Hugh Hewitt - <font size=4>Farrell Shiver is the owner of Shiver & Nelson, a document investigation lab in Woodstock, Georgia. Here are his qualifications:<font size=3>
Certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners
Member and Treasurer of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners
Member of the Questioned Documents Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences
Member of the Southeastern Association of Forensic Document Examiners
Former Chief Document Examiner - U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory
Editor, Journal of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners
Graduate of, and former chief instructor for the U.S. Army's two-year resident training program in Forensic Document Examination
Court qualified expert, including U.S. Federal District Court
Experienced in criminal cases and civil cases
Author of numerous papers and articles on the subject of Forensic Document Examination
Retired Special Agent of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command
I interviewed Shiver on air two hours ago, and here's the transcript of that exchange:
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HH: Farrell Shiver, welcome to the program.
FS: <font color=purple>Thank you for asking, Hugh.
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HH: Have you had a chance to take a look at these documents?
FS: <font color=purple>Just briefly, this afternoon.
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HH: Do they raise any questions in your mind?
FS: <font color=purple>Yes they do.
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HH: Can you tell me what kind of questions they raise?
FS: <font color=purple>Well, I looked over some of the websites that have been discussing this, and I downloaded the pdf files showing the memos from the internet. One of the things that people have been discussing is the proportional spacing of the documents, and just to give your listeners an idea of what I am talking about, when I am talking about proportional spacing, if you were to type on a your computer just a row of the letter w, and then underneath that a row of the letter i, and you were to change that font that you used on your computer between the courrier type font and the Times New Roman type font you would see in the courrier type font that the letters would wind up in nice little neat vertical rows, and that is typically how a typewriter would prepare a document, in these nice little neat vertical rows, unless it was a proportional spacing typewriter. In the Times New Roman, you will see that they do not line up in neat rows. Each letter is given just enough space for that letter, so the lowere case letter i would not need as much space as a w, which is a wider letter. Now, all the memos that are in question, are what we would call proportional spacing, how a book is typed, if you buy a book off the shelf, how they are type-set. And in some of these web sites they have talked about how pro[portional spacing would not have been available in 1972, that it only became available with the advent of computers and word processing, and that's not really true. Proportional space typewriters originated as early as the late 1930s, and were introduced commercially in 1944. So proportional space typewriters have been around for quite a while, so just the fact that these memos are done proportionally spaced is not enough to say that they are not genuine.
However there are some other features that are in the documents such as the "th" combination behind the 11th in the 4 May 1972 document.
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HH: That's referred to as a subscript font feature, I gather?
FS: <font color=purple>Well, superscript. Superscript.
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HH: Superscript.
FS: <font color=purple>When it is above. And the 18 August 1973 memo, behind the 187th. This type of feature is not something you would expect to find on the typewriter. It is something that is more characteristic of a computer preparing this, which is something that you would not expect Colonel Killian back in 1972, 1973 to be using.
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HH: Does that cause you to question whether these documents were actually prepared in 1973 and 1972?
FS: <font color=purple>It certainly causes me some concern and would cause me to question whether these documents were actually prepared at that time.
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HH: Other, later-breaking from this afternoon allegations: The font does not appear to match any availabvle at that time. Does that jibe with your understand of fonts available in 1972, 1973?
FS: <font color=purple>Well I haven't had the opportunity to do an exhaustive analysis of that. Certainly Times New Roman has been around as a font for quite a long time, but whether that was available on a typewriter in 1972, 1973 is a totally different question. It was certainbly available for printers and typesetting for books and newspapers and things of that nature. But I have not had an opportunity to do an exhaustive analysis. In addition, the quality of these documents, coming from a PDF file, is not such where you can really do the type of minute analysis that needs to be done.
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HH: How long would a very careful analysis have taken CBS to examine these?
FS: <font color=purple>Well for documents like this, I would spend at least a couple of days working on documents like this.
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HH: Another question that has been raised is the idea that some of the apostrophes in these documents are curved, and people are asking did typewriters at the time have the ability to make curved apostrophes.
FS: <font color=purple>Well that is an interesting question. In the sources that I looked at, none of the sources I looked at had curved apostrophes. I cannot rule out at this point that there were none available at that point. That would be part of just the typefont examination. Did the typefont that was used for this also have curved apostrophes? Certainly that is something that is available in the comluters that are used today. As a matter of fact, as I typed on my computer using Times Roman, it has the curved apostrophe, and if you were going to do an exhaustive analysis of this, that is something that you would have to look at.
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HH: Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty, the reporter who writes KerrySpot has asked if it is a mere coincidence that typing the same words into Microsoft Word results in spacing and line breaks, if left in Word's default, that are identical to those in the CBS document. How would you answer his question?
FS: <font color=purple>I haven't really addressed that question, and I would have to have some time to think about that.
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HH: All told, Mr. Shiver, you have been doing this a long time, and you are very careful, that's why I appreciate your taking the time with us. We did not discuss this before you came on air. You could have come on air and said "I believe in these documents completely," and that would have been fine by me. If you had to bet, at this point, if these are authentic or not authentic, which way would you be betting?
