HE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that 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.
Separately, we received this statement from Major Steven F. Lamb, the deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad:
An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims.
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.”
None of the MSM challenged Beauchamp’s fantasies when they were first published. And why would they? Scott’s lies fit the the story they want to believe, and tell. The challenge came from the right blogosphere and, once again, the blogosphere was the New Media venue that got it right.
The biggest mystery to me is why the mainstream media has any credibility left at all. Maybe its users aren’t looking for credibilty any more. Just reinforcement. Perhaps the MSM has become a cult, supported on faith alone, little more than the latest incarnation of the Holy Church of the True Believer.
UPDATE: So far, the TNR web site has no comment on this report.
UPDATE: Apparently TNR’s editors are on vacation.
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Did you expect different? They have another article containing allegations of atrocities and cover-up running now.
Well, they have all the traits…
PS their take on no supporting witnesses is that they’ve been ordered not to talk.
Yeah. This is a huge hit for them to take. Foer’s job is now 100% on the line. If they don’t find a way to get out in front of this (and I don’t see how they can do it) they are well and truly screwed.
Which, I guess, is why they aren’t rushing to respond. There is a hell of a lot riding on how they handle this.
I subscribed to TNR after their earlier problems, as I thought they had cleaned house.
I’m embarrassed to have been played for a fool.
I subscribed to TNR for a long time. Marty Peretz always struck me as a reasonable and intelligent guy, until he went totally in the tank for Al Gore. He embarassed himself, and I can only guess that he was promised the role of eminence grise in a Gore administration.
I let my subscription lapse around then, and never renewed. Of course, I don’t subscribe to anything paper any more.
Except for shelter mags like Dwell. For the furniture porn, you know?
Bill:
I’ve answered your questions here, and below:
1) They don’t;
2) True;
3) True; and
4) True–I call it the First Church of St. Dowd.
A decade ago, this story would have never been challenged… at least not seriously. TNR would have been able to get away with such shoddy reporting, and would have used it in order to realign the country’s perception on what is happening over in Iraq.
This story explains exactly why we lost the Vietnam War (because the media was controlled by people who were ideologically opposed to our winning it, and they deliberately mislead the public in order to sway public opinion), and why we will not lose the War on Terror. The genie is out of the bottle; Big Media’s stranglehold on The Truth has been broken.
The reason we haven’t heard from TNR is because they’ve been caught with their pants down. Caught doing the same thing that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were fired for; creating a narrative made up out of whole cloth.
The continued outing of the Big Lie that is constantly being foisted upon the world is what gives me enough optimism to believe that, yes, right will eventually triumph.
John Clifford has a good point. These allegations from Beauchamp are little different from John Kerry et al’s “Winter Soldier” fraud. They got a hell of a lot more juice out of that than they were able to get out of Beauchamp’s. Which is perhaps somewhat revealing of the nascent powers of blogs to balance the media establishment. Today I think we are at something of a stalemate, or close to it. Though it remains to be seen if the MSM’s power can be subverted entirely.
I read your last paragraph too quickly and saw the words “Just reinforcement” as “Just entertainment” the first time. Flip you for it which is truer.
We are at a stalemate in the struggle to expose the mainstream media and its evil intent until the lamestream via their political alliance with the dhimmocrats manage to silence the internet and talk radio by one ploy or another be it the fairness doctrine or its allianace with the left and its determined support of censorship that we to benignly tend to dismiss as pc and the lawsuits and hate crime legislation foisted on our country by the left wing and its buddies the islamofascists with their legions of monetarily well lubricated lawyer henchmen such Baker and Sandler.
We are at a stalemate in the struggle to expose the mainstream media and its evil intent until the lamestream via their political alliance with the dhimmocrats manage to silence the internet and talk radio by one ploy or another be it the fairness doctrine or its allianace with the left and its determined support of censorship that we to benignly tend to dismiss as pc and the lawsuits and hate crime legislation foisted on our country by the left wing and its buddies the islamofascists with their legions of monetarily well lubricated lawyer henchmen such Baker and Sandler.
I want to say something in favor of Beauchamp.
No matter his original motives, the way this thing shook out, he has effectively “pantsed” the liberal press.
Their underwear is down around their ankles now.
Let the fact that he vollunteered a total recantation mitigate our view of him in this matter.
That is all.
