For those of you who still want to believe in the authenticity of the Killian Papers, here's an article from Media Matters, detailing how much of what has been reported about the capabilities of early-70's typewriters has been subsequently discredited. These posts, here and here, on the Daily Kos website, takes to task the amateur sleuths who've transposed the PDF files of the Papers with their own concoctions created by the computer in their mom's basement, and reveals discrepancies in the documents that could only have been created by a typewriter. And Jerralyn Merritt discusses the fallibility of "expert witnesses" in the field of forensic typing comparison. To that I would like to add that it is not uncommon for expert witnesses in any area to provide that testimony most desired by the side employing them, and that one of the experts used to challenge the authenticity of the Killian Papers received hate mail and threatening phone calls after he seemed to back away from that position to the Boston Globe. And, of course, the one person who could provide an account different than that contained in the Killian Papers, the President, remains silent.

None of this is to say that I remain any less skeptical of the Killian Papers. As usual, the digital brownshirts went over the top in their early posting, making claims about typing technology and the like that went way beyond the facts, and their efforts to play investigative journalists have merely shown what the level of quackery that pervades the fields of both blogging and forensic typing analysis. But something still tells me to be wary, especially since CBS has not been particularly forthcoming as to how it received these papers, where these papers came from, and (with one exception) who their authenticating experts are. Since it doesn't appear that 60 Minutes ever received originals, we may never get a resolution of this dispute.