Thomas on Foster:
http://www.jameson245.com/stonfoster.htm

Foster on the Ramsey case:
http://www.jameson245.com/fosterbook.htm

48 Hours transcript
http://www.jameson245.com/48hourstranscript.htm

Donald was discredited by his own words, NOT "procedural mistakes".

From: Don Foster <foster@VASSAR.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, 12 Jun 2002 16:20:55 -0400
Subject: WS’s Elegy

In 1996, having ventured an attribution of W.S.'s "A Funeral Elegy" to
Shakespeare, I was blasted in the pages of TLS. But Shakespeare's
authorship was not as easily disproved as some skeptics anticipated.
Though several alternative attributions were advanced, they failed for a
good reason. They were mistakes. Recently, though, the French scholar,
G. D. Monsarrat, may have succeeded where English and American scholars
have failed, demonstrating in an article in the *Review of English
Studies* that the elegy looks like the work of the Jacobean dramatist,
John Ford. I know good evidence when I see it and I predict that
Monsarrat will carry the day. If I may quote the elegy, "what he spake
/ Seem'd rather answers which the wise embrace / Than busy questions
such as talkers make." No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his
own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar. Monsarrat's fine essay
has compelled me, largely against my will, to return to an attribution
and a text I have not considered in years. Years ago when Ford was
first mentioned as a possible author, I scoffed at the attribution.
Ford's rate of enjambment was too low. His use of "Shakespearean who"
was largely confined to *Christes Bloudy Sweat* (1613). His distinctive
vocabulary was not (and this was a downright mistake, as I have since
discovered upon indexing the Ford canon more fully) as richly
represented in the elegy as Shakespeare's. Ford would not, in a
first-person funeral poem, attempt to deceive anyone about the author's
identity. Etc. But I ought to have attended more closely to the internal
evidence-something that, in an irony that I can only now fully
appreciate, I myself insisted on in arguing the case for Shakespeare.

The 1612 quarto may have invited its first readers to take "W.S." for
William Shakespeare, but that external evidence, I think, must now be
viewed in a new light. I do not know how or why incorrect initials
were tagged to the title page and author's dedication, nor how the text
came to be published by Thomas Thorpe, nor why the elegist borrowed so
heavily from Shakespeare and from texts known to Shakespeare.
Monsarrat's hypothesis that Ford was employed as a ghost-writer for W.S.
seems, to me, implausible for several reasons but I have no better
solution to offer.

Since 1997 I have had a second career in criminology and forensic
linguistics that has taken time from an unfinished project that remains,
for me, a source of frustration. The Shaxicon database-which
contributed to my own conviction, in 1996, that Shakespeare wrote the
elegy-is still unpublished. Nor have I yet determined where I went
wrong with the statistical evidence. Still, my experience in recent
years with police detectives, FBI agents, lawyers, and juries has, I
hope, made me a better scholar. Our courts have long exacted higher
standards for the admissibility of evidence than literary journals. If
authorship of “A Funeral Elegy" were a crime, no court in America would
have allowed "expert witnesses" on the stand to opine that the offender
was Sclater or Slayter or Strode or Simon Wastell. Nor, if Shakespeare
were charged with the offense, would the courts have allowed a defense
"expert" to opine that Shakespeare was simply not a man to write that
sort of thing. My experience with the anonymous documents in criminal
investigations indicates that competent and trusted people-math
professors, parents, biowarfare experts-often commit acts or write texts
that you wouldn't expect of them. Personal opinions cannot stand for
evidence, nor can personal rhetoric. But in light of the evidence
marshaled by Monsarrat, and possibly augmented by Brian Vickers'
forthcoming book, the jury need not hold forth much longer on
Shakespeare's authorship of "A Funeral Elegy." The kinds of linguistic
and intertextual evidence I myself most trust-and that informs
Monsarrat's essay-associate "W.S." more strongly with Ford than with
Shakespeare.

