We Made A Serious Mistake. LTG Caslen Confirms Letter Was Not His. We Correct and Apologize.

Recently we published a post with a message submitted to our site purportedly from LTG (Ret) Robert Caslen which was filled with disparaging language towards USMAData. We stated the letter was “ostensibly” from LTG Caslen, noted we couldn’t confirm its authenticity, and published it with our response, believing we had no reason to doubt its origin.

We were wrong.

LTG Caslen recently contacted us to state he did not write or send the letter and was unaware of it until it was brought to his attention. Below is his email in full, as he requested:

UD,
I just recently found out about the letter I supposedly wrote to you all, and your publication of it. I did not write what you attributed to me and had nothing to do with it, nor did I have any knowledge of it until someone brought it to my attention yesterday.

Why you would publish it without confirming I was its author is beyond me. In my opinion, what you did was slanderous and subject to litigation, and it is overall quite disgusting.

The introduction of your article stated,
“5/13 update: We have also tagged him on X and submitted a request for confirmation directly to his personal website, robertcaslen.com; no response yet, but we’ll update here when we get one.”

I certainly hope you do provide an update of my denial and include my comments. Between your comments and your readers’ responses, I’m sure you’ve enjoyed dragging me through the mud. But regardless of what you think about me or my time as Superintendent, what you’ve done is wrong, and I hope you acknowledge that as well.
Robert Caslen

cc USMA AOG

We have removed the original post including the letter and our response, to prevent any further harm. We were able then to contact him on X and verify the denial message:

We Made The Mistake

We considered the possibility of a fake submission but did not conduct sufficient checks, letting our eagerness to respond cloud our judgment. This was a serious mistake.

Regardless of whether LTG Caslen holds any of the views in the original letter, he didn’t write it and he didn’t send it, and we were wrong to publish it without waiting to get in touch with him.

By publishing the unverified letter, we misled our readers and potentially harmed LTG Caslen’s reputation. We deeply regret this error and its impact.

To the readers who asked why we didn’t wait for confirmation: You were right. We should have done more to ensure accuracy. And now we have done something wrong, unjust, and untrustworthy. In the future, all diligence will be complete. No one will be quoted without fully-confident verification.

LTG Caslen, we sincerely apologize for our error and any distress it has caused.