Atkinson has agreed to review the recordings in his archive and verify a match with an official video of the event. (Details pending ...) "I've got a rep for being a straight shooter, whether or not it's embarrassing to someone. In my profession, integrity is the most important thing -- integrity and confidentiality. But this is cheating. It's one thing if an official has prompting when giving a speech, it's another if he went to Harvard, say, and had someone else write a paper for him."

Atkinson also says that it's not just Bush who's been coached -- Bill Clinton, too, received ear-prompting. John Ashcroft is "quite notorious for using wireless headsets," and Janet Reno used a system during the siege at Waco, Texas. Atkinson has documented the dozens of radio frequencies that the White House uses for its communications, and has pointed to the make and model of the prompter devices popular in the government. One of these devices is the RC-216 Receive-A-Cue system, manufactured and sold by Comtek Communications in Salt Lake City.

Jon Belgique, sales and marketing director of the firm, would not say whether Comtek sold systems to the government, but said that the devices are common and popular for all sorts of applications. TV people use them so that anchors can get breaking news feeds from producers, and correspondents out in the field can recite polished stories without the aid of a teleprompter. Actors use them to remember their lines, and to listen to "sidetone" -- the processed, amplified sound of their own voices. Businesspeople use prompting devices to give great speeches, and politicians and even members of the clergy have been known to do so as well, say several trainers in the use of these things. One ear-prompter trainer told Salon that he'd even coached politicians, but he declined to say who.

Comtek's prompting system consists of two main pieces -- a tiny earpiece and an iPod-size "induction receiver." The earpieces are tiny, roughly 1.5 centimeters in length, and a centimeter in diameter. Belgique says that Comtek's earpiece would be visible to those looking directly at the ear of a person wearing the device, but other experts say that newer devices are all but invisible in the ear. "They make them so small these days," says Rick Plastina, a Chicago-based actor and ear-prompter trainer who is called the "Ear Guru" by friends. "If you get right behind the person and look directly into the ear canal you'd be able to see it -- but otherwise you wouldn't know." The induction receiver is a small gadget that receives radio signals (coming from the person doing the prompting) and then sends the signals to an induction wire that you, the person who's being prompted, would wear around your neck. Some people claim to have seen this wire in this video. The neck loop sends audio signals to the earpiece through magnetic induction; no visible wire connects the earpiece to the receiver. (Incidentally, people who suffer from cardiac conditions, such as Dick Cheney, can't use the magnetic induction systems, according to Atkinson.)

It's this receiver that folks suspect is the bulge beneath the president's back. But according to Belgique, the upper back -- which is where, in various shapes and sizes, the bulge has appeared in all three debates -- is the wrong place to put the receiver. "That makes no sense," he says. "That makes no sense at all. Usually it's worn on the side, in the pocket, the small of the back. There's nothing that would go on the back up there." Others who've used ear-prompting systems concur -- you'd never put a receiver on your upper back. It would be awkward there; you'd need to strap it on somehow, and, even if you managed that, it'd be far more visible than, say, in your coat pocket. Why would the president have worn it back there? (Atkinson's theory is that the president was also wearing body armor, and the upper back was the only place to put the system. The White House told the New York Times that the president was not wearing a bulletproof vest. But this could just be a standard denial, part of keeping the president secure. Calls to Secret Service offices in Miami and Washington resulted in no reply (in the latter case), and in an angry Secret Service man (in the former) saying, "Well, I'm not going to answer ANYTHING.")

But let's adjust our tinfoil hats and plunge deeper. Location is not the only reason to doubt the Bush-was-wired story. Indeed, the best reason to be skeptical of the theory is Bush's performance -- abysmal. If Bush was being prompted, why was he so bad? Why the long, awkward pauses with nothing to say? Why did he characterize Iraqi insurgents as fighting vociferously? Why did he repeat himself so much -- working hard, hard work, working hard? Who was coaching him, Porky Pig?

Proponents of the Bush-wired meme say that the president may not have been used to using the system in an occasion such as a live debate. And this, it turns out, is a possibility. Using an ear prompter is something of a trick, because you've got to master talking and listening at exactly the same time. If you're new to it, "What's hard to get rid of is the deer-in-the-headlights look," says Don Cosgrove, an actor and ear-prompting trainer in St. Paul, Minn. "I am looking at you but concentrating on what's in my ear. You get a dead look in the eyes." Others say that another sign to watch for in ear-prompter novices is excessive blinking. Sound familiar?

Is it possible, then, that Bush's bad performance was caused by a lack of familiarity with an earpiece? It's plausible. But also it's not. That's because, trainers say, it doesn't take very long to learn to use one, and almost everyone is able to do it and look natural. Most people master ear-prompting in just one two- or three-hour course, trainers say. "The only person I've ever seen who's had trouble was a very, very intelligent woman who was trying to beat the system," says Cosgrove. "She was trying to speak with the words as she was hearing them," when what you're supposed to do is speak a split-second after you hear each word. It's virtually impossible to spot an actor who's using an ear prompter, experts say. The day Salon spoke to him, Rick Plastina, the Ear Guru, had used a prompter on a video shoot -- even the director had no idea he was being prompted (from a tape recording of the script he'd set up earlier), he says. "Marlon Brando used it on every movie he made from 1980 until he died," Plastina says. Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and many other stars have been known to use them.

Bush is no DeNiro, of course, nor even a Nicholson. But if he's been using prompting systems for a while, as Atkinson and others online have argued, then why hasn't he learned to use them well? And if he's so bad with them, why would his advisors have let him use them in a debate?

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