Scott Thomas
Posted at 8:19am on Aug. 11, 2007 My last word on Scott Thomas Dirtbag
Seriously.
By Jeff Emanuel
Erick handled this yesterday, and I'm a little busy, but I did want to weigh in this one last time on Le Affaire STB.
When presented with what they viewed as a validation of their beliefs, as well as the Next Big Story about American military depravity, The New Republic decided to rush the story to press, rather than to take the chance that fact-checking would reveal a chink in their superstar contributor's armor.
Even if TNR's masthead, and their vociferous supporters in the leftosphere, will not alter their views of the American military as a result of this incident, it is important for the public to learn that these tales of depravity and inhumanity turned out simply to be the exaggerations and fevered delusions of one troubled young man who, as the alleged incident with the woman shows, was in such a state long before he ever experienced the horrors of war.
When I was embedded with the 1-4 Cavalry at FOB Falcon this spring, the unit had nearly reached double-digits in school refurbishments. They had secured large swaths of their area of operations in Baghdad, and had made possible the return of several families, displaced by the heavy fighting there previously, to their homes. While so many soldiers in the US Army are -- and long have been -- young in years, and often act as such when off duty, I never once witnessed a single soldier acting even remotely like Beauchamp portrayed them in his incredibly offensive Baghdad Diaries.
While proving them to be incorrect is satisfying, and serves to validate the majority opinion that our soldiers are not inhuman monsters, dwelling on his accounts at any length takes away from the time which we could be using to recount the far greater number of stories about US military goodness, courage, and heroism.
When the Beauchamp story was first beginning to be sniffed out as being possibly false, I made an offer to TNR to investigate the veracity of Beauchamp's claims for them, as I will be back at FOB Falcon (where Beauchamp is stationed) this September as part of my current two-month front line embed in Iraq.
They never responded.
I believe that far less damage would have been done to them if they had.
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Posted at 10:15am on Aug. 10, 2007 All the Soldiers Refute All the Claims. All of them.
By Erick
Others, like Jeff, will I'm sure say more better than I, but the day should not get too far gone without mentioning this AP report:
The Army said this week it had concluded an investigation of Beauchamp's claims and found them false."During that investigation, all the soldiers from his unit refuted all claims that Pvt. Beauchamp made in his blog," Sgt. 1st Class Robert Timmons, a spokesman in Baghdad for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan., said in an e-mail interview.
The New Republic used Scott Thomas Beauchamp used the New Republic to expound on how war turns all soldiers into rogue cretins. All those soldiers, at least the ones Scott Thomas Beauchamp served with, have now refuted all of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's claims.
Are all the soldiers liars or just Scott Thomas Beauchamp? And if all soldiers are liars, isn't Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a soldier himself, a liar? Or are only those soldiers Scott Thomas Beauchamp serves with day in and day out sharing the same experiences liars?
TheNew Republic still has a lot of explaining to do.
Posted in Scott Thomas | The New Republic | War — Comments (26)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 2:11am on Aug. 3, 2007 The New Republic meets Dan Rather (and finds that they have a surprising amount in common) [Updated repeatedly]
The other shoe is starting to drop, and there's nobody there to catch it.
By Jeff Emanuel
Update 3: TNR's last paragraph just doesn't hold water (much like the rest of the editorial). The claim that their attempt to "re-report" the case was stopped in-progress by the Army's opening of an investigation is belied by this statement made by the editors last week:
According to Major Kirk Luedeke, a public affairs officer at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a formal military investigation has also been launched into the incidents described in the piece.
Although the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published, we have decided to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail
So last week, the Army investigation began before TNR's "re-reporting" did, and this week the Army's beginning its investigation halted TNR's already-in-progress "re-reporting"?
Update 2: Mike Goldfarb has posted his email exchange with TNR's Franklin Foer at the beginning of the controversy.
Update: Greyhawk points out via email:
Beuhring is a waypoint - a stop-off on the way into Iraq. As such, people come and go all the time, the population is extremely transitory but always large. Because of this, Beauchamp's current version of the story is one that will be impossible to prove or disprove - it's almost akin to claiming "actually I saw her at McDonalds in the Atlanta Airport one Saturday afternoon".
But ... the key point - this is a "pre-war" story, not a tale of the effects of war on American soft tissue.
This is a very important point; given TNR's claim that the entire purpose behind the series was to describe "the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war" (calling "Beauchamp's latest...a piece [that] was a startling confession of shame about some disturbing conduct, both his own and that of his fellow soldiers"), the fact that he carried out one of the most revolting acts he describes before he ever went to Iraq and experienced "the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war says far more about his breeding and his parents' poor job of raising him to be anything other than a horrible human being than it does about the horrible President Bush and his horrible war.
As Ace of Spades puts it:
he just happened to make an "error" that blamed his vicious cruelty on Bush's war in Iraq, when the actual fact (he did this before going to Iraq) suggests his vicious cruelty is due to his genetics and upbringing.
But not quite as good an opening graf that way, eh?
So he makes "a mistake," forgetting that Kuwait is not in Iraq.
The New Republic today published an editorial on the Scott Thomas Beauchamp situation and on their attempts to "re-report" his anecdotes with further investigation (always a great idea for a "journalistic" outlet that wishes to be respected).
What did they have to say? In a nutshell: Beauchamp was discovered by "Elspeth Reeve, a TNR reporter-researcher, whom he later married." What he had to say was believable because he was a soldier in Iraq and because "conservatives and liberals alike praised" his first essay. Further:
All of Beauchamp's essays were fact-checked before publication. We checked the plausibility of details with experts, contacted a corroborating witness, and pressed the author for further details. But publishing a first-person essay from a war zone requires a measure of faith in the writer. Given what we knew of Beauchamp, personally and professionally, we credited his report. After questions were raised about the veracity of his essay, TNR extensively re-reported Beauchamp's account
Read on.
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