I suspect Rolling Stone has a bad case of Assange-envy going on. They seem hell bent on whatever smears they can create or mine. I'm biased I'll admit though.
Rolling lame
I suspect Rolling Stone has a bad case of Assange-envy going on. They seem hell bent on whatever smears they can create or mine. I'm biased I'll admit though.
If this is a case of PSYOP
on American Congressional Leadership, MisoMan asks the following questions:
1). What was the actual task presented to the Information Operation Field Support Team?
2.). Where is the target audience analysis to ascertain what behavior was exhibited, and what was the desired behavior to achieve?
3). Why is LTC Holmes the sole voice in this story? What does MAJ Levie and the other two mystery members of this team have to say - with regards to the illegal IO Campaign?
4.). What is the parent unit (71st Theater Operation Group) position and interpretation with regards to the employment of the FST? After all, they are the subject matter experts in IO.
5). Finally, why now? Why wasn't the complaint filed through NTM-A, ISAF, and CENTCOM? Why not follow correct procedure and even address the investigation as potential retribution within military channels?
Too many questions and scenarios to suggest that this sensational story was a ploy to address a subsurface agenda.
That is all.
Romney Redux ?
This situation reminds me of George Romney's "brainwashing" snafu, George Romney presidential campaign, 1968 - Wiki (emphasis added):
So, one of the factual issues today is whether a thorough brain scrubbing or a light rinse was given out.The "brainwashing" reference had been an offhand, unplanned remark that came at the end of a long, behind-schedule day of campaigning. By September 7 it had found its way into prominence at The New York Times. Eight other governors who had been on the same 1965 trip as Romney said no such activity had taken place, with one of them, Philip H. Hoff of Vermont, saying Romney's remarks were "outrageous, kind of stinking ... Either he's a most naïve man or he lacks judgment." The connotations of brainwashing, following the experiences of American prisoners of war (highlighted by the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate), made Romney's comments devastating, especially as it reinforced the negative image of Romney's abilities that had already developed. The topic of brainwashing quickly became newspaper editorial and television talk show fodder, with Romney bearing the brunt of the topical humor. Senator Eugene McCarthy, running against Johnson for the Democratic nomination, said that in Romney's case, "a light rinse would have been sufficient." Republican Congressman Robert T. Stafford of Vermont sounded a common concern: "If you're running for the presidency, you are supposed to have too much on the ball to be brainwashed." After the remark was aired, Romney's poll ratings quickly nosedived, going from 11 percent behind Nixon to 26 percent behind.
Jack Goldsmith writes at Lawfare, Psy-ops Against Congress - Count Me as Skeptical (emphasis added):
Jack's five general points need to be resolved - or the contested factual positions laid out - before anyone can analyze whether what went on was "legal" or "illegal" (which does not necessarily equate to "terminal dumbness"). Like Jack, I'm not an SME in this legal area.First, Congress exercises a lot of control through appropriations over military operations, especially COIN operations that require throwing around a lot of U.S. dollars. It is commonplace for soldiers in the field to try to present an attractive picture on the ground for visiting congressional delegations in order to persuade them to continue or increase funding for missions. It is also commonplace to frame the pitch to address the interests, pet projects and peeves, inclinations, concerns, and the like, of visiting officials. Doing so requires research.
Second, as far as I can tell, the factual charges against General Caldwell come from a single source, Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of one of Caldwell’s information operations units. Hastings states that Caldwell and his subordinates asked Holmes to “conduct an IO campaign against” visiting officials. But the facts offered in support of this supposed operation are thin. Holmes was (by his account) ordered to research and provide background assessments on the visitors, and prep the General for his meetings. When Holmes complained about the order, it was clarified to specify that he should “only use publicly available records to create profiles of U.S. visitors.” Holmes colors this seemingly innocent tasking in dark shades. He says that Caldwell sought a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds” and claims that Caldwell asked: “How do we get these guys to give us more people? What do I have to plant inside their heads?” The “plant inside their heads” phrase conjures up an image of Caldwell asking Hastings to help him play psychological tricks on the visiting congressmen. But at bottom the story says only that Holmes was asked to do backgrounders on visiting dignitaries and to advise General Caldwell about how to brief the dignitaries in a persuasive way.
Third, as the Washington Post notes, Hastings’ article “did not cite evidence of false or misleading information being provided to the senators and other visitors.” Nor does Hastings provide much support for his claim that Caldwell acted illegally. Holmes apparently believed that what he was asked to do violated the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. I believe this law, as amended, prevents the State Department, not DOD, from directing foreign propaganda at domestic audiences. (Hastings says as much.) But I also believe that there are laws, presidential directives, and military regulations that prohibit DOD from using true psychological operations against members of Congress. (Hastings mentions, but does not cite or quote, prohibitions in Defense Authorizations.) Whatever the law might say, Hastings’ only support for the assertion that Caldwell acted illegally comes from Holmes himself, who is apparently not a lawyer. Hastings also cites an email from a JAG to Holmes, which stated: “Using IO to influence our own folks is a bad idea . . . and contrary to IO policy.” The JAG did not state that what Holmes claimed Caldwell asked him to do was illegal.
