Images Redacted

Brian De Palma is tediously consistent if nothing else.

His Vietnam war fiction "Casualties of War" portrayed American soldiers as rapist thugs merely bidding their time for the opportunity to commit inhuman acts against a bucolic population.

Unlike "Casualties," which was filmed decades after the war in Southeast Asia, De Palma's new film, "Redacted" is an admitted attempt by De Palma to sway world opinion against Americans soldiers while they are actively engaged in combat.

A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.

"Redacted," by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.

Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.

De Palma, 66, whose "Casualties of War" in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film's images, all based on real material he found on the Internet.

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.

"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.

As noted above, De Palma's film is propaganda to which he proudly admits:

"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.

I wonder how this country would have responded if Director John Ford had released a film showing American servicemen raping and killing an innocent Japanese girl in 1943 and murdering her family, instead of the propaganda film December 7.

In 1944, Ford was a commander in the USNR, and watched the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy from the USS Plunkett as the destroyer screened troop transports off Omaha Beach, and later landed on sands tinged red with the blood of American soldiers. To this day, most of the film Ford's team of combat cameramen shot on "Bloody Omaha" has never been seen. One may wonder how De Palma would have reacted in such a setting. Would his reaction have been to have noted the sacrifice of America's soldiers, or to vilify them for shooting fair-haired soldiers of the Wehrmacht as their lines collapsed and were overrun?

It seems almost certain that if De Palma covered the battle for Okinawa in 1945, his predilection for vilifying the American military would no doubt have led him to tell the story of the noble schoolteacher who led her classroom of children over the cliffs to their deaths at Humeyuri-no-to, and the bloodthirsty Marines they escaped from into death.

Of course, De Palma isn't making movies during World War Two vilifying America’s soldiers; he's making movies during a current war vilifying Americans soldiers.

What would once have been quickly identified as treasonous or seditious in past conflicts is now something that appears to be quite fashionable among certain aspects of our society.

De Palma and like-minded souls in Venice, Cannes, and Santa Barbara, of course, feel brave for making a film that portrays the young Midwestern privates and southern specialists and street-smart second lieutenants from Jersey on the frontlines as savages, capable and yearning to unleash unbearable cruelty.

As sweat drips in the eyes of soldiers and Marines as they attempt to bring peace to a land that has rarely known it, their enemies will be watching pirated and crudely-dubbed bootlegs of Redacted in training camps in Syria, in mosques in Saudi Arabia, and in homes throughout the Arab world, who already take a suspicious view of the American soldier in Iraq.

We will not see the pictures that would actually win the war, of an Iraqi father wrapping his arms around a suicide bomber to keep him from entering a mosque, or of the Iraqi interpreter who proudly dreams of becoming an American Marine. We won't see American ssaving Iraqi lives, or Iraqis saving American lives, or the brutality of those we fight.

Those, you see, are the pictures that Brian de Palma has redacted.

Blast From the Past: I'd almost forgotten. Venice was a pretty smart choice for De Palma, as the Italians have quite the fetish for dishonest anti-war propaganda.

Friday Stupid

I didn't post anything yesterday because I've got separate investigations going on at once that I'm trying to stay on top of, and I have the honor of providing a noted photojournalism expert with material for a photoethics speech he's giving overseas in October.

Since I haven't been giving you real content, here's some "Friday Stupid" to keep you entertained.

Only you can prevent forest fires:

I'll see if I can dig in and provide you with something more substantial (and less drafty) later today.

The Big Picture(s)

Quite frankly, this is perhaps one of the more comprehensive explanations of the media's failures in covering the Iraq War that I've seen to date. Brilliantly written, and painstakingly documented, is is an indictment of why our media has failed and continues to fail us in their reporting from Iraq.

The Big Picture(s).

Greetings From Mudville

A little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Greyhawk posts his latest from Baghdad in the Mudville Gazzette.

Rebuilding New Orleans: A Continuing Mistake

Two years ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana as a large Category 3 storm. While parts of coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama suffered the onslaught of the storm's surging waves and wind, most of the world's attention was paid, and is still being paid, to the City of New Orleans, where dozens of levee failures flooded most of the city.

More than 1,800 people were confirmed killed by Hurricane Katrina or in its wake, with 705 still missing, according to Wikipedia.

Literally millions of words have been written ascribing blame for the human failures that contributed to the loss of lives and property brought by this hurricane. The blame and blame-shifting continues to this day, and will be echoed, no doubt, long after the second-hand memories of the storm fade.

But this is not a post about past culpabilities, but those mistakes we are currently making in our all-too-human arrogance as we try to reclaim a disaster.

This is map of what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expected the Louisiana coastline to look like in 50 years, prior to the massive erosion and seafloor damage caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and also before the current fervor over global warming began predicting significant sea-level rise. The effects of Katrina and Rita have obviously shortened this timeline, and any sea-level rise that occurs will only hasten the demise of the city known as the Big Easy which is being killed, not protected, by the very levees and dikes that politicians seem so eager to keep building and rebuilding. Experts at LSU predict that the delta protecting New Orleans from a hungry Gulf of Mexico will be gone by 2090.

Several days ago, Presidential candidate Barack Obama unwittingly cited an appropriate passage from the Bible, even though, like most politicians, he drew exactly the wrong conclusions from the scripture he noted:

"Getting ready to talk to you today, I recall what Jesus said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount," Obama said at New Orleans' First Emmanuel Baptist Church. "He said, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock."

"The rains descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house. But it did not fall, because it was founded on the rock," he continued.

Most foundations and cities in America are built on rock, clay, or similarly durable soils, while New Orleans exemplifies the agonizing reality of the other house in that parable, the one that Obama didn't mention... that one made by foolish builders upon the sand, as noted in Matthew 7:24-27:

²⁴"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. ²⁶But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. ²⁷The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."

The shattered fool's house in Matthew was built upon the sand.

New Orleans is built upon an even more unstable soil, silt, that is constantly compacting and sinking. What's more, that sinking, unstable soil is in a bowl below sea-level surrounded by the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Pontchartrain, bodies of water that are eating away the coastline at a rate of 25 square miles or more each year.

In September of 2005, I interviewed a geologist who was the former Dean of his southern university's Coastal and Marine Studies program. His closing, unsolicited recommendation was that New Orleans "should be largely abandoned as a city."

New Orleans is doomed city, a geographical mistake destined to fall to geologic and hydraulic forces beyond our control. It is sad they we are too arrogant to concede this failed city to the sea, and seem destined to waste the billions of dollars that could be spent moving the inhabitants to higher ground.

Instead we seem intent on enticing back the poor and the destitute with promises of rebuilding what should not be rebuilt, just to put their lives in danger once more.

8/31 Update: Over at Reason, Steve Chapman is on the same page:

Before the nation undertakes the extravagant project of rebuilding New Orleans and securing it from the elements, we might ask if there isn't a better option, not only for the nation but for the flood victims.

The Democratic debate over the future of New Orleans somehow passed over the instructive example of Valmeyer, Ill. In 1993, the town of 900 was swamped, not for the first time, by a rain-swollen Mississippi River. It hasn't been swamped since, because it's not there anymore. Rather than remain in a vulnerable spot, the residents voted to relocate their village to a bluff 400 feet above the river.

But no one wants to suggest similar discretion in Louisiana.

New Orleans, like Valmeyer, had long been a natural disaster waiting to happen. Most of the city lies below sea level, surrounded by water on three sides, and it's sinking. On top of that, it's steadily grown more exposed to hurricanes, thanks to the loss of coastal wetlands that once served as a buffer. It's a bathtub waiting to be filled.

As one scientist said after Katrina, "A city should never have been built there in the first place." Now that we have a chance to correct the mistake, why repeat it?

Gee, that sounds familiar.

Bad Reporting After Bad

We've been over--and debunked--this story before:

The U.S. military's soaring demand for small-arms ammunition, fueled by two wars abroad, has left domestic police agencies less able to quickly replenish their supplies, leading some to conserve rounds by cutting back on weapons training, police officials said.

To varying degrees, officials in Montgomery, Loudoun and Anne Arundel counties said, they have begun rationing or making other adjustments to accommodate delivery schedules that have changed markedly since the military campaigns began in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As conclusively proved by interviewing three ammunition manufacturers last week, the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have little or nothing to do with police ammunition shortages in the United States.

To recap from that previous post, when the Associated Press ran essentially the same claims (a canned story deserves a canned response):

ATK's Ammunition Systems Group is the largest ammunition manufacturing body in the world. ATK runs the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant under contract, where it has the capacity to manufacture 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition a year, or put another way, a half billion rounds per year more than is being used by our military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is also a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition under Federal Premium, Speer Gold Dot, Lawman, and CCI Blazer brands. The law enforcement ammunition is made in plants in Idaho and Minnesota that are completely separate for their military operations at Lake City. These production lines do not, as the AP falsely states, use the same equipment used to manufacture military ammunition.

Those who stayed with the entire Associated Press article might note that ATK spokesman Bryce Hallowell did not buy the AP's conclusion that the war in Iraq was having a direct effect on police ammunition supplies.

He stated further:

"We had looked at this and didn't know if it was an anomaly or a long-term trend," Hallowell said. "We started running plants 24/7. Now we think it is long-term, so we're going to build more production capability."

I contacted Brian Grace of ATK Corporate Communications for further information, and he also doubted the Associated Press claim that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were responsible for a police ammunition shortage.

Since 9/11 we've seen a huge jump in demand from law enforcement. In the last fiscal year alone we saw demand from law enforcement jump 40%. By running our civil plants 24/7, hiring hundreds of new employees and streamlining our manufacturing processes we were able to increase our deliveries to law enforcement by 30% in that same period. In addition, we've just announced we'll be investing another $5 million in new production lines at our civil ammunition facilities.

I pressed Mr. Grace to clarify, asking:

Based upon this 40% increase in demand by law enforcement, is it more fair to categorize the difficulty of some departments in obtaining ammunition as a fact of increased police demand outstripping current manufacturing capabilities, and not as the result of the military needing more ammunition and drawing down civilian supply? Is their any shortage of lead, copper, or brass, or it is just a matter of not enough manufacturing equipment?

He responded:

Manufacturing capacity is the main issue. As you might imagine, for a precision manufacturing business that faced many years of steady demand, it can be quite a challenge to suddenly meet double-digit growth in demand. But we're very proud of the successes we've had with increasing our output while maintaining the quality and reliability of our products.

And we're committed to doing everything in our power to accelerate the growth in output, which is what precipitated the recently announced investment in additional equipment.

Let me make that crystal clear.

According to two spokesmen for the world's largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military's ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war.

Michael Shovel, National Sales Manager for COR-BON/Glaser, writes into explain that the price increases for ammunition are at least partially because of the demand from China for copper and lead for their building boom:

The reason that PD's and people are having trouble getting ammo and also the price increases is the war effort and also the fact that China is buying up lots of the copper and lead for their building boom. Our LE market has grown this year the same as it has the past 5 years. No big increase but no drop off either. The only issue with our ability to deliver ammunition in a timely manner is getting brass cases and primers. We do only some specialized ammo for the military and it's done in our custom shop instead on the production floor.

Interesting.

Mr. Shovel states that the war effort does play some role in the ammunition shortage, but does not say exactly what it is, and is apparently not speaking for his company when he makes that claim.

He states that their only issue in delivering ammunition has been getting brass cases and primers, and further, that the specialized military ammunition they produce is not part of their normal civilian/law enforcement manufacturing operations.

Michael Haugen, Manager of the Military Products Division for Remington Arms Company Inc., states:

I would say that if they [law enforcement] are not training it is not due to the availability of ammunition.

Remington has one plant that makes all of their ammunition (military, law enforcement, general civilian), and Mr. Haugen stated emphatically that military sales are "definitely not" in any way detracting from the development and manufacture of civilian and law enforcement ammunition, and that Remington has additional manufacturing capacity, depending on the product required.

We now how three major manufacturers stating that their law enforcement ammunition sales are not being impacted by military ammunition sales, which seems to be directly at odds with the claims made first by Associated Press reporters last week, and now by Washington Post staff writer Candace Rondeaux attempting to refloat an already scuttled premise.

And of course, Rondeaux was wrong when she said that the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge used by the military are "223-caliber rounds -- the same round fired by the military's M-16 and M-4 assault rifles."

Of course, had she bothered to contact ammunition companies in this story about ammunition, she might have figured a few of these things out before she went to print.

[h/t PrairiePundit]

Update: I'm not familiar with how the Washington Post cycles their news stories, but this one is no longer accessible from the front page.

Video: Kidnap Victim Rescued in Baghdad

The elated outburst from the family when the terp lets them know that he victim is alive is touching.

Scott Horton, We'd Like to Hear a "Who"

In the early hours of Saturday morning, I published an entry regarding a claim made by Harper's contributor Scott Horton.

In an August 24 entry called "Those Thuggish Neocons," Horton described what he claimed was a direct lie by a reporter:

I have no idea whether Beauchamp’s story was accurate. But at this point I have seen enough of the Neocon corner’s war fables to immediately discount anything that emerges from it. One example: back last spring, when I was living in Baghdad, on Haifa Street, I sat in the evening reading a report by one of the core Neocon pack. He was reporting from Baghdad, and recounted a day he had spent out on a patrol with U.S. troops on Haifa Street. He described a peaceful, pleasant, upscale community. Children were out playing on the street. Men and women were out going about their daily business. Well, in fact I had been forced to spend the day “in the submarine,” as they say, missing appointments I had in town. Why? This bucolic, marvelous Haifa Street that he described had erupted in gun battles the entire day. In the view of my security guards, with which I readily concurred, it was too unsafe. And yes, I could hear the gunfire and watch some of the exchanges from my position. No American patrol had passed by and there were certainly no children playing in the street. This was the point when I realized that many of these accounts were pure fabrications.

