carvaggio david and goliathI believe that it was Malcolm X who said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that when you throw a rock at a pack of dogs, the dog that squeals is the dog you hit. Well, Glenn Greenwald seems to have nailed a particularly noisy dog in the office of General Petraeus.

Perhaps Editor and Publisher can get you up to speed faster than I can:

The long and short of the Greenwald postings: For months the popular blogger — a former attorney and author of the recent bestseller “A Tragic Legacy” — has criticized the growing “politicization” of the military attached to Iraq, starting earlier this year and peaking around the appearance of Gen. David Petraeus before Congress (and the media) in September. This was even before William Safire declared, this past weekend, that the general ought to be considered as a running mate for a Republican candidate for president next year.

Oh, dear god, no.

Several months ago, Greenwald had received, and printed, emails from Boylan, a public affairs officer and chief spokesman for Gen. Petraeus, denying this trend and/or defending the general. So when he received an angry email from Boylan on Sunday, he posted much of it on his blog (and linked to the entire message), while asserting that the views and language in it proved his point about “politicization.”

Then it got really interesting. Boylan in another note to Greenwald seemed to deny that he wrote the email, while denouncing Greenwald for publishing it. But he did not state this clearly and refused to respond to Greenwald’s subsequent request for clarity. Meanwhile, various purported computer experts compared past and present emails from Boylan to Greenwald and suggested (to the latter) that they did seem to come from the same military email address overseas.

You owe it to yourself to go to Glenn’s place and read Boylan’s entire email. The spittle-flecked, hot-faced tone of self-righteous arrogance marks him out as a prime candidate to guest-post at RedState.org, and in spite of his rather heated denials of Glennzilla’s charges, Col. Boylan is clearly a political operative, and a right nasty one at that.

Here’s a sample paragraph:

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 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. . . .

Delightful. Sanctimonious prick.

Things get much weirder, though.

E&P:

E&P contacted Boylan for a clarification about the email. Late Monday night he (or someone claiming to be him) replied: “I am denying writing and sending it. I know from past experience with Mr. Greenwald that any email exchange with him would be posted to his site as well as there is no need to discuss anything with him. I would only contact him in response to anything he would directly send to me as he did in this case. I have not contacted Mr. Greenwald since this summer” — until Greenwald asked him to confirm the Sunday email, when “I told him it was not mine and I did not send it.”

He did not express any concern in his note, however, about someone hacking into his military email account.

And that seems like it would be a matter of gravest importance, some random hacker sending emails in the name of one of the most powerful US military officers in Iraq. Unless of course, Col. Boylan is suffering from the same rare form of epilepsy that caused Kurt Eichenwald to make several seriously dodgy ethical moves in his investigation of the Justin Berry child pornography case and then claim not to remember them later.

Tristero rips a page from Mark Twain in search of an explanation:

With great care, I sifted through all the evidence about who wrote the “Colonel Steven Boylan” emails to Glenn Greenwald. After much parsing of internet arcana, I’ve concluded that beyond a doubt these e-missives were not written by Colonel Boylan but rather by someone else with the same name.

Therefore Colonel Steven Boylan should not be held responsible for what Colonel Steven Boylan writes and fobs off as his, ie, Colonel Boylan’s. It is not his, i.e., Colonel Boylan’s, fault that his email account is identically similar to Colonel Boylan’s despite the fact that a fool could easily discern the difference.

Besides, even if we (mistakenly) assume that Colonel Boylan is, in fact, Colonel Boylan – which he is not – the notion of holding a military officer accountable for the words s/he writes during wartime is simply an outrageous idea on Glenn Greenwald’s part. The next thing you know he’ll insist that officers be held responsible for their actions.

And lord knows, we can’t have that.

Digby highlights the larger, meta-point in all this, which is that perhaps this is the reason why we can’t get honest reporting out of Iraq on to the main stage of American media coverage of the war:

I’m laughing, but only because it’s easier than crying. One of the things that has obviously worked very well on the press in recent years has been sheer, thuggish intimidation. When they aren’t in actual agreement, they are clearly frightened.

Greenwald discusses this in today’s update on the public affairs officer (and future Michele Malkin contributor) Colonel Stephen Boylan:

The ultimate significance of this matter, which goes far beyond the specific question of what Col. Boylan did or did not do in this case (though that is important in its own right), is articulated perfectly by Zack in this comment. The type of hostility, pseudo-intimidation, and stonewalling expressed by Col. Boylan here (in the emails of undisputed authenticity) is the type to which reporters are frequently subjected when they step out of line, particularly with war reporting. That is one reason why so few of them ever do.

The Good Colonel’s attempts to silence and intimidate opposing points of view doesn’t just stop with liberal bloggers, however. Boylan has been quite prolific in his correspondence:

That sparked an email from Boylan in Baghdad the next day. “I found your latest column to be less than fair and as many editorials, lacking context,” he wrote. “I find it insulting that you would even consider saying that General Petraeus lied to the gathering during the AP hosted event Monday. Simply put, you are in error and as such you even pointed it out in your own column….

”Because you don’t agree with his words, detainee vice [sic] civilians, you are saying that he has lied. I am not sure how you come to that conclusion that he has lied? Would you be willing to explain that? I assume you could disagree on what is a small number or it is that you don’t like his choice of words by using detainee.

”I am pleased that you can offer such a misinformed opinion based on one-hour event.”

The Colonel really, really needs to look into a future as a Righty blogger. He’s got all the chops, the assumed tone of offended dignity, the ad hominem attacks, the appropriate number of malapropisms, and only the sketchiest grasp of the whole concept of subject/verb agreement. He’d be absolutely perfect over at Blackfive or Powerline.

In the meantime, I can’t tell you how glad I am that my tax dollars are paying some arrogant blowhard in Iraq to send nasty, bullying letters to people and organizations he disagrees with. Obviously there could be no possible better use of his time. Especially since the surge is working so well and Iraq is now a vacation paradise strewn with ponies, rainbows, and man-sized boxes of candy.

Keep throwing those rocks, Glenzilla. We are in (as the military says) a “target-rich environment”. Obviously you’re doing something right, since every time you trot out a new post, the Wingnut Welfare machine goes into gear-chewing overdrive trying to shoot it down. The dogs that squeal are the dogs you’ve hit.

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