resolultion to say with genuine certainty that these letters and their spacing are without a doubt this particular font. Now if your only experience, as appears to be the case with Phinney, is with digitized fonts and the fine differences between patented fonts like Times Roman versus Times New Roman, and maybe how best to accurately display them and print them out on with current technology, he would be completely out his area of expertise when presented with documents of uneven, coarse resolution using Times Roman-*like* spacing and fonts. His natural instinct would be to look for a best fit for things he knows about -- like digitized Times Roman and Times New Roman fonts. But both of those fonts are based on old typefaces that were characterized and created very differently way back when, including during the 70's. And when you also stir in all these Roman-like fonts that were evidently common at the time, then you really need to do some research and show your work to justify your opinion and conclusion in the face of reasonable skepticism. Neither Phinney, Newcomer, or any other self-proclaimed typography experts claiming forgery has so far come even remotely close to what would be considered a sufficiently detailed scientific examination justifying their claims. It's so far been just one little spotty bit here, another spotty bit there, and lots of confused logic. That's not exactly enough. I personally pulled out repeating words from the memos to look for common characteristics and then compared them to Word recreations and found the same consistent discrepancies that Hailey did. What I did was hardly comprehensive, but it was still far more than what I've seen done by any of the so called typography experts.
Again, I apologize for noticing this comment earlier. True, the typographers here were discussing Times Roman spacing in terms of 18 units/em, and not really something like TrueType at 2048 units/em, but this still excuse not apparently recognizing this meant that many if not most daisywheel printers were then fully capable of *exactly* doing a Times font using 18 units/em by the mid-70's. And the last I checked, the mid-70's were not so far removed from the early 70's so that a 1972/73 system capable of duping the memo spacing was not exactly beyond the realm of possibility. And if you were truly all so knowledgeble about historical devices, you shouldn't depend on an Internet troll to show that there were indeed many devices in the 70's fully Times capable. Sorry if I sound harsh, but there was no good excuse for how this whole "thems wuz forged" Killian memo thing blew up much to Bush's advantage when all there needed was a little bit of research by the news media and all the supposed experts that came out of the woodwork. -BC 209.6.203.244 01:09, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Was I talking about you or was I talking about Phinney in regards to old tech? Or are you Phinney with an anonymous IP? And didn't I mention something about justifying claims with some sort of proof? I'm glad you had a daisywheel printer in the mid-80's, worked at an office in the late 70's and early 80's that had dedicated word processors, and have some copies of the printer review issues of PC Magazine. Now, are you going to do something constructive with this info, or....? By the way, did you see my further up posts about the Redactron "Redactor II" word processor? Neat, eh? -BC 209.6.203.244 00:01, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
And in dealing with a real-life issue of document forensics, the font is still only part of the equation -- Phinney made a fundamental mistake in only discussing the font aspects of Hailey's research but not other key issues Hailey noted and discussed, like the poor centering of the letterheads and the evidence for impact printing and wear. In my case I'm looking at *all* of these aspects together with what the official DoD records support and show, what people who should know what the truth is have said (or mostly not said), combined with some research into what exactly was the capabilities of the word processing technology available at the time the memos were allegedly written. And when you do bother to do all this, the forgery claim becomes laughably inane. The absolute worst thing that the memos can be are faithful transcriptions of handwritten notes made within just a few years of the dates appearing on them. Which even then precludes them from being "forgeries" or fakes in any meaningful way.
So instead of you or anyone else glibly saying that I don't understand stuff like FUnits and em squares, you would be a bit more productive and have slightly greater credibility if you spent less time making clueless comments here and more time producing research and results that actually support and back up even a little bit of your claims. -BC 209.6.203.244 13:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 15:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, the thing is that if you had focused on your greatest expertise, then you would have identified the spacing apparently used and left it at that. The poor quality of the memos made font identification too murky, and even you didn't really come down on the "Times Roman, not Times New Roman" side until pretty recently. So you didn't address the centering issue, the archaic formatting, the high degree of content matchup with office records, and excused the very odd superscripting with a very, very unlikely explanation -- that didn't stop you from jumping on the pro-forgery bandwagon. I'm sure you meant well, but that was really inappropriate, especially since is very, very clear that you did not know "about every specific machine that was known to be available in 1972" and hence could not have discounted them. I've already located an entire textbook typeset in 1978 using a Diablo printer and showing full proportional printing and superscripting. Indeed any daisywheel printer capable of 1/120" horizontal spacing can dupe the memos as is. Apparently all Qume daisywheels can do this, which pushes the date for memo-capable devices down to about 1973-74. Find one Diablo printer model circa 1972 with the 1/120" spacing ability, and that's it for the forgery nonsense. The memos with the matching letterheads were printed on pre-printed letterhead sheets, likely also created on a daisywheel, as was done commonly in pre-laser printer days. The printwheel, like Knox's Olimpia typewriter, had a small superscript "th" spoke but not an "st" one, and you still had to remember to select it since it was a manual operation, as with Knox's typewriter. The wear characteristics that Hailey noted? There they are. The archaic documant formatting? There you are as well. And of course there is no need for some convoluted and very unlikely explanation for the matchup of the content to official records, because, well again, there they are. Simple and all the other pieces fit. -BC 209.6.203.244 16:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm working on it ;) -BC 209.6.203.244 16:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