As I said two days ago, we need to know that those who are providing us information from the front lines are telling the truth to the best they can determine it. Whether you are for this conflict or against it is a matter of opinion, but to develop, reinforce, or change those opinions, we need facts.

If there are reporters who aren't just biased, but flat-out lying, we need to call them out and discredit them.

I sent the following an email to Mr. Horton at scott@harpers.org on August 25:

Mr. Horton,

I can't claim that Harper's is one of my normal stops, but I was very intrigued by your post today "Those Thuggish Neocons," particularly the paragraph about the reporter who fabricated the Haifa Street report you read.

If you are familiar with my small blog at all (and I'm sure you probably aren't); I often run down false or inaccurate media claims, typically hitting the wire service reporting the hardest, though I've also captured fraud and inaccuracies in newspapers and magazines as well. And yes, I'd readily admit that I have a conservative perspective, but that does not make me so biased that I approach the world with ideological blinders, as this post burning a false pro-Iranian War argument should show.

I was hoping that you would provide me with the date of the story you related as specifically as you can recall, along with the news organization and individual reporter you said was making up this report.

This is pretty obviously unethical and possibly illegal, and I want this resolved quickly.

Thanks,

To date, Mr. Horton has not responded to my query, though he has apparently been online and posting quite heavily; he has posted no fewer than seven blog entries yesterday and so far today. I hope he considers answering.

Since I submitted my first email and wrote my first post on the subject Saturday, a whole host of commenters has chimed in, suggesting certain writers and certain stories may be part of the story that Mr. Horton was referencing, including one of the reporters himself via email (who, as you may well imagine, stood behind his story).

The thing is, most of the stories suggested by both liberal and conservative commenters alike both came from 2007, and in an interview with Democracy Now!, Horton quite clearly shows that he was on Haifa Street for a period of three weeks, and "just returned" at some time prior to the April 14, 2006 interview.

This would seem to limit the time period of these dueling accounts to March or April of 2006.

I'd again like to ask Mr. Horton to tell us who wrote the report he said he read that was one of the "pure fabrications" he recalls.

If so, knowing the date range, I should be able to track down the article in question, and then cross-reference that again other media and military accounts to determine the accuracy of the disputed claim.

We need honesty in media, and need to burn dissemblers, left or right, to the ground.

Don't you agree, Mr. Horton?

Update: In case Mr. Horton's email is full or non-functioning, I've also sent a request in to Giulia Melucci, Harper's Vice President/Public Relations, and asked for her help in resolving this matter.

In Ramadi, Hope Comes in Little Things

Like new glass.

Burning Another Beauchamp

If we're to make any sort of sense of the Iraq War at all, we need to know that those who are providing us information on the conflict are being as honest in their reporting as inherent human biases allow. As it has often been said, we can allow people to have their own opinions, bu not their own facts. On that point, I think we can all agree.

Because of this shared desire for facts, those dissemblers who falsify accounts and events in that conflict should be brought to light and discredited so that the can no longer easily spread lies.

Friday, Harper's Scott Horton blasted one reporter for lying, and for being part of a group creating "pure fabrications" when it came to war reporting:

I have no idea whether Beauchamp's story was accurate. But at this point I have seen enough of the Neocon corner's war fables to immediately discount anything that emerges from it. One example: back last spring, when I was living in Baghdad, on Haifa Street, I sat in the evening reading a report by one of the core Neocon pack. He was reporting from Baghdad, and recounted a day he had spent out on a patrol with U.S. troops on Haifa Street. He described a peaceful, pleasant, upscale community. Children were out playing on the street. Men and women were out going about their daily business. Well, in fact I had been forced to spend the day "in the submarine," as they say, missing appointments I had in town. Why? This bucolic, marvelous Haifa Street that he described had erupted in gun battles the entire day. In the view of my security guards, with which I readily concurred, it was too unsafe. And yes, I could hear the gunfire and watch some of the exchanges from my position. No American patrol had passed by and there were certainly no children playing in the street. This was the point when I realized that many of these accounts were pure fabrications.

Clearly, Horton vividly recalls the details of that day, including both the day-long gun battles erupting around him (how could he not?) and the written words of a dishonest reporter that he knew well enough that he could even identify him as part of the core member of a specific group of reporters.

I don't care if this reporter Horton read is pro-war or antiwar; if he's lying, he's undermining all of our understanding about the war. We need a thorough investigation, and if the charges are accurate, this liar should be purged from his news organization and the profession altogether.

But first, we need information.

Horton establishes last spring as the rough time frame and Haifa Street as the location in Baghdad where this story of press duplicity allegedly took place. I've taking the liberty of contacting Mr. Horton via his Harper's email address, and I'm asking him to provide as much detail as possible about the fraudulent reporting of which he was a near-eyewitness. The more detail he can provide, the more concrete of a case we can make.

We need good reporting to understand the wars to which we're committing our nation's soldiers, and we need to discard those journalists that either can't tell truth from fiction, or prefer not to make the distinction.

Hopefully, we'll be able to get this resolved quite soon. Such fakery simply can't be allowed to stand.

Update: At the always thoughtful Bookworm Room, lawyer "Bookworm" digs further into Horton's article, and discovers "a swirling sea of anger" where honesty is perhaps not his priority.

Update: I've noticed that several people attempting to track down the article Mr. Horton may have been discussing have been focusing on articles written in 2007.

According to Democracy Now!, Horton was in Baghdad, on Haifa Street, prior to this April 14, 2006 article, and had only "recently returned." Further, that seems to be more consistent with his vague timeline of "back last spring."

I Think We'll Call It a "Rosie Brain"

big m t 4 u 2 c

The New Republic, Tom Cruise, and Post Turtles

"Help me, Help you."
Photo from TomCruiseFan.com

Dear "The Editors,"

I noticed with some bemusement earlier this week Jonathan Chait's attempt to rally the TNR faithful by attacking William Kristol, and note that Jonathan Cohn returned to that theme once again yesterday afternoon, with the slight exception of focusing on Ramesh Ponnuru's criticism of Chait's rant. I find it fascinating that you have the time to dedicate to critiques of critiques, but I'd really rather prefer that you just did your jobs as editors.

It has been precisely two weeks since your last attempt to whistle past those "legitimate questions that have been raised" about Scott Thomas Beauchamp's articles. It has been even more troubling that you have stone-walled those who have asked legitimate questions about your own investigation, which is far from transparent.

As Scott Johnson notes at Powerline this morning, Fridays seem to be a big day for TNR editors when it comes to releasing Beauchamp investigation-related news.

Towards that end, and knowing it is a little late, I'd still like to offer up my services to help you with your investigation.

You see, it doesn't often take very long to conduct a legitimate investigation into matters such as these.

For example, once I was finally able to reach Doug Coffey at BAE Systems, the company that manufacturers the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles that you refused to identify, it took only one email to determine that you didn't provide him with Beauchamp's dog-killing story to review for plausibility. I did, and his same-day response... well, we know how that ended up, don't we? It seems your researcher "re-reporting" the story just didn't know quite which questions to ask.

I seem to have a knack for knowing what to ask, so if you would be so kind, please provide the names of the civilian experts you claim to have interviewed during the course of your re-reporting, and I'll be happy to take a few minutes out of my day to make sure that you asked them the right questions, or for that matter, determine if you even asked the right experts the right questions.

Doing a thorough, transparent, and competent investigation doesn't take weeks.

Of course, that assumes that you want a thorough, transparent, and competent investigation.

Like you, dear readers, I find it rather doubtful that The New Republic will provide me or anyone else with the names of their civilian experts.

As details leak out, it seems Franklin Foer and his collaborators have become the cliché, and their continuing attempts to cover-up their editorial failures with even more questionable ethical violations and purposeful deceptions is worst than Beauchamp's fabulism. At this point, Franklin Foer and TNR's senior editors aren't so much editors as they are post turtles.

What's a post turtle? I recall an email where a doctor asked that same question when an old farmer whose hand he had been suturing used the term.

The farmer replied:

"When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle."

"You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the dumb thing get down."

The Journalism that Bloggers Actually Do (And Some Won't Discuss)

Is this attack on one liberal journalism professor by another liberal journalism professor in a left-coast liberal newspaper missing anything?

Off the top of my head, I'd say there is an almost purposeful lack of the important contributions to original reporting from center-right blogs.

Oh, I'm sure that there is a market for those who care about an over-priced chocolatier's deceptive marketing practices, but I'm quite convinced that Rathergate, the CBS/Sixty Minutes scandal that saw Mary Mapes and Dan Rather discredited while trying to run a pre-election hit piece on President Bush using fake documents, was far more important. Driving that scandal were "buckhead" on Free Republic, Powerline with their "The Sixty-First Minute" and Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, who showed that forged documents were created on the only version of Microsoft Word running in 1973. Rosen, instead of giving credit to the conservative bloggers that blew this story wide open, instead links to a non-blog web site.

Rather disingenuous, if you ask me.

Charles Johnson was also a lead blogger in the "fauxtography" scandals emanating from last summer's Israeli-Hezbollah war, catching Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj photoshopping a picture of combat. Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report discovered another Hajj photograph where the photographer cloned elements and duplicated them. Reuters subsequently pulled more than 900 photos as a result. Literally dozens of other photos were scoured by conservative bloggers and shown to be staged and/or staged managed by Hezbollah’s media minders.

This raft of stories also doesn't make it on Rosen's radar, which seems to only scan left.

Ed Morrissey's coverage of "Adscam" revealed corruption that was credited as a key factor in sending the Liberal Party of Canada down to defeat in national elections.

There is also the current, on-going meltdown with Scott Beauchamp and The New Republic, exposed and led by center-right bloggers beginning with Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard.

I've also had a busy couple of months myself, debunking a pair of wire service reported massacres that never occurred, revealing the hidden experts behind a ethically-bankrupt magazine's rigged investigation, embarrassing the world's oldest wire service into changing their photo attribution policies, and conclusively debunking a poorly-research Associated Press group report that sought to blame law enforcement ammunition shortages on current overseas conflicts.

One might think that most readers would find these right-generated stories marginally more interesting than an open-source software lawsuit details and chocolate exaggerations, but then, perhaps that is my bias.

A Sorry State of Affairs

I don't normally read Jonathan Chait and know little about him. I don't know what role he normally plays at The New Republic, or what role he may or may not have played in the magazine's latest fabulism scandal.

What I do know of Chait is that his attack on William Kristol this morning is written with the obvious intent of distracting TNR readers from the editors' compromised ethics by attacking an ideological opposite.

It is perhaps not the oldest trick in psychology or politics, but it is close: attack a common enemy to shore up your own faltering base. Chait's none-too-subtle-variation on this is to get readers riled up at Kristol for a comment where he states that liberals are turning against the troops. I would imagine that the quote is probably accurate, even though Chait provides neither a link to the original editorial, or the context in which this passage appeared.

But what is far more interesting—both to myself, and based upon their comments, some of the magazine's readers—is what Chait doesn't say in his attempt to distract us away from the magazine's editorial deceptions with his assault on Kristol.

The topic was The New Republic's decision to publish an essay by Scott Beauchamp, an American soldier serving in Iraq, detailing some repugnant acts he said he and his comrades committed. Legitimate questions have been raised about this essay's veracity. (We've been publishing updates on our continuing efforts to get answers to them at tnr.com.) But Kristol rushed past these questions, immediately declaring the piece a "fiction."

Legitimate questions were raised about Beauchamp's articles: all three of them, in fact. And we know now based upon an internal investigation by the United States Army, interviews with military personnel, contractors, vehicle experts, and even simple Google searches, is that the major allegations made in "Shock Troops" and in at least one of Beauchamp's other stories ("Dark of Night") are indeed, fiction. They are fabrications. Untruths. Lies.

The questions that remain surrounding this fabulist's train-wreck are concerned with the editorial decisions of Franklin Foer, Jason Zengerle, and perhaps even Chait and other editorial staffers.

Those questions—what did the editors know, when did they know it, and why do they continue to cover it up—those are the questions that remain unresolved and of interest to those following this on-going example of gross editorial misconduct.

To recap:

• TNR editor Franklin Foer claimed on July 20 that, "I've spoken extensively with the author of the piece and have communicated with other soldiers who witnessed the events described in the diarist. Thus far, these conversations have done nothing to undermine--and much to corroborate--the author's descriptions. I will let you know more after we complete our investigation." Foer has never provided any corroborating details to support these claims, despite his promise.
• The editors claimed that "the article [Shock Troops] was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published." The fact of the matter is that TNR subsequently had to change the "burned woman" assault story from happening at FOB Falcon and as the result of the psychological trauma experienced by the author as the result of combat, to another location in another country before Beauchamp ever went to war, precisely because they did not rigorously edit or fact check the article before publication. This is a not only evidence of a lie by the editors when they said they "rigorously edited and fact-checked" the article before publication, it fatally undermines the entire premise of the article.
• TNR has not released, and appears to have purposefully hidden, unfavorable testimony of those it interviewed in the course of their investigation. We know that TNR editor Jason Zengerle admitted to John Podhoretz of The Corner that a Kuwait-based PAO regarded the "burned woman" story as a myth or urban legend, yet TNR editors have never revealed these findings as part of their investigation. So much for the promise to "release the full results of our search when it is completed." We have no way of knowing if they have hidden other unfavorable information.
• TNR's editors have led a purposefully vague investigation that does not disclose the names, qualifications, or expertise of anyone they claimed to have interviewed during the course of their investigation, hindering anyone who would like to follow behind them and verify the veracity of their claimed research. They have not disclosed the questions they asked their experts, and have thus far refused to provide their answers directly.
• One of the experts has been located and re-interviewed, and discloses the fact that he was never specifically interviewed about the claims made by Beauchamp at all. Further, once provided with Beauchamp's direct claims, he cited the physical properties and characteristics that would make Beauchamp's claims highly unlikely if not impossible. TNR staffers are well aware of his new, more fully-informed response, and have yet to respond.

