<font color=brown>Commander's Son Questions Memos on Bush's Service
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"Farrell C. Shiver, a forensic document examiner based in Georgia who said he was a Republican, said the superscript "th's" throughout the memos were "something you would expect to find being done with a computer" and were "not consistent with something that you would expect to find from someone typing a document; they used typewriters in that particular time."
Mr. Shiver also said he was suspicious of the spacing in the memos and the curves in their apostrophes.
But he said that while the font seemed unusual for the period, "that does not prove that the documents are not genuine."
Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio who created a commonly used database of at least 3,000 old type fonts, said he had suspicions as well. "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens," said Dr. Bouffard, a Democrat. He also said the fonts were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," the commonly used Microsoft Word font.
However, Dr. Bouffard said, a colleague had called his attention to similarities between the font in the memos and that of the IBM Selectric Composer of the early 1970's.
But he said it would be unusual for Mr. Bush's commanding officer to have had the IBM machine because of its large size.
Dr. Bouffard said he would see if the fonts match more closely on Friday. "The problem I'm going to run into if this matches and Times Roman matches, to the extent of what we are able to see on these poor miserable copies that are passing around,'' he said, "then I don't think anybody's going to be able to say for sure.''
A senior executive at CBS said said, "We are convinced our source who got the documents had access to them and we trust the source.'' He added, "Can we produce the typewriter they came from in 1972 or 1973? Obviously not.''
The executive said the documents had been "vetted as thoroughly as possible.''
"We did have a number of experts,'' he said, adding that the producers also showed the documents to numerous people who worked with Colonel Killian and who said the memos were consistent with what he thought and representative of the sorts of documents he produced back then.
"It would be unbelievable for a forger to have written documents that could so closely reflect what the people closest to Killian said,'' he said, "that this is his tone of voice, what he thought back then, this is the situation back then. It would be a little odd to think that these things could have just surfaced.''
CBS News executives also produced a document released earlier by the White House about Mr. Bush's service that was clearly from a typewriter and had a superscript "th'' in it. CBS said it proved that some typewriters did indeed have superscript keys. But the characters were hard to make out after so much reproducing of the document, a problem, the CBS News official acknowledged, with the documents in the initial "60 Minutes'' program; those documents were not originals and have been copied repeatedly.
CBS News declined to say how it obtained the memos."
nytimes.com |
