Compassionate Left Puts US Soldiers in The Cross-Hairs Yet Again
Compassionate Left Puts US Soldiers in The Cross-Hairs Yet Again
This whole story made me want to vomit. Its hilarious how the far-left loons get all revved up when they find a story like this, this whole "I support the troops......but I really wish they were the crazed, murderous, disgusting creatures that I imagine them to be" nonsense is absurd.
This is the latest such example.......I'll call it....the Jessie MacBeth redux, except, this kid at least happened to be in Iraq. No matter how improbable or error-ridden this blog was, people were up in arms, praising this kid for his honesty for "FINALLY EXPOSING THE TRUTH!" Too bad, for what seems to be the 100th time it was all a bunch of BS, just like the MacBeth saga.
It only seems that way to you because you spend too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh. First! Stampeditontopnotouchbackstookthekeyandflusheddown thetoiletandtoucheda doorknaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwb!
Yet another article. Apparently the New Republic has a history of pushing this same sort of bulls%^t.
NEW YORK - A magazine gets a hot story straight from a soldier in Iraq and publishes his writing, complete with gory details, under a pseudonym. The stories are chilling: An Iraqi boy befriends American troops and later has his tongue cut out by insurgents. Soldiers mock a disfigured woman sitting near them in a dining hall. As a diversion, soldiers run over dogs with armored personnel carriers. Compelling stuff, and, according to the Army, not true.
Three articles by the soldier have run since January in The New Republic, a liberal magazine with a small circulation owned by Canadian company CanWest Corp. The stories, which ran under the name "Scott Thomas," were called into question by The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine with a small circulation owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The Standard last month challenged bloggers to check the dispatches.
Since then, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry, has come forward as the author. The New Republic said that Beauchamp "came to its attention" through Elspeth Reeve, a reporter-researcher at the magazine he later married.
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 Weekly Standard said Beauchamp signed a sworn statement admitting all three articles were exaggerations and falsehoods.
Calls to Editor Franklin Foer at The New Republic in Washington were not returned, but the magazine said on its Web site that it has conducted its own investigation and stands by Beauchamp's work.
In its note posted Aug. 2, it said, "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 the pieces were questioned, the magazine said it extensively re-reported his account, contacting dozens of people, including former soldiers, forensic experts, war reporters and Army public affairs officers.
The New Republic said it also spoke to five members of Beauchamp's company, all of whom corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes but requested anonymity.
In the note, the magazine said the incident with the disfigured woman took place in Kuwait, not Iraq. The magazine also said the Army took away Beauchamp's mobile phone and his computer and he "is currently unable to speak to even his family."
The Associated Press has been unable to reach Beauchamp, and the Army said details of the investigation were not expected to be released. "Personnel matters are handled internally; they are not discussed publicly," said Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa, an Army spokesman.
Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., said granting a writer anonymity "raises questions about authenticity and legitimacy."
"Anonymity allows an individual to make accusations against others with impunity," Steele said. "In this case, the anonymous diarist was accusing other soldiers of various levels of wrongdoing that were, at the least, moral failures, if not violations of military conduct. The anonymity further allows the writer to sidestep essential accountability that would exist, were he identified."
Steele said he was troubled by the fact that the magazine did not catch the scene-shifting from Kuwait to Iraq of the incident Beauchamp described involving the disfigured woman.
"If they were doing any kind of fact-checking, with multiple sources, that error ? or potential deception ? would have emerged," Steele said.
He added that he was also troubled by the relationship between Beauchamp and Reeve, his wife, who works at The New Republic. "It raises the possible specter of competing loyalties, which could undermine the credibility of the journalism," he said.
Paul McLeary, a staff writer for Columbia Journalism Review who has written about the matter, said The New Republic failed to do some basic journalistic legwork, such as calling the public affairs officer for Beauchamp's unit.
"There is a degree of trust and faith editors have to put in their writers," McLeary said. "If you're on a tight deadline, you have to go as far as you can. The New Republic definitely didn't go as far as it could in terms of checking out its stories."
This isn't the first time New Republic's credibility has been called into question.
In 1998, the magazine fired Stephen Glass after reports surfaced that he had enhanced a story about computer hackers. Editors at the magazine researched his work and said they found fabrications in 27 of the 41 articles he had written for the publication over three years.