In short, TNR's editors, led by Franklin Foer, have misled their readers, hidden testimony, and perhaps even rigged an investigation in order to claim some sort of vindication for their editorial and ethical failings.

These are the matters of importance that Johathan Chait, Franklin Foer, and other staffers at The New Republic would rather we didn't focus on.

They would much rather gin up "us versus them" conflicts between liberals and conservatives, between The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and supporters of the war versus those who would bring the troops home now, than focus on the all-too-apparent fact that the editorial leadership of The New Republic has lied to its readers, compromised their integrity, and dissembled to fellow journalists and critics alike. They've done all of this to cover-up just how poor of a job they did in allowing a staffer's husband to publish inflammatory articles without any apparent editorial controls in place.

The editors of The New Republic have rather obviously lied to us all. They continue to do so today, and no amount of blame-shifting or "look over there!" sleight-of-hand will hide that brutal fact.

In the comments to Chait's article, TNR subscriber "PJmolloy" states:

This is a vile piece. It almost makes Beauchamp look tolerable if this is the alternative.

I've subscribed to TNR off and on for forty years. But it looks like it'll be more off than on in the future. Isn't there someone who can help this magazine?

There is, of course.

Why CanWest MediaWorks refuses to do so is yet another mystery.

Update: Captain Ed pulls no punches:

Chait should save his shocked, shocked! hypocrisy for the people in his own office who violated journalistic standards to publish Beauchamp, apparently based on the word of his wife and sweetened by the themes of his inartful fabulism. Attacking Kristol for essentially nailing the strangely-silent editors and publisher of TNR may conform to the strategy of going on offense as the best defense, but it's rather transparent, like the glass house TNR has chosen to occupy.

Nor does Bryan at Hot Air:

Chait’s article is another example of TNR’s defense by offense, and it’s the work of a smear artist and a scoundrel.

Powerline's Scott Johnson rips the TNR editor's "Chaitred" as well.

It seems at this late stage that even an offensive by The New Republic is quite transparent and doomed to fail.

I also seem to have someone's undivided attention at the home office.

Misfire: AP's Bogus Ammo Shortage Story

An Associated Press report published late Friday afternoon stated that ammunition shortages in some law enforcement agencies around the nation were to be blamed on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

An Associated Press review of dozens of police and sheriff's departments found that many are struggling with delays of as long as a year for both handgun and rifle ammunition.

The damning narrative was grasped quickly by war critics who uttered banalities such as this:

Here's another little way the Bush doctrine is endangering our safety at home. Our local police are running out of ammo...

Similar thoughts from the community-based reality were echoed here:

The good news is, U.S. forces in the Middle East are not going to run out; the troops get most of their ammunition from a dedicated plant. The bad news is, the strain is a burden on police departments, which could undermine public safety.

Bloggers were hardly alone is running with the narrative, which was carried by the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, and other news agencies.

The Associated Press article cited police officers and sheriffs, and seems to present a bulletproof case.

Reality, however, shows that the assumptions made and biases held by the Associated Press reporters may have led the story to having been built on an entirely fault premise.

To understand the ammunition shortage being experienced by some police agencies today, we shouldn't look at September 11, 2001, but instead, begin with February 28, 1997.

It was on that day in North Hollywood, California that Larry Phillips, Jr. and Emil Matasareanu, two-heavily armed and armored bank robbers, engaged in a 44-minute shootout with an out-gunned Los Angeles Police Department. The two suspects fired more than 1,300 rounds of ammunition, and each was shot multiple times with police handguns. The 9mm police pistol bullets bounced off their homemade body armor. Phillips eventually died after being shot 11 times; Matasareanu died after being hit 29 times.

In the aftermath of the shootout, the LAPD, followed by police departments large and small nationwide, began to feel that rank-and-file patrol officers should be armed with semi-automatic or fully-automatic assault rifles or submachine guns in addition to their traditional sidearms, anticipating an up-tick of heavily armed and armored subjects. The trend has failed to materialize more than a decade later.

As with most trends in law enforcement, the trend towards the militarization of police patrol officers to a level once reserved for SWAT/ERT teams was slow, though one that gathered momentum rapidly after September 11, 2001.

Today, it is this increased and on-going militarization of police forces and the associated training requirements that have caused the ammunition shortages experienced by some police departments, and the lack of ammunition is not related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in any meaningful way.

The Associated Press report is not supported beyond anecdotal evidence by real, objective facts.

ATK's Ammunition Systems Group is the largest ammunition manufacturing body in the world. ATK runs the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant under contract, where it has the capacity to manufacture 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition a year, or put another way, a half billion rounds per year more than is being used by our military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is also a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition under Federal Premium, Speer Gold Dot, Lawman, and CCI Blazer brands. The law enforcement ammunition is made in plants in Idaho and Minnesota that are completely separate for their military operations at Lake City. These production lines do not, as the AP falsely states, use the same equipment used to manufacture military ammunition.

Those who stayed with the entire Associated Press article might note that ATK spokesman Bryce Hallowell did not buy the AP's conclusion that the war in Iraq was having a direct effect on police ammunition supplies.

He stated further:

"We had looked at this and didn't know if it was an anomaly or a long-term trend," Hallowell said. "We started running plants 24/7. Now we think it is long-term, so we're going to build more production capability."

I contacted Brian Grace of ATK Corporate Communications for further information, and he also doubted the Associated Press claim that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were responsible for a police ammunition shortage.

Since 9/11 we've seen a huge jump in demand from law enforcement. In the last fiscal year alone we saw demand from law enforcement jump 40%. By running our civil plants 24/7, hiring hundreds of new employees and streamlining our manufacturing processes we were able to increase our deliveries to law enforcement by 30% in that same period. In addition, we've just announced we'll be investing another $5 million in new production lines at our civil ammunition facilities.

I pressed Mr. Grace to clarify, asking:

Based upon this 40% increase in demand by law enforcement, is it more fair to categorize the difficulty of some departments in obtaining ammunition as a fact of increased police demand outstripping current manufacturing capabilities, and not as the result of the military needing more ammunition and drawing down civilian supply? Is their any shortage of lead, copper, or brass, or it is just a matter of not enough manufacturing equipment?

He responded:

Manufacturing capacity is the main issue. As you might imagine, for a precision manufacturing business that faced many years of steady demand, it can be quite a challenge to suddenly meet double-digit growth in demand. But we're very proud of the successes we've had with increasing our output while maintaining the quality and reliability of our products.

And we're committed to doing everything in our power to accelerate the growth in output, which is what precipitated the recently announced investment in additional equipment.

Let me make that crystal clear.

According to two spokesmen for the world's largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military's ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war.

Once again, a media organization with target fixation seems to have widely missed the mark.

Update: Another Manufacturer Weighs In
Michael Shovel, National Sales Manager for COR-BON/Glaser, writes into explain that the price increases for ammunition are at least partially because of the demand from China for copper and lead for their building boom [and for toy paint, and baby bibs, and pajamas, but I digress--ed]:

The reason that PD's and people are having trouble getting ammo and also the price increases is the war effort and also the fact that China is buying up lots of the copper and lead for their building boom. Our LE market has grown this year the same as it has the past 5 years. No big increase but no drop off either. The only issue with our ability to deliver ammunition in a timely manner is getting brass cases and primers. We do only some specialized ammo for the military and it's done in our custom shop instead on the production floor.

Interesting.

Mr. Shovel states that the war effort does play some role in the ammunition shortage, but does not say exactly what it is, and is apparently not speaking for his company when he makes that claim.

He states that their only issue in delivering ammunition has been getting brass cases and primers, and further, that the specialized military ammunition they produce is not part of their normal civilian/law enforcement manufacturing operations.

Dr. Ignatius Piazza, Director of the Frontsite Firearms Training Institute was also contacted about the shortage claimed by the Associated Press, as Frontsight's training courses typically require from hundreds to over a thousand rounds of ammunition per student per course.

Dr. Piazza noted, "From time to time ammo becomes in short supply but we always find it at various sources." He also stated that the shortages have been blamed on the ammunition companies "selling all they can sell" to the government, but once again, we don't seem to have any direct evidence of this charge revealed, at least not yet.

Could it be that the "conventional wisdom" is wrong?

Once again, I'm forced to wonder why the Associated Press reporters who composed this article chose to interview police officers about ammunition, instead of the companies that manufacture it and would have far more direct knowledge of the cause of any shortages.

Update: Manufacturer Remington Weighs In

Michael Haugen, Manager of the Military Products Division for Remington Arms Company Inc., states:

I would say that if they [law enforcement] are not training it is not due to the availability of ammunition.

Remington has one plant that makes all of their ammunition (military, law enforcement, general civilian), and Mr. Haugen stated emphatically that military sales are "definitely not" in any way detracting from the development and manufacture of civilian and law enforcement ammunition, and that Remington has additional manufacturing capacity, depending on the product required.

We now how three major manufacturers stating that their law enforcement ammunition sales are not being impacted by military ammunition sales, which seems to be directly at odds with the claims made by these Associated Press reporters.

I've approached Associated Press Media Relations Director Paul Colford and suggest that either a correction or retraction seems to be warranted for this story.

Blog Entry Prompts Photo Policy Changes at AFP?

CY commenter Dusty Raftery and I published a story this past Friday of how French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) apparently attempted to take credit for a U.S. Army photo taken in Afghanistan.

Later that evening, several readers come to the article from AFP's Paris domain, and apparently what they found may have led to a change in policy, where AFP is more transparent on the source of military-provided photos.

Note that the both the Army and the individual photographer are properly credited by AFP as they should be in several current military photos, such as the one above.

Let's hope that this continues.

Sucker-Punched

At Pajamas Media this morning, Richard Miniter has posted a devastating article called How The New Republic Got Suckered. It is the most incisive look into the heart of The New Republic during the early days of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal thus far.

Miniter draws heavily from former TNR assistant to the editor Robert McGee, who recounts his experiences inside The New Republic before being terminated and then slapped with a cease and desist order by the magazine's lawyers for revealing that Beauchamp was married to a TNR fact-checker and writer, Elspeth Reeve.

It is because of this relationship that I suspect Franklin Foer and other TNR editors failed to adequately fact-check Beauchamp's three articles. What still remains unanswered is if Reeve was the fact-checker on her husband's stories, as such a conflict of interest would be yet another violation of journalistic ethics.

Also telling, if accurate, is McGee's observation that Foer may have approached, and may still be approaching, the scandal with ideological blinders firmly in place.

Later that night, Robert McGee, a then-assistant to The New Republic's publisher, went looking for the host. He is curious what Foer thinks about the building scandal. He wants the inside dope.

He finds Foer on the front porch and asks as casually as he can: "So, what's up with this?"

As McGee recalls the conversation, Foer immediately volunteered the standard answer: conservatives have an ideological grudge to settle because they perceive the magazine to be anti-war, anti-military and so on.

"He sounded almost rehearsed," McGee said.

What bothered McGee about the conversation was that Foer saw the questions from the bloggers as a completely ideological attack. "Foer wasn't acknowledging that at least some of the attacks on the [Beauchamp's] 'Shock Troops' piece came from active-duty military members whose skepticism was factually grounded, and not just from stateside political pundits."

Discounting criticism merely as a result of the ideological position of the critics was a serious mistake by Foer, though hardly the first, and certainly not the last.

Just because political pundits made these observations does not make them invalid. It matters little who tells you that Glocks do not fire "square-backed" bullets; this fact does not change if it comes from a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.

Nor does it matter that it was this conservative blogger blew away TNR's insistence that they fact-checked Beauchamp's claims before publication by pointing out that if TNR has run so much as a Google search before publishing Beauchamp's libelous murder claim in “Dark of Night," then he would have likely been exposed as a fabulist well in advanced of "Shock Troops."

Time and again, it seems, Franklin Foer and perhaps other senior TNR editors allowed personal loyalties to subvert their editorial responsibilities.

In the beginning, these were small sins.

One wants to be able to trust the spouse of a staffer. I can understand why the fact-checking that should have occurred may have been minimized in Beauchamp's first post.

But in "Dead of Night," Beauchamp makes significant fact errors in leveling an accusation of murder. Personal relationships should matter little when an author makes such an inflammatory charge, and the editor's have a significant duty to verify that the facts support such a potentially divisive claim.

It is painfully obvious that even a passing attempt to verify the claims was never made. No handgun on the planet fires a "square-backed" pistol bullet, and if the editors had so much as bothered to click on the Glock web site, they would have readily discovered that Glocks use the same ammunition as every other 9x19mm caliber pistol, and that this claim was absurd.

Further, the editors of The New Republic made absolutely no attempt to verify the demonstrably false Beauchamp claim that "the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police."

This fabrication is easily discredited within seconds with a simple Google search.

Glocks are a common and favored handgun on the Iraqi black market:

Glock pistols were also easy to find. One young Iraqi man, Rebwar Mustafa, showed a Glock 19 he had bought at the bazaar in Kirkuk last year for $900. Five of his friends have bought identical models, he said.

There are literally dozens of stories of Glock pistols being recovered from insurgents, terrorists, and militiamen. They have been captured in cordon-and-search operations, in targeted raids, recovered in weapons caches, and taken from dead and wounded insurgents, militiamen, and criminals.

American soldiers also have them, as do civilian contractors. Ordinary Iraqi civilians (men and women) buy them to protect their families. Glock are quite likely the most ubiquitous handgun in Iraq, carried officially or unofficially by those on all sides, and those on no side at all.