To be more specific, you claim that daisywheel printers based on technology developed at Diablo Systems were "made since 1969" and were "evidently common by 1972". What is your evidence for that? You also appear to be claiming that these devices were capable of the proportional spacing exhibited in the Killian documents. What is your evidence for that? 71.212.31.95 18:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Not a thing likely to show up in a TexANG office. A Pentagon office, maybe. -- htom 06:59, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Talk about missing the obvious. The fired producer of the CBS Killian memos piece, Mary Mapes, wrote a book basically defending herself called "Truth and Duty". I'm not exactly fond of her -- when the right wing blogosphere started atttacking the memos story on the basis of the proportional printing/superscripting shown in the memos, Mapes and her crew basically just folded up without any sort of real counterattack, like, oh, maybe undercutting the charges with a little research into early 70's tech. I really think CBS could have perhaps brought more resources to bear on gathering the necessary info than some random Internet troll. In any case, I had no interest in Mapes's book, but I came across this much more interesting page on her website for the book: http://www.truthandduty.com/documents.htm
In it are descriptions of the memos and her attempt at "meshing" the memos to the DoD docs -- she got some of the matchups but not all -- but most interesting are the links to the PDF documents at the bottom under "SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS". These are Texas Air National Guard docs from about 1969 to the early 70's, but not related to Bush. What I noticed when I went through them all is that 7 of them are proportionally printed! I kid you not. It looks to my eye like they were done on an IBM Executive, but still. Mapes only mentions that one "appears to demonstrate proportional spacing" but says nothing about the rest. All but one are from the Adjutant General's office with the other being from the Governor's office. Go look: Doc1, Doc2, Doc6, Doc7, Doc9 (Resignation), Doc10, and Doc12 FYI -BC 209.6.203.244 23:33, 19 October 2006 (UTC) Fixed typos -BC 209.6.203.244 23:39, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I do not think that this particular phrase means what you think it does, when used in the context of a military fitness report. Notice that the phrase can be found in Kerry's records, too; his fitness report covering 17 Dec 66 to 10 Mar 67, on lines 16, and 17, and 18, and 20. Quoting ... Paragraphs 15 and 16 are not completed as this officer was observed only as a student ...
It's also used on the report covering 22 Mar 67 to 14 Apr 67 and probably others.
Records examined at http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/jkerry/ftnsrpts.pdf
And in some parts of some of the records it's a box to be checked. -- htom 06:55, 16 October 2006 (UTC) -- htom 06:57, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
May 4th, 1972 in regards to when Bush was ordered to take his physical. It's these match-ups that make the forgery alternative explanation ludicrous. But I still need to nail down at least one commonly available word processor from no later than 1973 that can dupe the memos as is to really start driving nails into the forgery coffin. We shall see.... -BC 70.90.98.226 21:49, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually I now don't think I need a 1972 word processor. 1973, yes, but not necessarily one from 1972. The thing is that if I did find particular brand of word processor that was common in 1972 capable of printing the memos as is, that would have been absolutely cutting edge tech for that year and unlikely to be found on an Air Guard base. So there would still be the issue of how Killian would have had access to something like that. Also there is the issue of where did the memos come from. Those types of memos are not archived by the DoD and would have been trashed and/or destroyed at some point unless there was some special reason to save them. From all accounts, Killian was a "stickler" for rules and regulations, and was big on memo writing. So at some point there were all these filed away memos which were trashed or destroyed after he left the service, yet the only ones that crop up 30 yrs later all involve Bush in some way. They had to have been filed away together like that for a reason somewhere off base. As I demonstated down further, the issue with the Bush's 1972-73 rating report was apparently a big deal that stretched out for several months and ended up involving the Adjutant General, who is commander in chief of the Texas National Guard and oversees all activities of the Texas National Guard, the Texas Air National Guard, and the Texas State Guard. The Air Force, while a separate military branch, has authority over the Air National Guard. The Air Force wanted a corrected rating report by the "Senior Rater" -- Killian in Bush's case -- and was not getting it. According to both the "Not observed" rating report and the CYA memo, Bush evidently didn't show up for his duties in Alabama and hence could not be rated.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the issue with the rating report looked very much like the sort of thing that Killian would have been prudent to get legal advice on, since he and Harris apparently were evidently being pressured to write something up that would be tantamount to falsifying an official Air Force record. From my research, law offices were heavy users of word processors since the first IBM Mag Selectrics came out in th 60's and were very quick adopters of the more sophisticated next generation word processors from the likes of Redactron in the early 70's. That's how Killian would have access to one. And what do lawyers usually ask you to bring when you have a particular issue of concern to discuss? One thing logically follows the other. Some of the memos at least may well be transcriptions of notes, both typed and handwritten, made and filed away at the law firm. The evidence for this would be in Hailey's high resolution copies of the memos has has. In his second, much more thorough study of them, he noted some recurring wear characteristics on some of the letters, which would indicate an impact printer. The thing is, though, is that a daisywheel would wear out its printwheels pretty quickly at high use, so in a year's interval, it would be very unlikely that the same printwheel would be in place and having the same wear pattern. Having all the memos transcribed nice and neatly together to be filed away would give the the characters the same wear pattern.