Valuable info from people who were on the ground and flatly deny Beauchamp's accounts.
Despite the fact that the Army has officially denied the veracity of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's "reports" from Iraq, the New Republic continues to stand by its fabricating writer
In the New York Times this morning:
In an e-mail message, Mr. Foer said, "Thus far, we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have," adding, "We hope the military will share what it has learned so that we can resolve this discrepancy."
And in the Washington Post:
But New Republic Editor Franklin Foer is standing his ground. "We've talked to military personnel directly involved in the events that Scott Thomas Beauchamp described, and they corroborated his account," Foer said. The magazine granted anonymity to the other soldiers it cited.
And also at WaPo:
Foer said the New Republic had asked Maj. Steven Lamb, an Army spokesman, about the allegation that Beauchamp had recanted his articles in a sworn statement, and that Lamb had replied: "I have no knowledge of that." Before going incommunicado, Beauchamp "told us that he signed a statement that did not contradict his writings for the New Republic," Foer said.
"Thus far," he added, "we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have."
In both newspapers, Foer issued the statement that "we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have."
That, gentle readers, is a deception.
TNR senior editor Jason Zengerle has admitted to receiving an email from U.S. Army PAO Renee D. Russo that as far as the "burned woman" claim in "Shock Troops" goes, that:
"a couple of soldiers did say that [they] heard rumors about the incident, but nothing based on fact. More like an urban legand [sic]."
This was published at National Review Online's The Corner in an email from Zengerle to John Podhoretz.
I'd note further that Zengerle claims here that he got this information only after the editors at The New Republic posted their August 2 goal-post moving claim that Beauchamp changed both the date and location of the alleged verbal abuse (From FOB Falcon after Beauchamp had been scarred by the horrors of war, to Camp Beuhring, Kuwait, before he ever entered combat).
No one at TNR seems willing to address the obvious fact that for one to blame his callousness on being psychologically traumatized by the horrors of combat, it is necessary to first be in combat.
By shifting this critical goalpost, Beauchamp is admitting that not only had he not "seen the elephant," he hadn't even been to the zoo.
And probably much to Foer's chagrin, it isn't just the military that is disputing this claim.
Last night I posted an email from a contractor at Camp Arijan, Kuwait, where Beauchamp seems to have been suffering from "pre-traumatic stress disorder."
William "Big Country" Coughlin has been at Camp Arijan since February, and flatly denies that such a woman exists:
I've been in the Middle East since March of 2004. I started contracting with CACI and have worked for KBR as well. I have had one six month break 'in service' from October of 2006 to February of 2007. (I had to let the kids remember who Dad was and who was paying the bills!) I was in Baghdad at Camp Victory for 22 months, and I have been here on Arifjan since February of this year, and NEVER have I seen ANY female contractor with ANY sort of wounds described by PV2 Beauchamp. I work EXTENSIVELY with ALL aspects of personnel here on Arifjan and can say without a doubt that he's full of it. Also, for the record, in my experience, ANY and ALL contractors who are wounded in any way, shape or form are usually evacuated posthaste due to the liability issues involved with the companies that hired them. KBR and CACI both had in place strict rules regarding hostile action and evacuation of ANYONE who might have been wounded or otherwise "injured in line of duty" so as to cover themselves legally in case of potential lawsuits and otherwise.
The idea that a female contractor with a 'half melted face' beggars belief...
This whole story made me want to vomit. Its hilarious how the far-left loons get all revved up when they find a story like this, this whole "I support the troops......but I really wish they were the crazed, murderous, disgusting creatures that I imagine them to be" nonsense is absurd.
This is the latest such example.......I'll call it....the Jessie MacBeth redux, except, this kid at least happened to be in Iraq. No matter how improbable or error-ridden this blog was, people were up in arms, praising this kid for his honesty for "FINALLY EXPOSING THE TRUTH!" Too bad, for what seems to be the 100th time it was all a bunch of BS, just like the MacBeth saga.
LOL...........Bradley Vehicles now swerve???? O RLY???????
On top of that, he talks about wearing people's skulls as helmets, and how he mutilated and raped a woman back in Kuwait, due to the "stress of war." I didn't know that there was a war going on Kuwait, and considering that he had been in the country for less than a month at the time, it seems if nothing else, that he'd be admitting to his own psychopathic tendencies.
