Please read all the updates
The blogosphere is abuzz that there might be an authoritative expert by the name of David E. Hailey, Jr., Ph.D. who might have proven the CBS documents are legit.
The Boston Globe is this correction]
And I have the goods.
He attempted to copy Charles’ work of reproducing the document on a typewriter. Supposedly, the top line is the CBS memo and the bottom line a 1970’s era typewriter. But there was a problem… (He later said it was not typed. read the pdf and you decide what he said)
First download the pdf his analysis. Then go to page 8 and zoom in on the “th” at 400% you’ll see…
As they sing on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the other.”
UPDATE I viewed the pdf on screen and it was obviously a forgery. Spoons says he could not see it so I rerasterized it as saved it as a jpg. I think it is clearer. If you doubt me, like everything in the blogosphere, follow the links. (/update)
Here is a hint for the good Professor– If you are going to forge documents DON’T LEAVE THE EVIDENCE on your webserver. [Ed – Most of the content previously available through this link is now gone.]
And if you don’t think that TH nailed him, feel free to download the PHOTOSHOP DOCUMENT he was working on when he created the forgery.
Not only did he forge the document but he let the work in progress in an open web folder.
And Professor, if you are reading this- and I know someone will mail it to you, I have downloaded your entire website as evidence and I saved screen caps of it, so don’t bother delete it. I also had an interesting phone call with the head of your department. You might give him a call.
Did you think we were stupid?
Update OpenSecrets.org say the good professor gave John Kerry $250 (thanks Allah)
Update 2: We got word from Charles at LGF that the Globe is backing away from the guy. I wonder why.
Update 3: The Backstory I had this story last night. In fact, I mailed it to James and Steven because it was a case of academic misconduct and they follow that sorta stuff.
I asked them to hold it because I was calling the head of his department in the morning. It was not etched in stone that I was going to blog this. I called the head of his department and he was a very nice gentleman. He looked at the pdf and agreed it did not look right but said he did not have the expertise to say it was a fraud.
He asked me to make the case for academic misconduct and mail it to him. I told him he would get it Monday morning. Once I saw the Globe was considering running the story and that Charles and Allah had links to it, I knew someone would bust the guy so I may as well do it.
In other words DSA… Not in your wildest freaking dreams. (ROFLMAO at closed circuit humor 😉
–Some people tried to cast doubt on my story. I investigated immediately and the good professor only dug himself deeper. —
]]>Update 4: One of the commenters noted that the pdf version was updated about 1pm TODAY. I have no idea if the guy knows he’s famous, so I don’t know if he was trying to cover his tracks or if he just just still working on the forgery (er document). If he was trying to cover something he did a bad job as the bogus TH is still plainly clear.
The pdf has been modified (as noted in update 4) with additional language explaining the figure. He calls it both figure 4 and figure 5 so there is some confusion there. HE NOW CLAIMS THE BOTTOM LINE WAS NOT TYPED.
At this point it is probably safe to assume his department head called him and he was trying to fix things. I’m in the process of seeing if his explanation is credible. If so, I’ll trumpet it. But so far, I’m very, very dubious.
Update 5 He is now doing more editing. Fixing sloppy work or digging in deeper? Jury still out. But keep an eye on the html version. If he makes the case, you’ll hear it here first.
Update 6: As I’ve noted in the comments, we’re working getting the original pdf uploaded. I can’t upload via web interface so I mailed it to Kevin who will FTP it up.
In the mean time, here’s the text. That whole part about not misunderstanding figure 4 was NOT in the original. The original has figure 4 then verbatim:
Figure 4. Washington Post analysis of criticisms advanced by “document experts.” Their criticism is that the type is proportional, the superscript “th” is consistent with word processing software and not consistent with mechanical technologies of the time. Some experts are certain that the font used is Times New Roman, probably unavailable on typewriters at the time, and certainly not used by the military at the time.
