Redstate

nothing to foer but foer itself

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

As Erick notes below, the Army investigation has resulted in all soldiers in Scott Thomas Beauchamp's platoon disavowing the "vignettes", as The New Republic's Frankin Foer so quaintly calls a series of direct assaults upon the reputation of the US Armed Forces, which appeared on TNR's pages. This number quite possibly includes Beauchamp himself.

There is an increasing body of evidence that not only were the Beauchamp "vignettes" false but that TNR has been a lot less than candid on its fact checking.

[UPDATE: hmmmm, maybe they just can't help themselves.]

Read on.

We know TNR's fact checking leviathan is not the reason people buy the magazine. This is the former employer of Stephen Glass... and of Scott Thomas Beauchamp... we're talking about. In their risible effort at damage control they admit that they didn't catch the fact that one of the key incidents in the story occurred in the wrong country (okay, I know, they are both hot and sandy and have oil and lots of brown folks so I see how a bunch of liberals schooled in identity politics would think they all look alike). As Charles Krauthammer notes:

Except that it is now revealed that the mess-hall incident happened before he even got to the war. On which point, the whole story -- and the whole morality tale it was meant to suggest -- collapses.

And it makes the rest of the narrative banal and uninteresting. It's the story of a disgusting human being, a mocker of the disfigured, who then goes to Iraq and, as such human beings are wont to do, finds the company of other such human beings who kill dogs for sport, wear the bones of dead children on their heads and find similar amusement in mocking the disfigured.

Since then Ace at Ace of Spades has deconstructed the list of corroborating witnesses and concludes that, fairly read, TNR may in fact have only talked to one person.

The coup, however, belongs to Confederate Yankee who actually contacts the same person TNR contacted as their expert on the Bradley. Needless to say, he doesn't get the same answers.

In a sure sign that the Four Horsemen are saddling up, even the Associated Press has decided this stinks though Captain Jamil Hussein still hasn't weighed in on the issue. When Reuters decides this is beyond the Pale, that knock at your front door will be Death, Plague, Famine, and War showing up for dinner.