[Well, Mr. Responsible Journalist, proivide Don Foster with more.

I obtained a full copy of Foster's Flatland article, and it doesn't stand scrutiny. He goes far beyond his claimed expertise to make psychological judgments about Sweeney and Bari. He also states with no supporting evidence cited that Bari may have participated in placing the Cloverdale sawmill bomb.

[Look, Nick, when will you wake up? There are plenty of local people around who heard what Sweeney and Bari said about these kinds of things. Sweeney BRAGGED about the Santa Rosa Airport Arson, which nearly killed somebody. It's a given at this point. He's got priors when it comes to bombs and/or incendiary devices and there are those who will testify to that effect in court. Do you have any idea how serious these issues are?]

Foster reveals a lack of knowledge about common language usage, at least in this region, such as pointing out the dropping of "of" from phrases "where it is required" as in "all of the trees" being expressed as "all the trees." Folks around here do that all the time. Or as Foster would write it "all (sic) the time."

Most of the rest of his discussion is sophomoric and unpersuasive, and there is nothing scientific or systematic about it that I can see. If Flatland and Gehrman are hinging the whole thing on Foster's analysis, you can forget it. It wouldn't stand up to peer review.

Foster is not the unquestioned scholarly expert you claim. He was caught flip-flopping in the JonBenet Ramsey case, first writing to the victim's mother that he was "absolutely and unequivocally" certain she didn't write the ransom note, then six months later signing on with the police and telling them she did write it. He also didn't inform the police of his prior letter to Ramsey, causing them great consternation when they found out he had flip-flopped.

The Boulder Daily Camera describes him as a "controversial linguist," and says his "analysis may have gone up in smoke." The newspaper quotes former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary as saying the FBI has never testified in court using the kind of "textual analysis" that Foster does. He said if used in a trial a judge would likely caution a jury that that linguistics isn't hard science or even a technical skill like handwriting analysis.

McCrary said Foster's decision to work for the Boulder police is "morally indefensible. You just can't do that. You can't take a stand on one side and then when the other side comes calling, you flip-flop."

In my interview with him, Foster told me he never has been accepted as an expert witness in a court trial, and he has never published anything about his methods in a professional journal where it would have to pass peer review. He said he would rather aim at a wider audience. When I twitted him over publishing in Flatland, with your specialty of UFOs, conspiracies and "fringe science," he laughed it off and said he was glad to give you his work in return for the favor you did in getting him involved in the Bari bomb case and supplying him with all the info that he could use for his book. He said his attribution work is "a sideline" rather than part of his job at Vassar, where he said he teaches freshman English and some literature courses.

Foster seems to be an ambitious amateur who latches on to notorious cases seeking fodder for his forthcoming book. He told me the book is due out in Y2K ( :), and will include the Bari case, along with the Unabomber, the Ramsey murder, even the Wanda Tinasky thing promoted by Bruce Anderson. Even his original claim to fame, fingering Shakespeare as the true author of a pedestrian Funeral Elegy is not well-accepted by other scholars, as Foster told me. An amusing writeup of the scholarly debate over Foster's Shakespeare claim and his methodology is titled "Funeral Elegy Update" and can be found at http://www.everreader.com/elegyupd.htm

In my opinion Gehrman's whole attack in Flatland on Sweeney and Bari is, to borrow a phrase, "much ado about nothing."

Nicholas Wilson
Mendocino

[My longtime friend and fishing buddy, Ed Gehrman, is too modest. He can say his story wasn't persuasive enough after seven drafts, but I know otherwise. The fact of the matter is, I was ready to run Ed's article without any endorsement from Don Foster. Foster's just along for the ride. You might say he's riding shotgun. I don't mean to discredit Foster by saying this, but Ed has educated us all.]