This is a bit of extrapolation, but a logical one given the evidential circumstances. If you accept the premise, supported by the DoD docs, that Bush's 1972-73 rating period was causing a lot of problems for at least Killian, then everything basically comes together if you simply put yourself in his place and figure out what steps you would have taken under those circumstance. -BC 70.90.98.226 14:42, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I thought I would compile the dates the all the rating reports, including who signed when, for a little game of "One of these is not like the others":
Rating period ending April 30, 1971 Harris May 26, 1971; Killian May 27, 1971; Hodges (additional endorsement) May 27, 1971
Rating period ending April 30, 1972 Harris May 26, 1972; Killian May 26, 1972; Hodges (additional endorsement) May 26, 1972
Rating period ending April 30, 1973 Harris May 2, 1973; Killian May 2, 1973; No Hodges FYI -BC 209.6.203.244 03:46, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
The records could simply have been lost or misplaced, you say? Hmmm.... Well, I was lying in this bed this morning thinking about what was the latest I could get up and still get the trash out to the curb in time when something completely different occurred to me.... Important Note #2 In my renewed recent quest for a smoking gun word processor, I neglected to spend more time looking for more matchups by DoD docs to the memos, and anything funky in the DoD docs. And I guess this could lead to overlooking the obvious (well, my idea of "obvious"). When I compiled those rating report sign-off dates above, I puzzled briefly over Harkness's request for the "missing" report -- but isn't a "Not Observed" rating report still a rating report? This morning, though, I thought maybe I ought to compile another collection of who-signed-what's. Let me know what you think:
April 30, 1973 End of Bush's rating period for 1972-73
May 2, 1973 The date on the "Not Observed" rating report
June 24, 1973 (One of the USA Today Killian memos I almost forgot about -BC 209.6.203.244 15:32, 20 October 2006 (UTC)): 1. I got a call from your staff concerning the evaluation of 1 st Lt. Bush due this month. His rater is Lt. Colonel Harris; 2. Neither Lt. Colonel Harris or I feel we can rate 1 st Lt. Bush since he was not training with 111 F.I.S. since April, 1972. His recent activity is outside the rating period; 3. Advise me how we are suppose to handle this.
June 29, 1973 Notice of Missing or Correction of Officer Effectiveness/Training Report. Signed off apparently on July 10, 1973 by Master Sargeant Daniel P. Harkness of the USAF, Selection Boards Branch. It asks about Bush's missing rating report. It notes that, ""Ratings must be entered on this officer in Sections V & VI, An AF Fm 77a should be requested from the training unit so that this officer can be rated in the position he held. This officer should have been reassigned in May 1972 since he no longer is training in his AFSC or with his unit of assignment."
August 18, 1973 The infamous CYA memo where Killian complains of Staudt pressuring Hodges about Bush, about how he didn't "have any feedback from 187th in Alabama" and how Harris took a phone call from "Grp" that day about Bush's missing rating report (the "OETR" aka the "Officer Effectivieness/Training Report"). Killian mentions he'll backdate the report but not rate.
Nov 12, 1973 Major Rufus Martin signs off on an AF Form 77a record saying Bush was "Not rated for the period 1 May 72 through 30 Apr 73 Report for this period not available for administrative reasons."
Nov 13, 1973 The date stamped on a record signed off by Martin "For the commander" that simply says "Basic communication complied with"
Nov 15, 1973 Major Charles K. Shoemake, for "The Adjutant General of Texas" in regards to to Harkness's June 29, 1973 inquiry, signs off a record that also just says "Basic communication complied with"
Is it my imagination or does there seem to be a big gap in paperwork between the CYA memo and the next DoD record on the matter? And where is Alabama in all of this -- weren't they suppose to supply the AF Fm 77a that Harkness referred to since that's where Bush was transferred to, and not Martin and Shoemake? Hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 13:39, 17 October 2006 (UTC) Fixed typos -BC 209.6.203.244 19:35, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Alrighty then....
I took that "fake" June 24, 1973 Killian memo (one of USA Today's) at face value and checked out the validity of this comment in regards to Bush: "His recent activity is outside the rating period." Unsurprisingly (to me at least), this was a dead-on observation, although not so obviously so because there are actually two different yearly periods involving Bush's military service:
Rating Period for Evaluation: May 1 - April 30
Reporting Period for Service and Training Points: May 27 - May 26 (Note that this period is based on Bush's enlistment date of May 27, 1968)
I rummaged through all the DoD records several times over and noted that there are 3 apparently separate types of recordkeeping for Bush's service: The "ARF Statement of Points Earned," which I'll call ARF; The "USAF Reserve Personnel Record Card" that's filled in by hand, and which I'll call AFPRC; and the payroll records, which I'll just call Payroll. I've listed each month from April 1972 to December 1973 and noted the dates of the days with entries. Some records could be missing, but the payroll records cover all of 1972 and 1973. I'm not too sure what to make of payroll entries with 31st dates, since obviously certain months like February, April and June were never 31 days long, even way back in the dark, misty days of the early 70's.
Some things to note: May 1973, was obviously indeed a busy month for Bush, but it really was outside of the rating period as the "forged" memo noted; also that month has a very peculiar entry for the AFPRC -- a lump amount of 41 points for the entire rating period plus 15 gratuitous as well instead of individual daily entries like for the other reporting periods. Go see page 47 of this and compare that to how the points were recorded in prior periods on pages 33-38 and 43-44 (fixed typo 209.6.203.244 12:41, 27 October 2006 (UTC)); and for the entire May 1972 - April 1973 "Not Observed" rating period, there is only a smattering of random entries.
It's kinda obvious that once Bush "cleared" Ellington supposedly for Alabama on May 15, 1972, he really did disappear until at least the end of October, where a couple of days are noted by the ARF, but he really didn't return to serious duty until May, 1973. In addition to working on the Alabama Senate campaign of Winton Blount, which was the reason given by Bush for wanting the transfer, it was a presidential election year so Bush also likely joined his father at the August Republican Convention in Miami. For some strange reason, those few random check-in's didn't quite add up to being "observed" for purposes of an AF Form 77 "Company Grade Officer Effectiveness Report," and unfortunately for Bush, his return to real duty about a full year later in May 1973 was a wee bit too late even though the records show that he put in a pretty full month then.