Somehow I spent 14 months in Iraq, all over the country, without snapping, as did all the folks from my unit. Stuff like this really disgusts me when an moron tries to slander so many good folks, and then a bunch of looney idiots jump on the bandwagon because they are finally hearing exactly what they want to believe. Yeah i read about this several days ago. I meant to post the article, but never got around to it. The new republic is pure trash. What I don't get is that there are plenty of legitimate ways of trashing this war. The fact that they would feel the need to resort to blatant lies and fabrications is pretty laughable.
Lastly, the facts as they are known currently.
Basically, I think the New Republic just outdid Newsweek/CBS/Dan Rather/Mary Mapes/Jessie Macbeth, by a long shot. They used a guy with a family connection to the magazine(his wife is a TNR reporter), a guy who is an aspiring writer, who joined the Army so that he would have "credibility" for his journalism career. The magazine clearly did not fact-check anything, all the facts thus far have shown that this is all a farce, and this is the biggest and most egregious example of a news outlet reporting literary fantasy as indisputable truth. I wonder if he brought a Camera with him. Maybe John Kerry lent him his old 8MM.
I wonder if he brought a Camera with him. Maybe John Kerry lent him his old 8MM.
This really reminds me of the fake but accurate Dan Rather affair. The stuff that Beauchamps wrote obviously fabricated.
- Wearing a child's skull under a helmet. (apparently the fit is too tight to accomodate this.)
- Square-backed bullets indicating Glocks. (no such thing as square backed bullets)
- Melted face lady seen almost every night. (nope. Not in Iraq. Must have been Kuwait.)
- Stratified graves. (Gee, can't remember where that is.)
- Bradley's lurching to catch dogs, 3 in a short time. (Hmmm. That would be an amazing ability. I can't do this with a 1 ton car, but I suppose a 33 ton tank makes it easier.)
But, TNR still is pretty sure he is telling the truth.
It only seems that way to you because you spend too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh. Are you suggesting that if someone is disgusted by this lying asshat that the problem is with them being too far right-wing?
- Square-backed bullets indicating Glocks. (no such thing as square backed bullets) hahahahahahaha
This whole story made me want to vomit. Its hilarious how the far-left loons get all revved up when they find a story like this, this whole "I support the troops......but I really wish they were the crazed, murderous, disgusting creatures that I imagine them to be" nonsense is absurd.
This is the latest such example.......I'll call it....the Jessie MacBeth redux, except, this kid at least happened to be in Iraq. No matter how improbable or error-ridden this blog was, people were up in arms, praising this kid for his honesty for "FINALLY EXPOSING THE TRUTH!" Too bad, for what seems to be the 100th time it was all a bunch of BS, just like the MacBeth saga.
It only seems that way to you because you spend too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh. First! Stampeditontopnotouchbackstookthekeyandflusheddown thetoiletandtoucheda doorknaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwb!
Answer:
Yet another article. Apparently the New Republic has a history of pushing this same sort of bulls%^t.
NEW YORK - A magazine gets a hot story straight from a soldier in Iraq and publishes his writing, complete with gory details, under a pseudonym. The stories are chilling: An Iraqi boy befriends American troops and later has his tongue cut out by insurgents. Soldiers mock a disfigured woman sitting near them in a dining hall. As a diversion, soldiers run over dogs with armored personnel carriers. Compelling stuff, and, according to the Army, not true.
Three articles by the soldier have run since January in The New Republic, a liberal magazine with a small circulation owned by Canadian company CanWest Corp. The stories, which ran under the name "Scott Thomas," were called into question by The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine with a small circulation owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The Standard last month challenged bloggers to check the dispatches.
Since then, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry, has come forward as the author. The New Republic said that Beauchamp "came to its attention" through Elspeth Reeve, a reporter-researcher at the magazine he later married.
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 Weekly Standard said Beauchamp signed a sworn statement admitting all three articles were exaggerations and falsehoods.
Calls to Editor Franklin Foer at The New Republic in Washington were not returned, but the magazine said on its Web site that it has conducted its own investigation and stands by Beauchamp's work.
In its note posted Aug. 2, it said, "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 the pieces were questioned, the magazine said it extensively re-reported his account, contacting dozens of people, including former soldiers, forensic experts, war reporters and Army public affairs officers.
