XDA

The New Republic has put on line an update about the three stories by the Baghdad Diarist, Scott Beauchamp, which have been criticized by many and investigated by the Army (who declared them almost completely false). The editors at TNR say they are standing by the stories as they continue to investigate them. It is the Army which is the bad guy here, for leaking true information (and misinformation), according to TNR.

I'm confused; if Beauchamp can and did talk to them (without his squad leader present) and they have talked to other soldiers (whom they claim backed up Beauchamp's unlikely accounts) what are they waiting on the Army for? Tell us who said the stories were true and let the press and bloggers (mainly bloggers) investigate what those guys said. Silence for nearly seven weeks has seemed like an ashamed unwillingness to face that fact that TNR has, yet again, published fiction as fact.

Here are links to some of the recent stuff from the people who have written often and well about this story for the three months it has been festering: Malkin; Bryan Preston; Ace; Bob Owens (from yesterday); and Confederate Yankee. No one seems too impressed with TNR's current stance.

Here is what I can add: In his second piece for TNR titled "Dead of Night" Beauchamp wrote:

Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.

Square backed shell casing? The Glock pistols in 9mm have round shell casings, just like all firearms now in use on the Earth.

Only the Iraqi police use Glocks? Glock pistols have been on the commercial market for decades, and there are literally dozens of stories of Glock pistols being recovered from the insurgents, in weapons caches or other raids, and on the black market for the past four years. This claim simply isn't supported by reality... (last paragraph here). (Also I posted a photo of an American soldier in Iraq with a Glock here).

If you're wrong about some things, it is difficult for others to have confidence that you're right about other things.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

William Blake

Apparently, Franklin Foer is a Blake fan. Yesterday, Drudge showed and then withdrew links to two transcripts of conversations various editors at The New Republic had with the Baghdad Fabulist, Scott Beauchamp and the Army report of its investigation into his writings, which slightly dissed his fellow troops. The withdrawal caused some headscratching. Were they fakes? Had Drudge been had?

No. Here is what editor Franklin Foer told unprepared Howard Kurtz: [Beauchamp] didn’t stand by his stories in that conversation, he didn’t recant his stories...He obviously was under considerable duress during that conversation, with his commanding officer in the room with him.

While the discussion “was extremely frustrating and engendered doubts,” Foer said, Beauchamp defended his story in a subsequent conversation that was conducted with no superiors present.

That's not saying the transcripts are fake. Indeed Foer is saying they are real and accurate.

However, the editors are sticking with the stories, based on that second telephone call they had with Beauchamp when we wasn't so intimidated, and on the unnamed other corroborating soldiers: Foer continued to defend the article days later. He did so again yesterday, reiterating that other soldiers whom the magazine would not identify had confirmed the allegations.

Please show us the transcript of that second conversation. Please identify the soldiers who told you what Beauchamp wrote was true. Please conclude the investigation and tell us ALL you found. Some time during this year would be nice.

Although I'm not a pilot, I'm told that there is a time when an airplane stall becomes an unrecoverable dive. That time for the TNR appears to be about now.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism

The Baghdad Diarist at The New Republic, Scott Beauchamp, published at least three stories in TNR which milbloggers and fellow traveler chickenhawks, like me, doubted. They were incredibly tame as far as accusations of soldier war crimes go (no cutting off ears, etc. or even waging war in the fashion of Jen-ghis Khan) and at worst even the most egregious of Beauchamp's fables would be, if true, merely a war faux pas. But they weren't true as reported by blogger the Confederate Yankee's source in the military in Iraq. Then about three months went by with the TNR doing an 'investigation.' Crickets chirped.

Today, Drudge posted a story that the Beauchamp fables have collapsed and included links to transcripts of the phone call TNR editors had with Beauchamp in early September and a copy of the army report. It seemed just as we suspected. Then the links disappeared and now I can't find the story. TNR's site is still in cricket filled summer but the guys who have been all over the story are still all over it and wondering, like I am, where the Drudge story went, and why even now TNR is still stonewalling.

