Dan Rather Explains Everything
Investigative Genius
Those of you following the latest coup of Sixty Minutes are no doubt struck with awe at CBS amazing ability to sift through current world events to find the most important news events of the era to focus on. In case you missed it, CBS found mysterious lost documents from 1972 that prove that Bush is a scoundrel who refused to go to his annual physical examination. What gall! What a scoundrel. This is the fourth investigation conducted by Sixty Minutes on Bushes failure to report for his physical.
IN case you missed tonight's broadcast, here is a transcript for you to review:
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showpost.php?p=2014729&postcount=93
Here is another view of Bushes National Guard service with a lot of boring facts.
http://www.hillnews.com/york/090904.aspx
Those of you following the latest coup of Sixty Minutes are no doubt struck with awe at CBS amazing ability to sift through current world events to find the most important news events of the era to focus on. In case you missed it, CBS found mysterious lost documents from 1972 that prove that Bush is a scoundrel who refused to go to his annual physical examination. What gall! What a scoundrel. This is the fourth investigation conducted by Sixty Minutes on Bushes failure to report for his physical.
IN case you missed tonight's broadcast, here is a transcript for you to review:
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showpost.php?p=2014729&postcount=93
Here is another view of Bushes National Guard service with a lot of boring facts.
http://www.hillnews.com/york/090904.aspx
Comments
If Dan Rather and CBS made this up out of whole cloth, I would be shocked. Some parts of the story, such as the interview with Barnes which lend support to the story, could prove to be politically motivated. However, it would be a sad day for a major news organization to publish and stand by a story that was made from whole cloth.
I would say the jury is still out on this. You will note that the immediate counter attacks stating the documents could not be produced on a 70's vintage typewriter have proven to be inaccurate. The fall back argument is that the IBM "Composer" probably wasn't used by the military. However, one of the original typeface experts that suspected the documents were a fake later stated that the military had tested the "Composer".
If this story is total BS, Rather had better apologize to the public if he wants to ever be taken seriously again.
Searching google news for Byron York,the guy that wrote your article supporting Bush's record, I found this site.
what I believe it shows is that 1) York writes for the right and 2) many right wing journals when on the attack making statements that proportional fonts didn't exist on typewriters of the time; that typewriters didn't have "curly" apostrophes; that they couldn't produce superscript "th", ect.
Check this site out http://mediamatters.org/items/200409100010
Here is an animation that alternates betweenn a PDF file of one of the disputed letters created in Microsoft Word and the CBS news original
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12551_One_More_CBS_Document_Example
What are the odds that a document created on a IBM typewriter in 1972 would perfectly match up with a Microsoft Word document printed on a Laser Printer?
How many people had this type of typewriter in 1972? If you really want to get technical, here is a memo received by Hugh Hewitt from a professor of Computer science, who helped to develop Word Processing programs on mainframe computers back in the 70's.
Hi Hugh,
I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has
followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30
years. A cursory glance at the "Killian documents" shows that they are
forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system. Even the
most powerful word processing systems available in the early 70's were
not designed to produce propotionally spaced documents. Moreover,
no mechanical typewriter, even with variable letter widths like the
IBM Executive typewriter, could produce precise propotional spacing
comparable to a modern word processor. Precise proportional
type-setting is a very demanding computational problem. Since modern PC's
are more powerful than supercomputers from the 70's, we take this form
of computation for granted.
Let me take a moment to recount the state-of-the-art in
word-processing in the 1970's. I used a state-of-the-art word
processing system to write my undergraduate thesis at Harvard in the
spring of 1971. I was one of a handful of Harvard students who were
given access to a PDP-10 time-sharing system to conduct my thesis
research. I used the same machine to prepare my thesis using a word
processing program called "runoff". The output device for "runoff" on
the Harvard PDP-10 was a flexowriter, a typewriter-like device driven
by punched paper tape. I had to write in the superscripts and
subscripts by hand because the flexowriter could not perform
fractional line spacing much less proportional font spacing. The
runoff program did not support any output devices with proportional
spacing. Neither did any other word processing of that era to my
knowledge. In the late 1970's, researchers at Bell Laboratories
developed a new version of runoff, called troff, to support
proportional typesetting on a photo-typesetter; troff is still
available today on standard Unix distributions.
