The Bush "Guard memos" are forgeries! (Nonpartisan printing expert weighs in)

http://www.flounder.com/bush.htm ^ | Joseph M. Newcomer

[not_apathetic_anymore]

First off, before I start getting a lot of the wrong kind of mail: I am not a fan of George Bush. But I am even less a fan of attempts to commit fraud, and particularly by a complete and utter failure of those we entrust to ensure that if the news is at least accurate. I know it is asking far too much to expect the news to be unbiased. But the people involved should not actually lie to us, or promulgate lies created by hoaxers, through their own incompetence....

This is a long page with many graphics...click on the link

[tdewey10]

Incorrect. See http://www.flounder.com/bush.htm
a typography expert.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

But, wait!! Dan Rather himself vouched for the authenticity of these memos. That settles it for me.

They're forgeries.

[Admin Moderator]

Glad to help

[Flamenco Lady]

I would hardly call this guy a handwriting expert, if he thinks any of the signatures are valid. I worked in the banking industry for almost 20 yrs., and spent may of them in bank branches. I was trained to watch for forged checks several times. At least on of these training sessions was done by an FBI expert on forgery. He taught us that the easiest way to spot a forgery (since most are not done very professionally) is to turn the suspected forgery upside down and compare it with a true copy of the person's signature (we used bank signature cards). We were told to look at the slant of the signature, because there may be some variations in the way a person forms their letters in their signature, but rarely does the slant change.

I compared the two signatures and the initials on the CBS documents upside down. The slant is slightly different on all three. I then compared 9 copies of signatures that are known to have been actually signed by Jerry Killian. All 9 signatures have virtually identical slants, when viewed upside down, but none of the CBS documents come anywhere close to the same slant as the known signatures.

I do not consider myself an expert, but even with my limited knowledge of forgeries, it is really very obvious that these are fakes. I believe that any well trained expert would spot these as fakes almost immediately.

[Ann Archy]

LOL!!!!! Ain't it the truth!!

[GaryL]

Incredible article! Who could possibly refute this man? I'd say this is "checkmate!"

[delacoert]

In the 11th paragraph of the article you just cited (and the topic of this thread):

"Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data...

The bolded lines in the above excerpt are the same lines I posted in #53 to which you take exception.

Please explain to me where I am incorrect.

[ProudVet77]

I've been waiting for someone with this kind of background to step forward. I used to work for Mergenthaler Linotype in the mid 70s but I was more in the operating system side of the business. But a lot of the people I use to have a beer with after work were specialists in this field like the author. There are plenty of folks that could shoot these memos down.

[meenie]

There is a trail of evidence leading to the forgeries and the man that made them if the FBI would get off their duff.

[js1138]

Some have argued that the documents are forgeries because the characters are “kerned”. Kerning is an operation which tucks characters together to compact space. However, Microsoft Word by default does not kern text. The text of the memo is not kerned. Kerning is a pairwise operation between characters, and each character pair that can be kerned has a specified kerning value. Microsoft fonts and many others come with accompanying kerning data. But kerning is complex, and computationally expensive, and therefore would have slowed down redisplay in a WYSIWYG editor. However, Times New Roman uses a characteristic of Microsoft TrueType fonts called the ABC dimensions, where the C dimension is the offset from the right edge of the bounding box of the character to the next character. If this offset is negative, the character with the negative C offset will overlap the character which follows (in some technologies, the distance from the start of one character to the start of another is called the “escapement”, so a negative C offset gives an escapement which is less than the character width). This gives the illusion of kerning, or what I sometimes call “pseudo-kerning”.

OK guys. This explains a lot. FReepers have been arguing for days that the CBS documents are kerned. I have been biting my tongue because I saw what I thought were obvious instances where the CBS documents were not kerned. Yet FReepers and others wer able to point out instances where something more sophisticated than proportional spacing occurred.

Now hold on. This is a bumpy ride. The forged documents and the MSWord documents are "pseudo-kerned". This is an automatic feature of True-Type. Another thread has a former Apple programmer discussing the invention of True-Type. The ultimate point is that The forged documents are typeset using a letter spacing technology that was not invented until 1989. Not only was it not invented until 1989, but it is patented. No one but a True-Type licencee (read Microsoft) can produce the CBS documents.

End of discussion.

[FreedomPoster]

Worthwhile addition to the already massive weight of evidence on this one.

[tdewey10]

Word doesn't kern by default. Word TrueType fonts do. So the documents are kerned via the font 'hints', not through some user activity.

[js1138]

This is highly technical, but it is the most important thread yet in this series. I recommend you go back and find the people who were interested in the technical discussion in earlier threads and ping them.

[billorites]

"How do you know "Clippy" is a girl?"

Well, if you can't tell the difference God help you.

[SkyPilot]

Boy--that was thorough. What an education.

Time for FOX News and CNN to stop saying "alleged" forgeries and say FORGERIES.

[B Knotts]

Therefore, the only reasonable explanation is that a time traveler brought Lt. Col. Killian a personal computer with Microsoft Word so that he could type the memos.

Well, either that, or the documents are phony.

[PatrickHenry]

js1138 suggests that I ping a few of the regulars for this thread.

[backhoe]

Thanks- copied & saved.

[Dan Evans]

Yes, the memo contains nested glyph pairs

No, I think he said the apparent kerning was caused by a negative C dimension of the Microsoft TrueType font if I'm not mistaken.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Hock, line, and sucker!

Have you invited the author to review our collection of threads?