I think it's a bad theory because, AFAIK, they're not supposed to have booze over there. It would be very disrespectful for Petraeus' PR guy, in particular, to be drinking. To accuse him of this is no passing accusation, it's accusing him of gross misconduct.

OTOH, to accuse him of staying up too late and writing things he regrets, that'd be fine. If it's true that he sent the e-mails. At this point, it's hard to tell.

IPs beginning with 10 are used on private networks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network). The 02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil machine that is probably a server of some sort received the mail from INTZEXEBHIZN01.iraq.centcom.mil which has the 10.70.20.11 address on the internal network. The real IP you should be looking at is 214.13.200.111, which resolves to DoD Network Information Center (http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=214.13.200.111).

I would agree that if the email was not from Col. Boylan his unit would go ballistic in tracking down the source. Having worked for a large international corporation where company information was the issue (with none of the national and tactical military security ramifications), we'd still have gone to whatever lengths necessary to at least plug the hole. The military would assume they'd been hacked by Osama bin Laden and go for the throat.

Is this really an email from Boylan? All of the responses here point to the fact none of us believe someone who would send such an email would have survived the career path necessary to obtain his current position. Weird. But then all of this is weird and getting weirder to the point even an email such as Boylan's doesn't shock us anymore.

The following ranges are reserved for use as 'private IP' space.

10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)

172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)

192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

You CANNOT DO A SEARCH on these while analyzing email header and do any identification.

These IP ranges are reserved so organizations can put computers on them BEHIND their routers, and thus not use up valuable and diminishingly available public, routable IP numbers.

On my home network, I use e.g. 172.16.0.0 subnet. If you look at the headers of an email from me, you will see a number from that PRIVATE range on the workstation I am sending from, and working up from there you will see the PUBLIC IP number assigned facing out to the Internet, and then you will see the SMARTHOST outbound server I go through provided by my ISP. The latter two are public IPs. You can traceroute them and get meaningful info.

So for those who posted notes where you traced the 10. number and think you proved something, stop it. You make my head hurt.

The numbers that are important are the public IPs that trace directly to servers in the DOD centcom IP block, a huge /8 block of PUBLIC IP addresses.

The originating computer is on a PRIVATE IP sitting behind that public IP that is facing out and managing traffic control to and form the Internet using NAT, address translation.

See my other posts for more detail.

Boylan is neither.

Is it normal in the Army now to have officers address a law-abiding citizen of the United States with the comtempt Boylan affords Greenwald? And I'm not talking about the possibly-fake e-mail, but Boylan's later hate and disdain-dripping missives.

This incident is illustrative of the danger of making a fetish of the military, and promoting those that wear uniforms like Petraeus above we mere civilians. It goes to their heads, and they begin to feel the laurels of a Roman general's victory parade pressing their temples.

How dare a mere civilian question your motives and purity, eh Boylan? Well, this is the United States of America and there are millions of us who want the questions Greenwalk is asking you and your boss answered.

You supposedly work for us too.

"I am interested in this issue. What I am doing about it does not concern you. Interesting is what I find it.

Whether I agree with what the email says or not is not an issue I wish to discuss with you, as I decided after our last exchange that I would not take the time or efforts to engage with you.

Is there a reason why you posted this?"

This is the exact same petulant and infantile tone of the original email. I have no doubt that the original was sent by this clown Boylan. Now he's trying to cover his ass, yet even while trying to do that, he reverts to his true character of an infantile right-wing pencil pushing bozo.

For the past hour I have been trying to get to the salon.com homepage, but my browser is not able to open the page. I believe Glenn Greenwald, in his his effort to trace Col. Boylan E-mail, has pissed off the US Army, and the US Army has launched a denial of service campaign against salon.com. Somebody at salon had better look into this, and take appropriate legal action.

Unless the Army has committed the ultimate sin of running an open relay, those emails came from someone in CENTCOM Iraq. If not Col. Boylan, then some other soldier is posing as Col. Boylan - something one would think he'd be less sanguine about.

In the department of non-denial denials, I'll note that answering "no" to that question wasn't strictly speaking a denial of authorship - merely a refusal to confirm authorship.

I'm not a I.T. person and can't prove who the emails came from, so I won't try to do so. I will simply take the Col. at his word.

Why the heck would he just blatantly lie about it?

But here is what I find disturbing. If Col. Boylan didn't send these emails, then who did? I'm speculating here, but fwiw, it seems to me that the person who sent the emails is not a native english speaker. The language is just a bit "off", and there appears to be a missing word or two. Almost like they're drunk or something, or haven't been using english all that long.

You may think I'm crazy, but I've heard on Fox and elsewhere, that Al Qaeda has attempted some internet activities, and that they do have I.T. people working on "their side".

What if they have broken into the US military internet system in Iraq? That would explain both the strange wording and Col. Boylan's saying that he didn't send anything from his end. Also, possibly, these bizarre things mentioned about Vermont real estate.

If some unauthorized individual or group is able to penetrate our military system in Iraq, what else might they be capable of doing over there? Could they break into Gen. Petraeus' system? Could we begin getting spam and "get rich quick" scams from our troops IP servers in Iraq? Could mail, even cash, be diverted from our troops to the enemy?

And, even worse, could Iran be behind all this?

I think Col. Boylan ought to take a second look at this, and not dismiss it out of hand.