Robin, Have you seen today’s Opinion Journal piece by a former KGB guy?:
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy.
he biggest mystery to me is why the mainstream media has any credibility left at all. Maybe its users aren’t looking for credibilty any more.
How many original stories are generated by the “MSM”?
How many of these stories are fabricated? I am sure you will find this to be a statistically insignificant number.
How many actual reporters are in the blogosphere-I mean anywhere-reporters who regularly do the leg work required to achieve insight and perspective? Crowing about this is pretty retarded, if the “MSM” is so horrible and false why do you want them to cover stories that are important to you? Wouldn’t their unbelievability actually hurt the veracity of the claims with which you agree?
Then there is insanity like this from big thinkers likePaul
We are at a stalemate in the struggle to expose the mainstream media and its evil intent until the lamestream via their political alliance with the dhimmocrats manage to silence the internet and talk radio
You going to say that’s not nuts?
This is a non-event but I guess it’s been pretty slim pickins for you guys now that the 9/11 fear-mongering center has crumbled, and the right wing blog echo chamber needs fodder to whine about or it too will disappear.
I don’t know about TNR, but if my business was in a crisis and I was on vacation, I’d come back and DEAL WITH IT.
What? Is this the latest bulletin from lefty sockpuppet central?
Of course it’s a non-event. It only becomes an event if a conservative venue fucks up.
Do you even begin to realize how feverishly and obviously transparent your agenda is, dumbass? Probably not. If you did, you wouldn’t be quite such a dumbass.
“UPDATE: Apparently TNR’s editors are on vacation.”
Bill, THEY are always on vacation, even when they are physically present. That’s what they call empty suits.
Sigh…
One thing the left hasn’t been able to accomplish yet is to create widespread revulsion for the military, which they accomplished to a certain extent during Vietnam. Beauchamp’s fantasy was pushed in an attempt to put in place the last missing piece in re-creating the MSM’s Vietnam vision for Iraq.
They will push stories like this and damn the consequences because it is so important to completing their Iraq narrative.
Dumbass? Haha that fell pretty fast.
You make a ridiculous hyperbolic statement regarding the entirety of our media and I am a dumbass.
Funny how these threads always turn to attacks rather than address my point which was considering the thousands of unique stories generated by the media each day something like this is a non-event.
The fabrications created in order to start this Iraq adventure are somehow justified in your small hysterical perception, but we need to shut down the American press because some seldom read nothing mag didn’t fact check some sensationalistic diary.
The fact that this little nugget is raising your ire about the media highlights all the things that don’t. You and those like you are mu ch more reliable liars and far more duplicitous. Instapundit and Michelle Malkin and Rush are journalists? I guess stirring up the villagers in your rapidly shrinking village is a way to make yourself relevant now that those towers are starting to lose their manipulative power for freaks like yourself.
Yes, exactly. A lefty dumbass spouting fuckwitted puppet-points from lefty dumbass central.
Let’s look at the record of the MSM, shall we?
Back Talk: The Liberal Media Hall of Shame
But you won’t, will you? Because you can’t.
And, of course, because you’re a brain-sucked, True-Believing, left-wing dumbass with an agenda as nakedly obvious as the fact that, intellectually speaking, you aren’t wearing any pants.
Not a pretty sight.
Tom sounds a little like someone who has just been told that the tooth fairy is a fantasy.
He has a point — there are lots of legitimate, hard-working and respectable journalists out there. There are also a lot of slithering toads who will do and say anything either to get column inches from their “editor” or propogate their dogma. Maybe we should qualify “MSM” to refer to those media outlets that have clearly indicated a suppressed bias but still foist their hypocritical cant on us as “journalism.”
Since that is a very large field, it will be easy to confuse it with virtually all “journalists,” but we have the same problem with psychiatrists and golf teaching professionals. Only one in 500 actually know what they are doing, and do it well.
You are all over the place. Fabricated stories…..hmmmm, should I take a look at Rush’s transcripts and search under Vince Foster? Or maybe the entirely fabricated Pelosi military plane episode. Sort of a ton of them.
You are such a champion of the truth and such a supporter of the troops shouldn’t you post each day regarding the much greater web of deceit surrounding Pat Tillman? Think about these two cases in comparison, there really is none. Now should the military be disbanded because they covered up the death of one of their members and shamefully treated his family? Instances, even several, don’t establish a quality of such a large undertaking as the American press or the armed services. But this isn’t about that anyway, it’s about you, and you crying and whining and screeching to further your agenda.
