Dan Rather came out swinging tonight but so far he was just shadow boxing. To defend his story, he made 4 arguments.
#1) You could find th’s in other documents. Fair enough. (or not, see ‘more’ below.) What about the other 300 anomalies Dan?
#2) We learned the name of their forensics guy… (I’ll save you the trouble and set up the search) Marcel Manley
My mini google tells me the guy is not that impressive. He has a few self-published books that I found. Mostly he is a “handwriting expert,” he has no apparent skills at looking at the rest of the document. Certainly not the resume’ that Bill at INDC Journal’s guy had. (He also seems more at home with the legalities of being an expert witness than being a forensics guy.)
I also found he apparently is behind the story that Kurt Cobain’s suicide note was bogus and he was really murdered. I’m speaking before I google enough but the guy seems like wingnut. (more later) Update: The guy who wrote the web page was a wingnut. No reflection on Matley.
Anyway the Forensics guy said (in a nut shell) that since the signatures match (which they don’t to my layman’s eye) the whole document is legit. Because obviously nobody would scan a signature and paste it into Word… No, never.
Prediction: CBS is going to get nailed on this guy… wait for it.
#3) Some guy -name not important- that said the documents were legitimate because everyone knew Bush sucked. (no joke)
#4) Some other guy -who has written multiple books bashing Bush- said the documents were legitimate because everyone knew Bush sucked. (No, I’m not making this up.)
Then Dan Rather said that we know the documents are real because well– Bush sucked. (Update 4)
Basically, CBS is making the case that since the content of the documents is true, the documents are legit. And we know the content is true because we have these documents to prove it. (an odd form of recursion)
The other humorous bit of defense is when Rather made the case that the blogosphere is way off base because the copies we got have been copied, faxed and recopied and some of them have been (gasp) downloaded. Completely ignoring that we all got the doc right from their web site. We are looking at a scan of what they have. 1 scan does not lose that much quality. All in all, that line was just laughable.
More as I google.
One more comment – To distill the above, their whole argument was that the signatures matched. The rest was fluff.
UPDATE: hmmm This is interesting… Seems Matley vouched for the authenticity of the Vince Foster suicide note.
UPDATE 2: ZERO (none, nada, zip) evidence this guy was in any way qualified to vouch for the authenticity of these documents. NONE. He is a handwriting guy who makes the case the signatures match. (they can be scanned) His only claim to fame is that he is a librarian. Google can find nothing this guy has ever done with anything other than handwriting. Bill at INDC spanked CBS.
Bottom line… CBS’s document expert ain’t.
UPDATE 3: I forgot to note that the defense of the documents came after Rather bashed Bush for a while… I know you’re surprised.
UPDATE 4: I kinda made a joke about everyone saying “Bush sucked” but from an evidentiary point of view that is what they offered. They said the documents must be legit because everyone knew this is what happened. Since the contents were true, the docs were, by definition, not forgeries. It really was rather odd. (oh heck, that pun wasn’t intended but I’ll take it) Only the mentally lame will accept this argument. (Apologies in advance to the usual suspects)
UPDATE 5: I forgot to mention, Rather looked and sounded very stressed… Like he knew we were listening to his every word….. Because we were. Muhaahaha
UPDATE 6: RTFC Read the freaking comments. I type slow. Many good points and links in comments – many I meant to get to. (thanks guys)
UPDATE 7: If you missed the broadcast you can catch it here.
UPDATE 8: Here is Matley’s CV Not very impressive. Lots of padding if you read it.
More: defeatjohnjohn.com Fisks the hell out of the superscript thing. Nailed.
Somehow I wouldnt be surprised if there wasnt a mea culpa by CBS sometime over the weekend. That way Dan wont have to eat crow.
Interesting, NBC had them analyzed by a forensic expert, his conclusion/ Most likely created with a modern word processing program.
Even CNN ran a story citing an expert who says these documents are fakes. CNN! Rather is treading water hoping that something big is going to happen over the weekend to distract everyone from this story.
You get what you pay for!
I thiink at this time we need to start taking up collections for Mr. Rather – it would seem that the only way out of the hole he is in is to get a bigger shovel.
Look further in the Kurt Cobain article — he was actually part of the Vince Foster commission.
I smell Clintonites at work!