Now, you can see how this might put Killian in an awkward position: while the the rating period ended at the end of April, he had until at least May 26 to actually fill out the report. And by May 26, Bush had apparently put in some serious make-up time. So what do you do if you're in Killian's position? Evidently for Killian himself, it was simple: all that May activity was nice, but it was still a month too late -- too bad. But apparently some others disagreed with that decision. Rufus Martin on May 26 gave Bush 56 ARF points (41+15), which is just over the minimal of 50, even though that's iffy legally -- you need to put in a full duty year to get 15 gratuitous points. For instance Bush only got 5 gratuitous points for the May 27, 1973 - May 26 1974 period because he left for Harvard in the fall of 1973. I bet the specific pressure put on Killian and Harris was to fold Bush's May activity into the rating report, but that would have been, well, wrong.
Some more surmising on my part, but here are some hard numbers and dates to chew on:
Apr 1972 ARF: AFPRC: 4,6,10-12,15-16; Payroll 4,6,10-12,15-16,31 (corrected 209.6.203.244 12:41, 27 October 2006 (UTC))
May 1972 ARF: AFPRC: 26 (15 Gratuitous Pts added for 5/27/72-5/26/73) Payroll: No pay
Jun 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Jul 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Aug 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Sep 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Oct 1972 ARF: 28-29; AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Nov 1972 ARF: 11-14; AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Dec 1972 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Jan 1973 ARF: 4-6,8-10; AFPRC: Payroll: 4-6,8-10
Feb 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll 31
Mar 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Apr 1973 ARF: 7-8; AFPRC: Payroll: 7-8,31
May 1973 ARF: 1-3,8-10,19-20,22-24,29-31; AFPRC: 26 (41 points + 15 gratuitous added); Payroll: 1-3,8-10,19-20,22-24,29-31
Jun 1973 ARF: 5-7,23-24; AFPRC: Payroll: 5-7,23-24,31
Jul 1973 ARF: 2-3,5,9-12,21-22,23-27,30; AFPRC: Payroll: 2-3,5,9-12,16-19,21-27,30
Aug 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Sep 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: 31
Oct 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
Nov 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: 31
Dec 1973 ARF: AFPRC: Payroll: No pay
-BC 209.6.203.244 04:11, 23 October 2006 (UTC) Fixed Wiki oddity with carriage returns. -BC 70.90.98.226 12:57, 23 October 2006 (UTC) 70.90.98.226 13:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 13:35, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
By the way, the above pretty much confirms that the May 2nd "Not Observed" rating report was indeed backdated just as the CYA memo says it was. While culling for date info, I noted that with the exception of payroll, yearly reports including things like ARF and AFPRC are all dated on or about May 26, which is based on the May 27 - May 26 reporting period for Bush, which in turn makes that May 2nd date for the 1972-1973 rating report extremely odd and out of place -- unless, of course, it was backdated just as the CYA said it was. -BC 70.90.98.226 18:38, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Fixed more typos and did some minor cleanups -BC 209.6.203.244 03:16, 24 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 03:18, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
I suppose I should mention a few notable discrepencies I came across while culling the DoD records aside from Rufus Martin giving all those points to Bush in one lump sum on May 26, 1973. These aren't really directly related to the Killian memos per se, but....well, whoever's out there can decide if they are significant or not.
1) The flight records have two evidently bogus entries at the very end of Bush's last military flights, which ended in 1972: "8/25" and "5/27". Not only are these completely out of sequence from the ones before them, but Bush had "cleared" Ellington for Alabama on 5/15 according to the "Not Observed" rating report and he was suspended from flying on August 1, 1972. See: Last Bush Flights
2) There should have been specific forms and records following up on Bush's flight suspension, but every single one is missing. These are Air Force requirements and not so much Guard. The "AFM 35-13" cited in Bush's suspension very clearly states: "All rated officers on flying status must accomplish a medical examination annually or biannually (flight surgeons) as prescribed by AFM 160-1. Failure to accomplish a required medical examination disqualifies the officer for flying duty and he will be suspended effective the first day of the month following his birthmonth, citing this paragraph as authority. (1) The local commander who has authority to convene a Flying Evaluation Board or forward through command channels a detailed report of the circumstances which resulted in the officer's failure to accomplish a medical examination, along with a recommendation that the suspension be removed. (2) The individual's major command will forward the report along with the command recommendation to USAFMPC/DPMAJD, Randolph AFB TX 78148, for final determination." See: AFM 35-13 and AFM 35-13 Excerpt
Note: I got the AFM 35-13 info from http://www.glcq.com/regs
3) There are literally no DoD records at all regarding Alabama from when Bush was suppose to be there doing "equivalent duty" with the 187th Tactical Recon Group. This Sept. 15, 1972 record shows that Bush was suppose to put in 2 full days on Oct 7-8, 1972 and then again two more on Nov 4-5, but these dates don't show up in the points or the payroll records, indicating Bush also didn't show up. So where is the paperwork regarding this and all other 187th matters? The DoD records indicate that forms and reports get CC'd (or "Cy'd") quite a bit and to different locations, so it's extremely, extremely unlikely that they and all their copies could would have been coincidently lost while other DoD docs for that period are readily found. Indeed it appears that the next time after that Sept. 15, 1972 that "Alabama" even gets mentioned in any official DoD doc is in the backdated "Not Observed" rating report in 1973.
Item #1 is just odd and I have no idea what it could mean (backdating maybe).
Note: this discrepency was also noted, among many others, in an analysis done by the AP, which got the records via FOIA, here: AP Analysis of Bush Flight Records.
