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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (16661)	9/16/2004 1:39:00 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

I don't think that anyone can say for certain that they are fakes or real. So I am in the camp of not believing either way...as I have stated before. There does appear to be evidence supporting both sides. That said, I missed the interview with the typist last nite...so I might not have the latest scoop either. You're setting the bar too high. Certainty is not required, as we are dealing with probabilities here. If this were a civil court case, a preponderance of the evidence would be sufficient. That would be that the evidence suggests by a margin of 50.01% that the documents are fake. I saw that one document expert put the figure at above 90% probability the documents are forged. That high a percentage would satisfy an even more stringent burden of proof - the clear, cogent and convincing standard. Hell, it might even get there for the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard imposed under criminal law. The best proof of fraud, IMO, is not what the bloggers and document experts have come up with, but is the inability of CBS and Dan Rather to come up with evidence that the documents are authentic. I have seen nothing to suggest they are, except for CBS's lame comment that there was equipment in existence in 1972 that could have created these documents. So? Did the Texas Air National Guard have such equipment? I doubt it.

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (16661)	9/16/2004 1:44:08 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

the experts seem to disagree as to whether the documents were typed on old IBM's or new word processors. LOL. Find me ONE expert who says they were typed on ANY typewriter. The fact is even the two experts CBS consulted before airing the story warned them the documents showed obvious signs of being forgeries. And the third, who was not really a document expert at all, but rather a handwriting analyst who claimed to be able to identify personality traits by handwriting analysis, says he never authenticated the documents. He only gave an opinion that the signatures on two of the docs appeared to match Killian's signature on other TANG docs. Oh, and as you noted, NONE of the experts, and that includes CBS's, have seen originals. CBS only has copies - or so they say. Finally, with the preponderance of the evidence saying "forgery", one is foolish to hang his hat on "it was possible" to type them on a specific, not commonly used machine available then. You can't reject the hypothesis that they are fakes based on a one in a million chance that they could have been created at that time by that person.