Screenshot of what Dan calls “the same superscript” on my site:
http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/001564.html
Not to mention…this guy is from San Francisco. Could’nt they find anybody in NY?
Ok here is my little homework I did from the USA Today docs and the CBS docs with Killians signature attached….
Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out which ones are forged, and which are real…..
Of course when you are a partisan hack like Rather, McCauliffe, Harkin, and their morons minions, any lie will do..
enjoy….
Feel free to pass this around….
Signatures Captured and reviewed from:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-02-14-bush-docs.htm
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/08/60II/main641984.shtml
If you have more let me know, and I will add them to the list with dates….
Regards,
Joe
View my Signature comparisons here:
http://www.aboutpolitics.net/images/killian.jpg
CBS’s expert verified the Vince Foster suicide note?? Ooooh, boy, that fact alone guarantees that the conspiracy types are going to go to town on this!
Somebody posted in the comments at Polipundit that the segment with CBS’ ‘expert’ was taped a few days ago. Makes you wonder what they were expecting?
You could find th’s in other documents. Fair enough…
Is it? I’ve seen pretty convincing arguments on other sites that either the other th’s may have been forged, or else came from completely different sources where their typewriters would be expected to have that superscript feature.
Why was Rather doing a news story about the possibility that they were forgeries? How is he supposed to be impartial about that?
This is a travesty. It was unprofessional of CBS to allow Rather to do this story because the outcome of it effects him. He cannot be impartial to it, and should have been taken off of the story.
CBS could have done a lot to revive its credibility by assigning a different reporter on this.
CV for Marcel Matley, found in a collection of documents related to discussion of Vince Foster’s suicide note.
http://nick.assumption.edu/WebVAX/Foster/matley.html
So this guy seems to be an expert in verifying dead people’s signatures…
This link, via Free Republic
http://sja.ucdavis.edu/SCC/scc001.htm
—— Begin quoting:
The committee also has questions regarding the relevance of Mr. Matley’s expertise on our proceedings. Why, for instance, would a handwriting expert have more to say on this matter than, say, a forensic document examiner; an expert on paper composition, photocopying processes, or ink chemicals; or simply a statistician? How are we to weigh testimony of a “handwriting expert” in assessing the evidence of violation or innocence? Is a handwriting expert the most relevant authority for assessing the physical and probable elements associated with adjudicating this matter.
—– End quoting
Guy appears to be handwriting analyst only.
When did CBS get handwriting expert Marcel Manley to authenticate the document??
Was it after they aired the hit peice or before??
Note that Matley doesn’t appear to comment on anything other than the signature, and on that, he’s fairly careful: “I would say based on our available handwriting evidence, yes. this is the same person.”
And the available evidence sucks, because it’s a photocopy, but based on that, OK.
I’m not sure he was evene *asked* about any other aspect of the documents, based on this. So CBS’ self defense in this, as in everything else, is accurate (they stand by their expert, who only looked at the signatures, and with poor evidence. but who made apparently reasonable conclusions given that), but woefully incomplete (doesn’t address dozens and dozens of *other* points.)
Really embarrassing, the way they’re cherry-picking isolated arguments to use and knock down as straw men, but not addressing the whole.
Fun thought exercise: can you imagine how this would go down if the organization in question was something other than CBS, and Mike Wallace in his prime was investigating it for “60 Minutes?” Do you think Wallace would say “Ah, case closed. We’ve got no story to cover here?”
Rather mentioned that Times New Roman has been around since the 1930’s. True, but I’ll bet it was as a font for linotype machines and not for typewriters. In other words, he failed to create a preponderance of evidence to support his case. The existence of the type means little if it didn’t exist on typewriters…
Here’s a link to the history of Times New Roman: http://www.linotype.com/7-510-7/stanleymorison.html
Created by Stanley Morison
Stanley Morison
Marcel Manley is also a hypocrite. CBS’s “memos” were copies but in 2001, Manley wrote an essay saying that one could never authenticate a document based on a copy.
See http://ratherbiased.com/news/content/view/215/2
David C – sure Wallace would have passed just as he did whenever it was pointed out that some persecuted and tormented Viet Nam vet had NEVER been in the military.
Marcel Manley is also a hypocrite. CBS’s “memos” were copies but in 2001, Manley wrote an essay saying that one could never authenticate a document based on a copy.
