The tape that wasn't there
The Chuck Cadman story takes another strange turn. The question of whether the Conservatives offered some sort of bribe to Chuck Cadman in 2005 to rejoin the Conservatives and bring down Paul Martin's government has already been put to rest with the RCMP reporting "no evidence" to support such an allegation.
But there is still the matter of the lawsuit filed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper against the Liberal Party for having published statements on the website to the effect that Stephen Harper knew of a bribe.
Part of the lawsuit hinged on a tape recording, a tape recording that the Conservatives now say has been doctored.
The Conservatives have taken square aim on this tape recording of Stephen Harper discussing the Chuck Cadman story with Tom Zytaruk. Zytaruk wrote the book that made the allegation of a million dollar life insurance policy being dangled in front of Cadman, who was dying of cancer:
Lawyers for the Conservative Party have filed a motion to prevent the Liberal Party from using a "doctored" 2005 tape recording of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The Tories claim they have proof that a recording of Harper discussing "financial considerations" offered to the late Chuck Cadman was altered.
In a taped interview with Zytaruk, Harper allegedly says "the offer to Chuck was that it was only to replace financial considerations he might lose due to an election.''
I have never said much about the tape, since it seems to say nothing more than what the Conservatives have said all along, and that is the offer was to help finance an election campaign, which as I understand it, is legal.
Note that the tape was not made by the Liberals, but by Zytaruk. Duplicates were then sold by the publishers. Nevertheless, the Liberals made great use of this tape. Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion made the tape his main prop:
However, Mr. Harper is heard on tape, directly following his September 9 , 2005 meeting with Mrs. Cadman, telling reporter Tom Zytaruk that he was aware of the offer, but told his operatives not to “press him”.
Mr. Dion said Prime Minister Harper’s claim that the Conservatives only offered for Mr. Cadman to rejoin their party and that Mr. Harper was unaware of an offer of an insurance policy appears to conflict with his own words in the 2005 taped interview.
“So why, on the tape, does the Prime Minister speak about the financial offer? Why does he speak about ‘financial insecurity’, ‘financial issues’, ‘financial considerations?’” asked Mr. Dion.
It was always about the tape:
Mr. Dion was referring to a taped conversation between journalist Tom Zytaruk and Stephen Harper, where Mr. Harper is clearly heard making comments which may suggest that he was aware of the allegation that Conservative officials tried to offer financial compensation to Mr. Cadman.
“Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister cannot get out of this so easily. The question was asked on the tape. It dealt with a $1- million insurance policy and it talked about ‘financial considerations’ for Mr. Cadman, ‘financial insecurity,’ ‘financial issues’.
“Once again, the question is as follows: What financial insecurity was the Prime Minister referring to in answer to a question with respect to a $1-million insurance policy?”
The tape was crucial because Donna Cadman, Chuck Cadman's widow, has come out to say that she believes Stephen Harper. Chuck Cadman himself, before he died, stated publicly that no one tried to bribe him.
The Liberals don't have any independent witness to support the allegation that Stephen Harper knew of a bribery attempt. The tape, as ambiguous as it was, was their best line of attack.
So Liberals came up with a new manta: Explain the tape!
Well, explaining the tape might turn out to be more complicated than anyone expected:
On Wednesday, Tory MP James Moore said the tape was incomplete. He said the "tape was doctored by inserting a sound clip that was fabricated."
The Tories say two expert audio analysts have confirmed that the audiotape was doctored.
"The Liberal Party has been caught using a doctored tape to make serious criminal accusations against the Prime Minister of Canada on the eve of an expected election campaign," said Moore.
"There is no truth to their reckless accusations. Their day in court will come soon enough. For now, Mr. Dion and the Liberals must offer Canadians a complete and honest explanation."
We don't have details about the alleged manipulation of the tape, or how it substantially changes the nature of the discussion it purports to have recorded. In a sense, we don't have to. If the recording was altered, then it is not a credible witness of the discussion, regardless of whether the manipulation was substantial or not.
I made the same point in the John Mark Karr story, where I predicted that the credibility of the evidence in the California charges might not stand up to scrutiny. I was surprised at just how right I was, when it was discovered that that the original evidence -- disk drivers from Karr's computer -- had been actually been lost, as incredible as that seems. The prosecution attempted to use copies of the drives as evidence, but that didn't pass the laugh test, not even for a moment, and John Mark Karr went free. No one accused the prosecution of offering copies that weren't accurate backups of the lost evidence, but then they didn't need to. Those drives weren't Karr's, and so were not relevant to the case.
