The devil made him do it

[Bob Of Burleson]

Senator says he had PTSD when he wrote thesis

Associated Press

Sen. John Walsh of Montana said Wednesday his failure to attribute conclusions and verbatim passages lifted from other scholars' work in his thesis to earn a master's degree from the U.S. Army War College was an unintentional mistake caused in part by post-traumatic stress disorder.

The apparent plagiarism first reported by The New York Times was the second potentially damaging issue raised this year involving the Democrat's 33-year military career, which has been a cornerstone of his campaign to keep the seat he was appointed to in February when Max Baucus resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China.

National Democrats said Wednesday they remained "100 percent behind Sen. Walsh" in his campaign against Republican Rep. Steve Daines.

Walsh told The Associated Press when he wrote the thesis, he had PTSD from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran's recent suicide.

"I don't want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor," the senator said. "My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment."

Walsh submitted his thesis, titled "The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy," to earn his Master of Strategic Studies degree in 2007, nearly two years after he returned from Iraq and about a year before he became Montana's adjutant general overseeing the state's National Guard and Department of Military Affairs.

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[LibraryLady]

Walsh told The Associated Press when he wrote the thesis, he had PTSD from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran's recent suicide.

"I don't want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor," the senator said. "My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment."

Then what was he doing in an academic program?????
Not buying what he is selling.

[Bob Of Burleson]

I’m one of the people
Sen. John Walsh
plagiarized from

By Sean M. Lynn-Jones
The Washington Post

Sen. John Walsh (D-Mont.) rides the Senate subway Capitol Hill on June 3. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

On Wednesday afternoon, a flurry of phone calls and e-mails informed me that Sen. John Walsh (D-MT) had apparently included—verbatim and without attribution—several pages of a 1998 paper of mine in a work he submitted to the U.S. Army War College. Walsh’s paper, which also failed to properly reference the work of others, was one of the requirements for the master’s degree he received from the War College in 2007.

I was peppered with questions: How did I feel about what Senator Walsh had done? Was I furious? Had he reached out to me? Was I going to demand an apology?

Honestly, I’m not outraged. Although I don’t condone plagiarism, I was surprised and mildly flattered that Sen. Walsh had decided to incorporate so much of my paper into his, albeit without citing me once. Even in 2007, my paper, “Why the United States Should Spread Democracy,” was out of date. I wrote it in 1998, when the Clinton administration was embracing the strategy of spreading democracy.

By 2007, U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had, to put it mildly, given democracy promotion a bad name.

The paper needed significant revisions to address what had happened in those two countries, respond to criticisms, and cite the most recent literature. Nevertheless, it remained online and was often the most viewed publication on the Web site of Harvard’s Belfer Center. Ironically, Walsh’s appropriation, without citation, of sections of my paper ensures that it will enjoy a much wider readership than if he had properly footnoted it in his student work.

I also confess to some political ambivalence. As a loyal Democrat, I still harbor hopes that there will be a Democratic majority in the Senate after the November 2014 elections. The revelations about Walsh’s paper make that outcome a little less likely. A Harvard colleague e-mailed to say that he could see the post-election headline already: “Democrats lose the Senate, Fail to Attribute Research Sources Properly.” Perhaps Senator Walsh will ride out the storm, just as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Vice President Biden did. He probably shouldn’t count on any campaign contributions from me.

Sean M. Lynn-Jones is editor of the quarterly journal International Security and a research associate at the Belfer Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

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