CBS is now claiming that their documents are authentic becuase lower-case “l” characters were used instead of numeric “1” characters.
Of course, when someone experimented on that assertion it fell flat. The forged documents don’t use alphabetic “l” characters to simulate the numeral 1. End of story.
Of course, if CBS were doing their homework, they’d note that the Selectric Composer did have separate characters for lowercase-“l”s and numeric “1”s. So, if they want to argue that the Bush memos were produced on an IBM Selectric, they couldn’t simultaneously argue that the memos didn’t have numeric “1”s.
In essence, CBS is throwing whatever bullshit they can in order to salvage what little remains of their credibility. It’s becoming nearly pathetic when anyone can do a few simple experiments and disprove nearly every contention they make. If this is what passes for journalism, I’ll take the “pajama clad” blogosphere over CBS’ BS any day of the week.
Jay, the IBM Selectic Composer is not the only probably candidate producer of the documents. The IBM Selectric II also existed at the time, though I don’t know how much it would have costed. Though it appears that the typeballs of the I and II have the same number of characters, but aren’t interchangeable. Have you looked into this?
I used to have a Selectric II. It couldn’t produce the kind of typographical signature that’s in the memos unless the typist physically changed type balls in the middle the memo.
And let’s face it, no typist is going to stop in the middle of an important memo to play with their balls.
Sorry, couldn’t resist that one…
This is hilarious. Two more experts have come forward and said that CBS hired them to look over the documents before airing them, and neither believe they are authentic. So CBS basically told them to get lost. Hey, who needs document experts that aren’t going to agree that Bush sucks?
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation/bush_guard_documents_040914-1.html