Whether Petraeus and his staff appreciated Greenwald’s criticisms or not, Greenwald has always maintained a professional attitude in his posts, and more importantly, he’s one of the most thorough bloggers of all in terms of researching his claims and backing them up with evidence. You could almost say that Greenwald is exhaustive in making his cases. In fact, he’s considerably better and more thorough than most members of the press — not that that’s saying much at this particular time. So when Boylan says, “Good thing you are not a journalist . . .”, I would take that as a compliment.

As many other posters have noted, Boylan’s disrespectful, rabidly partisan insults to Greenwald are not only highly unprofessional, but they exactly prove Greenwald’s thesis. It’s ridiculous to claim, as Boylan does, that Greenwald was not entitled to an interview with Petraeus because he’s not a journalist, after having granted similar interviews to the likes of Hugh Hewitt. The bias could not be any clearer.

This exchange from Boylan is really so egregiously out-of-line, in fact, that Petraeus himself now owes an explanation to Greenwald and all of his readers. Does Petraeus condone such disrespectful and unprofessional conduct from his staff towards citizens like Greenwald who are providing the kind of due diligence that is necessary in a free society? Does the General tolerate such an obvious lack of self-restraint and good judgment in his senior staff? I would turn Boylan’s taunts about “come see for yourself . . . but that would probably take something you don’t have” around. Is the General afraid of an interview with Greenwald, or what?

Mr. Owen,

Your comment

Alan Colmes is a cock-sucking punk, a shill for Fox.

makes it sound like being a cock-sucker is a bad thing.

If you've ever enjoyed being well-fellated, do you really have such contempt for the person providing you that satisfaction? Does giving a blow job make one despicable, unworthy of any respect? Is it somehow different if it's a woman's mouth or a man's?

Now, shilling for Fox, et al. is vile, inexcusable, and utterly depraved.

Apologies if someone has posted this information before, I skimmed the rest of the posts but...

There's no authentication or accounting associated with an individual piece of email so it's almost trivial to forge a piece of email, and there's nothing the sender can do to prevent it. You can add "public key" authentication that will definitely prove the sender -- it's almost impossible to forge. However, I strongly doubt this happened.

If the postmaster of the original .mil mailserver were reliable and cooperative, they have almost certainly a log of every email that was emitted and could definitively authenticate or reject any email emitted from them. It seems highly unlikely that they'd cooperate.

Absent that, it's perfectly possible to forge the right headers and inject the email in the right spot on the internet so that it cannot be distinguished from the original.

That said, it's somewhat tricky; there are all sorts of ways to accidentally go wrong; the spoofer would need to have an email from the Colonel in possession to get it completely right; it's possible that even if the spoofer did a perfect job there are some errors or even fingerprints.

And an email which wasn't detectable as a fraud might have quite a bit of information too: say, that either it was genuine or that it was created by someone who had samples of email from the Colonel or from someone with similar mail routing and who knew a lot about the mail routing between the .mil mail servers in question and Salon's mail server.

I'm a software engineer with 25 years of experience but I only know a bit about this -- I could spot some glaring errors and perhaps some subtle ones. I have access to some real experts in this area, though, and while I cannot speak for them, it's quite conceivable that I could get one of them to take an interest; the analysis isn't particularly time-consuming.

What would be needed would be the complete headers from the email in question and headers from genuine email from the Colonel to your email address, Glenn, as close before and after the possible spoof as you can (so we can compare the real headers with the doubtful ones and also get an idea how the real ones change over time).

I assume you can contact me through Salon (or just guess my gmail address from my name) and I'll check back here later today.

A very weaselly "no"

Just read the update.

Glenn, I am afraid the form of your question ("can you confirm") left him wiggle room.

Boylan's "no" could just as easily mean "no, I cannot confirm" as "no, it was not from me."

That would explain the ambivalence about spoofing.

-- Blue Meme

Sunday, October 28, 2007 10:09 AM

Ah yes, it would be in character for Our Political Cadre to toy with his lawyer interlocutor, by answering the question he asked ("could you confirm") in the midst of a blizzard of irrelevant shit.

"No, I cannot confirm, you little maggot. And I will not. GFY. Best, Boylan."

But no doubt more hours of research will have go into establishing the Truth.

All in a day's work.

It might be useful to post the full header fields (all of them, especially the Received: lines) from this message. Unless someone is really good at spoofing, that might well indicate whether or not the email was faked. (Judging from this guy's latest weaseling, I doubt it....)

Even more useful would be to post the headers from a very recent email message from Boylan, for example perhaps one of the ones that Glenn Greenwald received today, for comparison.

You two should ask Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel to take you on a trip to Iraq to investigate this emailgate. Since both of you have seen more combat than any man deserves, having the senators, who also know war first hand, with you will ensure your safety. On behalf of all veterans you can call your investigation committee, True Military Patriots Seeking Truth Not Politics.