Folks, I have great respect for the spirit of civil discussion and factual information that prevails on TBN and if my own biases make this sound like a rant, then it is proper that the moderators delete it. I hope I have attained the high standard of factual scholarship represented in many of the previous posts.
I went looking to see if the letter cited by cowboydoc might be one of those emails that is widely circulated, rather than the personal observation of the office manager or someone known personally to him.
I put "list of things that has happened in Iraq recently" into Google and got many hits.
Here is my interpretation of the first two Google hits:
http://www.mountainstatesman.com/main.php?story_id=1278&page=27
repeats that same letter, and prints two replies.
The first reply cited in mountainstatesman points to
http://www.orwelliantimes.com/2004/04/26.html#a318 , an obvious liberal site,
which quotes Lt. Col. Gregory O. Hapgood, the Public Affairs Officer for the Ohio National Guard. Hapgood confirmed that Reynolds is real but is not a medic as reported in some versions of the letter. Reynolds does communications work in the 234th Signal Battalion. "Lt. Col. Hapgood said that members of the force are not to take a politically partisan stance in any communications they use in which they identify themselves as members of the force." and "in essence, also said that it was improper for Sgt. Reynolds to attack Senator Kerry in his email." That article then goes on to use sources that Hapgood said were Reynolds' sources, to disprove many of Reynolds' points. You can click on all the asterisks to see other sources cited to refute Reynolds. They are mostly official US government press releases that in my opinion were adequately reported in the media.
My own opinion: if Reynolds is a 'communications specialist', could he be a propaganda specialist? I'd like to see the mission statement for the 234th Signal Battalion! Long ago I had a friend in the Reserves who told me that was his specialty, helping a war effort by controlling what was told to the citizens of an occupied country. Could Reynolds have gone a little beyond the line of his professional duties by asking his readers to write to Kerry?
The second reply returned by Google points to:
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/r/rayreynolds.htm
This labels as "Truth!" Reynolds' statement that "Iraqi oil reached 2 billion barrels exported" but the numbers cited in that paragraph don't add up. Mathematically that's 12 times the prewar production which I find hard to believe. One of the sources cited by orwelliantimes was a petroleum industry journal that looks credible to me and indicates oil production does not exceed prewar levels.
So - in summary, I think we each need to do our own research. My own limited efforts presented here make me question the facts in that letter, and therefor wonder what its real purpose is. I hope it simply represents a single overenthusiastic soldier.
