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Monday, October 29, 2007

Glenn Greenwald, The Hack, Once Again Misleads His Readers: BUMPED and Updated

SWATCH


[Updates below] MUST SEE.

I have shown on more than one occassion where Glenn Greenwald in his hackery has misled his readers, one of the reasons I never let anyone use him as a "source" in my comment section.

Yesterday the buzz around the blogosphere focused on an email that Greenwald claimed to have been from Col. Steven A. Boylan, the Public Affairs Officer and personal spokesman for Gen. David G. Petraeus.

Disclaimer: According to Greenwald, Boylan denies sending the original email, but lets pretend for a second that Boylan did send it.

If he sent it...good for him. It is about time someone called Greenwald on his misrepresentations which is shown yet again in his latest pathetic grab for attention.

He starts this way:

I had a prior e-mail exchange with Col. Boylan several months ago when I requested an interview with Gen. Petraeus after he had granted an exclusive interview to far-right partisan Hugh Hewitt (author of the 2006 prescient tract: Painting the Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority). In terms of whether the U.S. Army under Petraeus and Boylan is, in fact, becoming a political actor, I'll let multiple passages from Boylan's email to me this morning speak for itself:


The he goes on to show the email....or as we find out from the UT Document site of his and The Dread Pundit Bluto, he showed only portions of the original email allegedly from Boylan, to his readers.. (Then counted on the fact that barely anyone would click the link to see the whole thing, so why link to the whole thing and not SHOW it as clearly as he showed the convenient portions?)

First, go read the potions he showed his readers.....

Now, here is the whole thing.... bolded portions are the parts he didn't bother to show his readers and you had to go to the UT site or email him to receive.

Glenn,
I had hoped to post this in response to your article, but apparently it is closed already.

I am not sending this as anyone's spokesperson, just a straight military Public Affairs Officer, with about 27 months overall time in Iraq who is concerned with accuracy, context and characterization of information and has worked with media of all types since joining the career field in 1991.
The issues of accuracy, context, and proper characterization is something that perhaps you could do a little research and would assume you are aware of as a trained lawyer.

I do enjoy reading your diatribes as they provide comic relief here in Iraq. The amount of pure fiction is incredible. Since a great deal of this post is just opinion and everyone is entitled to their opinions, I will not address those even though they are shall we say -- based on few if any facts. That does surprise me with your training as a lawyer, but we will leave those jokes to another day.

You do have one fact in your post -- then Brigadier General Bergner did work at the National Security Council on matters concerning Iraq. Not surprising as he had returned from a year plus deployment to Iraq as the Multi-National Division - North Assistant Division Commander. It would seem reasonable that someone with Iraq experience would work issues at the NSC that was familiar with and had experience in Iraq. All else after that portion in your post about Major General Bergner is just your wishful thinking to support your flawed theory.

The claims about Steve Schmidt being out here on the staff in Iraq are just flat wrong. Pray tell, where do you think he is and how long have you fantasized that he has been here? Based on our records of who is in Iraq, I am really sorry to disappoint you, but he just isn't here.
You are either too lazy to do the research on the topics to gain the facts, or you are providing purposeful misinformation -- much like a propagandist.
Schmidt was here, but at the time for the vote on the Iraqi Constitution, October 2005 for 30 days. He was never on the MNF-I staff and for that short period was actually detailed to the Department of State. He hasn't been back since. Sorry to burst your bubble, but a little actual research on your part would have shown that he is actually not here, but that would contradict your conspiracy theory. I am curious as to when you think the media relations or operations changed here in Iraq. I in fact do know exactly the day and time that it changed and want to see if you are even in the same ballpark as reality.

For the third matter concerning the Beauchamp investigation and the documents that were leaked - it is very unfortunate that they were - but the documents are not secret or classified. So, there is your third major error in fact. Good thing you are not a journalist. The information that was released and it appears that has since been taken off the net is more of a matter concerning the Privacy Act. Since we don't know who released them, we are not able to take the appropriate actions and the media tends not to give up their sources -- good, bad or indifferent...I will not judge. That is our system and we must work with it.

As for working in secret with only certain media is laughable. The wide swatch of media engagements is by far the most diverse it could be. But you might not think it that way since we chose not to do an interview with you. You are not a journalist nor do you have any journalistic ethical standards as we found out from the last time I engaged with you. As we quickly found out, you published our email conversation without asking, without permission -- just another case in point to illustrate your lack of standards and ethics. You may recall that a 30-minute interview was conducted with the program that you claim to be a contributor. So instead of doing the interview with you, we went with the real talent, Alan Colmes.