But Franklin Foer's editors did not fact check any part of the murder claim made in "Dead of Night." That is clear, and in doing so, the editors' of The New Republic slipped from being loyal friends making an innocent mistake, into what can only be described as an overt case of editorial malpractice.

Had the editors of The New Republic actually edited this article and fact-checked it before publication, there is every reason to believe that these significant fact errors in "Dark of Night" would have eventually led to the quiet termination of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's writing career at The New Republic after one article.

But Franklin Foer and the other editors at The New Republic utterly failed in their editorial responsibilities.

Instead, the willful disregard of editorial standards allowed Beauchamp not only to libelously assign a murder based upon false claims, it also allowed him to later publish his most infamous post, "Shock Troops," in which he wrote three vignettes that effectively slandered every soldier in his entire company and within the other companies with which his unit served.

But this editorial dereliction of duty was by no means the greatest sin of the editors of The New Republic.

Once caught, they escalated their editorial incompetence with a series of readily apparent purposeful deceptions, dissembling to readers and critics alike.

Franklin Foer stated that The New Republic fact-checked "Shock Troops" before publication. That statement is an obvious falsehood. Foer's magazine utterly failed to fact-check the article prior to publication, and therefore had to move the time, location and underlying premise of Beauchamp's primary charge to another time and country when they did finally attempt to fact-check it well after publication.

Foer's editors attempted to further deceive readers and critics on at least two other known occasions.

The New Republic claimed to publish the findings of an internal investigation that they said vindicated the magazine, but was in actuality nothing more than an apparent attempt to save their jobs via a whitewash.

The magazine offered no named witnesses or experts, no evidence or testimony, and when one of the experts TNR claimed to have supported their story was located, it became abundantly obvious that TNR avoided a real investigation, did not provide him with any context, and was attempted to only provide itself with rhetorical cover. The attempt failed, miserably.

The magazine has also apparently made it a practice to bury dissenting viewpoints, such as when a military PAO based in Kuwait told TNR editor Jason Zengerle that the story was regarded as an urban legend or myth. Zengerle acknowledges he was told this, but the account was never published in The New Republic.

Foer's magazine then attempted to avoid responsibility for their editorial malpractice, purposeful deception, and account burying by blaming the Army, claiming that the Army was obstructing their investigation.

But the Army never obstructed any investigation by The New Republic. This is presumably fine, as The New Republic had no intention of really conducting one.

But now we are left with a magazine where the editors have moved beyond merely partisanship and incompetence to obvious willful deception of their readers and critics alike, and perhaps actionable fraud.

It remains to be seen how CanWest Mediaworks, owner of The New Republic and other media properties, will respond.

Kracker Boxed

I guess this answers the question of what happens "When the Sun Goes Down."

The New Republic: Duck and Cover, Still

Tomorrow marks precisely one month since Michael Goldfarb published Fact or Fiction? at The Weekly Standard, calling into doubt the veracity of claims made by a soldier later revealed as Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

Since that time, key "facts" in two of three Beauchamp-authored stories have been discredited.

• Glock pistols do not fire a unique "square-backed" 9-millimeter pistol cartridge.
• Glocks, far from only being used by the Iraqi Police as the author claimed as he libeled the Iraqi Police for murder, are instead one of the more common handguns in Iraq.
• Thee was never a "burned woman" in the dining facility at Camp Falcon as the author alleged. Nor was there a burned woman at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, a fact attested to by both named military personnel and named civilian contractors.
• There is no evidence there was ever a garbage-stratified grave as the author alleged (though there was a cemetery that was relocated), and no support than anyone could or would wear a section of rotting human skull under the close-fitting helmets currently used by the U.S. Army.
• There is no evidence of a dog-murdering Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle driver, and literally dozens of Bradley crewmen, commanders, drivers, infantrymen, and even the spokesman for the company that builds the Bradley all consistently stating it is all but impossible for a Bradley to be used as the author described.

In addition to the factual problems published in the articles, there have been significant issues revealed about the editorial management of The New Republic, the magazine that published the claims of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, issues that should call into question their ethics and credibility.

• TNR editor Franklin Foer claimed on July 20 that, "I've spoken extensively with the author of the piece and have communicated with other soldiers who witnessed the events described in the diarist. Thus far, these conversations have done nothing to undermine--and much to corroborate--the author's descriptions. I will let you know more after we complete our investigation." Foer has never provided any corroborating details to support these claims, despite his promise.
• The editors claimed that "the article [Shock Troops] was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published." The fact of the matter is that TNR subsequently had to change the "burned woman" assault story from happening at FOB Falcon and as the result of the psychological trauma experienced by the author as the result of combat, to another location in another country before Beauchamp ever went to war, precisely because they did not rigorously edit or fact check the article before publication. This is a not only evidence of a lie by the editors when they said they "rigorously edited and fact-checked" the article before publication, it fatally undermines the entire premise of the article.
• TNR has not released, and appears to have purposefully hidden, unfavorable testimony of those it interviewed in the course of their investigation. We know that TNR editor Jason Zengerle admitted to John Podhoretz of The Corner that a Kuwait-based PAO regarded the "burned woman" story as a myth or urban legend, yet TNR editors have never revealed these findings as part of their investigation. So much for the promise to "release the full results of our search when it is completed." We have no way of knowing if they have hidden other unfavorable information.
• TNR's editors have led a purposefully vague investigation that does not disclose the names, qualifications, or expertise of anyone they claimed to have interviewed during the course of their investigation, hindering anyone who would like to follow behind them and verify the veracity of their claimed research. They have not disclosed the questions they asked their experts, and have thus far refused to provide their answers directly.
• One of the experts has been located and re-interviewed, and discloses the fact that he was never specifically interviewed about the claims made by Beauchamp at all. Further, once provided with Beauchamp's direct claims, he cited the physical properties and characteristics that would make Beauchamp's claims highly unlikely if not impossible. TNR staffers are well aware of his new, more fully-informed response, and have yet to respond.

In short, TNR's editors, led by Franklin Foer, have misled their readers, hidden testimony, and perhaps even rigged an investigation in order to claim some sort of vindication for their editorial and ethical failings.

A month into this story, it seems apparent that the Editors at TNR and their owners at CanWest MediaWorks have no intention at all of dealing honestly with the continuing editorial and ethical failures of this magazine.

Few people read The New Republic before they self-immolated their credibility. If there is any consolation to their deplorable behavior, it is the knowledge that their audience will grow smaller still as a result.

Yet Again: AFP's Photo Woes Continue

Fresh off of being caught trying to pass off unfired civilian ammunition as evidence of soldiers shooting into the home of an elderly Iraqi woman, the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has been caught once again in a photography scandal involving the U.S. military, this time misidentifying a U.S. military photo taken by a member of the 173rd Airborne in Afghanistan last month as one of their own.

Here is the photo, as it ran Wednesday at BBC News.

(Click photo for full size)

You'll note that in the enlarged version of the page, the photo is credited "AFP" in the bottom right corner (The photo in the current version of the BBC article has since been changed).

The photo with the "AFP" stamp was not taken by an Agence France-Presse photographer, but by Sgt. Brandon Aird, 173rd ABCT Public Affairs, in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, and was first featured in this post by Sgt. Aird on Central Command's web site on July 31.

(Click photo for full size)

I've confirmed with an Army combat photographer that they cannot give or sell their photos directly to news agencies.

AFP misidentified this photo as one of their own, but it gets worse:

They were also apparently trying to sell the photo through AFP/Getty Images (via Daylife).

Once again, the photo editors of Agence France-Presse have some explaining to do.

[Author's note: Most of the information in this story was compiled by CY commenter Dusty Raftery. Excellent work, Dusty.]

Update: Dan Riehl notes that the BBC is using the photo as the teaser for a video segment that doesn't even involve U.S. soldiers. Truthy?

Update: Yup. It's our fault media credibilty is tanking.

Update: We get noticed.

Carrying Them Out on Their Shields

Milblogger and two-tour Iraq veteran John Rohan, who writes at The Shield of Achilles, absolutely eviscerates some of the more vocal defenders of Franklin Foer's whitewash of an investigation, and the poorly-written combat fiction of Scott Beauchamp that appears in The New Republic.

Rohans delivers Sullivan, Yglesias, Drum, Marshall and others take a well-deserved thrashing, administered by their own words in this retrospective, but I'd advise you not to hold your breath for any of them to apologize.

Going to the Well Once Too Often

Photographer Wissam al-Okaili has had quite an interesting summer in Iraq, and apparently made quite a few friends.

In July, he published a picture carried in media around the world, as an elderly Sadr City woman held up a object that she claimed was a bullet that came into her room and hit her bed. What was quite interesting about the claim is that the "bullet" had no rifling, and did not match up to a caliber used by any known U.S. or Russian-designed weapons system. Many at the time felt that the object was most likely a fake, but results were never conclusive.

Over at Blackfive last night, Uncle Jimbo caught al-Okaili attempting to use this narrative once too often as captured on Yahoo!'s photostream:

The woman in the photo—Uncle Jimbo notes that she looks like the same woman—makes a very similar claim, holding up bullets that she claims hit her house.

And they very well may have hit her house, if the were tossed or kicked in that direction, but it is quite obvious that bullets still in their cartridge casings have never been fired by a gun [note: the cursor arrow in the photo above was added by me to point at the casing during the screen capture, and is not in the original photo].

Based upon these photos alone, we can only say that Wissam al-Okaili may simply be a dupe of a photographer. Obviously, his editors weren't sharp enough to notice that fired bullets don't remain in their cartridges, either. Perhaps al-Okaili was merely the patsy for a manipulative and press savvy Madhi Army propaganda operative, and this AFP photographer was used as so many photographers were used in last summer's conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Other photos, taken by al-Okaili, however, begin to paint a more deliberate portrait of this photographer's body of work.

In this photo, dated just three days ago on Sunday, August 12, al-Okaili is shooting his photo from inside the passenger compartment of a shot-up vehicle. The boy in the photo is obviously aware of him. Is this a staged photo? If so, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a news photographer was also playing a role as a stage manager. As a stand-alone photo, this is a minor foul.

This photo was shot through a shattered house window this time, in a photo dated one day before the previous one. It probably isn't the same boy (in case you were wondering), but we're dealing with some minor stage management again, which now appears symptomatic.

In a photo dated Jul 25, he returns once more to the "through the shattered glass" motif, but this time with an older Iraqi man as his focal point.

Time and again, al-Okaili returns to the same type of picture, and in the case of the female bullet magnet, the same people.

I'd say that that is troubling, and perhaps something AFP needs to discuss with him, as it makes his work appear to be more contrived than captured. While they're having this discussion, perhaps they can pull in AFP photo editors and explain how bullets and firearms function.

Update: Rocco's Guide To Fired vs. Unfired Bullets. Sadly, some folks will noeed to bookmark that.

Update: Let's go back for a moment to the lady holding the ammunition above, and focus on the catridges in her hands. What kind of ammunition is it?

I don't think that it is either 7.62x51 NATO or 7.62x39, or 7.62x54R. The bullets themselves are too small, and overall, appear to be the wrong size and shape.

That would seem to narrow this down to the smaller class of assault rifle bullets, primarily the 5.56 NATO in common use by U.S. soldiers as the standard chambering for the M4, M16, and M249. Indeed, that is probably what they want you to infer from these photos.

But here's the thing: The standard 62-grain M855 5.56 ball ammo used by our military today has a green tip, the M856 tracer has an orange tip, the M995 AP a black tip, and the Mk262 is a hollowpoint with an open tip.

The picture seems to show common commercial 55-grain civilian ball ammunition patterned after the Vietnam-era M193. With this in mind, I'd state that this ammunition wasn't even dropped by American forces, as they don't carry such ammunition.

This isn't just a a photo that just shows ignorance. It appears to show a willful deception using civilian ammunition.

08/16 Update: Per Mr. Of Spades, it seems Getty is still running the photo with an unexplained caption correction that still doesn't explain that that cartridges held are civilian rounds. At Yahoo! it appears that the picture is moving around, and according to the latest search I've run on the photographer's work, seems to have been deleted.

No explanation, and presumably, no accountability.

Liar's Parade

Why do the Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories published in The New Republic matter?

Beauchamp's stories—"War Bonds," "Dead of Night", and "Shock Troops"—contained material either suspect, exaggerated, or in several proven instances, completely fabricated.

It is suspect that the soldiers in "War Bonds" would stop their vehicles in a "dark brown river of sewage" to change a tire; both Humvees and Strykers feature run-flat tires and automatic tire inflation systems that allow the vehicles to continue on for miles after experiencing a puncture.

Beauchamp's libel of the Iraqi Police as murderers in "Dark of Night" is based upon not one, but two completely false claims. The first is that Glock pistols can be identified by a unique "square-backed" 9mm pistol cartridge. This is utterly preposterous. There are no "square-backed" pistol cartridges chambered by commercial weapons manufacturers. The 9mm NATO (AKA, 9mm Luger, 9mm Parabellum) cartridge chambered and fired by Glock pistols is common in military, police and civilian handguns, carbines, and submachine guns worldwide, they do not use unique identifying ammunition.

The second claim is that only the Iraqi police carry Glock pistols. A simple Google search easily disproves that claim. Glocks are common among all military, police, militia, insurgent, and civilian populations. In "Dark of Night," Beauchamp based his libel upon two easily demonstrated falsehoods.

In Beauchamp's final article, "Shock Troops," he provides us with three distinct tall tales that a U.S. military investigation has concluded were categorically false.

