Typewriter Science Update: Below, where I reposted Slate Fray messages, I say in two places that independent experts should examine CBS's original Killian documents. However, CBS doesn't have the originals, according to this excerpt from the end of an LA Times story on the controversy:

Howard Rile of Long Beach, former president of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, cautioned against feverish vetting of the memos without seeing the originals and other documents produced at the same time and place.

That could be difficult because CBS says it does not have the original memos.

"We shouldn't have to be be doing this over the Internet," Rile said. "This sounds like a case that could be resolved very quickly if you get the evidence and examine it; if you get the original."

CBS has made the same mistake so many blogs and conservative radio talkers are making -- coming to conclusions about a document's authenticity (and it's only one document of the four that that is being challenged) without looking at the original. With the original, one could assess the age of the paper, perhaps test the ink, see the way the letters are embedded into the paper by the typewriter's keys, and so on.

Where is the original? Without it, we're stuck in a rounds of circumstantial analysis and counterarguments, which no doubt is part of the point with Bush backers. Because even without the one memo, there are enough facts to clearly show that George Bush got into the guard because of his connections, and that as time went on, he became increasingly indifferent to his obligation. He was a spoiled and aimless rich kid from one of the most politically connected families in the country.

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I just read a summary of the Killian memo debate in a Slate piece by Josh Levin. I've posted a response to that article, followed by a reply to a Fray poster who responded to my response. Here are those posts, edited a bit for clarity (changes appear in italics), with links to the originals I put up in Slate.

Subject:	Further Updates: Or More You Need to Know
From:	NC45
Date:	Sep 11 2004 5:23AM

From The Boston Globe, "Authenticity backed on Bush documents" By Francie Latour and Michael Rezendes, September 11, 2004:

After CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered documents that referred to a 1973 effort to "sugar coat" President Bush's service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the documents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time.

But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the documents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters in wide use in the early 1970s, when Bush was a first lieutenant.

Read More at:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/11/authenticity_backed_on_bush_documents/

See also, Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603

Unless and until an expert examines the original documents in CBS's possession, and not PDF's downloaded from the Net, the forgery claims have little basis in anything but speculation. And many of the bloggers who jump-started the discussion are getting their facts wrong (for example claiming that no typewriter existed at that time that could create superscripted "th" of the type found in the documents), and are making observations that are beside the point (They can replicate the layout and font with Microsoft Word. Well yeah, that's what a font is supposed to do, look the same whenever it's used. So what's the point?)

Slate Fray Link: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=12110196

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Reply to a Fray Post by gadfly19

Subject:	RE: Further Updates: Or More You Need to Know
From:	NC45
Date:	Sep 11 2004 6:30AM

I agree with your observations, generally. A few thoughts:

I think the best way, perhaps the only way, to help settle it --there will be groups that are never satified-- is for CBS News to share the original documents with independent examiners.

As for Killian's family, I feel for them. It's got to be painful to have someone you love, who has beed deceased for so long, cast posthumously into this debate about events from over 30 years ago. That said, it's very possible that they're wrong. Or put another way, as much as you love and know a person, there's often a lot you don't know about their day-to-day lives at work. I know my wife, for example, whom I'm very close to, doesn't know everything I do at work, what I write, and so on. I know the family claims aren't that simple, but I can see where it's possible that they might believe to the point of absolute certitude that the Killian wouldn't have held or written the views in the documents, but they could well be wrong.

And yet, for all that, here's where I agree with you most: Even if the documents are proved indisputedly genuine or undoubtedly forged, we're still not left with a serious discussion of current issues. I'd rather have that discussion than this campaign coverage reduced to a bad episode of Cold Case.

Can some reporter, any reporter, just ask each candidate this: You've said we're at war with terror, but terror is a tactic. And to say we're at war with terrorists, people who commit terror acts, is circular. Who are these people? What is their ideology? And how do we successfully end this war with them?

Slate Fray Link: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=12110478

  ¶ 9:33 AM 0 comments   

  Long Now

On the Internet, Sterling is amassing a roll call of their once-honored personal computer names: Altair, Amiga, Amstrad, Apples I, II and III, Apple Lisa, Apricot, Atari, AT&T, Commodore, CompuPro, Cromemco, Epson, Franklin, Grid, IBM PCjr, IBM XT, Kaypro, Morrow, NEC PC-8081, NorthStar, Osborne, Sinclair, Tandy, Wang, Xerox Star, Yamaha CX5M. Buried with them are whole clans of programming languages, operating systems, storage formats, and countless rotting applications in an infinite variety of mutually incompatible versions. Everything written on them was written on the wind, leaving not a trace.