It's a mystery which will probably not last too much longer.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism

Welshman Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards Blog has a good set of steps for The New Republic to undertake to clear its very tarnished reputation in light of what now appears to be another writer of fiction (like Stephen Glass) masquerading as a journalist, namely, the Baghdad Diarist, Scott Beauchamp. It boils down to this--fire everyone in charge and then independently investigate all aspects of the stories including what was done at TNR to nurture Pvt. Beauchamp, and then tell us about everything they find.

Right now the decibels of the crickets chirping is about 90 and growing louder and more ominous with each passing day. When editor Franklin Foer took over for fast talking, slow thinking Peter Beinart in February of this year, the New York Times reported that Foer was taking over the helm of a magazine which had lost nearly 40% of its already low circulation in four years. It doesn't appear they have a lot of cushion left to be losing 40% more, but they will if they continue to let this matter fester.

Having said all that, this really is nothing. Even if everything Beauchamp wrote was true, all he accused himself and fellow soldiers of doing was being rude and insensitive and killing dogs. Wow. War is indeed Hell. It's the cover-up that is doing the lyin's share of the damage.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism

The New Republic continues to release information in drips and dribbles about suspected Steven Glass memorial guest writer Scott Beauchamp. It doesn't appear they are doing themselves any good. Here's the latest from TNR re L'Affaire Beauchamp:

...we continue to investigate the anecdotes recounted in the Baghdad Diarist. Unfortunately, our efforts have been severely hampered by the U.S. Army. Although the Army says it has investigated Beauchamp's article and has found it to be false, it has refused our--and others'--requests to share any information or evidence from its investigation. What's more, the Army has rejected our requests to speak to Beauchamp himself, on the grounds that it wants "to protect his privacy."

At the same time the military has stonewalled our efforts to get to the truth, it has leaked damaging information about Beauchamp to conservative bloggers.

Here is how the Weekly Standard (by Michael Goldfarb who now owns this story) responds, with a note from Col. Steve Boylan :

We are not stonewalling anyone. There are official statements that are out there are on the record from several of us and nothing has changed.

We are not preventing him from speaking to TNR or anyone. He has full access to the Morale Welfare and Recreation phones that all the other members of the unit are free to use. It is my understanding that he has been informed of the requests to speak to various members of the media, both traditional and non-traditional and has declined. That is his right.

We will not nor can we force a Soldier to talk to the media or his family or anyone really for that matter in these types of issues.

As Mark Steyn writes, quoting Goldfarb: ...the army isn't stonewalling, Private Beauchamp is.

Steyn has more here.

So the Army won't produce what it has discovered because of statutory confidentiality and TNR won't let anyone else interview the 5 'corroborating' soldiers, to which it continues to cling to like a drowning man a straw, because it granted them anonymity, something a lot of truth tellers need and desire. Crickets madly chirp as the two gunfighters stare at each other under the scorching Arizona sky.

I predict the dam will burst by this time next week. The deluge will not touch Goldfarb and the other "people with ideological agendas" questioning this tempest in a teapot set of stories. I wonder if any real journalist will throw TNR editors a lifeline?

UPDATE: Krauthammer, as usual, had some good thoughts on the subject.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism

Michael Goldfarb over at the Weekly Standard has published leaked information from the Army's investigation of the three anti-troop stories by soldier Scott Beauchamp published by the New Republic and it's a killer:

...Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.

[...]

According to the military source, Beauchamp's recantation was volunteered on the first day of the military's investigation. So as Beauchamp was in Iraq signing an affidavit denying the truth of his stories, the New Republic was publishing a statement from him on its website on July 26, in which Beauchamp said, "I'm willing to stand by the entirety of my articles for the New Republic using my real name."

As we lawyers dream of asking--so were you lying then or are you lying now?