I am not sure why you are calling me a puppet but feed your frenzy if that’s where you find your motivation.
“Listen to them, children of the night…”
Count Dracula
Because you are. But I didn’t just call you a “puppet.” I called you a A lefty dumbass spouting fuckwitted puppet-points from lefty dumbass central..
Not to mention, a brain-sucked, True-Believing, left-wing dumbass with an agenda as nakedly obvious as the fact that, intellectually speaking, you aren’t wearing any pants.
Can’t you get anything right, Dumbass?
Another content free moron blogging bullshit nothingness wrapped up in and soiling the flag he claims to love so much.
Keep up the good work.
via MAX BLUMENTHAL:
The war in Iraq has sparked a parallel war between two of Washington’s most prominent partisan political publications, The New Republic and the Weekly Standard. The war has been akin to the ongoing seige of Baghdad’s Green Zone, with the Standard playing the role of Iraqi insurgents, lobbing mortars over the Green Zone gates while TNR rushes to shore up its defenses.
The war began on July 13, when The New Republic published a “Baghdad Diary” by “Scott Thomas,” an Army private writing under a pseudonym about U.S. atrocities in Iraq. Thomas described his participation in the mockery of a female soldier disfigured by an IED, claimed he witnessed troops intentionally running over dogs in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and alleged that another soldier played with the skulls of dead Iraqi children.
In attempt to challenge the wild notion that atrocities could occur amidst a violent occupation, the neoconservative Weekly Standard’s Matthew Goldfarb published an article declaring that TNR’s Baghdad Diary was “looking more like fiction.” Goldfarb’s piece relied on a series of letters supposedly sent to him by active-duty soldiers that raised questions about the veracity of TNR’s story.
As a result of intensifying attacks from the Standard and right-wing blogs — attacks amplified by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz — Thomas was forced to reveal his identity: Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp. According to Foer, the Army punished Beauchamp by revoking his cellphone and email privileges. Right-wing bloggers subsequently seized on TRN editor-in-chief Franklin Foer’s disclosure that Beauchamp is engaged to TNR reporter and researcher Elspeth Reeve.
Beauchamp has placed his career in extreme jeopardy and subjected his private life to the scrutiny of right-wing trolls, all to confirm his published account of U.S. atrocities in Iraq. TNR for its part has just completed a review of Beauchamp’s diary and found only one minor error. Now it is up to Goldfarb and his allies to back up their incendiary charges. Who are the Standard’s sources? Are they reliable? And if they are, why did the Standard omit key details about their backgrounds?
Among all the active duty soldiers used by Goldfarb to undermine Beauchamp, only one is cited by name: Matt Sanchez, a corporal in the Marine reserves. “Frankly, I don’t believe ANY of this story,” Sanchez proclaimed in the Standard about Beauchamp’s diary. Who is Sanchez? According to Goldfarb, he is simply a soldier “who stands behind his work.”
But Sanchez is more than a mere man in uniform. As I reported for Media Matters today, Sanchez is also a conservative pro-war activist whose bio includes a stint as the gay porn actor Rod Majors, (star of such filmic classics as “Beat Off Frenzy”) and an illustrious part-time job as a male prostitute — facts he has acknowledged “leaving … off my curriculum vitae.”
More importantly, Sanchez has been under investigation by the Marine Corps for fraud. According to an April 1 Marine Corps Times article, Sanchez was informed in a March 22 email from Reserve Col. Charles Jones, a staff judge advocate, that he was under investigation for lying “‘to various people, including but not limited to, representatives of the New York City United War Veterans Council [UWVC] and U-Haul Corporation’ about deploying to Iraq at the commandant’s request.” The email added: “‘Specifically, you wrongfully solicited funds to support your purported deployment to Iraq’ by coordinating a $300 payment from the UWVC and $12,000 from U-Haul.”
There is no excuse for Goldfarb’s omission of these facts about Sanchez. They were easily accessible through a simple Google search of Sanchez’s name, and have been the talk of the blogosphere for some time. I wrote extensively about Sanchez for the Huffington Post in March and appeared on a segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss his strange double life. Sanchez has also been profiled by Radar and by numerous bloggers. He even penned a long auto-apologia for Salon.com about his path from porn to the conservative movement. Couldn’t Goldfarb find a better on-the-record source? Apparently not.
