Writing on Michael Hastings' PSYOP story, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post follows up on many of the suspicions I shared last week in fantastic, and troublesome, detail if you took the Rolling Stone piece at its word. The best part, of course, is that Hastings' sole significant source on this turns out to not have been trained in any PSYOP work:
Although the Rolling Stone piece claims that Holmes specializes in psychological operations, the Army said it has no record of training Holmes in "psychological operations." Holmes said in his interview with The Post that he learned psychological operations techniques as part of his information operations training but he said he never claimed that he was psychological operations officer."It's stretching to say that we're the Jedi-mind-tricks guys," he said.
What's more, it seems the thin evidence in the Hastings piece regarding any inappropriate activity along these lines - beyond IO personnel handling something that a PAO ought to do - is borne out:
But the officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the investigation, said Holmes never was asked to use psychological operations, deception or other tactics that would be illegal when applied to fellow Americans. He simply was being asked to conduct research using publicly available material, they said. They also said Holmes never attended any of the meetings with visiting members of Congress.
That last sentence conflicts with the Hastings article as well, which claimed he sat in rooms with senators and took notes. But perhaps the best (or worst, depending on your perspective) portion of the piece comes at the end:
[Holmes] said he provided information about his case to the St. Petersburg Times in Florida a few months ago. When nothing was published, he gave the material to Rolling Stone, which wrote about his case in less than a week.
This seems to bear out all our suspicions last week that Hastings' piece was a rushed story, done without due diligence, and rife with error and wild exaggerations. If he plans to be taken seriously in the future, and not just viewed as someone who lucked into a weak McChrystal moment, this Polk award winner needs to mount a defense of this piece, and soon.
