Dear Mr. Greenwald: Please affirm the following fact pattern, or point out if I am wrong in any way.

Your correspondent, Colonel Steve Boylan, has told you that he does not wish to confirm or deny that he sent e-mail X. He further asserts that e-mail X contained a demand that the e-mail not be circulated in any way that was hostile to the point of view contained within e-mail X. You then published extensive extracts from e-mail X. Upon seeing these extracts, Col. Boylan at once realized that the demand, contained in email X, that e-mail X be kept private, had been broken. Col. Boylan asserts that he knew that this demand had been in e-mail X, even though he also asserts that it is not necessarily the case that he had sent e-mail X nor known of its existence, and therefore Col. Boylan has expressed what he believes to be justiied contempt at your alleged breach of good faith with the unknown party who sent e-mail X. Col. Boylan asserts that it is not necessaarily true that he sent e-mail X, he may know nothing about e-mail X, and he may not know who sent e-mail X, but he is certain that he is empowered to speak for the unknown person who sent e-mail X and he is unquestionably authorized to defend the interest of the writer, even though he may not know who the writer is.

Is this an accurate summary of the fact pattern at issue here?

Hoping his lastest fib to E&P will suffice. He needs two things to make it work. A. That his chain of command has his same ethical standards and covers up for him. & B. Nobody in the mainstream media cares.

My money is on Boylan.

Sorry, Steve, but I and most others here are highly interested in this topic as well as Glenn seeing this through. These past 4 posts serve a much larger point about politicizing our military, and entity that should remain untouched with politics, let alone the outright liars and dirty politicians in this Administration. Boylan's email exchanges could not epitomize this point any more clearer, as well as seeing his little tail between his legs when confronted.

Are there other issues out there of interest such as torture, illegal wiretapping, Iran, etc. that Glenn discusses? Sure, but not right now. I'm sure you can find a myriad of other blogs that cover those materials. Surely this isn't the only one you read, is it? I've got a good handful of blogs I touch on every day. If you need some assistance on examining other blogs that touch your torture interest, please let me know and I'll be happy to post a few.

But it's pretty obvious you won't find that topic here today, and maybe not even tomorrow. So feel free to move on our ask for help to move on towards other blogs of interest.

Boylan's actions are indicative of a serious problem in our military, as Glenn as so clearly pointed out. Boylan should be fired for many reasons, one that he cannot seem to control himself. That is dangerous behavior.

Egypt Steve, You could have stopped there.

Now, instead of talking about intimidation of journalists by the US military, rendition of "terror" suspects, the loss of the 4th Amendment or anything interesting, we've got you, all puffed up because Glenn is engaging you directly, like you mean something.

Glenn has a pet peeve about people commenting "why are you writing about this when there are so many oter interesting issues." It's just something that, for whatever reason, chaps his ass. For me, it's people who stand in the middle of the aisle at the supermarket. Whatever. Instead of just letting it go, he usually comes and comments about it.

These are not your fifteen minutes of fame. You're just some guy whose cart is blocking the produce section.

Some have said Egypt Steve is a troll. How could this be? Egypt Steve is smarter, better, handsomer, more acute and cleverer than Glenn. Just ask him. Egypt Steve knows the true value and importance of everything, as he will be the first to tell you. How dare Glenn, obsessed simpleton that he is, refuse to follow his sage advice? I have read all of Egypt Steve's many important books and place him emphatically in the pantheon of modern political genius. Glenn must give up on trying to have his own opinion in the face of such an intellectual giant. Why does Glenn hate America?

Besides, Egypt Steve has a pony.

You don't get it. This is, at its root, about the politicization of the military. That SHOULD worry you.

One of the reasons the USA remains a free country and not a banana republic, is that our military is controlled by civilians. It should play no role in domestic politics. In banana republics, the military selects and installs political leaders. The GOP/Bush White House is attempting to do exactly this, to enlist the military into its political operation.

GG is exposing one of the foot soldiers in this nascent attempt to further subvert American democracy. Think about the McCarthy era: the incident which brought about McCarthy's downfall was the Army-McCarthy hearings regarding G. David Schine. Who? Exactly. Everybody remembers McCarthy; political nerds remember Joseph Welch; hardly anyone today remembers the hearings were about whether the Army was pressured to give Schine favorable treatment. Yet these hearings about a relatively insignificant person were the downfall of the McCarthy and ended the HUAC witch hunts.

I hope you get it now. There is something much, much larger at stake than just whether or not Boylan is lying about authoring his pissy little email missive.

Absolutely. Ignore the idea that trying to make an unprovable assertion a topic for all this time, is unserious. Keep up the good work.

Certainly there's been a concerted effort across the Bush Administration to silence any criticism of its policies, no matter where the dissent arises. However, to me the most insidious thing about the entire exchange--whether fake emails or not, whether from Boylan or not--is not so much the pressure to silence, limit, or otherwise hamper its opponents. It is the fact that one can no longer 'know' the facts, even in the most old-fashioned sense. When one cannot know the facts, the 'truth' becomes exactly that, put into quotation marks.

So, Glenn, I applaud your continued efforts to find out what the hell is going on, and from whom the hell is coming, but the picture is a bit bigger in that the foundations of basic information exchange, communication writ large, is itself under attack. This most reactionary (and morally 'conservative') president is simultaneously the most postmodern. The signifier has been severed from the signified, and the center cannot hold. *Only* power legitimates the 'truth' in whatever guise the Administration needs at any particular moment in an particular phase of its ongoing operations.

You have to remember that this is official Defense Department policy. See the Information Operations Roadmap (Oct 2003) at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB177/. Under the neocon regime, information is now a theatre of war on a par with air, sea, land, and space.