This is pretty funny. Or it would be if it wasn’t so pathetic.
Some reading-challenged columnist at the San Diego Union Tribune has accused me and Fox News of a “forgery” in the satire that I did last summer on post-war Iraq/Europe.
Thanks to my Internet friends, I can now identify the source of the bogus 1945 Reuters news dispatch I wrote about Monday. That forgery likely served as the basis for White House and Pentagon comparisons of Iraqi resistance to German resistance in 1945, part of its sorry attempts to compare Iraq to World War II.
The source for the bogus news (one should have known) is Fox News.
A Fox contributor named Rand Simberg, described as “consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security” made up the Reuters dispatch for Fox on July 30 (posting it on his own Web site two days later). This was only a week before the first Bush references were made to German “werewolves” in one of several inept comparisons to World War II.
OK, so much for his fevered fantasies. Here’s reality.
Weary of all the handwringing and historical ignorance of the handwringers about how Iraq hadn’t been converted to Iowa only three months after the end of major combat operations, I wrote the piece and published it on my blog on July 28, as anyone can see who goes to read it. I didn’t write it “for Fox News.”
To indicate clearly that it was satire, I attributed it, as usual, to the mythical WW II news agency, “Routers,” and I incorporated my own 2003 copyright at the bottom. Subsequently, it was picked up by emailers, the copyright was stripped, “Routers” was misspelled to correspond to a more familiar (and actual) wire service, and it quickly found its way across cyberspace. These fake versions were debunked by Snopes a month later.
Anyway, two days after I wrote and published it (not before), I decided to submit it to Fox as my weekly column, and they decided to run it, with a new title, on July 30, as can be seen here. They also made it very clear that it was fictional satire, by using an introduction, and attributing it to me. So again it was neither a “forgery” or “bogus news.”
Next, he writes:
Rice claimed German werewolves “engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces” and cooperating Germans, “much like today’s Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embellished the story still further. Werewolves, he said, “plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings. Does this sound familiar,” he asked?
Only in Rice’s and Rumsfeld’s minds. The total number of post-conflict U.S. combat casualties in Germany was zero. In Iraq, that number is, so far, 357. Some comparison.
Well, neither Rice nor Rumsfeld claimed that there were U.S. casualties (though in fact the number was not zero–I think it was seven deaths, and there were many Russian ones in their zone), so this is a non-sequitur. The point was not a quantitative one about casualties, but about the fact that there was indeed a post-war resistance, however ineffective. (I should add that I suspect that part of the relative effectiveness has to do with the technologies available then and now, and the vast stores of weaponry available in post-war Iraq, relative to a post-war Germany that had been totally drained by a long war.)
Now, it is apparently true that, as a result of it being retransmitted as an authentic document, some in the administration were fooled, and it seems to have ultimately found its way past the firewalls even into the five-sided building itself. When I talked to the Pentagon correspondent for the Dallas Morning News about it last fall, he told me that he had attended a dinner at which someone sitting next to Rumsfeld told the SecDef something to the effect that “…and did you know that Truman was almost impeached over the situation in post-war Germany?”
Frankly, I doubt if all of the quotes this guy has in his article can be attributed to this piece, in either its original or plagiarized form. There was plenty of discussion of the Werwolf at the Command Post and other sites before I wrote my piece (and in fact, such discussions were what partially inspired the piece). We know that CNN and Fox were monitoring that site, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the White House and Security Council were as well. There’s no reason to think that my piece was the only, or even the first time that they had heard of the situation in the ex-Third Reich.
Anyway, I just thought I’d set the record straight, and I might suggest that the editors at the SD UT give their columnist a remedial lesson in vocabulary, date order, and perhaps a little refresher legal course in libel, lest he accuse any other innocent people of “forgeries” and “bogus news.”
[Thanks to emailer Robert McClimon for the tip]
[Update at 4:24 PM PST]
I should also note that this is old-school hackery. He didn’t bother to provide links to any of this (as I did). If he had, anyone who chose to follow them would have been able to figure out the reality, even if he couldn’t.
I suspect that this is partly because it was a dead-tree column transferred to the web, but I also suspect that even if he was a cybercolumnist, we wouldn’t have seen the links, because then his readership would have easily realized how foolish he was. I wonder how much longer these so-called journalists are going to be able to (or at least think they’re going to be able to) get away with this kind of scurrilous nonsense?