The same principle applies here, I think. Any manipulation of evidence means that it is simply inadmissible. If the order of the conversation has been changed, then the tape is out. If parts of the recording have been removed, even if it was just the sound of someone coughing, then the tape is out. If the tape recording we've heard has had nothing more than pauses added to extend gaps in the conversation, then the tape is out.
Would the tape be a fake? Well, it plays the sounds of a conversation that never actually happened.
In a sense, the tape wasn't there when the conversation took place.
Pieces of it are from a real conversation, but the conversation as a whole did not happen as is heard on the tape. The whole point of using electronic media like this as evidence is that, undoctored, it is an exact and incontrovertible record of the real events. But it is also known that these records are easily manipulated, especially in the digital realm (analog recordings can, of course, be digitized, manipulated, and the re-recorded on analog media). The ease with which these records can be altered is why, as in the John Mark Karr case, anything but the true original data is simply unacceptable.
Indeed, I don't know that anyone has the original tape. Even if someone offered up a tape as the original media used to record the conversation, how would you prove that? Show how it is different from the copy that everyone else has been peddling? Wouldn't that just confirm that the tape everyone has been listening to is a fake? But then maybe this new tape was doctored differently? Do we the pay for yet another analysis, now of this "original" tape? Or do we simply concede the obvious? The people who offered up the doctored tape, either to promote the book or to pursue a political agenda, have had their credibility seriously damaged, and that undermines any argument made by anyone using this tape or any tape from this source.
If the allegations of manipulation hold up, and if the Liberals are forced to withdraw the tape, then their defense in a libel suit is dramatically weakened. That could force the Liberals into a position in which they pursue a settlement, especially with party finances so weak. With the events of the past few weeks, I can't see the Conservatives being too generous.
Update: With regards to the original tape, the Toronto Star provides a bit more detail. Apparently the tape that was analyzed came from Tom Zytaruk himself:
[James Moore] said Harper's lawyers obtained a copy of the tape for their analysis from Zytaruk, but he refused to speculate who "doctored" the tape.
If the allegation of manipulation of the tape holds up, I wonder if Tom Zytaruk will be providing another tape for analysis, or if he might explain who else had the tape in their possession.
Update: Continuing with the same Toronto Star report, we have some idea of the nature of the alleged manipulation:
Audio experts Alan Gough of Stratford, Ont., and Tom Owen of Colonia, N.J., separately examined copies of the tape and reached similar conclusions that the tape had been edited.
“The tape has been edited and doctored and does not represent the entire conversation that took place,” Owen said in a sworn statement.
“This is not a continuous recording of one conversation,” Gough said in his affidavit.
“The interruptions of words, changes of background ambience and changes of frequency response indicate that this may be three separate recordings.”
That seems very odd. The question of this tape being an excerpt of a longer conversation has been kicked around for quite some time, and Ezra Levant was just one of many who demanded that the entire interview be released. But what Gough states implies much more than an excerpting of an interview, but of a splicing of discrete segments. Frequency response, simply put, is a measure of how a microphone responds to sounds at different frequencies. The "response" of a microphone is how efficiently it converts sound energy into electrical energy. If a microphone was allowed to sit in a more or less fixed location during a conversation, you'd expect the response to a particular set of frequencies (like the different frequencies that make up the "a" sounds in "Cadman" as said by Stephen Harper) would be the same. But changes in the frequency response indicate either a change in location or a change in equipment (the first could alter the frequencies picked up by the microphone for what seems to be the same sound because of differences in acoustic reflections from a new configuration of furniture and walls and such, as well as different relative locations of the microphone and the people speaking, and the second because, of course, different microphones will exhibit different responses to different frequencies because of differing designs). The change in background ambience suggests the place of the conversation moved. Three different conversations perhaps?
I'm not sure you can explain away differences in frequency response by simply saying you turned the tape recorder off and on during an interview. Unless you moved to a new location in the interim, the frequency response won't change when you turn the tape recorder back on. We can infer from Gough's statement that he detected three markedly different sets of frequency responses in a short two-minute conversation.
The tape that wasn't there, or the conversation that never happened?
Addendum: When did the Cadman story become linked to income trusts?
