Talk To TNR? Naaah. Illegally Leak To Drudge? A-OK!
Posted by Phoenix Woman on October 26, 2007
Remember Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the US soldier in Iraq that the right-wing noise machine first denied existed, then tried to destroy (just like they did with Jamil Hussein) because he said things that they didn’t like?
Sounds like the Army (and the conservatives to whom it leaks) needs its own ethics panel:
…the soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, came under withering criticism a few months ago by conservative bloggers who alleged he’d made up the stories about the troops. The Army conducted an internal investigation into the affair and concluded he’d largely fabricated them. TNR has stuck by Beauchamp, demanding that the Army publicly reveal whatever documents it had supporting the probe’s conclusion. The Army has refused. Well, guess what — the Army may not be willing to reveal its docs to TNR, the target of its investigation, but it has just acknowledged that someone internally has willingly leaked them to Matt Drudge.
This again calls into question the Army’s handling of this affair in a big way. It’s bad enough that the Army hasn’t been willing to show any transparency with regard to its probe into this. It’s worse still that someone — apparently an Army official — is leaking some of the probe docs to Drudge, likely as part of an effort to get back at TNR.
This goes beyond the Army’s being two-faced. As Glenn Greenwald mentions, this shows just how Bush and his cronies have, through their appointments of partisan hacks, TIG-welded the Army — which is supposed to be nonpartisan — to the right-wing media apparatus.
It is part and parcel of the Bush Junta’s politicizing and fascisizing institutions that the Founders had designed, and with very good reason, to be nonpartisan. The sad thing is that Bush has had seven years to rape every branch of government, from the Justice Department to FEMA and now the Department of Defense, and install his commissars and zampolit: Political hacks for whom ideology trumps country every time. The one good thing is that their own greed is their undoing: Many of these hacks bail on their government jobs because the pay is too low for them.
One Response to “Talk To TNR? Naaah. Illegally Leak To Drudge? A-OK!”
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Mercury Rising 鳯女 
tsisageya said
I’m not so sure this is good news…unless you like bathtubs.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101707I.shtml
At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with each dawn seems to come some new passing perfidy, each day a bump in magnification of the one that went before.
Blackwater contractors gunning down civilians in Iraq like the Dalton Gang shooting up Dodge City. The president’s veto of increased funding for S-CHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Secret legal opinions essentially endorsing the torture of terrorism suspects.
Monday’s New York Times reported, “With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees – jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate… The jobs are filled by people who do not have the clout to make decisions that comes with a permanent appointment endorsed by the Senate, scholars say.”
These include three cabinet positions: Justice, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs. In the words of Paul Light, a public service professor at New York University, “You’ve got more vacancies now than a hotel in hurricane season.”
How many people work in the United States government? About half of them.