Stewart Brand, from the Purpose Statement for Long Now's Library Project.

Long Now is a foundation that was established in 01966; the group adds a zero to the front of the establishment year and to all contemporary dates because its goal is to think, and plan, for into the future: 10,000 years. The zero leaves room for the future, reminds us of it, and asks us to think about it and to work towards it. Long Now seeks to counter Here Now thinking, short term thinking. In thinking long, they've established two main projects; one that has to do with preservation (The Library Project), another that has to with planning for the future (The Clock Project).

James Wolcott referenced Long Now in a post about the current presidential election, which is mired on the documentary minutiae of where Bush and Kerry were 30 years ago, and whether what they were doing matches precisely to what their biographies claim. Nor are the campaigns themselves talking much about the future. The future, for both campaigns is now. Both candidates, between swipes at one another, profess to be candidates of optomism who bring hope for the future, but neither seems willing to discuss the future, or to plan for what will sustain us in the future. But really campaigns are essentially cynical operations. They lofty rhetoric is a patina stretched thin over a relentlessy negative message about the opposition.

So like Wolcott, I found the visit to Long Now to be refreshing, especially for me, the library project. How do we record and preserve the works and records of our day so that the future can learn from both our triumphs and mistakes? And the question for Long Now isn't philosophical, it's also practical. They're not just imagining a library that will be there in 10,000 years from now, they're working to build it. Now that's optomism.

  ¶ 7:30 AM 0 comments   

  We Can't Trust Iraq's Future or Or Our Own Security to Bush
Looking through new reports and analyses on what went wrong and is failing still to go right in Iraq is monumentally dispiriting (see a short list below). Bush's team failed to adequately plan for the peace; they failed to recognize that toppling Saddam was not "mission accomplished," but only "mission begun." They failed to dispense allotted aid dollars. Bush forgot at one point to ask for monies needed for Afghanistan, which is still a country ruled by war lords, not a democracy. Bush failed to reckon with the details. Bush failed to use patience and judgment with the UN and our NATO allies.

George Bush did not lead us into war in any true sense of "leadership." He didn't trust the American people with the hard truths about going to war. He sugar coated the costs. This was a war of choice, not of necessity. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, in a series of columns from December 2002 to March 2003 noted Bush's failure to level with the public on why this was a war of choice and what the true costs would be would come back to haunt him (and us), and it has. Bush didn't lead, he mislead, on Iraq, and in the process lost site of the work to be done in Afghanistan.

No Leadership. Bush can't even name the enemy accurately. Terror is a tactic, not an entity. We're at war with a Radical Islamic Jihadists. Not with Islam, not with Muslims, not with terror. We haven't defeated the Taliban or silenced Al Qaeda so much as we've inspired Jihadists. Even Rumsfeld now admits that we haven't done enough via diplomacy and other forms of outreach to effect and alter the roots of Jihadism. And why haven't we done this? Because Bush posits that diplomacy is "either your with us or against us." He leaves no room for diplomacy.

Bush couldn't give an honest reason on why we should go into Iraq. He didn't articulate a vision of converting Iraq into an oasis of democracy, except as an afterthought when we he was warning us about the immediate danger Saddam posed. Remember, the Bush doctrine wasn't one of liberating oppressed peoples, but one of striking enemies preemptively. We went to Iraq to preempt an imminent threat that turns out not to have been capable of any of the imminent scenarios Bush's team painted in the lead up to war.

Bush is a miserable Commander-in-Chief. When you strip away the folksy lines, the swagger, the wanted "dead or alive" rhetoric, you get a man of privilege who was given whatever he wanted, positioned to succeed in life without really trying.

Bush seems to want to run the war the same way he's lived his life, without thinking too much on the details or working too hard. His expectation seems to be that what he wants will somehow simply happen because he's entitled, and by extension, America's entitled. And it's failing America, it's failing our soldiers in the field who are dying because of his incompetence, and it's failing Iraq.

"What Went Wrong in Iraq" by Larry Diamond in Foreign Affairs

Spencer Ackerman's Iraq'd Blog, post from 9/8/04

"US Troops Death Rate Rising in Iraq," by Thomas Ricks in the 9/8/04 Washington Post
  ¶ 1:58 AM 0 comments