I, Donald W. Foster, declare as follows:

1. I obtained my Ph.D. in English from the University of
California (Dec. 1985). I am currently employed by Vassar
College full-time as a Professor of English on the Jean
Webster Chair, having been hired by Vassar as an Assistant
Professor in 1986. In 1990 I was promoted to Associate Professor with
indeterminate tenure, and to Full Professor in 1995. My responsibilities include
classroom instruction and scholarly research in the fields of English language and
literature. In addition to my responsibilities within the academic community, I
serve often as a private consultant in matters of textual analysis and authorial
attribution. I have been retained in civil cases as a consultant and expert to
examine issues of authorial attribution of written documents. These cases have
included litigation involving wills and various other documents of disputed or
doubtful authorship. I am perhaps best known for having correctly identified Joe
Klein as the author of Primary Colors, "by Anonymous," in February 1996, three
weeks after the novel's initial release; six months later, Klein finally ackhowledged
his authorship of the novel.(1)

2. My publications include articles in various fields of literary study (classical and
biblical literature, early women writers, Shakespeare and Renaissance drama,
literary theory), but my area of special expertise is that of linguistic and textual
analysis as pertains to problems of attribution, textual indebtedness, and textual
transmission. My print publications in this area of specialization include one book
and many articles. In addition, I have developed and edited "Shaxicon" (a lexical
database for literary studies and linguistics) and the "Vassar Electronic Text
Archive," both of which resources have helped to solve problems of authorship
and intertextual indebtedness.

3. I have examined in detail the following documents:

a. The Turchie Affidavit (hereafter, the "Affidavit") in support of the
3 April 1996 Search Warrant in the case of United States v.
Kaczvnski, as well as the attachments to the said Affidavit.

b. The "T-documents," which consist of various letters and other
writings ascribed to the Defendant (written in the years 1968-1995,
some undated), and an untitled 1971 essay likewise ascribed to the
Defendant.

c. English translations of T-documents that were written in Spanish
and translated into English, as prepared by a Government translator.

d. The "U-documents," which consist of the Unabom Manuscript,
entitled "Industrial Society and Its Future," and other letters
purportedly by the same individual.

e. The "Notice of Motion and Motion to Suppress Evidence"
(hereafter, the "Motion to Suppress"; dated 3 March 1997), as well
as the appendices to the Motion to Suppress.

4. In studying these documents I have made comparative reference to various
linguistic and textual databases, a cross-sample extending to many millions of
words and thousands of writers. I have also compared various T- and
U-documents with the identified or identifiable sources that contribute textual
material to those documents.

5. In December 1996 I received a telephone call from Lauren Weil, who identified
herself as an assistant counsel for Ted Kaczynski's Defense. Ms. Weil explained
that the Defense intended to file a Motion to Suppress, arguing that the FBI's text
analysis was flawed and that it supplied insufficient grounds for the April 1996
Search Warrant. Ms. Weil asked if I would assist the Defense in critiquing the
FBI's text-analysis. I needed a few days to consider the available documents
before making a decision whether or not to assist the Defense in this respect. In
the interim, I downloaded from the World Wide Web various texts pertaining to
the Unabom case. These included the Affidavit, T-2 (the 1971 essay by
Kaczynski), and U-14 (i.e., the Unabom manuscript, "Industrial Society and Its
Future"). In my initial study of these documents, I found considerable internal
evidence that T-2 and U- 14 were likely to have been written in whole or in part
by the same person; and in my study of the Affidavit, I found that the FBI had
done a remarkably careful job in setting forth evidence of common authorship for
T-2 and U- 14. When Ms. Weil called me again a few days later, I declined her
invitation to assist the Defense. She asked me for the names of other scholars
who might be willing and able to help with the Motion to Suppress. Having
surveyed the evidence for common authorship of U-14 and T-2 (and of various
other T- and U-documents as represented in the Affidavit), I told Ms. Weil it was
unlikely she would find an attributional scholar willing to assail Fitzgerald's
text-analysis, except perhaps in a few minor particulars.

