I Suck At Discrediting Mainstream Media Journalists...

So there I was, working on what was sure to be a sure-fire way to prove myself within the blogging community. It started when I was surfing through Democratic Underground for a few laughs, when I ran across this thread that linked to this article: US soldiers to receive ecstasy to fight combat trauma, which was actually a reprint of this article in the Guardian. The discussions among the DUmmies in the thread focused on the assumed fact that the Pentagon was going to give MDMA to soldiers in Iraq. This clearly made no sense, so I googled a little in order to disprove this obvious falsehood. Maybe, I could even show this David Adam, Guardian Science Correspondent, to be a fraud! I looked in the FDA News database; no announcements there. While searching, I found this article in Spiegel Online. Money quote:

"The United States government has found a new way of recruiting soldiers for the Iraq war: It's offering them ecstasy. The trick is, the soldiers only get the free drugs after they have seen enough fighting to be experiencing flashbacks, recurring nightmares and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The usually tough-to-please US Food and Drug Administration has given the experimental treatments an initial go ahead and scientists in South Carolina have quickly gotten to work. "

If it turned out that the Guardian article had made these accusations as well, I'd be in the money! Links from Michelle Malkin were sure to follow, and I'd be hailed as another success story in the blogosphere! Unfortunately, it was not to be. While the Guardian article clearly doesn't go out of its way to say that active-duty soldiers won't be part of the study, and the unattributed Spiegel piece clearly wants readers to believe that, and the raving moonbats at Democratic Underground believe it implicitly, the truth is that the Guardian article does pretty much state the truth about the state of the research:

"He is about to advertise for war veterans who fought in the last five years to join the study."

Okay, so maybe that's not an example of how "researchers" had "quickly gotten to work", but it's not a smoking gun either. I guess I'll have to retire to the small dark corner of the blogosphere reserved for sub-blogs, and wait for another chance for the bright light of digital fame...

Going deep...