I disagree completely with Egypt Steve. It is important to expose the kind of abuse dished out by a military that demands and depends upon our financial support in extraordinary amounts and yet lies and attacks anyone who challenges it in any way. You have to see in detail how low and nasty this operation can get in order to fully appreciate why (although the abuse does not excuse the toadying journalists) the quality of information and reporting coming out of Iraq is so poor.

Thank you, Glenn. I post very rarely, but read your work regularly.

Why should they be any different from the Dept. of Justice?

for one thing, that the military would return to something like the public affairs office you were once part of (if I recall your previous posts correctly.) There was a level of professionalism that was once standard; and some of the men and women in the military still adhere (or until fairly recently did) to a similar standard if renato's testimony is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it.)

But Boylan is The New Standard. Recall, he was a Lt. Col. and the spokesman for the Multinational Force Iraq until some time last year, when he was briefly reassigned to the states, appeared in public fora as flack for the Pentagon, he was promoted to Colonel, and was sent back to Iraq as personal spokesman for Gen. Petraeus, in which capacity he has "engaged" not only with Glenn (until he decided not to) but with dozens or hundreds of media organizations and civilian individuals. He's been interviewed himself, repeatedly; he runs interference on interviews with his commander. He denied Glenn's request for an interview with Petraeus, and he has subsequently found fit (apparently) to insult and lie in response to one of Glenn's posts regarding politization of the military.

He is the New Standard. He is a purely political propagandist -- for the regime. Zampolit.

If he weren't the New Standard, he would have been relieved or reassigned long ago.

He seems totally unprofessional to you or to anyone with even a passing familiarity with competence and professionalism.

But he has been promoted and is serving as the personal spokesman for the Commander of the Multinational Force - Iraq.

What Boylan does is what Petraeus and his superiors want.

As for the pervasiveness of lies, let us recall: Tillman, Lynch, Haditha, attacks on al-Jazeera, innumerable civilian casualty incidents, etc, and the reason(s) our troops are in Iraq.

Lies are the foundation of all of it.

So... is Col. Boylan a professional, disciplined military spokesman or is he a partisan propagandist? Look at what he says and does, and judge him accordingly. -- r€nato

Is President Bush a professional politician elected to the highest office in the land or is he an evil, constitution shredding, torturing, faux cowboy?

He is both obviously.

Renato,

I am not sure what you were trying to accomplish with your post but I call bullshit. Boylan is both and that is what Glenn has been addressing. The "COL." before his name is a dead giveaway that he is military. This combined with the fact that his job description names him General Surge's spokesman means that he is... wait for it... a military spokesman. The entire point is that he IS disciplined and his discipline IS propaganda.

Just because you "have a very good friend" doesn't mean you have to disregard your working brain cells.

"For those who commented on Egypt Steve

Glenn has a new thread on Norm Podhoretz and his appearance on News Hour last night and this is what Egypt Steve posted."--RMP

This is what I like to see! Nail the head cases who are whipping up the next war, and who have real influence with (god forbid) serious presidential contenders. Kudos.--ESteve

Steve Boylan is the mouthpiece for the commanding general of the current FUBAR. So how is it that Egypt Steve decided that Podhoretz is more trouble to the state of US affairs than Boylan?

The more I read about the Iraq occupation, the more I wonder when this whole debacle is going to find its own Joseph Heller to satirize it. Or has this already happened? Have any satirical novels been written about the current Iraq war? If anyone knows of any, I'd be interested to hear.

The closest I can think of is NON-fiction such as "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, which had a quite few Heller-esque moments in it.

All the e-mails Boylan has sent were formulaic: 1) "You've got your facts wrong 2) why doesn't someone of your stature do fact checking, 3) why didn't you check with us before writing this." (This last opens up the possibility of establishing a "relationship" with Boylan, something that some journalists would find appealing -- a sort of implied carrot for falling in line: you play ball, and maybe I'll give you some inside stuff down the line).

He used this formula even when the facts were correct, even when he himself didn't know the facts, and acknowledged that. It suggests to me he's done it before and met with success -- it's a routine that has been working well. One wonders if this isn't some sort of protocol the military is teaching its PR people to follow, or if Boylan stumbled on something that worked for him, and so kept at it.

a tool (and he does sound like a real tool, doesn't he?) of this administration bullies and lies to a member of the press, then lies about it... where's the news? this has been their MO since the campaign in 2000.

of course, it is nice to have a mind like Greenwald's cataloging and analyzing the offenses. more power to him!

As usual, you have stated the current state of affairs very well. My hoping involved those in the military not at the top or those in other assignments where the Iraq war and politics are not so pervasive. Just like there are a lot of junior and mid-grade officers who graduated from West Point and who are leaving the military in large numbers, I am convinced that the religious-political disease has not permeated our military to the extent that it can't be cured.

We did it after Nixon and can do it again. But, we have to get this problem elevated to a high enough level that the American people will be behind us.