6. In March 1997, an attorney for the United States invited me to examine the
representations made in the Affidavit concerning the comparative text-analysis of
Special Agent Fitzgerald; and to examine the representations made in the Motion
to Suppress alleging flaws in that analysis. I agreed to do so. I have now
examined the pertinent documents in considerable detail. My opinions may be
summarized as follows:

7. It seems reasonable, fair, and accurate for the Affidavit to represent the U-14
and the T-documents as "very similar," in thought, language, and manner
(Affidavit, paragraph 110); and indeed it seems reasonable to conclude that these
texts are likely to have been written by the same individual. The evidence of
common authorship is set forth in the Affidavit judiciously and with admirable
objectivity and restraint; errors of fact or interpretation are relatively few and
insignificant. The evidence of authorial identity rests not in any one instance of
similar thought or language, but in a collocation of shared linguistic habits that
extends to spelling, rare diction, grammatical accidence, syntactical habits, shared
source material, and shared ideology, together with internal biographical evidence
that likewise points to authorial identity of the T- and U-documents.

8. More specifically, I find it reasonable, fair, and accurate, to conclude that T-2
(the 1971 essay) and U-14 are significantly "similar" as indicated in paragraph 112
of the Affidavit and as illustrated in the passages cited on pp. 65-66 (again with
the understanding that it is the collocation of similarities, and no particular
example, that points toward the likelihood of common authorship for T-2 and
U-14).

9. I find it likewise reasonable to conclude that the passages cited in paragraph
199 of the Affidavit are significantly "similar." Moreover, "you can't have your
cake and eat it too" is indeed the common American usage as indicated in
paragraph 200.

10. It is alleged in the Motion to Suppress that "Through a series of false
statements, material omissions, and irrelevant information, the Government
improperly attempted to suggest that there was evidence that Theodore
Kaczynski was the author of the Unabom manuscript" (Argument, p. iii, 52). I find
this representation to be unreasonable, unfair, and inaccurate. In my opinion, the
analysis by Special Agent Fitzgerald is unassailable in all important respects;
conversely, I find the comparative analysis in the Motion to Suppress to be highly
unreliable, containing many false and misleading statements and material
omissions (Argument, pp.52-76, 95-99, 109: "Critique of the FBI Analysis of the
T-Documents and the U-Documents," pp.1-77).

11. I find that the testimony of Harry M. Ermoian substantially understates the
significance of books and other documents from which the T- and U-documents
draw topical, ideological, or linguistic material. Many of the writings directly
mentioned or alluded to in both the T- and U-documents are widely known, as
noted by Ermoian, but the collocation of shared reading material and manner of
citation point likewise to authorial identity of the T- and U-documents.

12. I disagree strongly with the conclusion of Professor Robin Lakoff that the
FBI's claims of "authorial identity" are "untenable and unreliable at best" (Lakoff,
p. 10). Prof. Lakoff acknowledges that her examples of "errors" are "intended to
be illustrative, rather than exhaustive" (Lakoff. p.3), but I find that she
substantially misconstrues or misrepresents the evidence of common authorship as
set forth in the Affidavit. Lakoff extracts and decontextualizes particular linguistic
similarities in the T- and U-documents, observing particular examples in the
Affidavit to be commonplace, dismissing others as the result of content-linked
lexical choices; but nowhere is it alleged in the Affidavit that isolated verbal
parallels constitute evidence of common authorship. I find the methods and
conclusions of Agent Fitzgerald to be considerably more reliable and tenable than
those of Prof. Lakoff with respect to the probable authorship of the U-documents.

13. In my opinion, the Affidavit substantially understates the likelihood that the
U-documents and the T-documents were written in whole or part by the same
individual. The evidence of common authorship is far more extensive, detailed,
and compelling than the FBI has suggested. The similarities of thought,
expression, grammar, syntax, diction, and internal biographical evidence cannot be
attributed to mere chance, or to common subject matter, or even to a shared
ideology and set of beliefs. In my opinion, unless it can be shown that the original
English writings ascribed to the Defendant were not, in fact, written by him, one
must conclude that U-14. "Industrial Society and Its Future," was written by the
Defendant as well.

14. I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States that the
foregoing is true and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief. Executed
this 11th day of April, 1997, at Poughkeepsie, New York.

DONALD W. FOSTER
(signature)

1. D. Foster, "Primary Culprit." NewYork (26 Feb.1996: released 14 Feb.): 50-7.

(Understand, Foster was called in after TK had been identified as the Unabomber by his brother and was in jail. Personally I think 90% of the posters here could have matched the manifesto with TK's other writings and proved they were the same author. This wasn't playing detective - - it was matching what was already identified.)