The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets. […]

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Deryk Schlessinger joined the Army in 2004, telling a crowd of Santa Barbara, Calif., Army reservists gathered for an appearance by his mother that he resented the way Americans criticize the war without recognizing soldiers’ sacrifices. 

I remember seeing Deryk on CSPAN back in, probably 2000, which would have made him 14 or 15.  It was a talk by Dr. Laura Schlesinger, yattering on about raising good kids in this corrupt world of ours, proudly beaming about the young man’s home-school curriculum.  She made a point to throw the camera to Deryck for applause, and for Deryk to say something queasily wholesome.

Mike Paul, spokesman for Laura Schlessinger, released a statement which said, in part, “We hope all news media outlets will respect his privacy for his safety and the safety of those serving with him.” In an interview with The Tribune, Paul suggested that the page could be a fake.
That was a contention echoed by Army spokesman Robert Tallman, who said “it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.
“Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace,” Tallman continued. “Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda.” 

Interesting theory, that.  The Enemy zeroes in on a popular, but not overwhelmingly so, right wing talk show host and makes up a raunchy site so that the Enemies in America will have gist for the mill in their non-stop undermining of the troops.  Or something like that.

MySpace is an online social network in which users link pages together through like interests and shared friendships. The Deryk Schlessinger page included nearly a dozen “friends,” including a number of soldiers in Afghanistan, several of whom were linked back to Schlessinger’s page and some of whom had additional photos of, and comments from, Schlessinger on their sites. 

So much for that theory.  Or maybe The Enemy propped fake myspace pages for his friends and fellow soldiers?  Goddamnedit, this is one nasty psy-ops campaign!

The site indicated Schlessinger’s team has survived numerous mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks. It also included several graphic cartoons. In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life. 

I used to have ongoing discussions on an Internet message board with some fairly radical Christian fundamentalists.  One of the people, Eldon for those who remember anything and in the know, once posted something to the effect of “You never hear of kids out of Christian schools or home-schooling misbehaving.”  Then again, he was a Holocaust survivor, and Schlessinger is Jewish anyways — honorary Christian fundamentalists though she may be from various visits on Pat Robertson and the like.  It didn’t take me too much work to come up with stupid stories to dispute Eldon’s asinine statement.  The Amish are particularly amusing in their confusingly daft sinning.
I don’t quite know what to make of Deryck’s sense of humor here.  This whole story is part of a vast liberal conspiracy, right, from that well known Liberal Media outlet, the Salt Lake Tribune.  More items of interest here on the understandable fallout the writer had after writing this story, into the fury of the most conservative state in the Union.  Keep reading those comments… they will amuse you.

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