It was this third account, "Shock Troops," that matters most to active duty soldiers, veterans, and their families. In three separate accounts, Beauchamp tells stories of large groups of soldiers that allowed, encouraged, or participated in barbaric behavior, and in so doing, Beauchamp assaulted the honor and integrity of not just a rogue soldier or even a small unit, but his entire company and every soldier in every other company Forward Operating Base Falcon.

This mass libel offends or should offend everyone who supports our soldiers, even those who are against the war. Several weeks ago when Beauchamp was still nominally shielded by his pseudonym, I suggested that a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War who was based at FOB Falcon from Nov. 2005 to Nov. 2006 named Richard Peters might be in a position to tell us if he has heard or of witnessed these or similar stories while at the base.

After reading Beauchamp's "Shock Troops," and hearing of the various debunkings of Beauchamp's claims, IVAW member Peters responded via email:

Ok, yes it does seem to be "case closed" on this Scott Thomas fellow. People like him really get under my skin. The trouble with the antiwar movement is one of image, when losers like him spread elaborate lies it only weakens that image and the message is lost.

Whether you support the continuation of the conflict in Iraq, or if you favor a withdrawal as do Mr. Peters and the IVAW and other critics of the war, is frankly irrelevant to the discussion. Beauchamp's stories matter because they were fabrications created in the hopes of furthering the career of an arrogant, untalented writer, at the expense of the reputations of his fellow soldiers.

As a result of a military investigation into the allegations made in "Shock Troops," all of Beauchamp's claims were determined to be false, and Beauchamp himself faces administrative punishment for his serial fiction.

But Beauchamp's attempted collective character assassination is only part of the story, and at this point, isn't even the most offensive part of the tale.

Since this series of stories was first brought to the attention of milbloggers by Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard, the editors of The New Republic have continued to defend Beauchamp's stories, and have gone to disconcerting lengths to do so.

Perhaps most disturbing is that on July 26, TNR editors flatly lied to its readers, when they stated:

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. This process takes considerable time, as the primary subjects are on another continent, with intermittent access to phones and email. Thus far we've found nothing to disprove the facts in the article; we will release the full results of our search when it is completed.

Let me make this very clear: none of Beauchamp's three stories bears any evidence of fact-checking or rigorous editing.

The editors did not ask why vehicles with automatic tire inflation systems and run-flat tires designed to run for miles even after being punctured had to stop in waist-deep rivers of raw sewage in "War Bonds."

The editors did not catch the blatant "square-backed" cartridge claim, nor did they show enough diligence to even run a rudimentary Google search to check Beauchamp's claim that would have sent up immediate red flags when their correspondent alleged murder based upon a flagrant untruth that "the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police" in "Dead of Night."

In "Shock Troops," an act of depravity—verbally assaulting a female contractor for severe facial burns—at a combat base that the author blamed on the psychological trauma of combat was quickly exposed as not having occurred at the base in question at all. This bit of undone fact-checking exposed, TNR's editors shifted the story to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, never admitting the fact that that the shift in time and place means that the story was utterly false: one cannot be traumatized, hardened, or emotionally deadened by the horrors of combat in the Iraq War before having actually gone there.

TNR senior editor Jason Zengerle admitted that he received information from the U.S. Army PAO in Kuwait 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]."

The editors of TNR has decided not to share this or similar conflicting information with their readers.

Nor have they shared the fact that named contractors at Camp Arifjan, named U.S. Army officers, and literally dozens of soldiers have disputed ever seeing a contractor at Camp Arifjan or anywhere else who has matched this description. The New Republic's anonymous soldiers and fact-checking apparatus have not produced the name of a contractor, the specific date or even a likely date range for the incident, and fall back on insisting that that anonymous soldiers that they claim corroborate the burned contractor assault, and that we must take their word for it, despite all the documented claims from named military and civilian sources to the contrary.

Another claim made by Beauchamp and "fact checked" by TNR's legion of diligent staffers was the discovery of children's bodies under layers of garbage, and the subsequent wearing of part of a child's rotting skull by one soldier for an extended period of time.

The editors of The New Republic would deceive their readers, and pretend that the acknowledgement that a children's cemetery was uncovered and relocated during the creation of a combat outpost proved Beauchamp's claim that a soldier wore rotting human body parts during the day and into the night to the amusement of fellow soldiers, and without a single dissenting voice or reprimand from an NCO. It does nothing of the sort, and merely shows that Beauchamp likely took a rather mundane event—the discovery and relocation of a cemetery—and wove fiction around it to create an atrocity tacitly supported and even laughed at by his fellow soldiers.

Beauchamp's third claim, of a murderous rogue Bradley IFV driver, has been refuted by the U.S. military, Bradley drivers, commanders, crewmen, and soldiers, the crewmen of similar tracked vehicles such as the M113, virtually without contradiction, with the one notable exception coming, once again, from anonymous TNR sources.

One of their anonymous sources was actually discovered and re-questioned openly about the Bradley's capability to be used as described in "Shock Troops."

Despite TNR's claim that he supported the Bradley's ability to operate as described, Doug Coffey, Bradley manufacturer BAE Systems spokesman, actually tore TNR's claims apart when presented with all of Beauchamp's claims, in context.

It makes one wonder just how much "in the dark" The New Republic kept their other experts in order to create the illusion of an investigation that supported their initial claims.

The New Republic posted the results of an "investigation" that hides the names, positions, companies, and qualifications of their experts, and when one of their experts was tracked down, he told a quite different story. It becomes readily apparent that TNR, never "rigorously edited and fact-checked" Beauchamp's articles before publication. They still haven't.

Nor have they responded to valid criticisms...

...even though we know they have following such criticisms closely, and have been, daily.

What Franklin Foer and other editors of The New Republic have done is establish a pattern of deception, obfuscation, and blame-shifting. They continue to attempt to deceive their journalistic peers, their readers, and as their critics. TNR even purposefully hid the fact that one of their staff members is married to Beauchamp, and fired the temporary employee that disclosed this fact.

The New Republic seems convinced that despite the ever-growing collection of evidence that shows a clear breach of journalistic ethics, that if they simply find a way to "fool all of the people, all of the time," that they just might be able to save their credibility and their readership. Editor-in-Chief Marty Peretz does not seem willing to comment or act upon Franklin Foer's "rather" blatantly dishonest whitewash of an investigation, and Foer's obviously deceptive comments that the stories were fact-checked before publication.

As of yet, CanWest MediaWorks, the company that bought full interest in The New Republic in early 2007, has refused to act to salvage the credibility of their newest magazine.

One must wonder if they will wait to act until the magazine's already tarnished reputation is irreversibly damaged, or if that time is already passed.

More Easily Debunked Beauchamp Fiction: It Never Ends (Update: Joke?)

Had it not been hidden behind the subscriber firewall, I would have found this example of The New Republic's unwillingness to fact check Scott Beauchamp long ago.

It is already widely know that in Beauchamp's second dispatch, "Dead of Night," TNR editors did not take the common-sense step of fact-checking the article submitted, allowing Beauchamp to claim he saw "square-backed" pistol cartridges when such a cartridge does not exist. They also allowed him to claim that Iraqi policemen must have committed a murder, because they did not bother to do so much as the basic Google search that would have revealed that Glock pistols are very common throughout Iraq.

Yesterday evening I finally read of all "Dark of Night," and discovered this gem of a claim at the end.

As we slowly started moving back toward the Humvee, we could hear the dogs filling in the space behind us. I turned around and saw their green eyes flashing in the deep shadow where we'd left the body. Part of me thought we should have shot the dogs or done something to keep them from eating the body, but what good would it have done? We only would have been exposing ourselves to danger longer than we needed to.

Back in the Humvee, Hernandez started talking to me without looking in my direction. "Man, I've never seen anything like that before," he said.

"What? A guy killed by a cop?" I asked.

"No, man, zombie dogs. That shit was wild," he said, laughing.

Something inside of me fought for expression and then died. He was right. What else was there to do now but laugh?

"I took his driver's license," I said.

"You did?" questioned Hernandez.

"Yeah. It said he was an organ donor."

We chuckled in the dark for a moment, and then looked out the window into the night. We didn't talk again until we were back at our base.

Was anyone else the least bit surprised by Beauchamp's assertion that he stole the dead man's license, that he could read the Arabic on it, and that the deceased in an Islamic country was an organ donor?

It didn't seem to raise suspicions among TNR's editors, but it is obvious that nothing did with this post or his following fiction in "Shock Troops."

I contacted Bill Costlow, a former member of CPATT (Civilian Police Assistance Training Teams) now working in the D.C. Metro area, and he confirmed that Iraqi driver licenses are written in Arabic. He also confirmed that:

Muslims have some pretty strict requirements on the treatment of bodies — mostly geared towards respect for the dead and privacy for the families — autopsies are very difficult to get permission for because it's viewed as desecration and this has been an issue in a number of investigations.

From Baghdad, Hassan Elsaadaoui, a CPATT liaison with the Iraqi Interior Ministry concurs:

I think in the Iraqi or Muslim tradition they don't accept this practice of donating organs. Maybe in the future, it will be possible. There is no indication now on the back side of Iraqi driver's license. Also our medical system and doctors are not ready for this type procedure, because of the situation. They do not have the equipment and many of the very good doctors are now outside the country.

So I agree with Bill's notes that he sent to you.

Organ donation is not unheard of in Iraq, and indeed, there is a small black market where the destitute will sell a kidney for several thousand dollars, but this practice seems confined to living donors.

There is apparently no such thing as an official Iraqi organ donor program, much less one run through the government and noted on drivers licenses, when such donations of organs of the deceased are viewed as desecrating the dead.

It took me a grand total of two emails to get confirmation that this claim, like so many others written by Beuachamp, and published by The New Republic, was rooted firmly in fiction.

Beauchamp made up another one, and once more, Franklin Foer and the editors of The New Republic are proven to be dishonest when they claim that Beauchamp's stories were fact checked before publication.

Update: Is Beauchamp merely making a joke above? I admittedly didn't read it that way, but it very well could be the case.

The first experience most of us had with Beauchamp was with his last article first, and his allegation that he verbally assaulted a burn victim. It doesn't seem much of a stretch from abuser of the burned to robber of the dead, so I took his comments at face value as a real claim.

I suppose that it is just an indication of just how little credibility TNR and Beauchamp have that it isn't easy to tell his joking fake claims from his sincere fake claims.

Update: Ace seems quite unimpressed by Beauchamp's joke, and seems to think it should have been viewed as a red flag by TNR editors.

I think the angle here is not that he was outright fabricating, so much as he was employing literary devices in his stories-- playing a role in order to establish himself as a literary character for his coming novel, a hardass, seen-it-all veteran dripping with BAMFism...

Despite the fact that, you know, while his service in Iraq is no doubt dangerous, he's hardly seen much in the way of combat or actual danger. He's seen the possibility of danger, but, alas for his book proposal, not so much the real sort.

Rove to Rove

Gee, now who is going to transmit orders to our implants now?

The Right to Remain Silent

It appears that Bill Roggio and I were working parallel paths in running down--or perhaps over--the claims made in The New Republic's latest Scott Beauchamp defense, which consists of failing to take responsibility for their repeated editorial failings, and attempting to blame-shift all their ills on to the Army:

...we continue to investigate the anecdotes recounted in the Baghdad Diarist. Unfortunately, our efforts have been severely hampered by the U.S. Army. Although the Army says it has investigated Beauchamp's article and has found it to be false, it has refused our--and others'--requests to share any information or evidence from its investigation. What's more, the Army has rejected our requests to speak to Beauchamp himself, on the grounds that it wants "to protect his privacy."

But that isn't exactly the truth, is it? The Army has a legal obligation not to release the investigation's findings, with confidentiality being Beauchamp's right. Funny, how TNR decided not to publish that little detail.

As for who Beauchamp communicates with and why, Roggio reports:

I recently emailed Col. Steve Boylan asking for whatever information he could provide regarding the status of the investigation of Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Here is his response:

His commands investigation is complete. At this time, there is no formal what we call Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) actions being taken. However, there are other Administrative actions or what we call Non-Judicial Punishment that can be taken if the command deems appropriate. These are again administrative in nature and as such are not releasable to the public by law.

We are not stonewalling anyone. There are official statements that are out there are on the record from several of us and nothing has changed.

We are not preventing him from speaking to TNR or anyone. He has full access to the Morale Welfare and Recreation phones that all the other members of the unit are free to use. It is my understanding that he has been informed of the requests to speak to various members of the media, both traditional and non-traditional and has declined. That is his right.

We will not nor can we force a Soldier to talk to the media or his family or anyone really for that matter in these types of issues.

We fully understand the issues on this. What everyone must understand is that we will not breach the rights of the Soldier and this is where this is at this point.

I contacted Major Steven Lamb this afternoon to once more ask about about Beauchamp's ability to communicate. You may remember that five days ago he had stated that:

...the PAO system is only responding to specific inquiries, and little more is expected to be released unless PV-2 Beauchamp decides to discuss the matter further, which he is free to do.

I wanted to check in, to see if that was still the case.

It is:

All Soldiers have access to make morale calls however Beauchamp is not conducting interviews right now in order to protect his privacy and rights.

It would appear that Beauchamp has the ability to make calls, but no desire to speak any further with the media at this time, including The New Republic.

When Hidden Experts Are Found

Exactly one week ago today on August 2nd, the editors of the magazine The New Republic posted A Statement on Scott Thomas Beauchamp, in which they claimed:

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.

In this process, TNR contacted dozens of people. Editors and staffers spoke numerous times with Beauchamp. We also spoke with current and former soldiers, forensic experts, and other journalists who have covered the war extensively. And we sought assistance from Army Public Affairs officers. Most important, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp's company, and all corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)

What is most interesting about the The New Republic's statement is that while they state they spoke to "dozens of people" in fact-checking their stories, they refused to cite the names of their experts, or explain their qualifications—those qualities that make them experts.

