Dear Mr. Gordon,

I believe that you are uniquely positioned to investigate a situation that has developed over the last week and has the potential to do significant harm to the integrity of our armed forces in Iraq. I am confident that you are aware of the situation to which I refer, but I will summarize.

Last week, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com posted an article titled "The growing link between the U.S. military and right-wing media and blogs". On Sunday, Mr. Greenwald received a long, poorly-written email castigating him for the post. The email was signed by Col. Steven Boylan, spokesman for Gen. David Petraeus. Mr. Greenwald enlisted the services of several computer experts whose joint opinion was that this email appeared to have originated from the same computer as known emails from Col. Boylan that were part of a previous exchange Mr. Greenwald had with Col. Boylan last summer.

When Mr. Greenwald contacted Col. Boylan about the email, the Col. denied sending it. As the situation has unfolded over the course of this week, additional writers and bloggers who oppose the war in Iraq have come forward with harassing emails or blog posts that have come from Col. Boylan. The net result of this evidence tends to support and extend the thesis of Mr. Greenwald's post that started this discussion. That is, Col. Boylan appears to have engaged in a practice of selectively leaking to pro-war journalists and bloggers information that supports the Administration's views and efforts in Iraq while at the same time harassing and attempting to intimidate those who put forth dissenting opinions.

As the situation now stands, Col. Boylan is at the center of a storm of controversy. It has been shown that he has engaged in activities that are questionable for someone in his position. However, if the disputed email really came from him, then it is impossible to consider how he could continue in his current role.

Several possibilities have been under discussion for how the disputed email came into being if Col. Boylan did not write and/or send it. One possibility is that an underling in his office is responsible. If that is true, there is no functional difference from Col. Boylan sending the email himself and he should suffer the consequences. Another possibility that has been suggested is that the email is a fake and was somehow "injected" into the internet, but with all the hallmarks of having come from Col. Boylan's computer. Obviously, if someone has the capability of this level of forgery of military emails, significant damage could be done to US military efforts around the world. Finally, it has been suggested by some in the pro-war community that Mr. Greenwald has concocted the disputed email himself, in an effort to smear Col. Boylan.

I know that your reporting has been called into question several times by Mr. Greenwald. However, I believe that if you were to decide to undertake your own investigation of this situation, that Mr. Greenwald and Salon.com would cooperate with you. If you were to engage an independent computer forensic expert, I suspect that Mr. Greenwald's computer and the Salon.com servers and server logs would be made available. Because of your long history of working closely with Gen. Petraeus and Col. Boylan, I believe that you also would be welcomed by them if you approached them while investigating this issue. It would be only fair for you to offer the same independent computer expert as an observer to accompany military technicians examining the military servers and server logs that would be relevant to this inquiry. I do not doubt that you would be able to identify an independent expert with sufficient security clearance to observe these operations.

Simply put, I believe that your position as a long-time reporter in Iraq who has interacted repeatedly with Gen. Petraeus and Col. Boylan makes you the perfect person to determine the truth of what has really happened in this case. The integrity of our military operations in Iraq is at stake here, and either the Public Affairs Office has stepped over the boundary of ethical behavior or the security of the email servers in Iraq has been compromised. Either way, this is a story which you are uniquely postioned to pursue. Your country needs you to start a candid, independent investigation right away.

He's been noted to have written a number of pieces for the NY Times that seem to ignore a few inconvenient Iraq facts. Like many in the mainstream he's been noted to be a good stenographer for the Bush administration on circumstances related to Iraq.

I agree with you. The intended subtext here is that this story represents yet another blow to the integrity of Petraeus and Boylan. If Gordon chooses not to investigate, then that is another blow to his objectivity since his reporting is so reliant upon Petraeus. Had I really thought there was a chance of him doing what I proposed, I would not have subsequently posted it here.

Farhad,

Thanks for getting these emails. Please post them in full. Even from what we knew before you got the texts, this was a typical spam scam of the "overpayment" variety. I agree that the triple exclamation point quote also does not look like Boylan's style. In addition, the use of a gmail account falls in line with the scammers simply choosing a random name from news accounts.

However, the longer quote is as poorly composed as much of Boylan's work, with the exception that Boylan appears somewhat more versed in punctuating his horrid grammar and composition. Posting the fraudulent emails in full would allow further analysis of this type.

I googled the text from the long quote in Farhad's post that is also repeated in the letters section by alarikf and found that this scam is common in the rental market. See this web site for a copy of a letter similar to that received by alarikf:

http://tinyurl.com/2an9wz