CBS lied...

...or was at the very least, duped. Everytime I hear this story of the obviously forged documents, I remember ol' Dan telling us that Randy Weaver was in a "Mountain Top Fortress". We now know that he was in a plywood shack that he built himself. Ever since then, if Dan Rather said it, I doubted it. I think we are all justified to doubt him now more than ever. I personally think the DOJ should investigate and bring charges on the person that made these forgeries and anyone else that knew and helped in their making. You have opposing sides on this issue. There is the Daily Kos that has already determined that they are real, ignoring the facts as most liberals do. Then there is the other side, Little Green Footballs, that is named after snot, so use your best judgment there. The Daily Kos is convinced that this is possible. Well, I wonder what is the chance that someone in the Texas Air National Guard took an IBM Executive model C or D...no wait, it was the IBM Select Composer...or maybe they took parts off of one and put it on the other making an IBM Frankenstein, anyway, what if they took this mythical typewriter and created this document, that just so happens looks identical to one made by Microsoft Word, using the default settings?(I tried it, it is true, everything lines up exactly) Where was Bill Gates when all of this was going on? Daily Kos does make one good point, what makes one an "expert"?

Here is a challenge that I don't think anyone has tried, there must be other documents that can be proven without a doubt, that were produced by one of the actual typewriters at the TANG base. Take one of those documents and see if you could re-produce that document on a computer using the default settings of Word and get a perfect match. If you can, the documents may be real, if not, they are fake. Too simple? Probably.

Thomas Phinney, Program Manager, Fonts & Core Technologies, Adobe Systems was quoted by a "yellow dog" democrat, Jules Siegel as saying they are fake. Phinney, not speaking for Adobe, says "The incredibly bad reproduction of the memos makes it hard to state many things definitively. But one thing that is not degraded by the reproduction is the simple question of relative line lengths. Where does each line end, relative to the lines above and below it?"

"Given proportionally spaced fonts, and a large enough sample (as these four memos are)," he continues, "these line breakings offer a sort of digital fingerprint of the widths of the font used. The memos precisely match current digital versions of Times (and previous phototype and hot metal typesetting versions), but they do not match the IBM Composer fonts, nor do they match any version of the IBM Executive."

Well...

I typed something on a computer using MS Words, default settings and copied it using a fax machine, then I copied the copy. I did this 5 times and guess what, It looked like the memo's in question. The bottom of the font did not line up perfectly. The font washed out in one spot. If I can get a scanner, I will scan them and post them on here. That proves to me that if a 't' or an 'e' does not line up perfectly in the CBS copies, it still could have been made on a computer. The 5th copies type is even going down hill.

The bottom line is that those that want to believe that these documents are real, will believe it, no matter what kind of damning evidence they are given. On the other hand, the ones that know they are fake will not be convinced otherwise. I didn't hear about the documents until the scandal broke about them being fake, so I considered the source (Dan Rather) and figured they were. The more I hear, the more I believe they are fake. The burden of proof of the validity of the documents lay on the CBS doorstep.