It's astounding. What happened to independent thinking?

about three Marines in Jimmy Webb's unit being killed. There's no evidence that the story is true, and some evidence that it is not, which neither NLS or anyone else has countered. NLS gave no source for the story, Eleanor Clift offers no independent evidence that it's true, and I've offered evidence from the Iraq Casualty Count database that seems to undermine the tale.

Jaime has responded to my pointing out the discrepancy in comments at NLS by calling me a 'hater', 'stupid', and, in a screaming OMG diary on dKos predicting that I'll have to eat my words, a Republican. Meanwhile, neither she nor Ben have responded to requests for actual facts supporting the story.

Kos repeated the NLS story uncritically on the front page, Jane Hamsher picked it up with no real questioning, jaime's diary hit the recommended list at dKos, and now something that NLS pulled out of his rear end is out there as The Truth because people would rather believe an unsourced tale than take a minute to fact check. 

Until NLS names his source or provides some evidence to support the reality of the Marine incident, there's no reason for anyone to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Has he earned it?  He's had some solid scoops, but he's also pushed a lot of gossip and rumors and emotionally charged garbage out there.

Perhaps this is true, but at this point there is insufficient evidence to support it.  Skepticism is a good thing.

which lists all Marine losses.  There are a number for both November and October that could be the ones referenced in earlier reports.  They're almost all from the 2nd and 3rd divisions, all in Anbar province with the exception of one or two in Baghdad, and some are from a Tank Division and from some LARs.  If Jimmy's in an armored unit it would be something like that.  I have my suspicions about which unit it would be, but at this point OpSec forbids getting too specific.  Thing is, it's hard to get the thing right because it's not unusual for Marines to be seconded from one unit to another unit, but they can still be listed as belonging to their old unit.  That's what happened to my niece.  On her first deployment she went from something like widget counter or something to mortuary affairs, and although she belonged to one division she was seconded to another division, regiment, and company for the deployment.  On her second deployment she was once again seconded from her home unit to yet another MA unit, THEN to an armored unit because she volunteered for different duty.  I was still writing to her at her original deployment and she was still identified as being with them, but was in fact about two hundred miles away.  Complicating the matter is that there are some regiments with companies spread out all over the place.  You'd have to know the division, regiment, and company to know where Jimmy is, and correspondingly about his unit's losses, and no one should be giving out that kind of information.

And unless there's a factor we don't know about, e.g., Jimmy moved to another location, it seems unwise to have swarmed a bit of information that potentially narrows down the location of someone who is probably the most talked about soldier in Iraq.  Assuming it's true and even if it were publicly available in a low profile way, repping it increases the likelihood that an enemy on the ground will put it together with other information.  Something like - oh yeah, that's probably the tank we hit over at so-n-so and the rest of those guys are now at blah.

As a fellow Marine, leading a wire team. I was constantly assigned to different companies. Heck at one time during training I was assigned to an Army unit. This goes on all the time and during a conflict like this one, one never knows where one will be next. For those with name recognition that is a great way of running a unit to keep others guessing.
I worry about even saying this. It is not good to talk about our way of running the military.

Gordie, Kathy, and Catzmaw. (Gordie's last sentence goes too far, though; by that logic, even the amount of detail provided in DoD casualty reports is "saying too much"). 

However, if operational security makes it impossible to produce the evidence supporting a story about someone in the military, then passing that story along is even more of  a bad idea (much less front-paging it on one of the highest-traffic blogs, or spreading it further on national TV).