A BIG LETDOWN - U.S. TROOPS TIRED OF ADMINISTRATION LIES
JEFFREY KOFMAN
ABC NEWS.COM
7.17.03
FALLUJAH, Iraq, July 15- The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list," he told me. He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime.
"The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz," he said.
"If Donald Rumsfeld were sitting here in front of us, what would you say to him?" I asked a group of soldiers who gathered around a table, eager to talk to a visiting reporter.
"If he was here," said Pfc. Jason Punyahotra, "I would ask him why we're still here, why we've been told so many times and it's changed."
In the back of the group, Spc. Clinton Deitz put up his hand. "If Donald Rumsfeld was here," he said, "I'd ask him for his resignation."
As you can well imagine, this didn't go down too well in the White House. Here's what happened shortly after the ABC story was aired:
The Reliable Source; [FINAL Edition]
Lloyd Grove.
The Washington Post.
Washington, D.C.: Jul 18, 2003. pg. C.03
Some folks in the White House were apparently hopping mad when ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman did a story on Tuesday's "World News Tonight" about the plummeting morale of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq.
So angry, in fact, that the next day, a White House operative alerted cyber-gossip Matt Drudge to the fact that Kofman is not only openly gay, he's Canadian.
Yesterday [Matt Drudge] told us he was unaware of the ABC story until "someone from the White House communications shop tipped me to it" along with a profile of [Jeffrey Kofman] in the gay-oriented magazine the Advocate. On Wednesday, for 6 hours 38 minutes, the Drudge Report bannered Kofman's widely quoted ABC story -- in which enlisted people questioned the Army's credibility and one irked soldier went on camera to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign -- and linked to the Advocate piece with the understated headline "ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN."
Now, how did Kofman react?
TV Man Is (Shock) Gay, And (Horror) Canadian
by Antonia Zerbisias
Published on Saturday, July 19, 2003
by the Toronto Star
Click on his [Drudge] links and you'll land on a 2001 story from The Advocate, the venerable gay and lesbian newsmagazine, which profiles Kofman, mentioning his Canadian roots, his insistence on being "openly gay," his part in establishing a gay and lesbian journalists association in Toronto and his thoughts on being "a role model."
"Now my `secret' is out," Kofman joked yesterday, after logging another 18-hour day in Baghdad.
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