Documents may be forgeries

From factcheck.org:

Update: Documents May Be Forgeries09.10.2004

Serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of four documents that CBS News said it had obtained from the personal files of Bush's former squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard. We are removing reference to them in our Feb. 8 article on the "Texans for Truth" ad until these questions are settled to our satisfaction.
The four memos were purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, dated May 2, 1972, May 19 , 1972, August 1, 1972 and August 18, 1973. Killian died in 1984. CBS News didn't say how it had obtained the documents, but said it had was satisfied they were authentic after consulting experts. The White House did not question the documents when it released copies to reporters after obtaining them from CBS.
Subsequently, members of Killian's family said they suspected the documents weren't authentic, and experts quoted by conservative websites and mainstream news organizations said the documents could not have been produced by the typewriters in common use in the early 1970's. The memos contain proportional spacing, in which the letter "i" occupies less space than the letter "m," for example. And they contain the "superscript" character "th" (in “Report to111th F.I.S. administrative officer” in the May 2 memo, for example.) A feature of modern computer word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word automatically changes “th” to superscript characters when following numerals, but such characters were impossible to produce on ordinary typewriters in use in 1972.
The Associated Press quoted Killian's son Gary as saying he doubted his father would have written the 1973 memo which said there was pressure to "sugar coat" Bush's performance review. "It just wouldn't happen," he said. "No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."
The Washington Post quoted Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell calling the documents "a farce" and saying he didn't keep files: "I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person." She said CBS had not asked her to authenticate the records.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Killian's daughter, Nancy Killian Rodriguez, as saying her family knew nothing about the source of the documents. "You can imagine all this from our perspective . . . Why is a man who passed away 20 years ago being brought up on something that happened 30 years ago and what does that have to do with what's going on in the world right now?"
The AP also quoted the personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time, Rufus Martin, as saying he believes the documents are fake: "They looked to me like forgeries. . . I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."
The AP quoted independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines saying the documents looked as though they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
The Washington Post story quoted another document expert, William Flynn, a forensic specialist with 35 years of experience, as saying the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. "Although IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government," the Post said.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Farrell C. Shiver, a Georgia-based analyst who edits a journal for document examiners, as saying that the superscript "th" would have been very unusual for that time: "You would not be able to do that with a typewriter at that time unless you had a specialty key made." The New York Times also quoted Shiver questioning the curves in the apostrophes, but adding: "that does not prove that the documents are not genuine."
The New York Times also quoted Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio, as saying he could find nothing like the characters in the documents in a database he created of 3,000 old type fonts: "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens." He said they were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," a commonly used Microsoft Word font.