A lazy, ridiculous slur

Washington Free Beacon writer Adam Kredo thinks I’m somehow connected to Chuck Hagel and Chevron and Kazakhstan and… oh well, just read it.

When Kazakhstan’s riot police slaughtered dozens of striking oil field workers last year, Atlantic Council affiliate Joshua Foust rushed to discredit the reports.

Foust, a member of the Atlantic Council’s Young Atlanticist Working Group, attacked critics of the government-backed crackdown, claiming they were relying on a “completely invented body count” to “politicize” the incident.

In the lede graf he refers to, but doesn’t link, a blog post I wrote a year ago about the riots in Zhanaozen, where I said the claims that 70 protesters were gunned down was almost certainly exaggerated. Instead of linking to what I wrote, he chose instead to link to a piece of libel written by a date-raping middle aged meth addict that only comes up through determined Googling of my name — and not on the first page of the search, either.

Anyway, responding to everything in that piece, which amounts to the worst sort of guilt by association, is pointless: Kredo doesn’t care about any fact, just the straws he is grasping at to undo Chuck Hagel’s nomination. Because if he did care about facts, he would have mentioned that Hagel was also on the board of directors of the job I held at the time I wrote about Zhanaozen.

And most importantly, if Adam Kredo actually cared about facts he would have mentioned that I was right about Zhanaozen, and the claim that 70 people were killed actually was exaggerated: according to the best numbers available, the Kazakh police killed fifteen.