Conservatives' commissioned expert verifies tapes.

The CBC yesterday:

Harper says the party has its own experts checking out the tapes. "I'm waiting for a final report," he said.

And now, apparently, Kenney has announced that an expert has verified the tapes are authentic. (E. T. Bear has Kenney's press release at Blankout Times.) Here is the expert's letter.

Hon. Stephen Harper, P.C., M.P.
Leader of the Opposition
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6

Dear Mr. Harper,

In the past several days, I have had the opportunity to review the audio clips supplied to your office by Mr. Gurmant Grewal. I have reviewed these clips numerous times and offer this evaluation to you.

As a professional audio engineer, specializing in post-production work, it is my opinion that the clip entitled "Various Calls to Gurmant Grewal from Sudesh Kalia" appears unaltered and is a clean recording.

The clip entitled, "Meeting between Gurmant Grewal and Ujjal Dosanjh, joined by Tim Murphy (1:00 PM Ujjal Dossanjh’s Office, Confederation Building) May 17, 2005" appears unaltered and is a clean recording.

The clip entitled, "Various Calls to Gurmant Grewal from Ujjal Dosanjh and Tim Murphy" is a very poor recording throughout. There is a great deal of loud ambient noise and distortion. While there are several places that have unusual sounds, I cannot conclude that these are the result of any audio editing.

The clip entitled, "Meeting between Gurmant Grewal and Tim Murphy, (10:00AM), Mr. Grewal’s Office" seems to be unaltered and is a clean recording.

Please accept this as a summary of my findings. Should you have any questions, I am available at your earliest convenience.

Yours truly,


Randy Dash
Senior Editor & Manager of Operations
dMAX Media, Ottawa

The question, of course, is which tapes?

Dash apparently vouches for the tape with the title “Meeting between Gurmant Grewal and Tim Murphy, (10:00AM), Mr. Grewal’s Office”. But since I have just spent the day wrestling with 5 different audio versions of this and three different transcripts here. Of course, I only have the tape that I call 'J'. Did Dash have χ? Or even ψ?

What is it that is at issue? Surely it is not that the first tapes that the conservatives first released to the public were edited. The fact that the Conservatives themselves admitted this (here) shows the opposite, as does the extent and tendentiousness of the editing: see here (yellow marks what was cut out). (The case is summed up most admirably by Kevin Michael Grace, here.)

So, maybe the tapes that we now have are genuine? I certainly hope so. But the story that the genuine tapes tell is quite different from the ones that Grewal first released. Grewal asked for things; the Liberals refused. See here.