And I guess I should mention there seems to be a tenuous connection between all this and one of the memos, the Feb 2, 1972 USA Today one where Killian simply asks Harris to "Update me as soon as possible on flight certifications. Specifically — Bath and Bush." If you go to Bush's Flight Records, page 9, you'll see a double entry for Feb 10, the first one showing Bush having to make 2 passes in order to land (look towards the end of the line ) -- the first time indicated in all of his records. Also, on line 7, there is either Feb 19 or Feb 09 (it's smeared) date for a T-33 ("TO33A"), a training jet that he should have outgrown, and right after that there's anout-of-sequence entry for an "SMF102A," apparently an F102A simulator. This seems to indicate some sort of new and growing problem with flying, especially when you look at the following month, March, where Bush is not only flies a T-33 several times, but as only the co-pilot in about half of those. Now what would cause Killian back at the beginning of February to be apparently concerned that this sort of stuff would happen? Another hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 05:21, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Items #2 & #3, though, give much support to Bill Burkett's claim that 1997 there was a purge of embarrassing documents from Bush's military files involving Joe Allbaugh (Bush's chief of staff while governor of Texas) and Maj. Gen. Daniel James III, the Adjutant General of Texas from Nov 1995 - June 2002 before Mr. Bush promoted him to head the National Guard in Washington. (General Ross Ayers was the Adjutant General in 1972-73). Go see: Dallas Morning News Piece
All this detective work is intriguing, but it's not really a job an Internet troll should be doing. It's unfortunate that Bush's commanders at the time, William Harris and Jerry Killian, aren't around to answer some obvious questions about Bush's guard duty that Bush himself has overtly avoided. However Bobby Hodges and Rufus Martin are still around, though, and they should have been grilled much more than they have been so far over Bush's Air National Guard history. Bush Sr. was already a big shot at the time and then only several years later ran for President during the Republican primaries before becoming Vice-President to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Of course Bush Jr. became Governor of Texas in 1995 and the US President in 2000. So it's extremely unlikely that Martin and Hodges would have forgotten about Bush when he was a junior officer at their base, especially the time he was suspended from flying, which was apparently not so common a thing judging from the DoD records.
Indeed, Hodges and Martin are on record evidently fibbing to the grossly incompetent Thornburgh-Boccardi report panel when they both told the panel that Bush's flight suspension recorded by the DoD as the "Verbal orders of the Comdr on 1 Aug 72" (see Suspension Notice) was a reference to Hodges, although Hodges says he couldn't specifically remember issuing the verbal order "over 30 years ago." See CBS Panel Report, page 154
This is very much explicit BS since other DoD records clearly show that Killian was the Squadron Commander and therefore Bush's direct superior and the one who would have issued such a verbal order in the chain of command, and that Hodges simply signed off on the order over a month later on Sept, 5, 1972. See Hodges's Suspension Sign-off
Update: Actually, after rereading AFM 35-13, it does very much appear that Hodges and Martin lied to the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel. According to the AFM 35-13, there's apparently at least a 30-day grace period of sorts before written orders are "published," thereby making the suspension official. So the timeline for Bush's suspension is: Aug 1, 1972 - Killian verbally suspends Bush from flying; Sept 5, 1972 - Hodges signs off and "publishes" the order; Sept 19, 1972 -- date stamped on the order apparently by Martin, when the suspension order was forwarded to the Adjunct General (AGTEX/APO); Sept 29, 1972 - Aeronautical Orders Number 87 by the National Guard Bureau officially recording the suspension.
Note: Another apparent discrepency shows up when you look at another pilot who was Bush's friend at the time and future business partner, James Bath, the only other pilot suspended in Aeronautical Orders Number 87 but whose name is redacted (his entry follows Bush's). His suspension is identical to Bush's aside from the date, Sept 1, 1972 -- exactly a month after Bush's. But the date on the order is the 29th, not quite a 30 day grace period, odd considering that it took almost twice the time for Bush's verbal suspension to become official. Hmmm.... -BC 209.6.203.244 00:46, 27 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 04:20, 30 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 14:51, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Therefore it's my very strong feeling that if either Hodges or Martin were to be put under oath and asked about the memos and Bush's real military history, there would be little need for all this tedious detective work into early 1970's tech and all this painfully detailed assembly of supporting DoD evidence. Ya think? -BC 209.6.203.244 17:28, 24 October 2006 (UTC) 209.6.203.244 22:19, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry for the gap in updates. But I had a little side project to update for election day: http://aheckofa.com/FoolMeOnce/CBSBushMemos.html
The typographers out there might get a chuckle at what happened when I extrapolated the default proportional spacing for a Diablo-type daisywheel printer from an old PC Magazine print sample. Fun stuff indeed. Enjoy -BC 209.6.203.244 08:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Blogs written by someguy are not reliable sources. Do not use them as such. JBKramer 21:21, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
JBKramer is evidently confused, as WP:RS doesn't apply to the vast majority of links that were removed. Simply put, WP:RS is a policy that defines what sort of citations are acceptable; not links and not mentions. In other words, any facts stated or claims repeated in the article have to be backed up by reliable sources such as newspapers and not blogs (unless there's a very good reason to do so), but there's no restriction on mentioning blogs or linking to them if they're relevant. In this case, it's impossible to argue that the blogs are not relevant, since they were the ones who broke the story and did the initial research. They are primary sources and as such are important, even though their claims are not considered reliable until backed up by reliable tertiary sources. You can't describe this issue with sufficient depth unless you link to the primary sources that started it. — Imp i 09:52, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Au contraire, the subject of this article is both the Killian documents AND their unmasking as forgeries. The blogs were the first to spot the evidence of forgery and continued to drive it until the major news media caught hold of it. Thus they are an intrinsic part of the subject and we are indeed obliged to link to them. — Imp i 14:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Orwellian. http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/4/ htom 14:49, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
My 2 cents (earlier offered in response to authenticity issues):
Thanks, TheronJ 19:22, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
In an article like this where blogs, which seem to be unreliable sources are a main subject of the article and the controversy, need to be included to improve the article and Wikipedia as a whole, it may be prudent to
ignore all rules and add it anyways.--
RWR8189
23:56, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
The blogs are an integral part of the story. Where the events being cited themselves occurred in blog postings, that is the blog is the primary source, only citing independent news media reports is just silly. Removing the blog references has the effect of vandalism to the article (albeit with much better intentions than the usual vandalism, to be sure). -- Tphinney 07:00, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
This dispute is about whether blogs can be cited as reliable sources in this article.