Fourth, Hastings throws out so many unsupported and unfair zingers against Caldwell that it makes me question the credibility of the entire story. There are too many to list, but one of the most egregious (already noted by Andrew Exum) is when Hastings says that Caldwell “seemed more eager to advance his own career than to defeat the Taliban.” The evidence for this charge is Holmes’ claim that Caldwell “seemed far more focused on the Americans and the funding stream than he was on the Afghans.” But this unsupported assertion, even if true, does not mean that Caldwell cared more about his career than about the Afghanistan mission. The reality is that keeping Congress informed and on board is a vital element both of American democracy and success in Afghanistan.
Fifth, Hastings notes that Holmes was subsequently subject to an AR 15-6 investigation for “going off base in civilian clothes without permission, improperly using his position to start a private business, consuming alcohol, using Facebook too much, and having an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with one of his subordinates.” Hastings makes the investigation seem like retaliation. But on the evidence presented, it is also possible that Holmes’ feeding of the story to Hastings was retaliation for the 15-6 investigation. The Hastings story does not provide enough information to permit us to decide.
Regards
Mike
Wash Post opinion piece calls it...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030304229.html
By: Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, is a member of the panel.
They start off calling it "now discredited". Man I'd say... You folks tore this thing up with good information & good arguments right off. No weaseling around about it either.
This thing didn't pass the smell test for me right off because of some of the characteristics that the guy had, that the journalist had, & because of similarities to this kind of behavior I'm more familiar with in different circumstances. Piled onto that was my own experiences & observations about dealing with people in the military. It just didn't match up with what I've seen. Besides that a more rational context for what was being requested seemed to be a lot more in keeping with what happened. Occam's razor & and all that. However this isn't a job I knew details about, so I wanted to see what people who actually knew about this sort of thing had to say. At this point, I feel rather safe in saying that it was very educational for me overall to do that. That's the case a lot with topics on the site for me. I know sometimes it might seem like some of the debates beat dead animals, but if you're like me and need to learn a whole lot of stuff you didn't know, it's very useful stuff.
They only appear to be unnormal because investigative journalism has dwindled away in the U.S. and because the people aren't used to it any more.Originally Posted by anonamatic
If the load of bull$hit that RS published in the LTC Holmes story passes as "investigative journalism" to you, then I'm sorry.
The idiot author obviously didn't investigate anything, there were so many half-truths, misconstructions and misconceptions in that article, it hurt to read it. Critiques of the article have been posted- I'm not going through them again. I'm just arguing with your characterization of the article as "investigative". It read more like a semi-retarded junior high student puked back up whatever crap LTC Holmes fed him, after spinning it in the worst possible way.
Heh, I think you just made his point...
I doubt Fuchs thinks that's a paragon of investigative journalism. Doubt anyone does. I sure don't -- but I do agree with
Fuchs that the genre is virtually non-existent in the US today -- what now passes is for it amounts, like the subject article, to a supermarket tabloid sort of expose.
Thus you get the Assange's etc. out looking for some muck to rake. We started out with sensationalist news media, finally got real in the 1940s and 50s but it's been back down the hill pretty much since. It's really pathetic...
My take is that Rolling Stone at least attempts to do some investigative journalism. I don't like this to be termed 'Assange envy'.
I recently read how some newspaper praised itself for exposing that presidential wannabe despite his denials. It took them months and apparently a huge amount of work hours. This kind of effort has become rare in a media landscape that hires pundits for partisan brawling, sends its reporters into war zones as embeds (cuz it's so cheap), uses viewer-made videoclips fished out of Youtube or even directly asked fro in shows (CNN) and and and...
Regrettably, the German media landscape hasn't much investigative journalism either, but at least we have a bit less of the other superficial stuff.
40's? Really? Weren't three years of that decade soaked in wartime propaganda?
50's? Really? Weren't three or four years of them soaked in McCarthy's media whoring?
Last edited by Fuchs; 03-13-2011 at 08:39 PM.
Nah, not that bad...
Well, 3/10=30%. that means the vast majority were at least somewhat journalistic (which is not the same thing as totally accurate...).Nah, less than one and a half -- that's only 10-15%, thus >85% was reasonably sensible most of the time...50's? Really? Weren't three or four years of them soaked in McCarthy's media whoring?
In the 60s things started downhill, fairly slowly, continued to decline slightly in the 70s and 80, took an abrupt downturn in the 90s as the entertainment industry bought all the TV news guys -- who in turned adversely influenced the print media.
Maybe, hopefully, it's cyclical; and they'll have an epiphany.
Investigative journalism is a double-edged sword and at times can be downright pernicious. After Watergate a generation of reporters thought they too could be superstars if they played their cards right and found some dramatic and shocking story. Most news is boring and shouldn't be jazzed up to make it seem to be more dramatic than it really is. The other night I reread stuff about the Janet Cooke affair at the Washington Post in 1980; she was an attractive African-American woman reporter in her 20s hired by the Post who fabricated a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict in Washington DC. When she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize the Toledo Blade contacted the Post and said there were falsehoods in the canned biography of her that the Pulitzer people were publishing. After that Bob Woodward and another Post editor confronted her and after questioning she admitted that her news story and the educational credentials she claimed to have were fakes.
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