Still more tapes missing? (perhaps fragments of the Pizza tape?)
As you all know, Thursday night a mysterious press release was released in which it is claimed that the Grewal tapes had been adulterated. (See here, with the discussions here and here, and the CBC report here.)
That press release also issued two minor corrections, both translated from Punjabi:
Part #1"It depends how it is we meet."…and
(difficult to hear … "associating" or "who else"…)
"If it is something good then it would be tempting"
"If there is no way then we'll talk about it later or at home"
Part #2Some of you might remember how much trouble I had trying to guess where these excerpts come from. Apparently not from this tape. Nothing like this appears anywhere that I can find in the new transcript (click here to download pdf.
UD (in Punjabi) – Cabinet wrong
GG (in Punjabi) – I want to be someone up there[.] If I go with you guys[,] I want to be with someone up there[.] If I go with you guys, what commission[?] [ed.: I add punctuation]
(next passage in English difficult to hear, sounds like “very understandable”)
UD: What are we going to do with the numbers?
This could mean one of two things. Either the new transcript is faulty and these words are in the tapes but not in the transcript. OR this is from some other conversation between Grewal and Dosanjh. If the latter, could one or both of these excerpts be a fragment from the famous 'pizza tape'?
posted by buckets at 6/06/2005 09:55:00 AM
12 Comments:
My goodness, are we going to get 15 mninutes here, 5 minutes there until the ACTUAL 4 hours is released. WFT is going on over at the CPC?
Oh, they are so ready to govern...
See the G&M article today:
"The repeated "cup of tea" section is not on a new version of the recordings issued by the Conservatives last Thursday."
But in the Thursday press release, the party said only that certain brief passages of the audio tapes were accidentally omitted in the transfer to a CD format.
According to the release, the deletions they were restoring occurred after they received the tapes from Mr. Grewal. But the replacement tapes are now MISSING one of the most egregious examples of editing.
It seems as if someone was trying to "fix" the tapes - and from the CPC press release, the tapes were in their possession the whole time. Did the CPC make edits to the tapes, and then fail to disclose that in their press release?
Ha!:
http://www.fewings.ca/2005/hires/050603GrewalTapes.jpg
Bear's got a good idea.
I've toying with the idea of assembling a complete timeline of events and politicans' comments myself.
I'd link back here, of course. Often.
Thank you for all your hard work on this issue, I have been regularly refreshing this blog ever since this all started. I had my suspicions when I first listened to the tapes released, because even to the unaided ear some elements sounded wrong, as you had noted yourself. Now we have an American expert in the Globe telling us that the explanations the CPC have given for these "problems" is something he finds rather implausible, to put it kindly. He has been willing to state conclusively that these tapes were altered, the only thing he won't say with certainty is that the alterations are deliberate, but he is not inclined to accept any “accident” explanation the CPC has put forward to date.
I think you may be correct in that they held back the pizza tapes because it did not suit their narrative, but they retained them. I wonder how many times now there has been evidence of not just deletions but insertions into these tapes. I've lost count at this point. What this does show though is either the CPC did the alterations themselves, or they never checked the originals for alterations before they put their credibility and reputation behind them. The former is of course the worse outcome for the CPC, but the latter one still indicates severe incompetence all by itself.
No, these tapes are now almost certainly going to be more damaging to the CPC, and that is entirely the fault of the CPC. They had something they could have used to great political impact, yet instead it boomerangs onto themselves because they either were too stupid to verify the recording integrity, or they were too willing to make changes to make the case even worse for the Liberals while minimizing damage to themselves. If that latter was the case, wow did they ever get that one wrong.
Mark said "I've toying with the idea of assembling a complete timeline of events and politicans' comments myself."
Please do, Mark. I've been spending _way_ too much time on this. (Mrs. Buckets is beginning to suspect something.)
d.c. macdonald. Accidents do happen. But most of the changes remove things either that make Grewal look more sleezy or that make the Liberals look less sleezy. There is, I think, a pattern.
"Accidents do happen"
How can you say that anymore? As Anonymous posted above, the "cup of tea" deletion in the second tape seems to be of critical importance.
The deletion comes after the tapes were received from Grewal. Grewal couldn't have done this edit. So who could have besides the CPC?
Making deletions to fix up the duplication is far different from what the press release disclosed: adding to fill some gaps inadvertently made in the transfer process.
