Unhinged Claims from LibertyLynx -- and Rebuttals

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01/09/2014

Unhinged Claims from LibertyLynx -- and Rebuttals

Wow, this is pretty unhinged stuff. See the paste-up below if you love Twitter feeds, otherwise, here's the summary.

Sometimes when you confront people with their misrepresentations or exaggerations -- or lies -- they walk them back and fix them. Other times, they go batshit crazy. I guess this is one of those times.

LibertyLynx or "R," an anonymous person on the Internet who blogs a lot about the Snowden story and Russia, has made a whole bunch of wild accusations of me.

I don't have time to rebut all this in detail, but I will state for the record:

1. I'm definitely not Mr. X. That's creepy. That deranged individual (or deliberate provocateur) has harassed a number of people and some of us have filed reports on him to social media or blog providers or in some cases even the authorities. I see some of this has worked as his accounts are removed from Twitter and his blog is on password private now so his insane, long screeds with wild theories about me are now not in the view. I haven't taken time to refute them all, and now they're not visible any way, so good riddance. I still get crazy complaining emails from him which I've ignored.

I don't use alts or sock puppets -- I use this name, Catherine Fitzpatrick, because I want to be known. My avatar, Prokofy Neva is always linked to this. Just because someone is in Second Life with a small business doesn't mean they are creepy or scary stalkers and alt abusers. Such charges do seem odd coming from this anonymous personage LibertyLynx.

2. I have definitely not "ruined the careers" of Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior, or Nathan Hamm. Each one of these people began heckling me *first* -- after years of heckling other human rights activists and people in their field. All that was different about me was that I fought back.In fact, quite the contrary, while I barely knew these people who were not my colleagues, they went to my bosses at a former job (EurasiaNet) and complained about my critical posts about their views -- posts that in fact were legitimate and in fact were only defended and praised by a US government official, other scholars in the community, and a board member and staff members at my former job. I've written about this at length and the record is clear. A number of us left this news outlet for similar reasons -- it's not just about me or Registan.

I've documented this record carefully and you can see that my efforts to counter their blog posts favourable to the Central Asian regimes from the Realist International Relations school is what triggered their fury and efforts to get me discredited and fired. This is unacceptable behaviour and I documented it and condemned it. Academic freedom and open debate require it.

Each one of these people for completely other reasons unrelated to me then left their jobs. In Kendzior's case, she said that she didn't want to climb the ladder in academia, which she was very critical of despite her own achievements and offers for teaching when she completed herPhD. She left to work for Al Jazeera. While Sarah has made some really crazy claims -- like that her friends told her to call the police to file a complaint about me "stalking" her because I...published critical assessments about her articles in scholarly journals -- she herself has never claimed in any fashion that I "ruined her career". Someone who publishes as much as she does and is in demand for conferences is hardly "ruined" by sombody questioning their academic theses favourable to regimes in their blog posts.

Joshua Foust had made scores of enemies everywhere in many fields and among journalists and his departure from his position at a think-tank had nothing to do with me whatsoever; most likely it was related to the overall reduction in government and private funds for this region of Central Asia. It's surely a comment on his very fiery Twitter career largely unrelated to me (he made many enemies on the drones issue) that ultimately, when he abandoned trying to get an intelligence or defense contract, and opted to take a job in a foundation, he basically agreed to stop tweeting. Foust has made many outrageous claims about me, including a claim that I am responsible for an Uzbek terrorist suspect continuing to be held in jail (!!!), but he's never claimed anything as absurd as saying I "ruined his career". That he took care of himself.

Nathan Hamm, manager of Registan, was responsible for making a number of outrageous and false claims about me, apparently in the mistaken belief that I was someone else completely different than he suspected was out to get him; he lost his job in defense contracting also likely due to the shrinkage of Central Asian programs and is doing other work now -- he also has never made such an absurd claim about any "ruination of his career".

3. I have not made my blog Different Stans as some kind of "stalker blog" -- its record and statement of mission stand on their own. It's a blog filled with posts about many issues and persons in Central Asia, hardly only about Registan and this bunch. To be sure, they are criticized, but then that's ok and that's legitimate; what's puzzling is why LibertyLynch has adopted the same pro-regime and pro-"realism" position of these former defense contractors -- does this same something about LibertyLynx's own status as a defense contrator? Who knows? What's particularly puzzling about this is that the kind of behaviour that LibertyLynx would find unacceptable re: Putin -- think pieces that took his side sympathetically -- she appears willing to accept about Karimov or Nazarbayev from this Registan crowd. I'll chalk that up either to ignorance about this regime, or merely a desire to be contrary because I didn't line up perfectly with her views as required. This kind of behaviour can sometimes mean that someone is deliberately engaged in provocateur work to set people against each other and undermine critics, but in this case, I just think it's idiocy.

4. Of course I haven't taken the side of any hackers and I don't need to engage in skirmishes against ostensibly "my own side". But I also don't like getting hustled and collectivized on the Internet. If someone seems to going off on their reasoning, I don't feel I need to keep omerta or disobey the 11th commandment as the human rights movement calls it and never criticize someone on my own side. I want to get to the truth after all. What I see here is some of that anti-anti flavour of the 1960s or 1980s. If you aren't sufficiently loyal, why, then you're disloyal and suspect.

5. I don't see any turf war involved here. I think one thing that people are trying to do, however is increasingly get the attention of journalists at a time when reporters are finally starting to pay attention to this story. And perhaps they want "their" version to prevail. Frankly, I see many months have been wasted while Joshua Foust spent a lot of time first hijacking other people's work, including that of LibertyLynx and Streetwiseprof, not to mention me, and then steering journalists in certain directions which don't always seem to go to the heart of the story. But that sort of situation doesn't last for long on the Internet and won't now despite whatever capturing goes on.

I don't think the story of Snowden et. al. will be broken by one person or solved by one person but it will probably involve many people over years. I think it's an Alger Hiss sort of situation.