The Cadman affair has taken a strange turn.  The Conservatives are saying that Tom Zytaruk's taped interview with Stephen Harper has doctored:

Last month, the RCMP said that their investigation into the allegations of attempted bribery by Conservative officials found "no evidence" to support criminal charges.

Mr. Harper has denied the bribery allegation from the outset, and in March filed a libel suit against the Liberals over statements published on the Liberal party Web site.

The Conservatives have said in the past the only offer made to Cadman by the party officials was to rejoin the party and receive financial and other assistance for an election campaign.

In the interview, Mr. Harper acknowledged the party offered unspecified "financial considerations" to independent MP Chuck Cadman, who was dying of cancer at the time, so he would vote with the Conservatives against the former Liberal government.

However, in an affidavit filed in court this week, one of the specialists concluded a tape provided by Mr. Zytaruk to the Conservatives had been altered.

The Conservatives are seeking a court injunction preventing the Liberal party from using the tape. It has been posted it on various Liberal party-affiliated websites.

Who is saying that the tape recording has been doctored, and how?

On Mike Duffy Live today, Mike Duffy discusses the issue of the Cadman tape with James Moore.  Mike Duffy reveals that CTV did their own analysis:

We asked CTV audio wizard Ray Young to take a look at the tape, to put it through his spectrum analyzer and his high-priced computer gear, and he came back and says it's definitely not one continuous recording.  It has been stopped and started.  And that would seem to bolster your case that this is not a true reflection of everything that was said.

Stopped and started?  Or spliced together?  The CTV expert doesn't commit to one interpretation or the other, but Mike Duffy definitely comes down on the side that regardless, the question of whether the tape is legitimate is a valid one, and a serious one.

The CTV expert is not one used in the Conservative filing with the court.

During the subsequent discussion with Mike Duffy, James Moore clarifies the position being taken by the audio experts who submitted their findings to the court -- the discontinuities in the tape are not just artifacts of a tape recorder being stopped and started, but in the opinion of the experts, evidence of deliberate and significant editing.

Stephen Taylor has some of the documents on his blog.  Here are some of the more interesting comments from analyst Tom Owen:

I was asked my opinion as to whether or not this wire to wire tape recording represents the entire recorded interview.  I have concluded with scientific certainty that this tape has been edited and doctored to misrepresent the event as it actually occurred.

The tape begins abruptly with white noise...In this case, it was added at the beginning to obscure what we hear at the beginning of the recording.

There is an audible and visual edit after the words, "I mean there was an insurance policy for a million dollars for Donna"  After the click there is a fragmented word that is unintelligible lasting :03 secs.  Immediately before Mr Zytaruk says "Do you know anything about that?"

What does this last bit mean?

It means Stephen Harper was saying something, to which Tom Zytaruk added, "I mean there was an insurance policy for a million dollars for Donna."

We don't know what that was, because someone scrubbed it out with white noise.

Then something else was said.  We don't know what, because it was edited out (but leaving :03 second fragment behind).  Tom Zytaruk then says, "Do you know anything about that?"

What is that?  Is that the alleged insurance policy?  Or is that something else entirely?

It matters because Stephen Harper's next words on the tape are "I don't know the details.  I know that um, there were discussions, um.  But this is not for publication?"

Is Stephen Harper saying he doesn't know the details about the alleged insurance policy or that he doesn't know the details about whatever Tom Owen says that is missing from the recording (but for the :03 second fragment)?

Indeed, the rest of the conversation can't really be understood unless we know the answer to this question.

The second analysis by Alan Gough comes to a similar conclusion, and identifies the same points in the recording as suspect.

Gough goes even farther:

The interruptions of words, changes of background ambience, and changes of frequency response indicate that this may be 3 separate recordings.  Any further analysis of these anomalies should be performed on the original recording and not on a copy.

If 3 separate recordings have been edited together to create this copy, the editor is not highly skilled.  This level of editing could be accomplished by using two tape recorders or by an unskilled person using a very simple computer based audio editing program.

The analysis seems to be very detailed, and the affidavits provide by the two experts Owen and Gough include the spectral analysis printouts and other cool looking graphs.

Is this analysis credible?  Well, Tom Zytaruk is distancing himself from the tape used by the Liberals.  He goes even further, suggesting ever so gently that the Liberals had something to do with the manipulation (or that the manipulation happened sometime between Tom Zytaruk or his publisher digitizing the recording and the Liberals posting it):

Zytaruk, who first released the tape to the media, insisted Wednesday that he never altered the tape.

"One thing that nobody's been able to tell me today or been able to figure out it seems is, are they attacking my original tape or are they attacking something that appeared on somebody's website - the Liberal Party of Canada?" he said.

"I've got the original in a safe and secure place. . . I can't control what's going on people's websites and what they're doing with this tape after it goes out into the digital world.

With Zytaruk trying to shift the spotlight on to the Liberals, expect the NDP to move to drop the whole Cadman business, retreating to the position that they are the party of ideas and not of scandal-mongering.

Unless the Liberals can discredit the analysis, the tape is pure kryptonite.  If the Liberals are forced to drop the tape, their defense in the lawsuit crumbles, and then the news will return to the state of Liberal Party finances.  Can they afford to pay off the Tories in a settlement?  Can they afford not to, if the alternative means paying a court-ordered judgment?