See http://ratherbiased.com/news/content/view/215/2
Oscar,
Not familiar with the specific story you’re referring to, but I take your general point, that Mike Wallace has not always been a paragon of unbiased journalism himself. So to rephrase, imagine that CBS was an organization that Wallace wanted to “get,” and what the “60 Minutes” coverage of the people trying to defend a forged document would be like….
Go to FreeRepublic
NOW!!
“What’s the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman?”
I think they may have something… I
Seems to me Rather and CBS made a tactical error in airing this on a Friday. Thanks to their attention, the issue has now risen to the top of the list, or at least top current controversy after the obligatory 9/11 anniversary segment, for the Sunday talk shows unless violence breaks out somewhere. And, by doing such a poor job of presenting the case against the memos, he almost forces those shows to present the other side fully and properly. In addition the Blogosphere gets a 36 hour window to research and prepare. If he had laid low, the top story would have been the Chechen hostage massacre. They could have presented Monday, if necessary, taken time to do a more careful refutation and gotten into the 24 hour news cycle they can manage better. The haste of the response as well as Rather’s comportment indicate a bit of panic at Blackrock.
Why do I have this image of Saruman up in the tower surrounded by his ruined kingdom, perhaps with bloggers hanging out below smoking some Long-Bottom leaf and laughing.
CBS are going to let this guy take the fall for them. I think that it is in Manley’s interests answer the following questions…
(a) When did you verify the document?
(b) Did you only verify the signature (which doesn’t match), or the whole document?
(c) What areas of document analysis are you an expert in and qualified to verify?
btw Manley’s website is http://www.thedocumentexperts.com/
(from Nathanyl at http://idexer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=782#782)
Mrs Davis–very good point–doesn’t this remind you of Kerry’s reaction to the Swiftboats? I think it ultimately comes from the Clintonian era of never letting anything go stridently unchallenged, even if you’re lying, along with the smear-the-messenger philosophy.
I just blogged about this, but found it funny.
If you go to Drudge now, all the CBS links have been switched from his normal font…the replacement — Times New Roman of course…
Handwriting analyst = junk science.
“According to Denbeaux, handwriting analysis by experts suffers in two respects. It has never been subject to meaningful reliability or validity testing, comparing the results of the handwriting examiners’ conclusions with actual outcomes. There is no peer review by a”competitive, unbiased community of practitioners and academics.” Starzecpyzel, 880 F.Supp. at 1038. To the extent that it has been”generally accepted,” it is not by a”financially disinterested independent community, like an academic community,” Id.; only other handwriting analysts have weighed in. It has never been shown to be more reliable than the results obtained by lay people. Some tests have been done, but all lacked a control or comparison group of lay persons. Thus, Denbeaux concludes, there is no need for expert testimony on handwriting analysis. Lay people can do as well. In this regard, I accept Denbeaux’s testimony, and the article supporting it.
CBS might as well have hired a witch doctor.
My Blog is bigger than your lies…
The good news is Hannitty is on the case like a dog with a bone. He re-interviewed Amy Barnes this evening to make sure no one could doubt she’s convinced her dad is lying. Turns out according to every member of the Killian family CBS left out all the testimonials of anyone, including the names of people who worked with Killian, even guys that roomed with Bush. CBS is in a very small corner with no where to run.
The bad news is tommorow the entire Nation, and of course the media, will decend back into the obligatory wallering in our annual wake for the suffering and loss of some 2700 of our fellow citizens. CBS is playing for time hoping this will all go away. Thats the tactic. The blog hegemony has to not let that happen. The only way Rather and company will get their just deserts in this blatantly duplicitous and partisan effort to aid Kerry is if we just keep hammering to keep it all alive.
Sooner or later the whole scumbag mess of bitchslap experts in that viper den called the DNC will come slithering out of their holes if we persivere. … Simpre fie … Ohhhhhrah
Google search for {“marcel matley” typewriter}
(link: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&newwindow=1&c2coff=1&safe=off&lr=lang_en&q=%22marcel+matley%22+typewriter&spell=1 )
1 IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
(link: http://www.jonbenetindexguide.com/05132002Depo-CinaWong.htm )
… 14 Q. Who taught that course? 15 A. That was taught by Marcel Matley. 16 Q. Were
those full days? … 0077. 1 examination, typewriter identification, anonymous. …
So… he taught a course. But, it’s not in typewriter ID, but handwriting. Big Floppy Deal. There doesn’t seem to be any other google assication between him an a typewriter.
