by Yerusalyim 117 Replies latest social current
Teeny,
Don't you know that the liberals are always honest, never assume, ever make unsubstantiated claims, and always have the interest of their fellow man as priority?????????
Surely their kind and compassionate treatment of Yeru's humananity is evidence enough, isn't it?
Danny
Yerusalyim,
Sorry I blamed you for what I thought included your own errors in how you passed along the letter. At first I didn't doubt that you had passed on the letter exactly as you received it, and I was only annoyed at the deceptive propaganda distributed by a Major in the Army. (I have absolutely no doubt about its intentional mix of truth and falsehood for deceptive propaganda purposes, but that's for reasons I can get into another time.)
I admit though that (by the time of my 2nd post) I began to think you had stretched a couple minor details about the letter yourself, and I'll explain my reasons below. I'm sorry for that, however. I don't doubt at all that Major Rydbom is responsible (or has been asked to take responsibility) for sending the original letter, and I can't judge to what extent he believes the contents. I suspect it contains his slightly personalized version of all the media briefing points that soldiers are given (in the event that a media situation arises for them). I understand that some soldiers are given the media briefing points even before they are deployed to the field, according to a soldier's testimony I read yesterday.
I now can believe that the provenance deception (not the propaganda deception) started with your friend the Major or possibly even someone who edited the letter before he did. I read too much into the fact you claimed your friend was also a Major, ostensibly close to the source of the original letter, yet he obviously gave you a letter edited just enough for you to believe it came from him, when it actually came from another Major. It's just a little bit difficult to believe that any army engineer Major, when he received it by email, wouldn't have realized how quickly such a letter would spread on the Internet due to the sheer number of people who always grab at that kind of "evidence."
It appears to me that his intended original probably started out more like the one below, although I prefer the version that the Church is evidently claiming is the original. The version like the one you gave was posted around July 7 and the edits to that one are fairly small, except for the Syria/WOMD addition. Of course, I don't believe the actual heading with date and subject would have been like the one below. Besides the actual letter gives evidence of Microsoft Word auto-corrections, more typical of a printed letter rather than an email to a Church. I'm only including it because the header was on a couple early copies and it probably does give the original date, at least, where someone formatted with day and time to give it an even more accurate look.
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 1:45 PM
Subject: Open Current Events Letter From A U.S. Army Major In Iraq
It has been a while since I have written to my friends at First Lutheran Church about what's really going on here in Iraq. The news you watch on TV is exaggerated, sensationalized and selective. Good news doesn't sell.
Funny thing is, yours is the only one I found, so far, that took out "at First Lutheran Church" which would be absolutely necessary to remove if you or an earlier intended recipient were supposed to be tricked into thinking the letter was directly from a friend (such as your Major friend).
I've just checked out a few of the other forums where this letter is being openly discussed. I've only scanned 4 of the forums but I've seen about 10 other places where I looked at the letter. (From a quick glance I see that about half of them have the Syria lines added, even though that version was posted earlier than most of the more correct ones.)
The only one that differs almost completely with the one that Rydbom claims would be his is the letter that a certain person says she requested from the Church...
check the site: http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=7379 for the attempt made on that site to verify the original letter. This email is the most curious: The dates cause problems if you accept the May 23 date, and less of a problem if you accept the "2 June" date within the letter, and even less of a problem if you accept the June 26 date given on most of the major sites printing the letter like "bushcountry.com" "sfft.org" (soldiers for the truth), etc.
| 39 | Lizzel 7/7/2003 03:54PM PST |
Audrey from the First Lutheran Church of Richmond Beach was kind enough to send me the original letter.She also told me the letter is fro May 23
OPEN LETTER
TO
FIRST LUTHERAN CHURCH
OF
RICHMOND BEACH
3 July 03To all the wonderful people of First Lutheran Church from Iraq, Greetings. This will be my last letter as my time here is quickly coming to a close. I would like to provide some final thoughts on my time in Iraq.
First, you need to understand that, in general, the Iraqi people are industrious, resourceful, and eager for a new life. The news, again, has been bad, and this time, things have gotten a little worse. There has been more disorganized hostile activity against US forces AND Iraqi civilians. We are taking fewer casualties than before, even with the increased attacks. The Iraqi civilians, specifically businesses, are being threatened and even bombed or burned out, for dealing with coalition forces. These are the same people as before, Fedayeen and Ba’ath Party members who are now officially out of a job forever. They will not go away quietly, but with these methods, they will gain no new recruits and will not stay alive long either. We send out forces on raids to capture major Fedayeen and Ba’ath Party leaders everyday, mostly on information from Iraqi’s and we are more often than not, successful. Time is on our side.
There have also been attacks against Iraqi Infrastructure by these terrorist forces as well, that again, does nothing but hurt the Iraqi people. Oil pipelines and electrical power transmission lines have been the main targets. What do we do about it? We hire Iraqi companies to go out and fix them and pay top dollar and help the Iraqi economy, that’s what we do. Then we train Iraqi security forces to secure the pipelines and the power lines, paying more Iraqi people and creating jobs where there were none before. That’s what we do too.
