Honestly, I am disappoint in Sandwich for posting this conspiracy theory bull****.
Heartily concur.
I'll never understand the mind of a birther.
I'm so glad I both posted my suspicions as to the real reason, and hid them at the same time. It allowed people such as yourselves some slack to show how well you pay attention to things (hint: you don't, apparently). So let me make things somewhat obvious.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, "birther" (whatever the heck
that is), or any other stereotype. I'm a person with eyes that can see things in front of me, ears that hear things around me, and a mind to discern if what I see (or am shown) or hear makes sense or is totally off the wall. So A) quit your labelling.
B) The circumstances of me posting this are as follows: A friend saw the infowars video about this whole thing and asked my opinion on whether it was legit, knowing that I was computer-savvy, and well-aquainted with Photoshop (not that Photoshop is used to see the layers in this document, but whatever). I told him I'd download the file and check it out. I also told him the following:
I can easily imagine a scenario where someone took the document from the White Hose site, photoshopped to appear like a fake, uploaded a video about it being fake, and posted a link to their own altered document, stating that if the White House had replaced the document already, people could download what it used to be here (providing them with the altered version). So I'll download the document from the White House site and look into it.
So I did so. The document, as downloaded from the White House site, does indeed still have the odd-looking layers in it, and the other inconsistencies. So I came here, looking to see what you guys had concluded about the odd document,
because I respect the immense collective knowledge of this particular internet crowd. To my surprise, I found absolutely nothing about this, which is
why I was disappointed.
So I posted this thread and my conclusions about the veracity of the document, pointing out the obvious oddness, and asking
your opinions on the matter:
*snip*
Does this look as bizarre to you as it does to me?
If someone wanted to forge a document, I'd certainly expect them to do a better job of it. I certainly could.
I'll post what this looks like to me in a spolier tag, but I want to get your unfettered opinions before you see my opinion, so no peeking until you investigate.
It looks to me like the t_______ p______ of the d_______ resulted in a f____ d_______, possibly a f__, that was p___________ for b_____ r_________.
After this, I continued poking around the net some more, looking into the conspiracy sites to see what inconsistencies they were finding, etc. Of course I had to wade through lots of biased, off-the-wall comments, but among the junk, I found what I believe to be true. I mostly fits in with what I had concluded, but brought in an added aspect that I was unaware of.
I ran across a few comments that brought forth the point that the odd layers found in the White House PDF look very much like the automatic layers added into documents that are scanned
and run through OCR. I never dealt with OCR myself, so I was unaware of this aspect of it, although I have a general idea of how it works. With that in mind, I looked at the document again, and in my opinion, it fits - the document does indeed appear to have been scanned in and run through OCR, which created the layers. The only other missing piece is simply shoddy workmanship on the side of whoever was in charge of processing the actual document for uploading... but it's pretty easy to imagine a government worker producing shoddy work.
In conclusion, here's the full version of my spoiler above:
It looks to me like the transmit process of the document resulted in a faded document, possibly a fax, that was photoshopped for better readability.