The New Republic said it also spoke to five members of Beauchamp's company, all of whom corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes but requested anonymity.
In the note, the magazine said the incident with the disfigured woman took place in Kuwait, not Iraq. The magazine also said the Army took away Beauchamp's mobile phone and his computer and he "is currently unable to speak to even his family."
The Associated Press has been unable to reach Beauchamp, and the Army said details of the investigation were not expected to be released. "Personnel matters are handled internally; they are not discussed publicly," said Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa, an Army spokesman.
Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., said granting a writer anonymity "raises questions about authenticity and legitimacy."
"Anonymity allows an individual to make accusations against others with impunity," Steele said. "In this case, the anonymous diarist was accusing other soldiers of various levels of wrongdoing that were, at the least, moral failures, if not violations of military conduct. The anonymity further allows the writer to sidestep essential accountability that would exist, were he identified."
Steele said he was troubled by the fact that the magazine did not catch the scene-shifting from Kuwait to Iraq of the incident Beauchamp described involving the disfigured woman.
"If they were doing any kind of fact-checking, with multiple sources, that error ? or potential deception ? would have emerged," Steele said.
He added that he was also troubled by the relationship between Beauchamp and Reeve, his wife, who works at The New Republic. "It raises the possible specter of competing loyalties, which could undermine the credibility of the journalism," he said.
Paul McLeary, a staff writer for Columbia Journalism Review who has written about the matter, said The New Republic failed to do some basic journalistic legwork, such as calling the public affairs officer for Beauchamp's unit.
"There is a degree of trust and faith editors have to put in their writers," McLeary said. "If you're on a tight deadline, you have to go as far as you can. The New Republic definitely didn't go as far as it could in terms of checking out its stories."
This isn't the first time New Republic's credibility has been called into question.
In 1998, the magazine fired Stephen Glass after reports surfaced that he had enhanced a story about computer hackers. Editors at the magazine researched his work and said they found fabrications in 27 of the 41 articles he had written for the publication over three years.
Answer:
Valuable info from people who were on the ground and flatly deny Beauchamp's accounts.
Despite the fact that the Army has officially denied the veracity of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's "reports" from Iraq, the New Republic continues to stand by its fabricating writer
In the New York Times this morning:
In an e-mail message, Mr. Foer said, "Thus far, we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have," adding, "We hope the military will share what it has learned so that we can resolve this discrepancy."
And in the Washington Post:
But New Republic Editor Franklin Foer is standing his ground. "We've talked to military personnel directly involved in the events that Scott Thomas Beauchamp described, and they corroborated his account," Foer said. The magazine granted anonymity to the other soldiers it cited.
And also at WaPo:
Foer said the New Republic had asked Maj. Steven Lamb, an Army spokesman, about the allegation that Beauchamp had recanted his articles in a sworn statement, and that Lamb had replied: "I have no knowledge of that." Before going incommunicado, Beauchamp "told us that he signed a statement that did not contradict his writings for the New Republic," Foer said.
"Thus far," he added, "we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have."
In both newspapers, Foer issued the statement that "we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have."
That, gentle readers, is a deception.
TNR senior editor Jason Zengerle has admitted to receiving an email from U.S. Army PAO Renee D. Russo that as far as the "burned woman" claim in "Shock Troops" goes, that:
"a couple of soldiers did say that [they] heard rumors about the incident, but nothing based on fact. More like an urban legand [sic]."
This was published at National Review Online's The Corner in an email from Zengerle to John Podhoretz.
I'd note further that Zengerle claims here that he got this information only after the editors at The New Republic posted their August 2 goal-post moving claim that Beauchamp changed both the date and location of the alleged verbal abuse (From FOB Falcon after Beauchamp had been scarred by the horrors of war, to Camp Beuhring, Kuwait, before he ever entered combat).
No one at TNR seems willing to address the obvious fact that for one to blame his callousness on being psychologically traumatized by the horrors of combat, it is necessary to first be in combat.
By shifting this critical goalpost, Beauchamp is admitting that not only had he not "seen the elephant," he hadn't even been to the zoo.
And probably much to Foer's chagrin, it isn't just the military that is disputing this claim.
