The Art of Politics

The Pudding

The Washington Post answers our request, and gives us the proof...

Here's what we asked for:

More telling would be examination of known-good documents from the same office, to evaluate their makeup - are they kerned, line spaced uniformly for the width of the page, do they use the same typeface, share the same abbreviation, scriptings, and decimalizations (1st Lt. or 1st LT). This should be very easy to do - to put the matter somewhat aside, produce a known, verifiably authentic document from the same office showing the same characteristics.

And the Washington Post delivers here.

This should about do it. One of these documents is consistent with a 1972 typewriter - and one isn't. Examining the formatting - the signature left aligned, no superscript, no decimal point after abbreviations (such as Lt), fixed width type, date format - exposes how very, very different these two documents appear, and if the government likes anything, it's conformity. The signature is also clearly different. The authentic document has characters that seem to float a bit, with each having somewhat different strike heights which are typical of a typewriter. In fact, these documents are so different in style and appearance that it boggles the mind how anyone can imagine they came from the same group, and how CBS could continue to coyly declaim that their authenticity is merely "questioned".

CBS clearly stepped in it, and it wasn't pudding...

UPDATE: Another WP disassembling of the bogus ANG documents, devastating in detail...

Posted by MEC2 at September 18, 2004 06:31 PM