Salam on Riverbend

I did receive a short but gracious reply from Salam Pax over the weekend on the subject of his acquaintance with Riverbend. He confirms Riverbend's story about their acquaintance on a couple of points.

"Riverbend sent me an email quite some time before the war. It freaked me out, I thought she was the secret police. Then I was not sure she were in Baghdad (questions about a specific billboard midtown cleared that) and after a couple of emails I asked her to write a post on my blog."

[..]

"I have no personal acquaintance with her unfortunately."

(a) they are not personally acquainted (NB. Could I ask all TeamTroy members when they post their dimwitted, trolling comments claiming this proves Riverbend is a Berkeley student to just sign themselves TeamTroy when they do so, instead of making up new pseudonyms to replace the recently outed Lopez, Brad, Susaita, WKS. I'd be grateful if you'd do this to save me the hassle of spending the 2 minutes having to do it myself? Cheers)

(b) he was very suspicious when he heard from her (before the war)

(c) they exchanged emails wherein he interrogated her about details of Baghdad

(d) eventually he accepted she was genuine.

So there we have it. Salam before the war when he lived in genuine and reasonable fear of being tracked down by Saddam's secret police, after a long period of suspicion, accepted Riverbend as being a genuine young woman in Iraq.

There remain of course a number of people Stateside with zero on the ground knowledge of the situation and much, much less reason to be suspicious who think they know better than he does.

I've said if before - some people will believe, or pretend to believe, anything as long as it suits their political views. And I don't of course expect Salam's post to change that.

The rest of us will just watch as the purposeful denial becomes ever more clear.