The efforts of Sanchez and right-wing bloggers to take Beauchamp down were allegedly supported by a TNR staffer with a bizarre background. I just received a letter from a source close to TNR. The source wrote:
One reason Beauchamp had to go public was that conservative bloggers were tracking him down. And the reason they were was that a temp who was working as assistant for our publisher was leaking like crazy to right-wing websites. Not that he knew much, but he was hanging around, he went to a going away party for Ryan [Lizza] at frank’s [Frank Foer] house, eavesdropping and then posting on right-wing websites.
That’s how they found out about Scott being married to Ellie [Elspeth Reeve].
Anyway, the guy’s name is Robert McGee. His online pseudonym: Throbert McGee. Not real hard to track down (especially when he’s posting that he works at TNR.)
After a little Googling, I found that “Throbert McGee” (seen here embracing his “longtime sidekick Juan”) once kept a “blinkin’ blog” where he posted about “Faggot fixer-upper wallpaper” and linked to the overtly racist right-wing blog, “Little Green Footballs.” On the forum of another conservative blog, Throbert commented favorably about Matt Sanchez’s “11″ Monster Cock.” Throbert also used this forum as his platform to attack Beauchamp and leak information to conservative bloggers about Beauchamp’s private life.
I hear there are darker postings by Throbert lurking in the blogosphere, but I will leave it to his right-wing mouthpieces to explain those. And I will wait (hopefully not in vain) for the Weekly Standard’s Goldfarb to come clean about Sanchez and the rest of the unnamed “active duty soldiers and various experts” he used as sources.
I’m not sure which of us he’s referring to, Bill or me, and I have tried mostly to stay out of this one, confining myself to quick jeers, but:
Tom’s position is that it’s all right for the MSM to fabricate, distort, ignore and generally deform the facts, but if a blogger does it, then it’s unpatriotic.
Tom further asserts that Bill wishes to destroy the MSM, when no such asertion is made. Reform, certainly, but that seems a task akin to cleaning the Augean stables.
Finally, in spite of numerous citations and quotations from Bill, Tom finds Bill’s comments “contentless,” which I take to mean that Tom, like many of his ilk, finds that which he either can’t understand or can’t accept to be irrelevant.
Tom, therefore, is not thinking very clearly, but that was obvious from the outset.
Still, it is wrong for Bill to call him names, because taunting the disadvantaged is bad manners.
I hope Tom continues to visit, because herein lies his hope for enlightenment; elsewise he is condemned to the dim netherworld of confusion and illogic from which he originally, like an imp of Chaos, sprang.
And if you think I’m bad, you ought to see the hopeless lefty puppets my blogging attracts.
Slope-browed, jawless dumbasses, every single one of them.
Um. Please excuse my manners.
O yeth. You bad. You de baddetht.
Oh, my God, Judwit - you’ve discovered another Gay Porn Cock. Of lies. Why do you lefty numbwit “supporters of gay rights” always automatically roll out a person’s homosexuality as some sort of automatic refutation of anything they say?
Hey, Judwit, I hear you’re a fag. Therefore, obviously, not one single truthful word has ever passed your lips.
Right?
Gay porn cock - of lies!
All of which is laughable, of course. No matter how many poles Sanchez may, or may not, have snorted, it has absolutely no relevance to the matter at, um, hand, which is that the Right Blogosphere spotted Beauchamp for an outright liar from the very beginning, and he has now admitted that he was writing outright lies in his fictional fantasies for TNR, a rag that swallowed them whole because they fit a story TNR wanted desperately to tell, whether it was true or not.
And, Judwit, wiggle all you want, and try to smear as much as you can (is that the official lefty stance now? being gay is an automatic smear?) in an orgy of smoke, mirrors, and desperate attempts at misdirection, but neither you nor TNR is going to be able to wiggle out of this.
Wait a minute. I want to hear more about this. Is there a correlation between credulity and penis size? Have I gotten confused about this? I certainly hope so.
From TNR.
Their corroborating witnesses are all “anonymous”. Wonder if they exist.
Since the US military has publicly said it interviewed all of Beauchamp’s company, and nobody was able to support or verify any of his charges, I’d say those “witnesses” don’t exist.