{"id":22542,"date":"2011-03-09T16:31:07","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T20:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=22542"},"modified":"2011-03-09T16:41:48","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T20:41:48","slug":"holmes-admits-that-caldwells-psyop-wasnt-psy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=22542","title":{"rendered":"Holmes admits that Caldwell’s PsyOp wasn’t Psy-ish"},"content":{"rendered":"

LTC Michael Holmes, the fellow who went to Rolling Stone<\/a>‘s Michael Hastings and told the story repeated breathlessly across the internet that Brigadier General William Caldwell was bending the minds of visiting politicians, has finally admitted that maybe it wasn’t such a big deal as he first indicated. Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com<\/a> gives Hastings a feather massage;<\/p>\n

Lt. Col. Michael Holmes, concedes that Lt. Gen. Caldwell\u2019s effort was little more than spinning legislators \u2014 something any press flack could have done innocuously. Holmes\u2019 main message to the inquiry will actually be more meta: he\u2019s a whistleblower, subject to retaliation from Caldwell\u2019s staff after he expressed doubt that an info-ops guy like him should be spinning U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

Caldwell\u2019s command \u201cwas all about intimidation and reprisal, making people toe the line,\u201d Holmes tells Danger Room at a Washington D.C. coffee shop. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Toe the legal line.<\/p>\n

[T]here was no inherent line crossed. Holmes feared that his training as an information operations officer disqualified him from spinning U.S. legislators, since information operations aren\u2019t supposed to target U.S. citizens. But both Holmes and Caldwell\u2019s team have told Danger Room that the training command didn\u2019t actually perform information operations \u2014 like attacking enemy computer networks, psychological warfare, or military deception. Indeed, while Holmes\u2019 September 2010 officer evaluation report refers to Holmes as an \u201cInformation Operations Supervisor,\u201d it noted, \u201cthere is not an operational requirement for Information Operations\u201d in the training command.<\/p>\n

The spin itself, Holmes says, was unproblematic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, unproblematic. It wasn’t made to sound unproblematic last month when Holmes’s dramatic retelling was made to sound, as my friend Blackfive said<\/a>, like “Men who stare at Senators” Jedi mind tricks.<\/p>\n

So now with Holmes under oath this morning at the Pentagon with Lt. Gen. William Webster, the investigating officer<\/a> in this newest investigation, Holmes’ story is suddenly more innocuous than it was in the Rolling Stone. Funny how that works.<\/p>\n

And of course, Holmes was claiming that I’m a paid agent of BG Caldwell sent to smear him. Come to think of it, that check is late. Ackerman admits that both Holmes and Hastings are his friends which explains the tongue bath Ackerman gave them today. At this point, I’ll refrain from calling them all three shitbags until my check clears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LTC Michael Holmes, the fellow who went to Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings and told the story … Holmes admits that Caldwell’s PsyOp wasn’t Psy-ish<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shitbags"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}