The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Keith Thompson:

But I have to ask: Is there the slightest chance that this story is fabricated? It sounds like such an *amazingly* stupid thing to do, perhaps the *exactly stupidest* thing to do if you were trying to win hearts and minds over there, that I have to wonder if it might be BS, planted to cultivate outrage.

I can't directly answer that, but PBS's Frontline recently did a show on the situation in Iraq. It showed some US soldiers systematically destroying a car by running over it twice with a tank. This was as punishment for looting. Some of the soldiers laughed as they did this.

I think the incident took place not long after the fall of Baghdad (but after the first few days, when looting was ignored).

According to the show's narrator, the car's owner was a taxi driver. The car was his livelihood.

I didn't see any indication of collective punishment, but it seems like part of the same pattern as destroying orchards.

The show made the point that soldiers are not trained to be policemen. Their job is to kill people and break things, not "to protect and to serve".

I just did a reverse lookup on the (850) 269-XXXX phone number you posted (Googling a phone number does a phone directory lookup). It appears to belong to someone who lives about 45 miles away from the address you gave for Guy McFarland.

If I were going to use my domain to post porn spam, I wouldn't put my real phone number in the DNS entry.

Novak's column referred to her as an "Agency operative". A lot of the commentary here and elsewhere refers to her as a (possible) "CIA agent". Is there a significant distinction between "agent" and "operative" that we're missing? I have no idea; I know very little about the CIA, and most of that is wrong.

Comment statistics for Keith Thompson on the Electrolite blog

Total: 7 comments. View all these comments on a single page.