The Black Republican

Ace and Charles Johnson are hot on the case of more apparent forgeries - this time involving a suspicious-looking PDF, an image stolen from a commemorative figurine company, and the Washington Post reporterette propping up the whole fiasco.

I'm not ready to proclaim it a genuine Rathergate just yet, but it's great street theater either way.

UPDATE: It's beginning to look like someone in the State Department is sending out (what are to him) important-looking inter-office memos in a non-official format. The scandal isn't that they're fake, but that someone down the food chain is spreading questionable information that just so happens to get manipluated (yet again) by every armchair general and self-serving pundit from Washington to Baghdad trying to tell us the war is lost.

As I say over at Ace: "We've gone from 'fake, but accurate' to 'real, but unauthorized, unsourced, and exaggerated'. Is that supposed to be progress?"

UPDATE2: I managed a bit of deduction to suggest an answer to one of the minor mysteries floating about.

Use of an eagle figurine is confusing. Why bother with it when your unit already has its own letterhead? Why even both making a .pdf when a simple e-mail message would do the trick?

Thank you, Dave - you've solved the mystery of the differing dates and differing file formats.

Col. Lang posted the document as a Word .DOC on 23 May, but the .DOC itself was created the same day as the date of the memo - 21 May. Whoever created the PDF took the same file Lang has (from the same or a similar source, or from his site) and used Word to convert it to PDF.

Why? Because the MS Word .DOC is an insecure file format commonly used to transmit worms. Only an idiot sends a Word .DOC over the Internet as an attachment. (And only an idiot opens a Word .DOC he finds on the Internet, but I decided to take one for the team on this.) The person who created the PDF was either unwilling or unable to transmit the .DOC (some networks are properly configured to prevent their transmission).

Now.... who would be sending that email with the PDF attached, and to whom?

Any bets that the WaPo server is configured not to accept .DOC files?

I'm ready for a beer... blocking spam, chasing trolls, solving the mysteries of astrology, PDFs, and the universe - this blog stuff is hard work. It is curious, though, that both these stories came out of The Washington Post. Think they're trying to catch up with the New York Times?