Are we making progress? Overall? Yes. There has been a little backsliding. When the power lines go down, the power grid fluctuates wildly and the power plant shuts down. When the power plant shuts down, the oil refinery shuts down and when the oil refinery shuts down, the oil flow has to stop because there is only so much storage capacity and there is no LPG produced for people to cook with. So you see, it’s all interconnected. So how can I say we are progressing? Easy. We are contracting to repair two key 400Kv Ultra-high voltage lines as I type this. It’ll be 60 days until they are complete, but this will stabilize power for the entire country. We have companies going to the Bayji Thermal Power plant to repair the last 2 of 6 turbines adding 250 Mega-watts to the grid in the next 2 weeks. We have another company going to the Bayji Gas Turbine plant to repair 2 of it’s 4 turbines in the next two weeks adding ANOTHER 250 Mega-watts to the national power grid. I have personally signed two contracts with local Iraqi companies to repair and upgrade water treatment plants in 2 cities. The Al Dour water facility contract is $23,000 worth of pumps and chlorination equipment and the Baqubah water treatment facility is $99,795 worth of pumps, laboratory testing equipment, pipes, chlorination metering and injection equipment and upgrade of their distribution towers. The work at these two facilities will be complete within the next 30 days and provide CLEAN and TREATED drinking water to 100,000 people for the first time in their lives.
THAT’S HOW I CAN SAY WE ARE MAKING PROGRESS……
People have to remember, the 4th Infantry Division has been in central Iraq for a total of 96 days now, 3 months and 1 week. Patience is a virtue. 96 days to both secure an area the size of West Virginia, defeat remaining terrorist forces inside that area AND fix things destroyed in a war, looted by the local population to survive and keep an economy functioning at some level. Yes, patience is a virtue, and most news channels and many Americans need to be more virtuous.
What about the UN? We are all persons of faith, please don’t waste it on the UN. I may elaborate in person when I get back.
Respectfully,
ERIC RYDBOM
MAJOR, ENGINEER
Deputy Division Engineer
4th Infantry Division
Tikrit, Iraq
---------------------------------
Gamaliel
Teeny
If you had friends who would glom onto a writing and pass it off to you as their own, especially about a serious issue, would you continue their friendship??
SS
SS, first thing I would do is ask them what was up. However, since I usually don't discount what my friends tell me in e-mail, this has never come up.
I don't think Yeru posted this hoping or thinking he was going to dupe anyone. He knows *some people* are going to tear apart anything he posts. If his friend took the info from someone else and passed it off as his own, he is like most people. They take information and regurgitate it as their own.
As for continuing my friendship with someone who had plagiarized; it would depend. Very good, long friendships are not broken because someone makes a mistake. If that were true, no one would have any friends. As *someone* likes to point out *Who are we to Judge?*
Claiming Yeru has no credibility and is a liar is pretty harsh.
Btw, at this point, putting iraq back together is something the US does owe the iraqi people.
(((YES))) I agree S.S. I wish I had said this just once in all the threads about this topic.
And not just the U.S. All the countries that have been suckling their oil and selling Saddam weapons, we/they all owe the Iraqi people. If others won't then the U.S. needs to continue it without France, Germany, and Russia. I wish more people would be willing to fix the problem first and the not obsess about the blame.
I don't know of anyone who thinks we shouldn't put Iraq back together, just not under the UN banner of failure please.
To put this to rest, the email I received was sent to a slew of people, mostly military email addresses, in exactly the form I published here. It came from a guy I had been acquainted with when at Ft Campbell. My assumption was that it was his personal letter to us as it wasn't a "Forwarded" email.
I have since communicated with Maj Rydbom, who really does exist. I sent him a copy of the email as it's seen here. He says that is the letter he wrote, he said some versions he's seen (this thing has really traveled) say something about WMD in Syria, which he didn't write. You can see copies of the email traffic above.
But you're right, I'm a big fat liar just like Bush and Blair, but not Clinton, because CLINTON knows how to define "is".
I don't think you're "a big fat liar" Yeru ... you obviously had no reason to believe that the letter (or email) wasn't as it was portrayed and posted it in good faith.
However, I disagree with you about the UN. The USA has done too good a job of trying to rubbish the UN so that it could get it's war - it shoudl get over it because the UN involvement is vital to have things sorted out properly. I think if the USA thinks it can do it alone then it's just going to be there forever with ongoing casualties.
I agree with Simon, Yeru, and don't think your a liar.
You made a mistake thinking it was a personal letter, not a forwarded one.
Simple mistake to make.
Simon,
When the UN can point to a record of successful intervention and nation building, I'll concede the point that they should be involved.
The UN has a long history of rubbishing itself, no help is needed from the US. The July 2003 readers Digest has a good article outlining this actions of theirs on page 29. It should still be available at your local library, if any can afford the effort.
A few apologies to Yeru would also be in order.