The reasoning behind that purposeful obfuscation is becoming ever more clear with each passing day.

In addition to avoiding the statements made by Army PAOs that Beauchamp's claims were "false" in their totality, and that one claim in particular was the stuff of "urban myth or legend," it appears that one of the experts cited by The New Republic's editors was not fully appraised of what TNR was trying to justify in one claim in particular.

The New Republic stated:

The last section of the Diarist described soldiers using Bradley Fighting Vehicles to kill dogs. On this topic, one soldier who witnessed the incident described by Beauchamp, wrote in an e-mail: "How you do this (I've seen it done more than once) is, when you approach the dog in question, suddenly lurch the Bradley on the opposite side of the road the dog is on. The rear-end of the vehicle will then swing TOWARD the animal, scaring it into running out into the road. If it works, the dog is running into the center of the road as the driver swings his yoke back around the other way, and the dog becomes a chalk outline." TNR contacted the manufacturer of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle System, where a spokesman confirmed that the vehicle is as maneuverable as Beauchamp described. Instructors who train soldiers to drive Bradleys told us the same thing. And a veteran war correspondent described the tendency of stray Iraqi dogs to flock toward noisy military convoys.

Once again, no sources were named. That TNR would not reveal who these sources are who was a decision many interpreted as an attempt by TNR to keep others from interviewing these same experts. In the paragraph above, TNR mentions that they spoke to a spokesman of the company of manufacturers the Bradley.

Guess what? I did, too.

Doug Coffey is the Head of Communications, Land & Armaments, for BAE Systems, the Bradley IFV's manufacturer that TNR wouldn't name.

He was indeed contacted by a TNR staffer, but that the questions asked by the researcher were couched in generalities.

Bob, I received your earlier email and wanted to talk to some others about the specific questions you asked. To answer your last question first, yes, I did talk to a young researcher with TNR who only asked general questions about "whether a Bradley could drive through a wall" and "if it was possible for a dog to get caught in the tracks" and general questions about vehicle specifications.

In short, the TNR researcher did not provide the text of "Shock Troops" for Mr. Coffery to review, and only asked the vaguest possible questions. It seems rather obvious that this was not an attempt to actually verify Beauchamp's claims, but was instead designed to help The New Republic manufacturer a whitewash of an investigation.

Feeling that a little context was in order, I provided Mr. Coffey with Beauchamp's text from "Shock Troops" related to his company's Bradley IFV:

I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America—providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle's tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver's hatch.

One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book. The second kill was a straight shot: A dog that was lying in the street and bathing in the sun didn't have enough time to get up and run away from the speeding Bradley. Its front half was completely severed from its rear, which was twitching wildly, and its head was still raised and smiling at the sun as if nothing had happened at all. I didn't see the third kill, but I heard about it over the radio. Everyone was laughing, nearly rolling with laughter. I approached the private after the mission and asked him about it.
"So, you killed a few dogs today," I said skeptically.

"Hell yeah, I did. It's like hunting in Iraq!" he said, shaking with laughter.

"Did you run over dogs before the war, back in Indiana?" I asked him.

"No," he replied, and looked at me curiously. Almost as if the question itself was in poor taste.

Along with the context the TNR researcher didn't provide, I'd asked a set of questions, including these:

Would a Bradley driver who "took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market," run a significant risk of damaging the vehicle's track systems? Would such actions also possibly damage the vehicle's armor? Could it have an adverse affect on other crucial vehicle components? Please elaborate as much as possible. I'd also like to ask you about the claims made by the author as he describes the process of killing three dogs using the tracks of the Bradley IFV. I recognize this is more speculative in nature, but would ask that you comment about the possibility that a Bradley's driver could "jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road."

I don't pretend to be the most mechanically-minded person, but I think that a tracked vehicle such as a Bradley turning "hard to the right" would have a right tread that is either stationary, or nearly so. Is this a correct statement?

If this is a true statement, then it seems the possibility of any animal being run over by a stationary or near stationary track is quite slim. Would you agree with that assessment?

What is the likelihood that a Bradley's track system would "drag a dog for a little while?

Mr. Coffey's response:

I can't pretend to know what may or may not have happened in Iraq but the impression the writer leaves is that a "driver" can go on joy rides with a 35 ton vehicle at will. The vehicle has a crew and a commander of the vehicle who is in charge. In order for the scenario described to have taken place, there would have to have been collaboration by the entire crew.

The driver's vision, even if sitting in an open hatch is severely restricted along the sides. He sits forward on the left side of the vehicle. His vision is significantly impaired along the right side of the vehicle which makes the account to "suddenly swerve to the right" and actually catch an animal suspect. If you were to attempt the same feat in your car, it would be very difficult and you have the benefit of side mirrors.

Anyone familiar with tracked vehicles knows that turning sharply requires the road wheels on the side of the turn to either stop or reverse as the road wheels on the opposite side accelerates. What may not be obvious is that the track once on the ground, doesn't move. The road wheels roll across it but the track itself is stationary until it is pushed forward by the road wheels.

The width of the track makes it highly unlikely that running over a dog would leave two intact parts. One half of the dog would have to be completely crushed.

It also seems suspicious that a driver could go on repeated joy rides or purposefully run into things. Less a risk to the track though that is certainly possible but there is sensitive equipment on the top of the vehicle, antennas, sights, TOW missile launcher, commander and if it was a newer vehicle, the commander's independent viewer, not to mention the main gun. Strange things are known to happen in a combat environment but I can't imagine that the vehicle commander or the unit commander would tolerate repeated misuse of the vehicle, especially any action that could damage its ability to engage.

In other words, BAE System's Head of Communications over the division than manufactures the Bradley IFV was never specifically asked to comment on the claims made in "Shock Troops" by TNR's legion of fact-checkers.

When he saw the claims made in "Shock Troops," he stated, by citing the physical properties of his company's vehicle, that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for the Bradley story told in "Shock Troops" to have been correct.

Once more, we have to question the accuracy and the integrity of The New Republic's editors, who ran an investigation apparently designed to provide merely cover instead of facts.

Update: I'll be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show tonight with Dean Barnett after Mark Steyn around 6:20-ish to talk about this, unless I get bumped or something.

Right Idea, Wrong Iranian Rocket

Fox News is running a story this morning that shows still photos from a captured insurgent video.

The story claims:

Dramatic video produced by Iraqi insurgents and captured in a raid earlier this week by U.S. troops clearly shows a battery of sophisticated Iranian-made rocket launchers firing on American positions east of Baghdad, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The video, captured during a raid on Monday by the 3rd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment in northeast Nahrawan, shows insurgents setting up and carrying out an attack on Sunday, as well as an attack on July 11 that killed one soldier and wounded 15 others, officials said. The raid last month appeared to involve 34 launchers firing 107 mm Iranian-made rockets.

Not so fast there, Sparky.

This is one of the photos run in the Fox story:

Please note the size and shape of the rocket. Fox was smart in hedging its bets that (emphasis mine), "The raid last month appeared to involve 34 launchers firing 107 mm Iranian-made rockets."

These aren't 107mm rockets.

These are:

I first published these two photos of captured Iranian rockets captured outside Forward Operating Base Hammer on July 15.

You'll note that the crude launchers seem very similar in construction, but that the Iranian rockets in the Fox News story are far larger, and are of a different shape, than the verified 107mm rockets captured at FOB Hammer.

Iran seems to be shipping Iraqi insurgents some of their more deadly 230mm rocket variants.

I wonder if the insurgents ordered them via credit card from Iran's www.terror.com.

Ho-Hum: Yet Another False Media-Reported Massacre In Iraq

On Sunday, Reuters reported that the scene of a large massacre had been discovered near Baquba:

BAGHDAD, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Iraqi police said on Sunday they had found 60 decomposed bodies dumped in thick grass in Baquba, north of Baghdad.

There was no indication of how the 60 people had been killed, police said. Baquba is the capital of volatile Diyala province, where thousands of extra U.S. and Iraqi soldiers have been sent to stem growing violence.

Why did the police have such a hard time providing an indication of how the 60 people had been killed? Probably because there were no bodies to examine.

Via email from Major Rob Parke, U.S. Army:

Bob,

This story is false. We have had coalition soldiers looking for the last two days at the locations that IPs reported these bodies. We've asked all the locals in the area and they have no idea what we are talking about. We've gone to areas that might be close, gone to suspicious locations, all turned up nothing.

Most of the news stories all say the report stated decomposing bodies which would indicate if it was true, it happened before we arrived. Considering we discovered an Al Qaeda Jail, courthouse, and torture house in western Baqubah, it wouldn't surprise me if there were 60 bodies buried out there somewhere. Bottom line is we have done some extensive looking and found nothing.

This is the second large-scale massacre reported in major wire services in less than six weeks that seem utterly without merit; both Reuters and the Associated Press were duped by insurgents posing as police officers who claimed 20 beheaded bodies were discovered near Um Al-Abeed on June 28.

That was also false.

As I noted at the time:

..reporting in Iraq is very dangerous work, and insurgent groups and terrorists do target journalists for assassination.

But it is equally true that insurgent groups and terrorists also use the media to plant false stories, and that media organizations consistently fail to find credible, independent sources to verify alleged atrocities and attacks before presenting an alleged story as fact.

Further, it appears that some news organizations, through a combination of questionable news-gathering techniques, insufficient editorial practices and indifferent -perhaps intractable- management, are more susceptible to running false and fabricated stories than others, with the Associated Press and Reuters being among the worst offenders.

Throughout the Iraq War, and with seemingly increasing frequency over the past year, these media outlets have become increasingly reliant upon anonymous sources and questionable sources hiding behind pseudonyms to deliver "news" with no apparent basis in fact.

In some of these instances, these wire services have been forced to retract days later, as they have with the false Um al-Abeed beheading story. Sadly, the international and national news outlets that often carry the initial claims as "page one" material fail to do so with the refutations, leaving most media consumers with the impression that the original account was accurate.

Remarkably, these news organizations continue to employ the same reporters and editors that have published multiple erroneous or highly suspect claims, or who have consistently cited discredited or disreputable sources.

Further, these wire services continue to employ newsgathering techniques that rely upon anonymous sources with little or no direct involvement with the story being reported, and often publish these claims as absolute fact, without any indication they are publishing what is often, at best, hearsay.

The MNF-I refutation of the Um al-Abeed decapitation story states that the claim was "completely false and fabricated by unknown sources."

That isn't exactly true. Both Reuters and the Associated Press presumably know precisely who their sources were for this story, as they know who their sources were for other discredited stories.

They just as they certainly know, or should know, which of their indigenous reporters—"stringers," in industry parlance—have been providing these suspect or discredited stories, and which editors have allowed these stories to press based upon the flimsiest of evidence, which often does not meet the service's own stated reportorial standards.

To date, these wire services have consistently failed to visibly enforce standards of reporting, and in some instances, have promoted employees involved in using questionable sources and printing false claims. Once promoted, these same employees only further degrade editorial standards, leading to the public's increasing distrust of these news organizations.

Wire services are only as valuable as the amount of trust readers can invest in their reporting.

With now two debunked massacres and the continued slow-roasting of The New Republic for their refusal to deal honestly with the Scott Thomas Beauchamp articles in the last weeks alone, we're forced to realize that the Weekly World News is not closing their doors on August 27 because mock journalism is unpopular, but instead because larger news organizations crowded them out of the market.

(h/t to Michael Yon, who alerted me that he smelled a rat in this story all the way from his current location in Indonesia).

Deceiver

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...

Let's look at the facts as we now know them:

• "Scott Thomas" published three separate stories in The New Republic.
• "Scott Thomas" made two claims in his second article, "Dead of Night," that were flatly false:
  1. That he saw a spent "square-backed" pistol cartridge. As a firearms "expert" who deals with literally dozens of different kinds of pistol, rifle, and shotgun ammunition on a near-daily basis, I flatly deny that such a thing exists. Please feel free to quote me on that.
  2. Beauchamp claims that the "square-backed" cartridge was proof that the Iraqi Police were involved in the shooting, because "The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police." Someone should tell that to the New York Times, military press releases, video-sharing web sites and other media outlets that would have shown that Glocks are very common in Iraq.
  3. Glocks are quite likely the most ubiquitous handgun in Iraq, carried officially or unofficially by those on all sides, and those on no side at all.
  4. A simple Google search would have disproved both of these claims made in "Dead of Night" within seconds or minutes.
  5. This strongly suggests that The New Republic did not even make a cursory attempt to fact-check "Dead of Night" before publication.
• Beauchamp's stories has been flatly denied by named U.S. Army PAO's Col. Steven Boylan (PAO to General Petraeus), LTC Andy Sams, Major Steven Lamb, Major Renee D. Russo, and Major Kirk Luedeke.
• Beauchamp's First Sergeant Hatley also flatly refuted the claims.
• Contractor William "Big Country" Coughlin has been at Camp Arijan since February, and flatly denies seeing such a woman.
• TNR senior editor Jason Zengerle admits to have received email from PAO Russo stating that this story was regarded as an urban legend or myth, but refuses to publish this contradictory account.
• TNR has not named a single witness, of any type. This included not only the soldiers they granted anonymity, but the civilian personnel they said they spoke with at the company who manufactures the Bradley IFV (BAE Systems), who are presumably not subject to a military gag order. TNR would not even disclose the name of the manufacturer, much less who their experts were, or precisely what they said.
• TNR has failed to cite or name the forensic experts they spoke with, reveal the questions they asked, or reveal their expert's responses.
• TNR has failed to cite or name the current or former solders they spoke with, what their qualifications were, reveal the questions they asked, or reveal their expert's responses.
• TNR has failed to cite or name the journalists they spoke with, explain why they are more qualified than TNR's own crack staff, reveal the questions they asked, or their expert's responses.
• TNR has utterly failed to address the obvious fact errors in "Dark of Night" that seems to prove their lack of fact-checking prior to the publication of that article.
• TNR has purposefully and willfully deceived their readers when they claimed "all of Beauchamp's essays were fact-checked before publication," as the various Glocks-in-Iraq-related links above abundantly prove beyond any shadow of a doubt.
• TNR did not present conflicting accounts from Major Luedeke or Major Lamb denying Beauchamp's claims as "urban legends of myths" and as "false".