The critical arguments of the above document experts are both spurious and uninformed. The ability of the military to produce the proportional text with a superscript “th” with a typewriter is beyond question. [it is? -ed] The only real questions are “is this Times New Roman or similarly contemporary, digital font,” and, “is the typing mechanical or digital?”
Working on the hypothesis that this is Typewriter, and was typed on a machine, I am able to exactly reproduce a Bush memo (Figure 4). [editors note he means figure 5.]After figure 5 he has the caption (in bold) then more text.
Figure 5. The above is an example of a bush memo and my replica based on using Typewriter condensed as my font of choice. Note that the match is exact.
Using the hypothesis established from examining the Bush memos, it becomes possible to create a virtually flawless replica.IMPORTANT: Even if you accept that he never meant to imply he physically typed it, he just worded it poorly in the original, WHY DID HE HAVE TO PASTE IN THE TH? If it were so easy to replicate, why not do it? IF he had to paste it in, it is still a forgery.
I still have many doubts. Anyone?
The professors now says:
I was able to establish the font family based on the best examples of each character. I was able to recreate most of the defining characteristics using a font called “ITC American Typewriter Condensed.” Once I had identified the font family, I recreated the memo using characters from that font family.
ITC is International Typeface Corporation.
You can see the font he claims he uses at ITCFONTS.COM
Look down and to the right and you will see “View full character set”
There is no superscript “th” in that font. You have to make it on a computer. That’s why he pasted it in!
And at the risk of pointing out the obvious, if he produced it on a computer how exactly does that help his case???
We are left with thinking he is either a forger or incomprehensibly dumb. All things considered, I’d admit to stretching the truth before I’d own up to being this dumb. But that’s just me.
One more… Sorry for delay… original pdf file here.
Update 8: Some say they did not understand this post as it was too cryptic. If so, read Dr. Hailey Redux.
Go through that again in dumb english. Sorry man, it is cool, but needs translating. Otherwise, dead center!
One word: Awesome.
Um, please explain. I see little lines in the top corner, but I don’t know what that means.
Yeah, I don’t get it.
What am I seeing? What does it mean? Is the point that the second th isn’t as distorted as the first one?
I’m completely lost.
WOW. What will these people stop at?
Pajamahadeen catching forgers morning, noon, and night. Fantastic! Excellent work!
Nailed him.
One of these days the Left is going to dig up somebody competant to forge their documents.
If you go Hailey’s index, you’ll see the published file: bush_04_May_72_with_typewri.gif. This is the published image. Also listed is: bush_with_typewri.gif. This is the image BEFORE Hailey pasted in a superscript th. He seems to be forging his forgery defense.
Oh, excellent . . . he is busted.
Paul – Right on, brother! You are just abso-frickin’-lutely righteous for exposing this lame ass shill.
Maybe we need to find out which mail order campus gave him his PhD as well.
Death to all who oppose the blogosphere. You will be assimilated…..
Still doesn’t ‘prove’ anything – no one ‘knows’ where the documents came from – anyone could have created them. That’s the thing – there is no paper trail that verifies those so-called documents ever existed before someone got the idea to try to screw Bush.
And really, more importantly, who the hell cares, outside of a bunch of moronic Dimocrats and Newspeople who can’t stand the idea of a Republican President?
If the Boston Globe and CBS are still expending time and energy on this craziness, I would suggest that their stockholders should start selling the damn stock.
I’ll shut up now.
He forged the 2nd th by using Photoshop to erase the old th and overlayed the new th on top of the old th.
Now he can use another title after his PhD salutation “Caught in 24 hrs”
Bless OpenSecrets.org Must be a lot of money ($250) for a Utah English Professor.
HAILEY, DAVID
RICHMOND,UT 84333
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY/ASSOCIATE PRO
5/25/2004
$250
Kerry, John
see link on update (-ed)
Offhand, I’d say the line over the “th” (which is oddly sharp compared to the rest of the document) was formed by doing a cut and paste to lower the superscript, but he didn’t catch the top of the “t.” Had he zoomed in to take a closer look, he’d have realized the cut was faulty.
