CBS Defends Itself (Badly)

CBS is is sticking behind their story that the memos purporting to show George Bush shirked his duties in the Texas Air National Guard are genuine. In their own defense, CBS has pointed to the IBM Selectric Composer as the machine of that era that could have generated the typesetting anomolies cited as evidence of forgery. Well, here is a picture of that machine:

Look at that thing. That's one mean electric typewriter. The author of this web page describes how the machine is used:

The basic task of the IBM Composer was to produce justified camera ready copy using proportional fonts. It has the capability of using a variety of font sizes and styles.
The first IBM Composer was the IBM "Selectric" Composer announced in 1966. It was a hybrid "Selectric" typewriter that was modified to have proportional spaced fonts. It is 100% mechanical and has no digital electronics. Since it has no memory, the user was required to type everything twice. While typing the text the first time, the machine would measure the length of the line and count the number of spaces. When the user finished typing a line of text, they would record special measurements into the right margin of the paper. Once the entire column of text was typed and measured, it would then be retyped, however before typing each line, the operator would set the special justification dial (on the right side) to the proper settings, then type the line. The machine would automatically insert the appropriate amount of space between words so that all of the text would be justified.

Putting aside for a moment that there is no reason one would expect a then state-of-the-art typesetting machine to be sitting in a National Guard hanger, waiting to produce the "camera ready copy" loved by fighter pilots worldwide, does anyone seriously believe that a National Guardsman, who his family says hated typing, would sit down and go through all that rigamarole just to write a memo to his own file?