Lysander
The fact that Hannity interviewed Amy Barnes is impressive. I was actually holding off on believing that story. Anyone (maybe even me) could call a radio talk show and claim to be “Amy Barnes”. However when Amy Barnes is specifically interviewed by Fox News; that validates the information sufficiently to narrow that down to a “he said/she said”, which wasn’t what Barnes was hoped (by the Dems) to provide…
Robert,
And one of her DAD’s employees called in saying one of the interviews was cancelled and he was speaking in her name. It’s on Command-Post. He tried to cancel her interview without her permission.
He dad looks more and more like a real bastard.
from Transcript of Rather on CBS link
“DOCUMENT AND HANDWRITING EXAMINER MARCEL MATLEY ANALYZED THE DOCUMENTS FOR CBS NEWS.
HE SAYS HE BELIEVES THEY ARE REAL…BUT IS CONCERNED ABOUT EXACTLY WHAT IS BEING EXAMINED BY SOME OF THE PEOPLE QUESTIONING THE DOCUMENTS….BECAUSE DETIORATION OCCURS EACH TIME A DOCUMENT IS REPRODUCED…..AND THE DOCUMENTS BEING ANALYZED OUTSIDE OF CBS HAVEBEEN PHOTOCOPIED, FAXED, SCANNED AND DOWNLOADED…. AND ARE FAR REMOVED FROM THE DOCUMENTS CBS STARTED WITH WHICH WERE ALSO PHOTOCOPIES.”
Aren’t we all only looking at the pdf documents that CBS put on their website.
Now…
If Mately told CBS that their memos are “not reliable representations of the memos” because they are not the original and hence can’t be authenticated, why did they unprofessionally go ahead with the Memo piece without getting a copy of the originals to authenticate.
Direct Link to Dan Blabber’s Report Tonight
http://www.bushlies2.us/video/wmv/bush_awol_cbs.wmv
Dan – you can stop digging now.
Beijing reports American newsman Dan Rather just appeared downtown with a shovel. “He came from the ground. It was like Godzilla!”
I have a sick feeling that the mainstream Liberal media will let this scandal die. They don’t want their actions being questioned even when they’re doing some sleazy partisan reporting. I wonder how Fox News Channel’s Newswatch on Saturday will deal with the subject. That idiot Leftie Neal Gabler will probably blame conservative bloggers and then mention Halliburton. And the two supposed conservatives — Jim Pinkerton and Cal Thomas — will allow Jane Hall and Gabler to get away with pooh-poohing the story as a Republican trick. Last week, Jane Hall, for instance, said that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth were “probably lying.” All Jim Pinkerton said was that she shouldn’t say they’re all lying.
That the signatures are forged was clear to me (an complete non-expert), in that the Killian “K” had an entirely different stroke between the two versions.
The original, verified signature shows a “V” shaped stroke, followed by a short leg added to the “V” to form the “K”. The forgeries show a single vertical stroke connected to a separate ”
What is this supposed expert’s value?
Jim:
No way. Liberal or no, media companies are in constant, ruthless competition with each other. They’re going to rip CBS a new one over this; not in the name of ideology, but in the name of market share.
The best thing for Rather to do now is run a “we’re so sorry please forgive us” come-to-Jesus segment. That worked for Dateline when they were dynamiting pickup trucks, and it can (eventually) work here too. The other media sharks will continue to rip and rend at CBS until we see this sort of confession/apology.
Sorry — I should have used ascii code, as I lost the end of my sentence due to use of a plaintext “<”. Second paragraph about the Killian “K” should have read:
The original, verified signature shows a “V” shaped stroke, followed by a short leg added to the “V” to form the “K”. The forgeries show a single vertical stroke connected to a separate “<” stroke to form the “K”.
Old AF Admin Wheenie with 20 years in service here. One thing I haven’t heard a lot about, only a little, is the format of some of the documents. They’re just wrong. The headers are wrong. The signature blocks are wrong. They’re just WRONG.
There’s no such thing as a Memo for file. There’s a Memorandum for Record, but no Memo for file. NO SUCH THING.
Addressing an official document with
MEMORANDUM FOR:
didn’t occur until the 1990s. The AF didn’t move their signature blocks over to the right of the documents until the same time, before then they were anchored four clear lines down the left margin.