FS: (Laughing) <font color=purple>As a document examiner, I don't like to bet on documents. Mr. Hewitt, but I would certainly say that if I had to give an opinion right now, the opinion would not go towrads it being genuine. I certainly have strong questions about this "th" combination that is being used in the superscript, that we discussed earlier.
In one of the websites I noticed that one of my colleagues had been cited, Dr. Philip Bouffard, and he has indictaed that he is about 90% certain that the documents are not genuine. He had had the opportunity to do a more exhaustive analysis of this than I have.
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HH: Is he credible?
FS: <font color=purple>He is a very credible individual. As a matter of fact, the program that is used by document examiners, throughout the cpountry, in classifying documents, was developed by Dr. Bouffard.
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HH: If CBS brought you these documents, what would you do?
FS: <font color=purple>The first thing I would do is compare the documents to one another, I'd want to see what the common elements or the elements that were not in common between the documents. But I really don't want to bore your listeners with a lot of technical details as to what's going here, in a document examination. Just let me say that there are some elements of the document that certainly raise some red flags, and some suspicions, and we talked abouth the "th" and we talked about the apostrophe being there as some of these suspicious elements. And if it was determined that a typewriter was not available that could have a "th" combination like this, which I really don't believe there was, or a curved apostrophe, which so far I haven't found one in the references that I have looked at, then that would indicate that the document could not have been prepared at the time it was supposed to have been prepared.
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HH: In other words, that they ought not to have been relied upon for any news judgment? Would that have been your advice to CBS?
FS: <font color=purple>Yes sir, I would agree with that statement. I am also concerend that CBS has not identified the expert that has authenticated these documents. I am wondering why they are not willing to do that. That seems unusual. There are an awful lot of unqualified people that claim to be document examiners, and I am wondering if there ,ight not be a source of embarassment if they were to identify who it was that authenticated these documents for them.
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HH: I see. Some other people have identified problems with the signature and the initialing. I haven't had a chance. I have got them in my hands and I am certainly not an expert. Did anything jump out at you on those issues?
FS: <font color=purple>I have not really addressed those issues, and was brought up on one of the web sites that has been discussing this, it would be quite easy for some one using computer manipulation to take a genuine signature and manipulate it on to the document if they had those available from other records.
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HH: Are you surprised--assume for a moment that this is a forgery-- are you surprised at the superscript "th"? That just seems so easy to have deduced as fraudulent.
FS: <font color=purple>Well, again, there's an awful lot of people that advertise themselves as being document examiners that really don't have the qualifications to do this and I am very surprised that someone authenticate this as a genuine document with that "th" being in that position. if someone was able to show that that was available at that time that would counteract that argument.
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HH: Of course the "th" doesn't appear in each of the documents, but does its appearance in a series of documents, at least two f them, suggest that the other two --part of the series that are produced at the same time-- suffer from the same frailty?
FS: <font color=purple>Well, if the documents are all supposed to be from the same source, certainly if two of the documents can be shown to not be genuine, that might cast doubt on the other documents that were associated with it.
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HH: I think you have answered my questions completely, Mr. Shiver. I really appreciate it. As this story develops, I may try and impose on your time again, I know it is late back in Woodstock Georgia, and I appreciate your taking the the time to look at this this afternoon and to inform our audience acrss the United States of your opinion. Anything else you want to state, we have about a minute until the break?
FS: <font color=purple>Not really, do you have any other questions for me?
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HH: Nope. You have answered mine, which is, I am going to take it to the bank that these are not good docs.
Game. Set. Match. Other sites with updates: Captain's Quarters; LittleGreenFootballs, IpseDixit, and the first to the story, Powerline, where the links keep piling up. And stop by JustOneMinute for the first of many amusing look back at how anti-Bush bloggers spasmed over the forgeries. Somebody make sure there aren't any sharp objects around Josh Marshall, who earlier today wrote:
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"Now, I'm no military man. But aside from orders that contravene the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the US constitution, I don't think an officer or an enlisted man is allowed to disobey an order just because he comes up with some logic by which he decides the order doesn't really make sense. An order is an order, right?
Wartime situations can also provide extenuating circumstances for disobeying an order, as in cases where the exigencies of combat render an order moot or create a situation where the recipient of the order can say that circumstances had changed so radically that the issuer of the order wouldn't have issued it had they known, etc. etc. But I assume we can stipulate that this wasn't a live combat situation.
And here we get down to a specific and perhaps touchy point. Why wouldn't Bush show up for that physical? An Air Force pilot's physical is a bigger deal than the one civilians get on a routine basis. But still, it's not that big a deal. Even if he didn't think it was necessary, why disobey a direct order to get around it?"<font color=black>
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Fever. Swamp. Forgeries. Make. For. Bad. Blogging. Speculation.
Incredibly, CBS is sticking to its story: <font color=blue>"As a standard practice at CBS, each of the documents broadcast on '60 Minutes' was thoroughly investigated by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity."<font color=black>
How interesting it will be see to watch old media cover this in the morning papers. Integrity-check time. |