Failing to disclose the edit by the CPC in the press release suggests that the CPC was willing to mislead the media and the public on this point, by suggesting the tapes were the "clean originals", when clearly they are not.
Isn't this the smoking gun? What am I not getting here?
I've got to admit, I'm with anonymous at 10:30 AM on this one at this point. I'd warrant that there is a better chance I will win the next super 7 jackpot than these alterations were not the result of intentional interference. That business with the tea cups is particularly telling, indeed, it may well prove out to be the smoking gun that anonymous believes it to be. I might still be willing to think it was Grewal were it not for the continual updates the CPC keeps releasing, both audio and transcripts.
I am still having a bit of difficulty accepting the idea that the CPC could be this stupid, but I am running out of alternate possible explanations. If you are going to level charges like the CPC and Grewal did, the very *LAST* thing you want is to be accused and proven to be bearing false witness in those charges, yet that is exactly what the CPC has left itself open to. What this says about the party of ethics and morality that they would do such a thing, something I do not know has a precedent in Canadian political history, is just how desperate for power they are and to what lengths they will go to gain it.
This is a major scandal for the CPC, and the longer they go without acknowledging what is becoming increasingly the only explanation, that they altered the tapes and bore false witness to Canadians, the worse the impacts will be.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050606.wxtape06/BNStory/National/
"Yesterday, Jack Mitchell, a U.S. forensic audio expert who conducted a preliminary review of portions of the originally released recordings, said they had been altered. He said he did not believe the changes occurred in the digital-copying process.
"These tapes have been edited. This is not a maybe. This is not something that's unexplained. This is not, 'Oh, this is odd.' This is a definitive statement. The tapes have been edited," Mr. Mitchell said.
He said he could not say with certainty how the alterations occurred, or conclude definitely that it was done intentionally.
However, Mr. Mitchell said that he not only found instances of possible edits, including sections where it appeared that phrases had been added to the recordings, but also a telltale repeat of a brief snippet of conversation that was repeated exactly.
"The entire thing repeats exactly. It's not the speaker repeating his phrase. This repeats exactly in the same way, with the same rhythm, with the same timing, with the same noise signatures. This is impossible," he said.
Mr. Mitchell said that he is not aware of such a glitch ever being produced in a digital transfer.
"I don't know how it could. I really don't," he said.
Errors in digital transfer can produce crashes that end the recording, or "dropouts" where brief gaps lasting a fraction of a second to a few seconds are created.
"But as far as it actually taking the digital file and sort of combining them and doing its own editing and changing things, I think that's nonsense. I've never seen it, I've never heard of a report of it."
Well, as I said, anony and dcm, there is a patttern.
But I'm a methodical person. I want to collect the data first, analyze it one piece at a time, tie up the loose ends, make a judgement, and then construct a case.
So far I'm somewhere between step 1 and 2.
Buckets:
I can well understand where you are coming from. When this all started last May 18, I was unwilling to trust anything until I knew that all the recordings were out there for context's sake, and that they were not altered in any way. Until that point I was unwilling to take the argument regarding the recording contents by the CPC and other opposition parties at face value. Then I heard the first releases, and I thought some of it sounded off just with my ear. I don't have access to sound equipment nor is my computer set up to do such work, so I had to wait.
Then over the last five days I have seen more than enough to convince me these tapes were altered, at least the copies the CPC released to the public, and done so with intent. What intent exactly I don't know, though the most likely intent is to minimize the Grewal looking like he was selling his vote, and to maximize the idea the Liberals were trying to buy his vote. I do know that I cannot accept the answers the CPC has provided to explain all this, the idea this was all due to accident and coincidence is really hard to swallow at this point, given everything that has come out.
Bottom line for me, is even if the originals were not altered, it is clear the copies were, and now it looks like it was the CPC doing the editing as opposed to Grewal, which was my first suspicion. At this point it does not matter if it is the originals or copies that the CPC altered, the fact is they altered these tapes and by doing so bore false witness. I have seen many Conservatives argue that the cops do this kind of editing all the time without it being a problem, however the cops also have to provide the full transcript as well as proof of the integrity of the chain of evidence from the moment of recording to the moment it is used in court. That this fact appears lost on the Conservatives tells me just how little they understand the logic they are using to defend these tapes.
Incidentally, can you or anyone else think of a similar case in Canadian political history where a party leader has used altered evidence against his political opposition? I've been racking my brains on this one and I can't think of anything comparable to this incident. Anyone else?
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