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.