[Apologetics] [Petitions] Demand Dan Rather & CBS News Retraction

[Stuart D. Gathman]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Dianne Dawson wrote:

> ALERT: Reports are now exploding across newspapers, 
> television and the internet that CBS News, led by blatantly 
> biased Dan Rather, used forged documents during a "60 
> Minutes" segment Wednesday night in an incompetent attempt 
> to smear President George W. Bush's National Guard service. 

It's not so obvious as all that.  It is true that when typed into
MS Word with default settings and Times Roman font, the exact same
spacing and letters are produced.  It is also true, that the pixels for
the letters match exactly at the center of focus, whereas the "original"
becomes more smeared farther from the center of focus - just as if
a copier was involved in aging the "original".  The use of supercript
"TH" is suspicious since typewriters of the time had no general 
superscript capability.  The tab stop for the date headers matches
exactly with the default tab stop on MS Word.

However, the Times Roman font was designed to emulate the classic font (which
has been around since the turn of the century) as closely as possible.  There
was a reasonably priced typewriter from the period, the IBM Executive, capable
of proportional spacing with the Time Roman font (actually something very
slightly different).  Furthermore, IBM offered up to 4 custom keys for 
these typewriters.  It would make sense for the military to order theirs
with "ST", "ND", "RD", "TH" keys.  

On the other hand, the typist had to press the return key at the end of 
every line with the Executive.  The operators word-wrap choices (somewhat
arbitray) coincided exactly with those made by MS Word - extremely unlikely
(but possible).  It is also surprising that the TH custom key would produce a
glyph with exactly the same font, size, and height as the MS Word superscript
font.  Also, the officer cited as applying "pressure" on the memos dated 1973
had retired in 1971 according to military records.

I would like to find out whether the military actually used IBM Executives
for their memos before making a judgement.

We already knew that Bush's guard service was lackluster toward the end.
The only new accusation this evidence supports (if true) is that his
superiors were pressured into giving him a pass.

-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
    Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.