Did Richard Warman lie about "lucy"?

In the recent debate about whether Richard Warman was responsible for the racist Cools-post, one sometimes finds the claim that Warman was caught in a lie about his membership on Freedomsite during the Lemire hearing. For example, one commenter at drdawgsblawg offered this summary

Warman previously denied under oath that he'd signed onto a message board as the infamous "Lucy", then recanted when it became clear moments later that he had indeed used that pseudonym. So, did he "lie" then? I suppose it depends on how finely one likes to split hairs.

When challenged, he linked to a graphic a snippet of the transcript that had been posted to freedominion, which I repost here (the red underline and arrow were added by me):

Based solely on this, one might conclude that Warman had lied. It is always worthwhile, however, to be attentive to how evidence is presented and how that presentation affects one's perception. In this case, note especially the tendentiousness of what I've underlined in red.

Was there some "incontrovertible proof" presented, as was claimed by whoever prepared this picture? No. Let's look at the actual transcripts. Here is a screen capture of the bottom of p. 769 and the top of 770, including the page break. Note the red arrows, which point to what the commentary has replaced.

As you can see, there was no evidence presented at all, much less 'incontrovertible proof', and what the commentary has replaced is nothing more than a page number. What happened? Warman was asked whether he had registered an account, he answered that he had not as far as he remembered. When he was shown an account name that jogged his memory, he immediately corrected himself.

Now, those who dislike Warman or his actions are free to disbelieve him if they choose. But we also know (from Klatt's affidavit) (1) that Warman never posted any messages on the board as "lucy", (2) that he had logged in under this name precisely twice (see here, p. 37 of the pdf), and (3) that both his log-ins occurred within a two-hour period on Nov. 15, 2003. Given that more than three years had passed between these logins in 2003 and his testimony in February, 2007, surely any fair-minded individual would have no difficulty believing that he had simply forgotten about the "lucy" account in the interim.

So. A lie or an honest mistake? Take your pick. But if we're going to call this a lie, what are we to make about the numerous misstatements of Klatt in his sworn testimony?

Edited and rewritten for clarity and concision.

Klatt affidavit in Richard Warman & CHRC v. Lemire

I've been wondering aloud for the past few weeks (here and here) why it is that although Warman's critics have produced scores and scores of documents (see here, for example), the actual evidence that he was the Cools poster were nowhere to be found. Logs were produced to show that Warman visited the site without logging in on Oct. 15, 2003, and these have been cited as some kind of proof (here and here). But where were the logs of the notorious Cools post? Why was some evidence being fed into the blogosphere, but the most important evidence not?

Someone pointed out to me that the logs were part of the original Klatt affidavit, which I've managed to acquire. So that you can see the whole thing, I've uploaded into scribd.com and embedded it below. There are several serious mistakes in Klatt's testimony that I have already identified, and I hope to return to these soon. For now, however, the logs of the notorious "Cools" post is on p. 35, and these show that the case against Warman is fatally flawed: 90sAREover had a different browser installed than what we know Warman used for all of his posts in October and November. I'll clarify this later today.

Read this doc on Scribd: Klatt affidavit - 22 Aug 2006

More on R1 1.3 as the user agent string in the Cools post of 90sAREover

We have already seen that the user agent string of 90sAREover (who posted a nasty racist screed against Anne Cools on Sept. 5, 2003) was "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Rogers Hi-Speed Internet; (R1 1.3))".

The reference to Rogers here is to a special version of Rogers' browser distributed to its subscribers.

In a user agent string, R1 1.3, refers to Real Player, and we can now state definitively what the specific version was: RealOne Player, version 2, and as you can see here (red arrow for the RealOne version; violet arrow for the user agent string):

The difficulty, as commentator freemarkets pointed out in the comments to an earlier thread, is that we can only get the RealOne Player to show up in the user agent string if it is actually the browser that is being used. That is, Real Player versions for Windows, at least since RealOne, have a browser built into them, so that you can surf the web using Real Player.

It seems that the only possible explanation is that the Cools poster 90sAREover was using RealOne as his browser. But an important question remains outstanding. How is it that "Rogers Hi-Speed Internet" found its way into the user agent string. Was there a special Rogers version of RealOne Player?

Klatt's testimony, or sometimes 204 = 200

Here are pages 1636-8 of Richard Warman and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal v. Marc Lemire (T1073/5405 vol. 9) of Feb. 8, 2007. In it, Bernard Klatt is testifying about the logs of Lemire's site.

The point to note is that during his visit to the site on Sept. 5, 2003, the user "90sareover" showed up in Lemire's logs both as 66.185.84.204 and as 66.185.84.200, although only visiting the site briefly. Klatt is unable to explain this, but it is a phenomenon that is worth keeping in mind, since if 90sAREover had hit return in one of the moments when his traffic was being channeled through 66.185.84.200, we'd not be having this discussion.

p. 1636:

p. 1637:

p. 1638: