• The Federal gov’t.: sincerely yours The Federal gov’t.: sincerely yours By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – December 21, 2004 For about $3,500, the Automated Signature Technology Co. of Sterling, Va., will sell you a SigTech 800 signature signing machine.
• The Federal gov’t.: sincerely yours
The Federal gov’t.: sincerely yours
By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – December 21, 2004
For about $3,500, the Automated Signature Technology Co. of Sterling, Va., will sell you a SigTech 800 signature signing machine. You sign your name on the matrix plate one time, insert your favorite pen (felt-tip Sharpies work best) and hey, presto! You’re free from the burden of having to personally sign letters, photographs, books, hats, T-shirts, baseball bats – whatever.
The SigTech 800, and the more expensive high-volume SigTech 4000, are the bane of autograph collectors. Even so, experts have learned to spot machine-signed signatures; they look for telltale evenness in the ink flow, a sure sign that a human hand wasn’t at work.
A month ago, a couple of colonels in the Pentagon became suspicious that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was using a signature machine to sign letters to spouses and parents of men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They leaked the news to David H. Hackworth, once the Army’s most decorated soldier and now a military affairs critic and reporter.
At first, the Pentagon denied the story, but last week, a spokesman admitted it was true.
“In the interest of ensuring timely contact with grieving family members, he has not individually signed each letter,” spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Mr. Rumsfeld said he wrote and approved each letter and would personally sign them in the future.
President George W. Bush defended Mr. Rumsfeld as a “good and decent man” and a “caring fellow” at his presidential press conference Monday. “I have heard the anguish in his voice and seen his eyes when we talk about the danger in Iraq and the fact that youngsters are over there in harm’s way,” the president said.
No doubt that’s true, though Mr. Rumsfeld doesn’t come across in public as a sensitive, New Age guy. Indeed, in combination with his “you go to war with the Army you have” comments to Iraq-bound troops two weeks ago, “Lettergate” portrays a technocrat more attuned to efficiency than empathy.
For all his macho insensitivity, the genuineness of Mr. Rumsfeld’s signature is less important than why the war was started and how it has been run. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld must be judged less on how the letters were signed than why they had to be written.
