I've been lightly following the Beauchamp story in the blogosphere for the past week or so - Beauchamp, of course, being a soldier who wrote some rather lurid stories for the New Republic (the flagship liberal magazine in the United States) of military behaviour in Iraq. The stories smelled bogus to me right out the gate, and as time as gone on we've just got more and more confirmation that Beauchamp was, if not entirely making the stories up, certainly exaggerating them to such a degree that they are all but outright lies, as Michael Goldfarb over at Weekly Standard notes:
THE 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."
The magazine's editors admitted on August 2 that one of the anecdotes Beauchamp stood by in its entirety--meant to illustrate the "morally and emotionally distorting effects of war"--took place (if at all) in Kuwait, before his tour of duty in Iraq began, and not, as he had claimed, in his mess hall in Iraq. That event was the public humiliation by Beauchamp and a comrade of a woman whose face had been "melted" by an IED.
The New Republic is leftwing, but it isn't kook left - while reading TNR will give you hearty doses of liberalism, you can at least expect it to be well written and containing a good deal of solid thinking. So, what happened here? Trite as it may seem, it was just the MSM's liberal bias at work here.
There are a lot of things which went to work here:
1. Most MSMers have never been in the military, and just don't know the military culture of the United States of America.
2. Most MSMers are college educated and can't imagine that anyone smart and clever would ever volunteer for what, to the average MSMer, seems to be mindless drudgery punctuated by the prospect of being shot at from time to time.
3. In politics, MSMers are forever looking for the next Watergate, because only a corrupt man could be a Republican President. In war, MSMers are forever looking for the next My Lai, because the military is a brutal oragnization staffed with sub-par people who are bound to go beserk from time to time.
4. Most MSMers despise President Bush and are pre-disposed to believe the worst of any effort undertaken at President Bush's direction.
In a word, the MSM is primed for stories like those related by Beauchamp - so primed that they simply would not do the really in depth checking which would have revealed the fraud earlyon...and, also, so ignorant of military affairs that they probably didn't even know where to start checking, supposing they wanted to be sure before publication. Pretty much anyone with a knowledge of military life - like Beauchamp - could cook up the same sort of stories and would have those stories swallowed without difficulty by most MSMers.
This is not the first time in this war that we've had alleged atrocity stories about American soldiers turn out to be entirely bogus, or at least greatly exaggerated. And it really must stop - this sort of thing, even after being exposed as a fraud, is grist for the enemy propaganda mill. In previous wars, the enemy at least had to make up his own anti-American propaganda; these days, fools in America produce it, and incompetant MSMers broadcast it without thinking.
My advice to the MSM? Whenever you get an atrocity story, run it by two or three people who have actually served in the miltary. Learn the difference between truth and what we called in the Navy a "sea story". It isn't too hard, and you'll avoid throwing muck upon the fantastic men and women of our armed forces.
...and, as an aside, for those who don't know: the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale? A fairy tale starts, "once upon a time"; a sea story starts, "no sh**".
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