Statements by editors involved in the dispute:
Comments
Why the superscript th in Rathergate? The article doesn't explain and I'm not American, so I don't know myself. It seems odd that there'd be something visually odd in the article with no apparent justification… — OwenBlacker 18:07, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Note: I have removed the original research presented here by User:Callmebc (as another editor on this page asked someone to do). In addition, at 7,000 plus words the essay seems to run against the policy that Wikipedia is not a hosting service. Callmebc is free to post this information on his or her own website and, if he/she can provide valid citations, seek consensus on adding the info to the article's page. But the talk page should not be used for hosting long diatribes like this. Best, -- Alabamaboy 17:39, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Extra Note This: And I just put it back, "Hick boy" -- this is a discussion, and the post uses extensive hyperlinks to documented and existing sources to undermine the forgery charges. I gave everyone ample opportunity to find fault and they've so far failed. If you think I'm wrong anywhere, feel free to take your best Google at it and post your results. In the meantime, keep your crawfishing hands off it. Callmebc 00:18, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I've again removed this information. You can discuss making changes to this article but you can not use this article's talk page to post an entirely different counter-point to the article. That violates several Wikipedia policies, which I mentioned above. Also, please stop the personal attacks or you will be blocked. -- Alabamaboy 17:01, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a number of policies regarding WP:BLP, personal attacks, and civility, all of which you are violating or have violated on this discussion page and in other places. Calling everyone who disagrees with you or has asked you to abide by Wikipedia policy a liar (as you did to me in your comments above) also violates the cornerstone of Wikipedia civility, which is to assume good faith. In addition, my previous concerns about the essay you keep posting here are still valid. I have no axe to grind on this article or talk page except to make sure that the page and these discussions follow Wikipedia policy. If you wish to take me to arbitration over this (as you've threatened to do), feel free to do so. Best, -- Alabamaboy 01:57, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
2 April post, restored by Andyvphil 15:40, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Short and to the point, eh? Did I not just thoroughly squash every single objection...?
I'm also curious about your assertion, 'Whether it was a 1973 Redactron or a phototypesetter that Killean DIDN'T have in his bedroom or office is irrelevant -- the point is that he didn't, in 1972, type the memos Rather produced before the camera.' Where did I say he had a "Redactron or a phototypesetter" in his "bedroom or office"? I don't seem to recall claiming this for some strange reason.
And, [a]lso you wrote, 'The fact that you suggest the Rather memos could instead have been 1973 transcriptions from 1972 originals by the man who didn't type suggests that you've given up on the idea that the Rather memos are the 1972 originals they purport to be. True or false? ' False. Actually I have long maintained that, and this is an exact quote from my web site: 'At the absolute worse, they had to have been accurate transcriptions, and even then they would have had to have been printed out within a year or so of their date for reasons described further down.
Nobody has refuted this. Also I keep pointing out that the Feb. 2nd, 1972 memo, which CBS had but never used, contains information -- concern over Bush's flight certification -- that could only have been even surmised from carefully analyzing Bush's flight records. But it turns out that those flight records were not released until Sept. 7th, 2004 -- and CBS had obtained the memos from Burkett on Sept. 2nd and 5th.
OK, everyone, let's go try to figure out what "Andyvphil" is trying to say here (I'll separate out my stuff he quotes from his):
Short and to the point, eh? Did I not just thoroughly squash every single objection...?
OK, did everyone follow that? He earlier made the comment a 1973 Redactron or a phototypesetter that Killean DIDN'T have in his bedroom or office is irrelevant supposedly in some sort of response to something I never posted, so I called him on it. Somewhere in this, although it's a bit unclear why, Andyvphil "therefore" concludes Killian didn't type them up. Sherlockingly logical, no?
Alrighty then. Because office word processors since the 60's could save to magnetic media for later editing and printing pretty much the same way things are done today, I had to allow for that. I also had to allow for the likely possibility that someone, like say a legal secretary, may have typed up Killian's handwritten notes, which would technically mean that they would be transcriptions in that case. Andyvphil seems to think that if, say, a secretary types up and prints out her boss's notes, or even retypes and cleans up something he had typed up earlier, that's counterfeiting. Hmmm....correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe that's not exactly a universally held belief.
Hmmm...Andyvphil actually says something genuinely interesting here: Maybe they're accurate 1973 transcriptions of 1972 memos, but Killian didn't, in 1972, type the memos Rather produced before the camera! So in a half-ass, still self-denying manner, he's allowing that they could maybe, possibly have been created in 1973 as transcriptions, but which he then claims would still make them "counterfeit". I'm now very curious if this is going to be the main fall back position for the bloggers who had been screaming "Forgeries!" "Fakes!" "Rathergate!" at the top of their virtual lungs the past couple of years. Whatever -- while interesting, the right wing blogger community, despite being the instigators and using false information and outright lies as "evidence," was actually never the greatest villain in all of this and hence not my main target.... Callmebc 14:08, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Look, the bottom line is that: A) nobody has come even close to recreating all of the memos with a modern word processor; B) key formatting artifacts in the memos, like the odd superscripting pattern, are consistent with old office equipment; C) everybody (well, except for one or two exceptions...) was absolutely clueless about how widespread and sophisticated 70's era word processing was. It wasn't even known that IBM's standard office typewriter until the arrival of the Selectrics, a model called the Executive, came with proportional printing, multiple typeface options, and interchangeable typebars with special characters; D) ALL of the so called evidence for forgery, from alleged appearance and formatting issues to terminology to content turns out to be utter BS with any scrutiny; E) one of the memos, the February 2nd, 1972 one, could not have been forged, period, since the *only* information even useable in theory for reconstructing the contents, the flight records, was not made available by the DoD until after CBS had obtained the memos.