Last night I posted an email from a contractor at Camp Arijan, Kuwait, where Beauchamp seems to have been suffering from "pre-traumatic stress disorder."
William "Big Country" Coughlin has been at Camp Arijan since February, and flatly denies that such a woman exists:
I've been in the Middle East since March of 2004. I started contracting with CACI and have worked for KBR as well. I have had one six month break 'in service' from October of 2006 to February of 2007. (I had to let the kids remember who Dad was and who was paying the bills!) I was in Baghdad at Camp Victory for 22 months, and I have been here on Arifjan since February of this year, and NEVER have I seen ANY female contractor with ANY sort of wounds described by PV2 Beauchamp. I work EXTENSIVELY with ALL aspects of personnel here on Arifjan and can say without a doubt that he's full of it. Also, for the record, in my experience, ANY and ALL contractors who are wounded in any way, shape or form are usually evacuated posthaste due to the liability issues involved with the companies that hired them. KBR and CACI both had in place strict rules regarding hostile action and evacuation of ANYONE who might have been wounded or otherwise "injured in line of duty" so as to cover themselves legally in case of potential lawsuits and otherwise.
The idea that a female contractor with a 'half melted face' beggars belief...
Answer:
This whole story made me want to vomit. Its hilarious how the far-left loons get all revved up when they find a story like this, this whole "I support the troops......but I really wish they were the crazed, murderous, disgusting creatures that I imagine them to be" nonsense is absurd.
This is the latest such example.......I'll call it....the Jessie MacBeth redux, except, this kid at least happened to be in Iraq. No matter how improbable or error-ridden this blog was, people were up in arms, praising this kid for his honesty for "FINALLY EXPOSING THE TRUTH!" Too bad, for what seems to be the 100th time it was all a bunch of BS, just like the MacBeth saga.
LOL...........Bradley Vehicles now swerve???? O RLY???????
On top of that, he talks about wearing people's skulls as helmets, and how he mutilated and raped a woman back in Kuwait, due to the "stress of war." I didn't know that there was a war going on Kuwait, and considering that he had been in the country for less than a month at the time, it seems if nothing else, that he'd be admitting to his own psychopathic tendencies.
Somehow I spent 14 months in Iraq, all over the country, without snapping, as did all the folks from my unit. Stuff like this really disgusts me when an moron tries to slander so many good folks, and then a bunch of looney idiots jump on the bandwagon because they are finally hearing exactly what they want to believe. Yeah i read about this several days ago. I meant to post the article, but never got around to it. The new republic is pure trash. What I don't get is that there are plenty of legitimate ways of trashing this war. The fact that they would feel the need to resort to blatant lies and fabrications is pretty laughable.
Answer:
Lastly, the facts as they are known currently.
Basically, I think the New Republic just outdid Newsweek/CBS/Dan Rather/Mary Mapes/Jessie Macbeth, by a long shot. They used a guy with a family connection to the magazine(his wife is a TNR reporter), a guy who is an aspiring writer, who joined the Army so that he would have "credibility" for his journalism career. The magazine clearly did not fact-check anything, all the facts thus far have shown that this is all a farce, and this is the biggest and most egregious example of a news outlet reporting literary fantasy as indisputable truth. I wonder if he brought a Camera with him. Maybe John Kerry lent him his old 8MM.
Answer:
I wonder if he brought a Camera with him. Maybe John Kerry lent him his old 8MM.
This really reminds me of the fake but accurate Dan Rather affair. The stuff that Beauchamps wrote obviously fabricated.
- Wearing a child's skull under a helmet. (apparently the fit is too tight to accomodate this.)
- Square-backed bullets indicating Glocks. (no such thing as square backed bullets)
- Melted face lady seen almost every night. (nope. Not in Iraq. Must have been Kuwait.)
- Stratified graves. (Gee, can't remember where that is.)
- Bradley's lurching to catch dogs, 3 in a short time. (Hmmm. That would be an amazing ability. I can't do this with a 1 ton car, but I suppose a 33 ton tank makes it easier.)
But, TNR still is pretty sure he is telling the truth.
Answer:
It only seems that way to you because you spend too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh. Are you suggesting that if someone is disgusted by this lying asshat that the problem is with them being too far right-wing?
Answer:
- Square-backed bullets indicating Glocks. (no such thing as square backed bullets) hahahahahahaha