Reply #1: Killian's secretary says contents correct - Media lab below says produced

[papau]

via technology in effect in 72 - indeed not on the Selectric Composer but more likely on the Killian Secretary's Olympia proportional spacing typewriter. She says she typed up memos with that content - but those were not by her.

So where does the "fakes" conclusion come from? From the SOB's in the media who believe assertions by Bush are truth, that's where.

In any case, Howie Kurtz today was patting himself on the back for being the first to say they were fakes.

I do love my not controlled by the right wing GOP US Media - they just act that way.



http://imrl.usu.edu/bush_memo_study/index.htm

Interactive Media Research Laboratory is a small university lab that does scholarly studies and writes about issues involving the impact of technology on communications. Among other things, it is investigates archival and authentication problems. As the principal investigator and lab director I have researched and written on these topics since 1991, with more than 50 peer reviewed publications.

In addition, I served in the U.S. military (Army) from 1963 to 1972. For five of those seven years I was an Army illustrator responsible for short run publications including memos such as those in question. Ultimately, I have a total of almost 35 years experience examining document production, including analyzing and spec’ing type. I have an archive that includes military documents produced between 1963 and 1984 and have access to a repository of military documents here at the university. Finally, I have extensive experience using computers to manage and manipulate images, including type.

Nature of the Studies

I divided the project into steps designed to identify the specific font and describe how the memos were produced.

1. Examine the physical nature of the documents. Do they look like military memos? Can they have been typed? If they were typed, did appropriate technologies exist at the time to have been typed then?

2. Identify the defining characteristics in the font used in the memos, especially focusing on the nature of the serifs but also examining the characteristics of the strokes that would be used to produce the characters. Are the serifs square or spur-like? Do the strokes vary in width or are they of consistent thickness? If some strokes vary, which ones?

3. Identify typefaces that replicated the above characteristics.

4. Identify a manufacturer who produced a typeface that fit the memos and manufactured a machine capable of producing the unique format.

5. Identify any characteristics that would indicate a typewriter and not digital impressions (e.g., worn or damaged characters).

6. Search for any typing artifacts (e.g., strikeovers).

7. Based on the above, establish a hypothesis describing how the documents may have been created and recreate scenarios that successfully reproduced the effects found in the typed memos.

OVERVIEW OF FINDINGS -- NATURE OF THE DOCUMENT

The information available in such poor reproductions is surprisingly significant.

First, The documents are not Times New Roman, or any similar font, nor are they produced with word processing software (or at least, were not printed using contemporary printing technologies). The documents are almost certainly printed using an impact printer (typewriter or daisy wheel) and are not digitally produced for the following three reasons:

1. The font is a common typewriter typeface invented at the beginning of the 20th century and in continuous use until the computer replaced the typewriter. The font’s name is “Typewriter.” Although the typeface was somewhat modified for civilian communities in the 1960s, it remained commonplace in the military well into the 1970s. In short, the Bush memos were produced in a version of Typewriter commonly used in the military at the time.

2. It is possible to find worn and damaged characters. The top left of the “t” is clearly worn to the extent that it seldom makes an impression. The “e” shows clear indications of physical damage. It appears to have three scratches and/or gouges extending diagonally down and across the bowl and across the lower stroke. The “a” and the “s” show similar indicators of wear and damage.

3. Seldom used characters such as numbers, capitals, and the lower case “o,” “q” and “p” (and the other less used lower case characters) show no signs of damage.

4. Overall inconsistency of the characters goes well beyond what one would expect from photocopying and digitizing and indicates that they were produced using an inconsistent (i.e., “mechanical”) process.

5. There are indications of white “blisters” cause by a character typed on paper that was deformed by the impact of a previously struck character.

I will leave it to others to verify my findings with additional physical evidence, but I contend that the memos were probably done in a proprietary IBM typewriter font redesigned specifically for proportional typing. In 1984, I wrote articles on an IBM Selectric that uses an uncondensed IBM equivalent. The font used in the memos is a variant of the font used in Figure 1, below.