Someone please explain to me why we should have any faith at all in what Franklin Foer, Jason Zengerle, and the other editors and reporters at The New Republic claim. They've proven they have not fact-checked articles they claim to have fact-checked prior to publication, they have not proved a single named credible source to support their charges, and they refuse to admit that their time-shifting, country-hopping "burned woman" claims have completely undermined the premise of the entire article.

I cannot think of a single reason that we should trust them, when all they seem to be trying to do is muddy the waters just enough that they might possibly escape with their careers intact.

Another Camp Arifjan Account

An email just in from a long-term contractor at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, where Scott Beauchamp says he verbally abused a female contractor, and the New Republic refuses to admit that they've been "Glassed" yet again:

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. If in fact there was such an unfortunate individual around, they would have been evacuated as soon as humanly possible. Hope this helps!

Best Regards

William "Big Country" Coughlin

We've had several weeks for the New Republic to provide something, anything, in the way of actual proof. They have failed, and stories such as this of William Coughlin add to an ever-expanding list of those who dispute their claims.

Suddenly Shrinking Sources

The editors of The New Republic seem to be sticking to their story... just quite a bit less of it:

We've talked to military personnel directly involved in the events that Scott Thomas Beauchamp described, and they corroborated his account as detailed in our statement. When we called Army spokesman Major Steven F. Lamb and asked about an anonymously sourced allegation that Beauchamp had recanted his articles in a sworn statement, he told us, "I have no knowledge of that." He added, "If someone is speaking anonymously [to The Weekly Standard], they are on their own." When we pressed Lamb for details on the Army investigation, he told us, "We don't go into the details of how we conduct our investigations."

Just five days ago, TNR editors claimed far more support for Beauchamp's stories, stating that they spoke to all sorts of experts—none that they would cite by name or position, but they assured us they were experts all the same—in addition to the soldiers they interviewed, and of course, Beauchamp.

They seem to have dropped their experts, Beauchamp, and claims of fact-checking before publication, all of which were murky at best, and deceitful at worst.

Now, they seem to hang their ever-less-descriptive claims on an unknown number of "military personnel."

Showing poor-form, TNR editors seem to be laying the framework to claim that they could have proven their contentions, gosh-darn it, if that mean old military would just let them dig into the military investigation, Beauchamp's personnel records be damned.

Is there a moral to this story? Perhaps.

If you're going to stick to your guns, make sure they don't fire square-backed bullets.

It Didn't Have To Be This Way

Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard reports that according to an anonymous source close to the investigation, PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp has recanted:

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 military sources I contacted will neither confirm nor deny Goldfarb's report, citing Beauchamp's right to privacy and on-going administrative actions.

I think that in light of everything else we know about this unfolding scandal, however, that the statement is quite plausibly correct.

Sadly, if the editors of The New Republic had actually fact-checked Beauchamp's claims prior to "Shock Troops," obvious fact errors in his second post, "Dead of Night," should have alerted them to the fact that Beauchamp was not a reliable or accurate source of information.

It didn't have to be this way

In "Dead of Night," Beauchamp wrote a paragraph that contained two factual inaccuracies that should have been quite easy to discern with even a minimal attempt at fact checking, fact checking that it is obvious that The New Republic did not engage in.

Beauchamp wrote:

Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.

Anyone with even minimal familiarity with firearms--and by "minimal," I mean anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to firearms in news stories, television programs, or movies--should know that there is no such thing as a "9mm with a square back." All modern cartridges in common use are tubular cases with a round base, or in Beauchamp's parlance, "back."

Here is an excellent photo of the base of a spent 9mm cartridge casing as captured by PAXcam:

Note that this is a fired case manufactured by CCI, and in the middle is the primer. In the center of the primer, lending to a "bull’s-eye" visual effect, is an indentation made by a standard firing pin. It is round in shape, due to the fact that most pistols in common use have rounded firing pins.

Taken in the context of the paragraph, it could be reasonably be concluded that what Beauchamp probably meant to say was that the indentation made on the primer was square or rectangular in shape, leading him to believe that the indentation was made by the squared striker used by Glock pistols. As a matter of fact, this is what I stated when I first addressed this "red flag" article on July 20.

Oddly enough, though, he returns to state "The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks." He is once again talking about the case itself, and not the mark on the primer.

In retrospect, as such shell casings do not exist as a clear matter of fact (and this is beyond dispute), I don't think it unreasonable to conclude that Scott Thomas Beauchamp never saw such a shell casing, and that this entire paragraph was fabricated based upon stories he probably heard from other soldiers, and then was inaccurately retold in this tale.

I could reasonably forgive The New Republic for missing this factual untruth, as it may simply be that they had no one on staff to vet this article that has even a passing familiarity with firearms.

The second factual error, however, was exceedingly easy to fact check, and would have exposed Beauchamp as being a fact-challenged writer well in advance of the publication of "Shock Troops."

This is the statement that should have sent the red flag:

And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.

The obvious implication of this statement is that Scott Thomas Beauchamp was specifically implicating the Iraqi police in a shooting.

Such a implication demands at least a cursory attempt at fact-checking the claim that only the Iraqi police carry Glock pistols, and the easiest way to do that is to simply Google the words "Glock" and "Iraq."

If TNR's editors had taken even that minimal fact-checking step, they would have discovered articles from the New York Times, military press releases, video-sharing web sites and other media outlets that would have shown that Glocks are very common in Iraq. Glocks are quite likely the most ubiquitous handgun in Iraq, carried officially or unofficially by those on all sides, and those on no side at all. The New Republic utterly failed to fact-check an inflammatory charge made by Beauchamp that implicated the Iraqi police as the only group that could have fired that cartridge.

In one paragraph in his second article, Beauchamp should have been exposed as a questionable writer, whose articles needed to be thoroughly vetted before publication. Franklin Foer's editorial staff utterly failed to fact-check "Dead of Night." Had they caught these errors, it is possible that "Shock Troops" would have faced more scrutiny that it obviously did, and the article that now has caused such a firestorm, and may yet cost Foer and other TNR editors their jobs, may have never gone to publication.

Even after "Shock Troops" was published, it wasn't too late

After "Shock Troops" went to press and Michael Goldfarb called the account into question in "Fact or Fiction?, various bloggers and military officers starting to pick the story apart.

Franklin Foer should have admitted at that time that they were relying on the word of a soldier well-known to them, and that they did not see a need to fact-check the stories prior to publication as a result.

Instead, Foer announced that TNR would conduct an investigation, and that conversations with soldiers have done nothing to undermine--and much to corroborate--the author's descriptions." Foer was conveniently and self-servingly ignoring structural problems with the story, apparently convinced that fervent testimony has more use than facts.

Just four days later, TNR made the rather outlandish claim that "the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published," which is a blatant untruth.

As a matter of fact, it was obvious that fact-checking had not been completed prior to TNR's August 2 publication of the results of their investigation, as senior editor Jason Zingerle admitted yesterday at The Corner, when he stated that he did not receive word back from Kuwait-based PAO Major Renee D. Russo prior to publication of their self-styled vindication, and perhaps more damning, did not deem fit to print her statement that Beauchamp's story was a "likely urban legend or myth" once he had it.

Where do we go from here?

PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp is probably finished as a writer, and possibly finished as a soldier. At this point, if he has the common sense to keep his mouth shut, his role in this sad drama, at least in the public eye, should be over.

We in the blogosphere will move on at some point in the near future; as a matter of fact, so many of those who have defended Beauchamp and TNR on ideological grounds alone already have.

Others--myself included--will likely follow the incident for a while longer.

The New Republic's ordeal, however, is only just beginning.

TNR's owners, Canwest MediaWorks International and the TNR's editor-in-chief Martin Peretz have some tough decisions to make in the days ahead.

It seems obvious that TNR did not fact-check Beauchamp's stories before they were originally published, which is not by itself an unpardonable sin. What is far harder to justify is the decision of the editors to try to insist that they fact-checked Beauchamp's articles when they clearly did not. That, in my opinion, amounts to a lie.

Franklin Foer and other editors at The New Republic apparently tried to fool their readers with a combination of what they said and what they decided not to say, and abusing your readership in such a manner is one way to assure that an already shrinking readership will continue to collapse.

If The New Republic is to survive this latest scandal, it appears that that excising a significant portion of their editorial staff is the only real option.

Sadly, it the editors had only been forthright and admitted their mistakes early on, their futures at The New Republic--and perhaps even the future of the magazine itself--would not now be in doubt.

Further Confirmation: No Burned Woman Here

Adding to the debunking of The New Republic's new claim that "burned contractor" story took place in Kuwait before PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp deployed into a combat zone, U.S. Army Public Affairs Chief PAO for US ARCENT Kuwait LTC Andy Sams replies to an emailed inquiry about the claim:

Mr. Owens,

We have absolutely no record of this. MAJ Russo contacted Buerhing and our Area Support Group and they do not have anything either.

Sincerely,
LTC Andy Sams

This follows an earlier refutation from Kuwait-based U.S. Army PAO Renee D. Russo at Camp Arifjan, and the discovery of the fact that Jason Zengerle, Senior Editor of The New Republic knew in advance (update: this claim was unsupported. See correction here) of the publication of TNR's own investigation, which conveniently refused to address the fact that the U.S. Army has been unable to find any record of a burned female contractor at bases in Iraq or Kuwait, and considers the story "a urban legend or myth."

U.S. Army Col. Steven Bolyan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus, responded to an inquiry of mine on August 3, and stated that:

An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

Further email exchanges with U.S. Army PAO Major Steven Lamb with Multi National Division-Baghdad states that any administrative punishment handed down to PV-2 Beauchamp is a personnel matter, and therefore, will not be discussed publicly. Access to the findings of the Army investigation of Beauchamp's claims, where all soldiers in his platoon and company were interviewed and could not substantiate his claims, has not yet been determined.

As Col. Boylan has released the findings conclusions of the Army investigation of this matter to this blogger and the information is in the public domain, the Army is not planning a press release discussing the findings at this time. Instead, Major Lamb states that the PAO system is only responding to specific inquiries, and little more is expected to be released unless PV-2 Beauchamp decides to discuss the matter further, which he is free to do.

Commenters on this and other blogs have speculated that since PV-2 Beauchamp is receiving only administrative and not criminal punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for the allegations he made in The New Republic, that he has likely refuted his allegations when interviewed during the course of the Army investigation. I'd caution that this is idle speculation, and we have no evidence to support this theory.

The New Republic, which published a defense of the stories they published from Beauchamp that excluded contradictory statements from Major Russo and which failed to provide any documentation to support their claims that the Beauchamp stories were fact-checked before publication, and which failed to identify the experts that they say confirmed the plausibility of the claims by either name, organization, or qualifications, has taken a pre-scheduled vacation and is not apparently available for comment, even though the credibility of the editorial staff and the magazine's veracity are now in question.

TNR: Not Quite All the News that's Fit to Print

***Major Correction Below***

A funny thing happened on the way to The New Republic's verification/justification/re-investigation of the series of stories published in TNR by one Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

The editors of The New Republic declared:

... After questions were raised about the veracity of his essay, TNR extensively re-reported Beauchamp's account.

In this process, TNR contacted dozens of people. Editors and staffers spoke numerous times with Beauchamp. We also spoke with current and former soldiers, forensic experts, and other journalists who have covered the war extensively. And we sought assistance from Army Public Affairs officers...

It's quite interesting that in publishing the findings of an investigation in which the magazine's very reputation hangs in the balance, that The New Republic somehow forgot to cite the names and positions of the experts who corroborate their magazine's printed claims. Typically, the providing of such information is viewed as lending credibility to the organization attempting to defend itself.

Fortunately for The New Republic, I was able to find one of their experts, and the conversation I had with her was enlightening, to say the least.

As noted above, among the experts that TNR relied on were Army Public Affairs Officers, or PAOs.

Among the reasons The New Republic contacted Army PAOs was an attempt to verify this claim:

Beauchamp's essay consisted of three discrete anecdotes. In the first, Beauchamp recounted how he and a fellow soldier mocked a disfigured woman seated near them in a dining hall. Three soldiers with whom TNR has spoken have said they repeatedly saw the same facially disfigured woman. One was the soldier specifically mentioned in the Diarist. He told us: "We were really poking fun at her; it was just me and Scott, the day that I made that comment. We were pretty loud. She was sitting at the table behind me. We were at the end of the table. I believe that there were a few people a few feet to the right."

The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp's on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq. When presented with this important discrepancy, Beauchamp acknowledged his error. We sincerely regret this mistake.

The New Republic posted the results of their investigation, including the passages cited above, late on the afternoon of August 2nd.

On August 3rd, I contacted Major Renee D. Russo, Third Army/USARCENT PAO at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in an attempt to fact-check the new claim that the verbally assault on a female burn victim occurred at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, and not at Forward Operating Base Falcon in Iraq as he had claimed after his series of articles published by The New Republic was first disputed.

In a response posted on August 3rd, Major Russo stated:

Mr. Owens,

We have received other media queries on the alleged incident, but have
not been able to find anyone to back it up. There is not a police
report or complaint filed on this incident during that timeframe. Right now it is considered to be a Urban Legend or Myth.

