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Pentagon's deputy inspector general: Lt. Gen. Boykin should be punished for religious speeches
A 10-month investigation into speeches made to Christian groups by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, one of the Pentagon's top intelligence officers, says he broke three rules, according to Reuters and The Washington Post.

Boykin, the report said, didn't get specific clearance for using official data in his speeches, didn't sufficiently note that his remarks were personal and not necessarily those of the U.S. government, and didn't report being reimbursed for travel costs.

But Boykin did make "good faith efforts" to clear the speeches through military lawyers, the report says, and apparently wasn't told that he had to get specific clearance.

"We recommend that the Acting Secretary of the Army take appropriate corrective action with respect to Lt. Gen. Boykin," the report concludes.

The Pentagon isn't saying anything yet, since the results of the investigation haven't officially been released. But an anonymous "senior Defense official who is familiar with the report's contents" told The Washington Post that

the report is seen as a "complete exoneration" that ultimately found Boykin responsible for a few "relatively minor offenses" related to technical and bureaucratic issues. … The senior Pentagon official said that it is not regular practice for top Defense Department officials to submit speeches of a personal nature for review and clearance.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (remember them?) said it welcomed the report, and said that Boykin should be reassigned to a job "in which he will not be able to harm America's image in the Muslim world."

Weblog is still waiting for the release of actual transcripts of what Boykin really said at those 23 events in 2002, since even the excerpts that were directly quoted have been widely misrepresented in media accounts.

Crisis editor Deal Hudson: I'm being attacked because I exposed a Kerry-USCCB alliance
Deal Hudson, who has been advising the Bush campaign since 1998 on how to court conservative Catholic voters, says he's done. The reason, he wrote in National Review Online yesterday, is that "a liberal Catholic publication" is about to publish an article targeting "my life, my past, and apparently any mistakes that he could uncover to embarrass me."

"No one regrets my past mistakes more than I do," he said, without alluding to what those mistakes are, or what the yet unpublished article will address. "I've been married seventeen years, my daughter is fifteen, my adopted son from Romania is seven, and my wife and I are happily married. When we entered the political fray in the 2000 campaign we knew the risk of political involvement but considered the issues worth the potential cost. We still do."

Both The New York Times and Newsday today report that the magazine working on the story is The National Catholic Reporter, and that the article will apparently focus on Hudson's leaving Fordham University in 1995 after a student accused him of sexual harassment.

National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Roberts didn't talk to the Times, but told Newsday that the magazine was planning to do a "straightforward profile" of the Crisis Magazine editor, not an exposé. "But as we started talking to people, these things came up," he said. "We decided that he's such a public figure, and he's been uncompromising in judging other people's behavior."

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48