That’s my guess anyway.
Ho. Lee. Etc.
Now I see it. Whoa.
Reminds me of a time when I had to explain permissions on files to someone who had left up some very interesting emails for the world to see… I learned how to anonymous email that day.
Still, was pre-emption a good idea? These people may actually learn something in this process, and as Laurence says, someone who can actually forge convincingly may come out of this process.
But man oh man. Good work.
The th in the second line was photshopped in. In the original there was no th “typed” in (probably because there is no way to do so on a typewriter he was using).
So he photoshopped the th in and claimed he did it on a typewriter–when he didn’t.
For crying out loud. How can people do this and not expect to get caught?
Dr. Hailey, what do you have to say for yourself? And why, man, why? The story was just about dead. CBS succeeded in waiting the storm out, and nobody’s talking about it anymore. Now you revive it, and possibly permanently damage your career in the process. What were you thinking?
The downloaded Photoshop image shows the document’s second line illustrated above withOUT a superscript “th.” I believe this shows that the good professor used Photoshop to add said “th” to his doc, confirming it to the Wizzer as being a fake.
arb
Hey, this reminds me of Professor Michael Bellesiles, the history professor who wrote that firearms were rare in early America. His research was a total fraud!
http://home.att.net/~r.s.mccain/bellesiles.html
Add my voice to the “dumb it down for us” crowd. I am looking at two lines of texts, one with fuzzy TH superscript and one with a clear one. The clear one has some lines next to it. OK, so what does any of that mean?
I also do not have Photoshop, so I can’t see what kind of damning evidence is in the PSD file. I have Photoshop on my home computer and frequently use it to scan things in (since I can use 32-bit color and adjust levels better than the scanner can), so I certainly wouldn’t make anything of it if it is just a PSD file with an allegedly scanned typewriter document in it, as that in itself proves nothing. But maybe if I could see the document, I’d see clear signs of forgery-in-progress…so maybe you could explain what that would be for those of us without Photoshop access.
Thanks.
good work! i checked out the open web folder and there’s a lot of stuff there. anything else incriminating? i have a friend on the faculty at USU and i’ll ask him if he knows anything about this guy.
looks like a good case for a professional ethics violation.
Wonder how fast the Boston Globe is stopping the presses.
WOW now that was some fast responses… Ok I was close on the “cut and paste” but I was thinking about lowering the original and using a sharpen filter. Duh, he put an entirely new “th” in and failed to cover the old one entirely.
The 2nd superscripted ‘th’ has been added later. It doesn’t have the edge pixelation the letters on either side have. It looks “clearer” than the set of letters it was supposedly typed along with.
This is caused by forgery; admittedly a better forgery than the original see-BS forgery (which was totally outrageous) but a poor forgery still.
You know when you’re at the mall and everyone is staring at one of those hidden 3D pictures of a lighthouse or a three-masted schooner or the space shuttle or something where the whole thing looks like a bunch of squiggly lines until you cross your eyes just right and then BAM it comes into view, except all around you one by one people are saying “Oh, I see it” or “Wow, there it is” except you’re just standing there like an idiot staring so hard you feel like you’re eyes are just going to shoot out of your head at like a million miles per hour because you just can’t figure out what the hell it is everyone else sees and you’re going so insane that you’re sure you’re just about to start punching everyone int heir stupid faces because you think you’re either crazy or blind or having a stroke or something?
I feel like that.
You are a GOD!
Simple explanation: the cut and pasted the TH into the image of the document to make it look like the TH he created on his typewriter matches the TH from the CBS memo. If you look at the PDF and the PSD files, you can see that the 72 in the date “1972” a few lines above the superscript TH also appears to be pasted in.
Considering the professor’s credentials, this lameness does not surprise me – he’s a technical writer. We are not known for our mental acuity. At least, I’m not!
