The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Brian AtBendingTruth:

Hi Teresa (spelt your name right this time!)
Sorry to have turned part of your blog into another battlefield in the larger culture wars. It took a while but Mr Chamblee did get back to me to confirm these were not in fact his comments. The comments were in fact made by the same guy responsible for the fake riverSbend blog (which now thanks to a concerted campaign by many in the web community is basically defunct). I can't claim any psychic powers of deduction to figure out it was him. I knew Mr Chamblee and the culprit were adversaries of longstanding. And Mr Chamblee is no more likely to speak out in support of the fake blog, than Osama Bin Laden is to say Bush deserves more time to set things right in Iraq :)
------
Mr Chamblee wrote:

I read the piece attributed to me, and it's a fake. It completely baffles me
why some people have so little regard for themselves and so little personal
honor that they would impersonate someone else.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, and I have exposed Troy to the
readers of soc.retirement in two posts a few minutes ago.

Regards

James A. Chamblee

Thanks Theresa. I'm very hesitant about responding to "Jim Chamblee" here, because I have a strong suspicion that this is not in fact this posters real name and he is being impersonated.

I have written an email to the address given above, just to have Jim Chamblee confirm that these are his sentiments.

If I get a response from the address given here and it confirms that these are really the sentiments of Mr Jim Chamblee I may address them further.

Alternatively Mr Chamblee, if he really does read this site, is invited to sent me an email to bendingtruth@hotmail.com confirming that these are really his thoughts.

One way or another we should know soon enough what Mr Jim Chamblee really thinks about a 70 year old American man pretending to be a young Iraqi woman in order to discredit her. And if Mr Jim Chamblee really doesn't think this is indicative of any kind of "skullduggery"

Hi, I'm not a regular here, and I hope you will all pardon the intrusion.

I noticed through a web search that there was some discussion on this site a few weeks ago about the Iraqi Riverbend blogger and the fake riverSbend propaganda site set up to dilute its message.

The Riverbend blog is written by a genuine Iraqi young woman. The riverSbend blog is written by a rather bitter American man who doesn't like what she's saying.

This is not to say that everything that appears on the riverSbend blog is untrue. Most of it is true, from a certain perspective. Just not the perspective of a young woman in Iraq.

If you want to check up on my proof that the riverSbend blogger is fake please check on my blog on suzerainty.blogspot.com. I prove here that the archives not only can be faked, but that they have been faked.

There is an abundance of outright plagiarism on the riverSbend faker's site. From sources like the NYT and from a lot of military sources, as well as the US state dept.

I also noted a few people were wondering who the faker was and why they're doing this. Well I know. It wasn't too hard to actually find out the guy's name but I'm not going to reveal that. ULtimately if I did I'd have to take responsibility for anything that happened to him in the future as a result of that, and we all know that there are a lot of nuts out there, so I would be very cautious about publicly unmasking someone. After all I'm not on the Whitehouse staff.

What I will say is that he's, perhaps surprisingly, somewhere around 70 years old. He lives in a Southern state in the US. He's ex military, very pro-war and he really doesn't like the fact that riverbend is a little more conflicted about it than he is. I don't think one can always necessarily gauge someone's personality from the things they post on the net. However I will say that in the past the riverSbend faker has been accused of issuing violent threats online. Maybe that's another reason good reason for not revealing his name. It could be very embarrassing getting beat up by a septegenarian.

Now fair enough if a 70 year old grandad in the States wants to say things in Iraq are all nice and rosy. But why not be honest about this perspective? Because if a 70 year old grandad in the States wants to tell me that I'm probably not going to give it quite so much credence as when I'm told something different by someone who's actually there.

As I mention on my blog, yesterday by a little bit of cyber activism, myself and artist Mark Vallen at art-for-a-change.com got the rabidly pro-War blogger to display a graphic that said "Bush is a liar. Stop the war now." Unfortunately when I checked today the riverSbend faker had taken it down. Again I'm going to stress my blog is not an anti-Bush, anti-war blog in its basic intent. It is a pro-Truth and pro-Riverbend blog. (Although she has had no direct input into what it says there)

Anyway I hope if there's any doubt in anyone's mind about the validity of the riverSbend counterfeit then I can remove all doubt at my Bending Truth blog (suzerainty.blogspot.com). Or you can email me at bendingtruth@hotmail.com.

Ultimately I'd like that any time anyone does an internet search on riverSbend they're going to find very close by a little note like this pointing out what a load of garbage it is. There's something about the notion of a beleaguered Iraqi woman having her freedom of expression corrupted by a misanthropic old coot with a keyboard, that gets my goat, which is why ultimately I have decided to do all this.

Anyway thanks for your time. And remember Accept No Substitutes :)

Brian

Comment statistics for Brian AtBendingTruth on the Making Light blog

Total: 3 comments. View all these comments on a single page.