And I'll keep repeating this until it seeps into your thick head: there is no way whatsoever to fit all of the available evidence into any forgery scenario under any circumstances -- it is literally impossible Callmebc 23:50, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Please note that it would be highly uncommon for the Air National Guard unit and Killian's secretary to have a $7,000 or $8,000 wordprocessing machine with tape or cartridge memory during the early 1970's that you alledged was the type of machine that could provide the proportional spacing. Also note that Killian's secretary specifically said that she had a standard typewriter, not a wordprocessor. She also said that in her memory, she did not write those memos and it was her belief that they were forged.
Not only was the word processing market booming by 1972, but you can't and never could recreate all of the memos with modern word processing equipment. The "CYA" memo recreation of Charles Johnson that got such a wide circulation involved the simplest and shortest memo and even then there were notable discrepencies. Word recreations fail on the three other memos, most noticeably the two with letterheads. This is all covered further up. Since the average person in 1972 was absolutely computer illiterate, and since most of the word processors at that time looked like typewriters attached to a metal box, TANG could have had some and unless you were one of the operators, nobody would remember them. But I never thought the memos were created on base -- they were likely created in a law or JAG office given how they were grouped and given the sensitive nature of the topic: a son with powerful family connections blowing off his pilot duty along with an official USAF inquiry into the "Not Observed" rating report. That would have put Killian in a very awkward position where legal advice would have been smart and prudent.
Why do you insist that she typed these original documents when she herself says that she did not. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes dug her up (which they failed to do for the original broadcast) only after they were challenged by bloggers. She, the supposed author of the documents, discredited them. She then went on to say that she heard negative things about Bush and that he missed meetings (as she recalled), but says that she did not type those documents, and she would have been the person to do it.
Would Killian have authored them? Would he have a $7K-$8K machine in his own office while his secretary used a standard typewriter and did most of the unit typing? Imagine how fantastic a scenaqrio you are suggesting. Would the LTC have had such a machine in his home office for typing private notes? (Would you?).
Let's return to the real world! Even after extensive research by Rather and Mapes, they say "the documents have not been proven to be forgeries". And they go on to say that, "While the documents may not be originals, at least the story is true". Why did they fail to defend their own investigative report? Mapes has written a book on the topic, and has not "uncovered" this hypothesis that Killian's secretary had a $7K early wordprocessor in her office (because she knows it is not true having spoken directly with the secretary).
The fact that there existed in the world a machine that could produce proportional spacing in the early 1970's is far short of saying the secretary forgot what kind of machine she worked on and forgot that she typed the memos. She denies both! And she is a Bush critic (as her interview on 60 Minutes clearly shows).((unsigned insertion by Reallygone, 18:06 6 April 2007 (UTC)))
The Killian memos have been demonstrably proven to be forgeries. All involved, other than the politically driven Bush-haters, accept widespread acknowledgement of the counterfit nature of the documents presented by Rather and Mapes in an attempt to affect the outcome of the last Presidential election. Excellent work was done by a number of Bloggers to expose the documents as fakes and shed light on the agendas of others who wished it wasn't so.((unsigned insertion by 72.204.236.227, 22:12 6 April 2007 (UTC)))
Missing from the Aftermath section is the "reassignment" of Sr Producer Esther Kartiganer, [4] who sued CBS as a result. [5] No time to add this myself...but the story element is readily Googled. Andyvphil 14:14, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
The section "Initial Skepticism" doesn't explicitly cover the initial lack of skepticism in MSM. See the AP Story [6] with it's repetition of the misidentificaltion of Stoudt as heading TANG. And see [7] (search for "Washington Post"). The significance of this story is that that was overcome, so the initial gullibility/resistance maybe needs to be covered better? Andyvphil 13:09, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
The research may turn up a typewriter that could have possibly performed the task but that is not a conclusive fact and it most certainly does not effect whether or not the documents are forgeries. This was an Air National Guard office. The chance of it having the most sophisticated advanced office equipment of that current year are not only low but highly improbable. The budget for the Air National Guard was going down. They were letting pilots go and they were retiring planes. The documents can't be verified as real and they certainly were not verified as original or real prior to Dan Rather going on TV. However, rather than wait until they were verified which would have been to late for the election, Rather and Maples ran the story anyway. Maples and Rather have never hide the fact that they disliked the republicans and Bush. To say this was anything but a convienant hatchet job is giving it more credit than it is worth. The real underlying story is that a major news outlet ran with an unconfirmed story defaming a canidate just prior to an election. They knew without question that the news they reported would and could effect the election. We had a major news outlet pick a canidate they liked, and they ran a hit piece attacking the one they didn't. They campaigned for a canidate without any restrictions or consequences.
The opinion pieces are the only punishment that they really got. They lost thier jobs, but what happened to CBS? Nothing.