So in 1971, even the most powerful available computer systems were not
equipped to produce documents like the Killian documents. In Fall
1971, I entered graduate school in Computer Science at Stanford. I
soon gravitated to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which had
the most powerful time-sharing system (a PDP-10) on campus. In either
1972 or 1973, Xerox gave the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory a prototype xerographic printer called a "Xerox Graphics
Printer (XGP)". Two similar prototypes were given to the MIT Computer
Science Department and the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science
Department. The programming staff at the Stanford AI Laboratory was
thrilled with the gift because it was the first opportunity that
computer science research community had to develop software to support
printer quality type-setting. The three Computer Science Departments
cooperated in developing the word processing programs to support the
XGP. I wrote my first published research paper and my doctoral
disseration using the XGP in Spring 1976. It would take another
decade before comparable word processing systems were available to
most computer science researchers on minicomputers running Unix. It
would take nearly another decade before they were widely used on
personal computers.
Sincerely,
Robert "Corky" Cartwright
Professor of Computer Science
Rice University"
I wrote Professor Carwright back and asked if I could reproduce his e-mail on the blog. Before he answered that, he had sent me a second e-mail, as well as one to the DailyKos, who is mounting a very, very lame defense of the CBS forgeries. Here is the Professor's e-mail to Kos:
"Hi Markos,
You are tilting at windmills with the IBM Selectric Composer theory.
Go to http://www.ibmcomposer.org/docs/Selectric%20Composer%20Operations%20Manual.pdf
which is a user's manual showing some sample typed text using this typewriter.
The typed text in the "Killian memos" is kerned (check out letter combinations like "fo"
and "fe"), but the Composer text is clearly not. Kerning is a computationally complex
task beyond the capacity of any mechanical typewriter--even one as expensive and elaborate
as the IBM Selectric Composer. Moreover, the proportional spacing in the sample text is
rather crude (look at the typesetting of "11" for example) which is the best that a
mechanical typewriter--even one as complex as the Composer--can do.
Consult someone who understands the typography behind modern word processing.
The "Killian memos" are word processed documents.
Robert "Corky" Cartwright
Professor of Computer Science
Rice University
ACM Fellow
P.S. I would have posted a comment on your site but you have a 24 hour waiting period
that prevented it."
Here's the third e-mail, from earlier today:
"Hi Hugh,
I have seen reports that Dan Rather has upped the ante on the
authenticity of the Killian documents by insisting that they are
authentic. How foolish!
In the testimony that I have seen by forensic experts questioning the
authenticity of the documents, they have qualified their opinions by
stating that no typewriter familiar to them could have produced the
documents. Perhaps they are merely being cautious to safeguard their
reputations. But I wonder if these typewriter experts appreciate the
computational complexity of modern "print-quality" word processing.
No mechanical typewriter could implement the complex sequence of rules
governing the formatting of text in a word processor like Microsoft
Word.
The Killian memos could not have been typed on an IBM Executive
typewriter with "proportional spacing" or any other typewriter using
similar technology. According to product descriptions on the web, the
IBM Executive typewriter supports only four different character
widths. In contrast, modern proportional spacing involves a far more
sophisticated type-setting algorithm. Every type font in Word (or any
other modern word processing system) has a custom width for every
character. Moreover, the spacing between individual pairs of
characters is modified by a process called "kerning" that compensates
for the fact that letters have varying shapes that affect our
perception of proper spacing. To achieve an aesthetically pleasing
result, the type-setting process must take into account the
relationship between adjacent character shapes. For example, the
letter "T" followed by the letter "o" looks badly spaced if the "o" is
not tucked under the overhang provided by the top of the "T". On the
other hand, no such adjustment is appropriate if the letter "T" is
followed by the letter "H". In the Killian documents, you can clearly
see the effects of kerning in pairs of letters such as "fo" and "fe".
I am amazed that Dan Rather and his associates at CBS are blind to the
overwhelming evidence that these documents are blatant forgeries.
Sincerely,
Robert "Corky" Cartwright
Rice University"
Unlike CBS, I did a quick google search on my source, Professor Cartwright, and found him to be who he says he is.
Cartwright's contributions to the conversation on the CBS fraud are just three examples of thousands and thousands of e-mails to bloggers working the story of the CBS fraud. This is what The Belmont Club is talking about in his post today, what I called "open source journalism" this morning, and what The American Thinker and Samizdata are referring to as "the wisdom of the many," and "distriibuted intelligence," respectively. No matter what you call it, the old media is now undeniably on notice that whoppers get walloped.
http://hughhewitt.com/#postid877
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