I also noticed that you fail to mention the amount of material that is leaked to those other publications that I dare you to call right-wing like the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. I do not condone or wish them to happen, but it happens. If you believe they are right-wing, then again, it is nice to live in a fantasy world.

I invite you to come see for yourself and go anywhere in Iraq you want, go see what our forces are doing, go see what the other coalition forces are doing, go hang out with the reporters outside the International Zone since that is where they live and work and see for yourself what ground truth is so that you can be better informed. But that would take something you probably don't have.

Steve

Steven A. Boylan
Colonel, US Army
Public Affairs Officer

Notice the parts that Greenwald deliberately redacted from his original post are the parts that shows him for the hack and liar that he is?

The whole reason Greenwald did that was because he didn't like being called out on what he is (a liar that misrepresents facts) and what he isn't (a journalist or a person that has any ethics).

Jules Crittenden finishes the spanking that Boylan or Greenwald faking Boylan, or the fake Boylan, or whatever, started, by pointing a few historical Greenwald moments of "sockpuppetry".

Note to Col. Boylan: IF that email did come from you Sir, KUDOS on calling that hack...well..... A HACK!!!!

The Jawa Report gets an indignant email from Greenwald... HYSTERICAL.

Below are a few reactions but I am only showing small excerpts, so please make sure you read the entire pieces...they are great!!!

More from The Van Der Galiƫn Gazette:

Everyone who disagrees with Greenwald, it seems, is a hack, an incompetent, a tool of the right-wing conspiracy that denies him the ability to make his world view a reality.


A Second Hand Conjecture:

Glenn Greenwald is a disgrace, and whatever the failings of Col. Boylan I cannot but help share his disdain.

And Mr. Rick Ellensburg or Wilson, or Greenwald or whoever you wish to go by, when I say you are dishonest, paranoid and a propagandist, I mean it in the most civil and professional way.

Bookworm Room:

So, right off the bat, we learn why Greenwald received the unsolicited letter, we learn that Boylan is not writing in his professional capacity, and we learn that he has just a few factual quibbles with Greenwald’s view of events. You should definitely head over to Bluto’s place to see the rest, and to get a sense of just how much Greenwald changed the meaning of the original text with his selective redactions.

As I noted in my Rush post, the tactic that Greenwald and Media Matters use is the “reporting” equivalent of those movie advertisements that say “Johnny Critic of ABS news said ‘It’s amazing….’” And then, of course, when you track down the whole Johnny Critic review, you discover he actually said “It’s amazing that anybody would pay money to see this piece of garbage.”



Classical Values:

In the traditional, World War II sense, "apolitical" meant staying out of ordinary domestic partisan politics. Military leaders tend to shy away from making political endorsments, and thus Eisenhower would have been unlikely to tell the troops which party to vote for, notwithstanding his personal beliefs.

However, because it is the job of the military to fight and win wars, matters that go to the heart of the war -- such as wartime propaganda -- are not ordinary partisan politics. For example, in World War II, the United States had to contend with enemy propaganda, and enemy propagandists. Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw are two examples. It is always the job of the military to oppose and counter enemy propaganda by any means possible. This is all the more true in a propaganda war, which the current war is.

Factor in the maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and Greenwald's sanctimonious moral posture becomes questionable, if not disingenuous.



Funny, until this, for the past couple of months I haven't seen much out of Greenwald, at least nothing that anyone was paying much attention to in the blogosphere.

Could this simply be a pathetic bid for attention?

If so, he got it, but since he looks like the lying hack he is, he probably got more than he bargained for.

By the way, to any Greenwald supporters... don't bother defending him, I have too many examples posted about this hack and his previous lies and misrepresentations to deliberately mislead his readers and ya'll just let him lead you around by the leash like the good little robotic lapdogs you are.


[Update] Ace has some great points about Greenwald's own IP address....

Even worse-- the final nail in the coffin. While the previous post demonstrated "Rick Ellensburg" regurgitating Glenn Greenwald's arguments, in his writing style, a closer examination shows he also PREgurgitates Glenn Greenwald's arguments, writing comments very similar to Glenn Greenwald posts the day before Glenn Greenwald actually writes them on his blog.


Thats all I am going to show, click Ace of Spades to see it all for yourself.

[Update #2]
Ok, so more from Ace here and here. Follow all the links of all three URLS because Ace is having WAYYYYYYYYYYYY too much fun with this.

The more links I follow, the funnier this whole thing is getting.

[Update #3] Funnier and funnier, Hot Air has a great timeline put together (from 2006) in a very comprehensive manner that shows all of this is not a new problem for Greenwald but an ongoing thing which implies a serious mental condition.

GO. READ.





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