Quek807 20:43, 6 April 2007 (UTC)Shane Hanson
See The Smoking Memo at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12615
Also, try typing up the memo yourself using a modern version of MS word and compare the results to the CBS memo. Then try it with, say, StarOffice under Linux and see what happens.((unsigned insertion by 70.20.186.13, 00:24 7 April 2007 (UTC)))
While there is a lot of focus on proportional fonts and the th superscript, an even more conclusive objection to some of the documents being 1972-era is the kerning. Kerning is the removal of small amount of space between some adjacent letter combinations to provide a more polished look, typical peresent only in typesetting. Kerning is not done with a mechanical typewriter with a proporational font... as to do kerning, you need to know the next letter to be typed. In hot type typesetting like linotype, the typesetter types without regard to waiting for next character to appear on the page, so it would not be confusing to the typesetter that the creation of the type lags behind the typing. Primer on kerning. The presence of kerning is a clear indication that a computer based word processing software program was used in creating the documents (unless someone wants to propose that routine memos in the military were produced on linotype machines). Seriously, don't spend the rest of your life on this. StreamingRadioGuide 20:56, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a webspace provider or a discussion forum. More importantly, Wikipedia is most emphatically not a vehicle for defaming living people. (The rules here forbid saying anything negative about someone unless a proper source has previously said that on the record. Note that these rules now apply to all pages on Wikipedia, not just the articles.) I have just redacted several defamatory statements, replacing them with "[Redacted per WP:BLP". I did not check the comments from 2006. Please redact anything I missed.
We should also try to be polite to each other. Criticising comment is OK; attacking other editors is not.
Another problem is that this page is too long, and should be archived ASAP. (We'd need to copy the "Esther Kartiganer" section onto the new talk page, because we haven't fixed that aspect of the article yet.) CWC 12:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to make a general warning on this page about avoiding personal attacks (such as [9] and [10]). Everyone in this discussion should also realize that Wikipedia's WP:BLP policy does indeed apply to article talk pages, as some people on this page have already stated. Anyone repeatedly violating these policies could be blocked. Best,-- Alabamaboy 17:11, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
It appears now that some of the people who have been attacking me in one way or the other perhaps have been doing so for reasons beyond what was represented: they are apparently supporters, or perhaps even members, of the Little Green Footballs blog site. Since LGF via Charles Johnson was one of the main instigators of the forgery charges, and since some of my cites undercut both Johnson's CYA memo experiment and his credibility, that would create a clear conflict of interest for this Wiki topic and a violation of WP:COI:
A Wikipedia conflict of interest is an incompatibility between the purpose of Wikipedia, to produce a neutral encyclopedia, and the aims of individual editors. These include editing for the sake of promoting oneself, other individuals, causes, organizations, companies, or products, as well as suppressing negative information, and criticizing competitors.
You know who you are -- please recuse yourself from any further editing here unless you intend to follow the official Wikipedia policy for this situation:
If you feel the need to edit Wikipedia articles despite a real or perceived conflict of interest, we strongly encourage you to submit content for review on the article's talk page or file a request for Comment, and let trusted community members judge whether the material belongs in Wikipedia.
FYI. Callmebc 22:41, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
I have blocked Callmebc from editing for 72 hours for various policy violations. To other editors, my general recommendation about how to handle WP:COI is to declare affiliations in your own user space and exercise personal restraint at relevant articles. The safest route where COI is obvious (such as an article about one's place of employment) is to post material and citations to the talk page and let uninvolved Wikipedians evaluate it for inclusion in the article. Regards, Durova Charge! 07:09, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
Lost in all the recent acrimony on this discussion page is the whole issue of what to do about the main page for the "Killian documents" -- if nothing else, I've demonstrated that there is a vast amount of information highly pertinent to both the memos and the forgery charges that are not referenced in any way. According to the Wikipedia's own "Encylopedia" article:
Works of encyclopedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain. Works vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, depending on the target audience.
And by any defintion of "important accumulated knowledge," the main page is severely lacking. In particular:
1) The forgery charges originated with and centered on [www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/replies?c=47 unsupported claims] regarding the capabilities of 70's and even 80's office technology, but the main page has no references whatsoever indicating what 70's era office technology was really like, despite such information being readily available.
2) The contents issue, aka the "Fake but accurate" charge is also never addressed, despite the DoD maintaining a database of all of Bush's released military records. Actually, it appears that the DoD site is not even mentioned -- a very serious omission.
3) Many of the forgery charges center on format issues, often comparing the memos format to that of official records. However, Official USAF writing guides are available that clearly define the purpose of those memos and their recommended format, but again the Wikipedia main page has no reference to these either.
4) The main page is often wrong, lacking or extremely misleading in important details. Examples: both CBS and USA Today got 6 memos from Burkett -- CBS chose only to use 4 of them; Peter Tytell is a typewriter expert whose family up until 2001 owned a typewriter shop and not a "document expert" per se; there is an invalid passage that goes It was reported that the new Killian memos were inconsistent with his endorsement of Lt Bush's May 1971 performance review, a year prior to the date on the disputed documents. Killian endorsed the rating officer's evaluation of Bush, which in part described him as "an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot" -- this is highly misleading since the relevant performance review (aka a "Rating Report") that covers the time period of the memos is the 1972-1973 "Not Observed" rating report; Charles Johnson's animated overlay "experiment" of the "CYA" is noticeably featured but there is no reference to his inability to duplicate that with any of the other memos or to a similar graphic illustrating what happens when you do attempt that with one of the longer memos; and there is no link to a much more comprehensive interview of Marian by the Drudge Report where she essentially confirms that Staudt was indeed pressuring Killian, as well as no clarity on Knox's actual status -- was she indeed just a "pool clerk/typist" as has been alleged by Killian's son Gary? -- that would be very important in relation to what sort of memos and documents she would be privvy to.
Given all these inadaquacies of the main page in being able to "convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain," it would seem very wise and prudent at this time to place a "WP:CU" "Cleanup" banner at the top of the main page until many if not most of these issues are addressed. Agree or disagree? And please state specifically your justification for either. Callmebc