Excellent catch on this!
Playing Devils Avocate for a second…
Isn’t this guy supposed to be someone who is looking to debunk the documents?
If so, that would probably involve photoshopping around and trying to move elements of documents around to see if they fit. This could be a work in progress, it could be a temporary throwaway image he wasn’t planning on using to provide evidence of the authenticity of the documents.
I just think there are a variety of reasons to explain the point you are making, if I think you are making the point I think you are.
I went to Utah State, located DEEP in a very conservative small town. Literally 85% or more of these people are religious, gun-toting, hard-wrking industrious conservative folk who are identified as Republicans. The second you step on to campus, however, they hit you over the head, suck any sense of value and morality from your soul, and begin to indoctinate every wit with their liberal bias. Even in good ol’ Logan Utah.
From the doctors paper in the parent directory
“Working on the hypothesis that this is Typewriter, and was typed on a machine, I am able to exactly reproduce a Bush memo (Figure 4).”
And wiz has the evidence that he was forging them.
People need to start reading the visuals more clossely…the guy’s headline screams “I’m Left, I’m Left, I’m LEEEFFTTT!”
This is a great job you’ve done…I downloaded the pdf file for safe keeping but you know, I really anticipate all the other “evidence” to just be gone in the next few minutes. Or, at least, soon. Great job here, really great!
People need to start reading the visuals more clossely…the guy’s headline screams “I’m Left, I’m Left, I’m LEEEFFTTT!”
This is a great job you’ve done…I downloaded the pdf file for safe keeping but you know, I really anticipate all the other “evidence” to just be gone in the next few minutes. Or, at least, soon. Great job here, really great!
Look at the two versions of 1972 just above th. The numbers are obviously different too.
The Bush Doctrine in Action!
I emailed this story to the USU student newspaper. Maybe it will get some buzz.
Question, we know forging goverment documents is a felony.
Is forging forged goverment documents to pass them as real documents still a felony ?? If so,
we know who did it this time, unlike the originals.
Just a thought
Next thing you know, CBS/Kerry will be showing “‘Father’ Guido Carducci” discussing HIS versions of the, um, “documents.”
Then, it’ll be Oscar the Cookie Monster. THEN, it’ll be Heloise. THEN, there will be…
“one of these things doesn’t belong..Can you find which one is not like the other before I finish this song?”…Sorry that song is stuck in my head now.
Here’s his email address
dhailey@english.usu.edu
What about the lack of a . after the 2?
I don’t get what you are saying.
The doctor says “Do not misunderstand figure 4. My addition is not typed. It is replicated based on the characters already in the memo.”
Doesn’t this mean he was using photoshop to move the “type” around? to layout the memo?
Am I missing smoething? Isn’t one missing a period after the two? Seems like a dumb mistake.
The original fakes were better than this one.
Just for the record, I don’t doubt Paul on this. When 39 people in the room see something, and I don’t, I’d have to be crazy or even more arrogant than my wife says I am not to recognize that the odds favor them being right. I just don’t understand the argument.
Having never used photoshop, I guess I just don’t know what a photoshopped document looks like.
And what’s with the “72” missing from the date on one of those, two. It’s strange – is he actually saying he cut and pasted chunks from one place and another in Photoshop and moved them around to “recreate” actual typespeak?
I’m confused. He says on page 8, in the first paragraph, beginning with “Do not misunderstand…” that he put that together with photoshop and a digital Typewriter font. Was that not in the PDF you downloaded?
haha… feel free to contact this joker…
dhailey@english.usu.edu
http://imrl.usu.edu/Hailey/content/index.html
I also had an interesting phone call with the head of your department. You might give him a call.
Paul, what was the “interesting conversation?”
Way to go, Wiz. Buy yourself some nice silk pj’s. You deserve ’em!
Way to go, Wiz. Buy yourself some nice silk pj’s. You deserve ’em!