Let's say you wanted to help the Republican Party spin criticism of the war on Iraq for political gain. Or you were were living vicariously through the lives of real service men and women and adopting the virtual personality of a person serving in Iraq. Or you were just a little crazy. Maybe you'd decide that it was a good idea to find any place on the Web that would give you an audience for your nonsense, right?
Charles Kuffner of Off The Kuff posed an interesting question yesterday about a very odd comment posting on his blog:
I can't tell if the person who just now left the second comment on this post is a joker with a good working knowledge of Internet trivia, or someone testing out a new comment-bot. Anyone wanna take a guess?The comment, if you check it out, is incredibly odd. At first I assumed it was written by a very mediocre writer or someone with a very poor grasp of English but that didn't quite make sense...certain parts of the comment are quite lucid although they don't make sense in their context.
Loving Google as much as I do, I decided to engage in a little investigative journalism. A search for the opening line came up with two additional letters reportedly from two different U.S. Marines (here and here). My curiosity piqued, I started pulling other random phrases and conducting Google searches:
"MEDEVAC'd her and her family to receive treatment" came up with another letter from Marine Hal Camp, almost (but not quite) identical to the G. Gordon Liddy letter mentioned above.
"because as Pat Boone points out so well in his article, there were no secrets about the abuse" locates yet another posting, this time anonymous, which also rails on the media's depiction of the abuse scandal in Iraq.
"We are training up their local police forces" locates "an interesting email from a Marine involved in the rebuilding stage" and, yet another, heartwarming Liddy-esque letter.
I stopped there. Maybe this post is, as Charles Kuff suggested, just a joke. The signature would certainly suggest that was the case but the connections to other, seemingly serious, pro-war postings online seem a bit too well-researched. Not to mention that the joke would be a whole lot funnier if the excerpts from other "letters" were pasted together in a way that they actually made sense. The fact that the signature links to the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research is kind of funny, though I doubt that's intentional.
What's not funny is the possibility that someone is playing on the goodwill of average Americans towards U.S. troops to spread misinformation. That, my friends, is morally indefensible.
Posted by sarah at July 2, 2004 1:16 AM | TrackBack