Iraq War Critics: Joe Conason on Soldiers' Letters

Joe Conason has some excellent comments on the soldiers'-letters issue on his Salon.com Weblog. When I heard Conason speak last month, he mentioned that he gets e-mail from soldiers that are surprisingly critical of official policy. But I don't remember seeing him use those in any of his columns. He also commented that he thinks they're genuine because they come with the .mil extension. So like any journalist should be, he's aware that there are sourcing issues in using something like that in a story.

He observes in his blog:

No doubt each and every one of the soldiers approached by their C.O. to sign the letter agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments about the good works that the Army is accomplishing in Kirkuk (except perhaps for the private who supposedly signed the letter although he said he had never read it).

But what would the soldiers have told the C.O. if they disagreed? It's inappropriate at best for a military officer to circulate a form letter among soldiers under his command, and then suggest that their signatures were entirely voluntary. Everyone knows what "volunteer" often means in the military.

He also quotes a senior CNN international correspondent saying:

I mean if you saw a letter from a U.S. soldier in Iraq in a paper now, would you trust it? I don't think I would, and that's really the point. I think I called it yesterday an insult to those U.S. soldiers who are out there and I think it is. I mean, yes, there is good news to be told, but I think they deserve to tell it themselves, and they also deserve the chance to say there is bad news. And we need to give them the opportunity to do both.

Go read the whole thing. If you're not a Salon subscriber, you have to go through the minor annoyance of clicking at the top to get a "day pass" and watch a few seconds of an ad.

Conason also references a story about how it was the unit of the same commander behind the mass mailing flap who earlier "discovered"possible WMD evidence that turned out, like the rest of it, to be not that.

Tags: joe conason, iraq war