We'll see what TNR editors say when they get back from 'vacation.' So far it's just cricket chirping.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt's producer, Duane Patterson, (back to blogging at Townhall) has some good thoughts on this mess. Since TNR confirmed all but one of Beauchamp's 'lies' after he had allegedly recanted, a lot of us want to know how exactly they blew the fact checking long after the stories were published. A small story, perhaps, but telling of the bigger lefty dominated media picture.

UPDATE II: Here's a telling bit from the TNR's doubling down last month on the apparent lies they had published, and which the editors claim were fact checked before publication:

Most important, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp's company, and all corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.) (Emphasis added). Yeah, I bet.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism

A lot has been made of the three stories by Scott Beauchamp (under a pseudonym) which appeared in the New Republic, a small magazine of the left which has had bad luck with lying, making it up from whole cloth, reporters like Stephen Glass. Scott Beauchamp is a soldier and frustrated writer who was the boyfriend and is now the husband of a TNR staffer. The three stories were: 1) His making fun of a woman burned and disfigured by an IED; 2) A soldier picking up a skull fragment from a long dead little boy and wearing it like a yarmulke; and, 3) A soldier using his Bradly Fighting Vehicle to run over things including dogs. Regarding the second two, all I can say is oh, the horror, the horror*. But the first one bugs me still. All of the stories were to show the deadened soul war afflicts to the average soldier, or, as the TNR editors describe it--the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war.

Now the TNR is doubling down. They have finished their investigation of the stories (after they were published--isn't that the wrong way to do it?) and they are satisfied with the accuracy of each. Oh, but about the first one they say, there is a single mistake--the mocking of the burned woman didn't take place in Iraq between combat patrols, but in Kuwait before Scott Beauchamp got into any sort of combat, or had any sort of contact with the soul deadening aspect of war. I guess it was the result of the morally and emotionally distorting effects of flying in from Germany or, more likely, Beauchamp's just a jerk. As the incomparable Mark Steyn put it: War is hell, but, if you beat up a bloke in a pub in southern England a year before D-Day, that may not be the best anecdote to prove your point.

Ace blogger Ace of Spades takes the TNR editors on in high art mocking form:

TNR calls this an “error.” Error? Mistake? He was off by an entire country and something like nine months?

This is what TNR terms an “error,” a “mistake”? And when they “fact-checked” this beforehand, how did their “rigorous editing and fact-checking” miss the fact this took place in another country, before actual deployment?

I’m reminded of Steven Wright’s joke: “The other day I was… oh wait, that was someone else.”

Could happen to anyone, really. Common mistake.

What made this tall tale smell (and not “smell good,” per TNR’s standard of “fact-checking”) was that no one could figure out what the hell a badly disfigured woman — obviously a medical evacuation case — was doing wandering around a Forward Operating Base in the first place. A med-evac was there… why? In the thick of combat and high-tempo activity… why? What is FOB Falcon, a goddamned sanitarium/spa? Do they have lovely regenerative baths there?

It also didn’t help that no one — no one spoken to — could remember seeing such a woman on the base.

But the TNR isn't the only body investigating the three stories. The army has apparently finished its vetting of the truth of the stories post publication and here, according to milblogger Matt Sanchez, is its conclusion: After a thorough investigation that lasted nearly a week the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division has concluded that the allegations made by Private Thomas Scott Beauchamp, the "Baghdad Diarist", have been "refuted by members of his platoon and proven to be false" (Emphasis added).

Whom to believe?



*Imperial Japanese troops in Nanjing, China, in early Winter 1937-38, used to cut holes in the sides of women and young girls who were being raped by three soldiers so that the victims were physically capable of being raped by a fourth or fifth impatient soldier. After knowing that little fact, disrespect to part of a long dead corpse, or running over a dog with an APC, pale to actual and utter insignificance.

UPDATE: The Confederate Yankee is reporting that the Army's conclusion to its investigation of Beauchamp is officially he's lying. No one in the unit corroborated what Beauchamp wrote. Col. Stevan Boylan had this to say:

To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?
Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by thecommand and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon andcompany were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

Hmmm.

Labels: The New Republic; Free Form Journalism