Army Gen. Stan McChrystal at his retirement ceremony last July / Army photo by D. Myles Cullen
Kind of sweet that just as Columbia University was announcing this year’s crop of Pulitzer Prize winners, the Pentagon inspector general was saying the Rolling Stone piece that led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal nearly a year ago didn’t pass muster with Defense Department editors. The IG concluded that there was insufficient evidence that members of his staff were insubordinate and that “not all of the events at issue occurred as reported in the article.”
Hmm…does that mean President Obama was wrong to haul McChrystal back to Washington from Kabul and basically fire him after The Runaway General appeared in the magazine last June? (You might get that impression: four days after the IG finished its report, the White House tapped McChrystal to help oversee a program to aid military families strained by a decade of war.)
Rolling Stone stood by author Michael Hastings’ reporting. “Much of the report, in fact, confirms our reporting, noting only that the Pentagon was unable to find witnesses `who acknowledged making or hearing the comments as reported,'” it said in a statement. “This is not surprising, given that the civilian and military advisors questioned by the Pentagon knew that their careers were on the line if they admitted to making such comments.” One aide allegedly said then-national security adviser James Jones was a “clown” and others allegedly made similar comments that some saw as insubordinate.
Anyway, the bottom line is clear, even if precisely what happened isn’t. I have been among military officers long and frequently enough to hear their jokes, guffaws and tirades, some off color, and some out of line in polite company. They never struck me as newsworthy; they struck me as human. I have also been among reporters long enough to know that facts can be slippery things, like mental quicksilver. It seems that in this case, both sides, perhaps innocently, played a little fast with the facts, amid blurry ground rules, that sparked the end of McChrystal’s career after 34 years of service.