Earlier I pointed out an error by an individual claiming documents purportedly written by George W. Bush’s former Texas Air National Guard superior Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian were fake. The author of that page apparently got a lot of negative e-mail and is not happy about it. Well, then don’t write articles where your sole claim is “some guy e-mailed me saying there were no typewriters that could do proportional spacing.” It turns out there were 7 or 8 different models that could do so.
Little Green Footballs has a much more compelling case for claiming the documents are forgeries. Charles over there opened up a new Word document and simply typed in the text of the memo. Surprise, surprise, surprise, doing so creates a document that, when printed, is identical to the memo that CBS is touting.
INDCJournal.Com talked to an expert on fonts who told him that since the font on the typewriter is proportional, given the time period there are only a small number of fonts it could be and the font in the document doesn’t appear to match any of those fonts. The kicker is that some of the numbers appear to be in the same font that Word defaults to in the Little Green Footballs experiment — Times New Roman. Times New Roman, of course, is a font that didn’t exist until very recently.
SpaceTownUSA.Com repeated the Little Green Footballs experiment with another of the documents and found the same thing. Either the document is a forgery or this typewriter from the 1970s had the uncanny ability to spit out memos that are almost identical to what Word turns out in its defaults using Times New Roman today.
So are the documents fake? Who knows? Weirder things have happened than this, so it’s certainly possible this is all some weird coincidence. But there is something that should give anyone pause. CBS featured someone who looked at the documents and declared them consistent with other documents known to be authentic, but as far as I can tell neither CBS nor its authenticator saw the original documents. All CBS has, apparently, is copies of the documents which is troubling. So to begin with these are not official documents, but rather documents allegedly pulled from the personal files. Second, the person who allegedly wrote them died years ago so he cannot testify to their veracity. Finally, all we have to base their authenticity are copies rather than the originals.
At the very least, CBS should give more details on how it went about authenticating the documents and have its authenticator address the font issue.