I am still researching the incident and will have to get back with you
later with any new developments.

This statement was viewed by many as quite problematic for the credibility of The New Republic and Beauchamp; not only had they been put in a position where they felt compelled to retract a key element that established the tone of narrative in "Shock Troops"--and one that fatally undermined Beauchamp's premise that the horrors of combat had caused him psychological trauma, as he had not yet been to war--it also cast serious doubts on the claimed event having occurred at Camp Buehring as well, or perhaps at all.

After publishing the information above, that the Beauchamp story is "considered to be an urban legend or myth," I asked Major Russo if she had been contacted by Franklin Foer or any other reporter or editor from the New Republic attempting to verify their new Camp Buehring claim.

It seemed odd to me that with their magazine's reputation on the line, they would go to press without attempting to verify the story of Beauchamp's location shifting.

It so happens that Jason Zengerle, Senior Editor of The New Republic did contact Major Russo. What did Major Russo tell Editor Zengerle?

According to Major Russo:

I released the same information that I gave you. The process and answers are the same when dealing with media queries.

In other words, the Army PAO contacted by The New Republic was told by the PAO that the claim could not be verified, and that the burn victim story was regarded as an "urban legend or myth"... and The New Republic ran their story without disclosing this apparent contradiction.

Apparently, The New Republic decided for their readers and critics that they did not need to know that the military considered Beauchamp's claim an urban legend.

It makes one wonder if any of their other un-credited, unnamed people relayed a similar tale, only to have that news covered-up by the editors of The New Republic.

Update/Correction: Though he has not attempted to refute these claims directly with me, Jason Zegerle, senior editor at The New Republic, is disputing them via John Podhoretz at The Corner:

Zengerle has emailed me to say he actually received an communique about this from Maj. Renee Russo (yes, that's her real name), an Army public-affairs officer, the day after the Note was published rather than before. He also points out that Russo's email to him differs from other statements by Russo in that she told him "a couple of soldiers did say that [they] heard rumors about the incident, but nothing based on fact. More like an urban legand [sic]."

The public-affairs officer told Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee that "we have received other media queries on the alleged incident, but have not been able to find anyone to back it up. There is not a police report or complaint filed on this incident during that timeframe. Right now it is considered to be a Urban Legend or Myth." She did not mention the "couple of soldiers" who "did say that [they] heard rumors about the incident," but the repetition of the "urban legend" term kind of implies that.

Is Zengerle's claim that he didn't receive word from Russo until after the August 2 TNR investigation accurate?

I don't know that for a fact, and didn't know that for a fact when I published, and so I owe Jason Zengerle an apology.

It doesn't much matter if what he says is factually true; what matters is that I made an assumption that in my mind was obvious. It was, in retrospect, guided by what I thought was probably true based upon the way the magazine has and continues to act, instead of what I could support with the facts.

I apologize to Jason Zengerle, and I apologize to my readers for making that unsupported assumption.

That said... why did TNRdecide once again to publish before their fact-checking had been complete?

It's Official: Beauchamp's Claims Debunked by Army Internal Investigation

Col. Steven Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus, just emailed me the following in response to my request to confirm an earlier report that the U.S. Army's investigation into the claims made by PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp made in The New Republic had been completed.

He states:

To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?

Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the
command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon and
company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

As to what will happen to him?

Answer: As there is no evidence of criminal conduct, he is subject to
Administrative punishment as determined by his chain of command. Under
the various rules and regulations, administrative actions are not
releasable to the public by the military on what does or does not
happen.

Let's look at that once more: "members of Thomas' platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims."

Presumably thorough, in-person interviews of all of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division, and Beauchamp's platoon within Alpha Company by military investigators, and not one of those soldiers could confirm Beauchamp's stories as told in The New Republic.

Note that the investigation didn't just stop by stating that the claims were uncorroborated; Col. Boylan states categorically that Beauchamp's allegations were false. Not a lot of wiggle room there.

It appears that the proverbial ball is now in The New Republic's court. It will be interesting to see what their next move will be.

Breaking: Kuwait-Based Army PAO Calls Beauchamp/New Republic Claim an "Urban Legend or Myth"

I've been silent on the New Republic's latest attempt to explain their editorial dereliction of editorial duties in the Scott Thomas Beauchamp collection of stories know as "Shock Troops" when those latest explanations surfaced yesterday, but that doesn't mean I've been disinterested.

Instead, I've been trying to run down some of the claims TNR has made by contacting experts for on-the-record discussions of Beauchamp's allegations... a level of transparency that Franklin Foer and The New Republic doesn't seem to want to provide.

One of the revisions to the Beauchamp story was the new claim that Beauchamp's verbal assault of a badly-burned female contractor for wounds he claimed were caused by an IED happened not in Forward Operating Base (FOB) Falcon in Iraq after Beauchamp's psyche had been scarred by the horrors of war, but instead occurred in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, before Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division had even deployed into combat.

This, of course, completely undermines the narrative Beauchamp was seeking to establish, and that Franklin Foer claimed to have fact-checked.

But beyond those tiny inaccuracies--you know, that the incident happened in the wrong country, and before he experienced the horrors of war, and not after--we are left to ask the obvious question: did Foer put any effort into checking to see if this new claim was any more accurate than Beauchamp's previous one?

I did.

This morning, I contact Major Renee D. Russo, Third Army USARCENT PAO in Kuwait, to ask her if she knew of "a female civilian contractor at Camp Buehring with severe facial burns, and if so, when" she was there.

Here is her emailed response, in full.

Mr. Owens,

We have received other media queries on the alleged incident, but have
not been able to find anyone to back it up. There is not a police
report or complaint filed on this incident during that timeframe. Right now it is considered to be a Urban Legend or Myth.

I am still researching the incident and will have to get back with you
later with any new developments.

As it stands now, the U.S. Army in Kuwait, like the U.S. Army in Iraq, is casting strong doubts on the veracity of Beauchamp's claims, stating that to the best they can determine at this time, the female contractor Beauchamp claims to have abused is either part of an "urban legend or myth."

I've also attempting to get verification form a total of five PAOs in Kuwait to see if they have any record of Franklin Foer or any other reporter or editor from The New Republic attempting to contact them prior to publishing the revised Camp Buehring claim to see if TNR made a good faith effort to verify that a contractor matching this woman's description was based in U.S. military bases in Kuwait.

Update: Both Bryan at Hot Air and Ace link to a post by Matt Sanchez from FOB Falcon, claiming that the military investigation into Beauchamp's stories was completed August 1, and that his claims have been:

"...refuted by members of his platoon and proven to be false."

That quote comes from Sergeant First Class Robert Timmons, the acting public affairs official of the 4th IBCT, 1st ID.

I'll post any documentation as it becomes available.

Vacation destination: Iraq / FOB Falcon

During discussions and posting covering the Scott Thomas Beauchamp diaries Milblogger Laughing Wolf, posting at Blackfive, issued a challenge to Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary.

Since there are some profound and troubling issues that remain, let me make an offer. This fat ol' crip is willing to take a leave of absence, or quit my day job if necessary, to take a trip to embed with the troops. As part of that journey, let's you and I go visit the unit in question, and let the people there tell you the problem with the message. Let's visit a few other milbloggers while we are at it, maybe a few other bloggers period, and see if they can help. I'm willing to put it all on the line right now, especially if the money could be raised to cover the process via PMI, and to ensure I still had a lair to which to return. How about it, are you and CJR willing to put your money where your mouth is? I'm willing to put my body and what meager funds I have on the line for this. How about you?

Just four days after issuing the challenge Laughing Wolf has his response. Its game on.

A few days ago, I issued a challenge to Paul McLeary and CJR, and Paul has accepted that challenge. As he notes here and in the e-mail exchanges, he stepped in it, which is something with which I think we can all empathize. Our discussions have been interesting, thoughtful, and fruitful.

The result is that we are working together with PMI to go to Iraq and FOB Falcon. Our mutual goal is to go see the reality on the ground, find out what the troops think on the issue of Bleu Beau, blogs, blogging, and a number of other subjects.

In addition to what is done with Paul, I am looking to embed with a Marine unit while there after our time at FOB Falcon.

We do not yet know how much, if any, support will come from CJR. Therefore, we are looking for funding, and I am looking for your help to send me to Iraq. More than that, I see this as an opportunity to try and make it easier for the next trip by getting some additional resources to PMI.

As he said, Laughing Wolf's vacation to the Middle East isn't going to be a cheap trip. LW is going about it the right way in that he's not only trying to fund his trip, but by building up the resources / equipment available to PMI he's hoping to make it easier for other bloggers to embed.

So please, give what you can.
Donations though PMI (tax deductible) can be made here. Just be sure to note they are For LW Embed.

Donations to help offset his personal costs, really it isn't going to be cheap, can also be made on Laughing Wolf's personal site (on the right sidebar, both paypal and amazon).

On a personal note, I'm honored to count LW as one of the few friends I've made through blogging and can't adequately put into words how proud I am of him.

Wrong City, Wrong Province: No Problem

The police station was in Hibhib.

Hibhib is not Baghdad. Baquba (or Baqouba) , the next-closest large city, is also is not Baghdad. Both are in Diyala Province, more than 30 miles north-northeast of Baghdad.

So how, precisely, is this a Baghdad police station?

Those multiple layers of fact checkers strike again...

The Profit of Jihad

Sadly, it wasn't until the very end, as he peered into Paradise, that Safi realized that the Koran was less than specific about his reward...

He was destined to spend his eternity with vegansexuals, and was none to happy about it.

Prayers for Minneapolis

As you are no doubt well aware of by now, the I35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed during rush our this evening.

Dozens of vehicles have fallen into the river or the ground below; others have been crushed by the falling span. As I write this, authorities are stating that they can confirm seven people have died, that more than 30 are injured, and that 20 people or more are thought to be missing.

My heart goes out to those who have loved ones involved in this disaster, and I ask those readers who are religious to please consider saying prayers for those involved in this disaster, their families, the first responders, and attending medical personnel.

Update: James Lileks is continuing to update the story.

Worth noting are the stories of the heroism of ordinary people amid the disaster, as many people nearby and on the bridge rushed to aid others.

From Lileks at 10:21 PM:

I’m listening to a story on the news about a man who survived the fall – then ran to help the kids on the bus. I’d guess the fellow never considered what he might do in such a situation. Never thought about it much. Who would? But then you find yourself on a bridge that’s crashed down into the Mississippi, and you’re struggling with the seat belt buckle. It works , but your hands feel thick. You’re alive – which doesn’t seem that odd, really, you’ve always been alive, so this is just different, but you have strange thoughts about insurance and a mad swirl of panic and there’s blood in your hair but you can stand – and then you see a school bus. So you go to the bus. Of course you go the bus.

Most of us would. It’s a remarkable instinct that wells up and kicks in, and it’s something you never expected to experience. As someone said about humans: We’re at our best when things are worst.

Would you have run to the bus? I'll answer for you: yes.

And from what I'm hearing, many did exactly that.

Poorly-Formed Ideas

Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama seems to have, as my father might put it, "engaged his mouth before putting his mind in gear."

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

CNN provides us with this:

According to excerpts from the speech released by his campaign, Obama, D-Illinois, will say: "When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world's most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland."

Let us presume for the sake of argument that Obama is elected President, and as Commander in Chief, feels he has no choice but to invade Pakistan.

In his mind, what constitutes an "invasion?"

Does Mr. Obama mean periodic cross-border air raids by UAVs, attack aircraft, and special forces soldiers when intelligence assets identify specific targets, or does he mean what most of us would take way from these articles, which is a larger, full-spectrum invasion by land, air, and perhaps even naval forces?

What part of Pakistan would he invade?

Would he invade only the Taliban-controlled tribal areas of North and South Warizistan where we have seen most of the terrorist-related activities, or would he advocate a wider invasion of the Islamic nuclear state?

If a President Obama felt that an invasion of Pakistan was warranted, would he take preemptive steps to dismantle or destroy the Pakistani nuclear arsenal to prevent these munitions from possibly being used against American forces? He seems to suggest this when he states "we need to take out the terrorists and the world's most deadly weapons."

Does he realize that if he take such a step he would be attacking official Pakistani military bases and likely kill Pakistani soldiers, airmen, and other personnel that are not terrorists, forcing Pakistan directly into war with the United States?

Should efforts to destroy the Pakistani nuclear arsenal fall short of success, what are his contingencies? How would he keep any surviving Pakistani nuclear weapons from being used against invading U.S. soldiers. Does Obama realize that he would be responsible no only for any U.S. military losses, but for thousands of more lives in the region affected by the blast and its residual fallout effects?

This stance also brings up other issues.

If he truly believes that risking an assault on a nuclear state to suppress terrorism if diplomacy doesn't work is a viable option, why doesn't he join Senator Leiberman in saying that we must use all of our resources, including military force, against Iran, an aspiring nuclear country with a clear track record of the state sponsorship of terrorism throughout the region? Put bluntly, how could his policies be said to have any consistency if he advocates invading one state (Pakistan) for allowing terrorism, while failing to address another state (Iran) for directly supporting it throughout the region?

And how does he square his stated approaches to Iran and Pakistan with his advocating a withdrawal from Iraq, where we are already engaged with Islamic extremists who wish to create precisely the same kind of state that he says he would invade?

For quite some time--and due in no small part to the apparent lack of other strong primary candidates--I'd been rather confident that the 2008 Democrat Presidential ticket would be some combination of Hillary and Obama.

This frankly daft mash-up of contradictory foreign policy positions seems to indicate that the freshman senator from Illinois simply isn't ready for higher office, and very well may give John Edwards a fighting chance of getting on the ticket... then again, maybe not.