An official signature block looks like this.
JOHN S. SUPERTROOP, Rank, USAF
Duty Title
Three line signature blocks are reserved for flag officers (Generals) and Colonels sitting in a General’s billet. But they look like
JOHN S. SUPERTROOP
General, USAF
Duty Title
Now civilians may scoff and say so what? Who cares about admin details like that? Ummmmm, the military does…quite a bit too much actually. I’ve seen inspection teams tear entire careers apart over the admin details being mucked up.
There isn’t an admin guy in any branch of the service who wouldn’t have taken one look at these documents and waved the bullshit flag. You could show those documents to any airman coming fresh out of school down at Keesler and they’d have a blast tearing them apart.
Those documents aren’t just fakes…they’re really really bad fakes. And all it would have taken was someone with some sense of how these things are done. The more I look at them…the more I get the feeling that someone sort of scanned through AFM 33-326 and shoved all this together. Before that we had AFR 10-1 and it had the formats I mentioned above.
Remember though, before anyone goes, “Hey, that looks right.” We didn’t use that manual until 1996 and it’s been updated since then.
Bottom line, wrong fonts, wrong headers, wrong formats. It’s bullshit, you can’t hide from it.
Recently, usually while driving, I have found myself breaking into uncontrollable laughter. The Kerry campaign is so unbelievably lame!! The bow with one string – Kerry’s Outstanding Adventure in Vietnam. Carter smoozing with Maggot Moore at the Convention out in the open for everyone to see. Teresa, who makes Hillary look at an absolute snuggle-bug. A PI lawyer for VP candidate. Kerry with decades of indolence in the Senate. Documents forged on Word by what must be an 18-year old campaign volunteer. Kerry’s bogus Purple Hearts (two out of three unwarranted). Kerry starring in the absurd ‘Retro-Metro’ ad campaign. Rather making an ass of himself. The list grows and grows, and then the uncontrollable laughter starts up again.
Dear AF Admin Wheenie TIMMER,
THANKS for the straight poop. I suspect one of the reasons the military puts so much stock in correctness of form for records is PRECISELY to have some way of spotting badly researched FORGERIES.
David March
Liberal or no, media companies are in constant, ruthless competition with each other.
The companies are, but the newsrooms themselves are not.
The leftbats make that same fallacy, assuming that because media companies are corporations, therefore the tilt of their coverage is going to be conservative. Hell, even if corporate management could control the newsrooms’ biases, it still wouldn’t guarantee a rightward slant because corporations are not ideological institutions. What conservatism can be found in corporate America is temperamental, as in “don’t rock the boat or you’ll offend the market”, not ideological as in “post the Ten Commandments in every public building and ban abortion everywhere for any reason.”
Media companies have gotten very rich and powerful by letting the newsrooms become echo chambers of one another. But the newsrooms only compete to see who’ll be first with a juicy story, not to try to hurt the credibility of another company’s newsroom.
In fact, the latter would be deemed uncollegial. If they could have ignored the forgery story they would have. And if they can let it drop quietly off the radar, by storming after the Next Big Story (“This just in! Kerry served in Vietnam! May have been decorated! Film at 11!”), they’ll do it.
Fox News being one exception to the above which ought eventually to break things open — but so far the other newsrooms have all closed ranks against the interloper.
DNC answer Karl Rowe did it!!!! Maybe not. Who wants to run for President in 2008???? It could have been an inside job. Remember Bill had a long talk with Kerry just before these documents appeared.
Read this link “http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091104dnpolguard.117c8.html” from the Dallas Morning News. Apparently Colonel “sugarcoat” wasn’t even in the military when the memo was written.
I think the most amazing thing to come of all of this Dan Rather is a partisan thing is that it took so long. I know someone who worked for him at the ’96 RNC in San Diego. He so disreguarded the RNC as news, he left town before it was over. Someone in Old Media needs to stand up and let their brain breath, and remember what their job is. They are to report the news. Not create it, not support specific canidates, not regurgitate hearsay. I don’t think anyone has seen this effect Pres. Bush in any negative manner. So the attack did nothing but allow a clear case example for people to smell what Old Media has been shoveling.
I should make a note that it was not my friend that disreguarded the RNC as news, but Rather. It should read, “Rather so disreguarded the RNC as news…”