CNN Wants to Know: Is the Military Brainwashing Senators?

Yes, that was actually a headline on CNN this afternoon, just a sample of the overblown media reaction to the latest Rolling Stone piece from Michael Hastings that alleges a commander in Afghanistan tasked a psy ops army team to mess with the heads of visiting senators.

I'm not the only one who doesn't think this is worth quite the fuss being put up. I asked Sen. Bob Corker, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee who just returned from a two day visit to Afghanistan, about the allegations, and he did not seem terribly concerned that he might have been the target of some sort of psychological mind-meld during his stay. The story, online at CQ.com (subscription required), quotes Corker as saying, “the generals, the officers below them and everyone that we met . . . they told us the good, the bad and the ugly. I thought they were very transparent.”

UPDATE, 2/28:

Aaaand the other shoe drops, per Rajiv Chandresakaran's story from Sunday's post.

"Although the Rolling Stone piece claims that Holmes specializes in psychological operations, the Army said it has no record of training Holmes in "psychological operations." Holmes said in his interview with The Post that he learned psychological operations techniques as part of his information operations training but he said he never claimed that he was psychological operations officer."