Tall Tales?

The New Republic is standing by a disturbing account written by a GI in Iraq, even as the Army says the stories are not true.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

Aug. 9, 2007 - What to make of the boxing match between The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, two Washington-based magazines, over the articles of a soldier diarist?

To recap: TNR last month published the account of a GI in Iraq who described men in his unit running down stray dogs with their Bradleys, amusing themselves with the excavated skull of an Iraqi child and mocking a woman in the mess hall whose face was burned in an IED attack. Titled “Shock Troops,” it was the soldier's third column for TNR, all written on his laptop in Iraq and printed under a pseudonym.

When a blogger for the neoconservative Weekly Standard disputed the facts, the Baghdad diarist revealed himself as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp of the Army's first infantry division, prompting a military investigation into each of the allegations.

But while the army announced this week it found no evidence to substantiate the misdeeds, the squabbling continues. TNR says its senior editors have corroborated details of the article through their own reporting, interviewing five members of Beauchamp's platoon and finding only one significant inaccuracy: the mess hall incident took place in Kuwait, not in Iraq. The Weekly Standard, for its part, says most or all of the article is fabricated and accuses TNR editors of letting their bias against the war impair their judgment.

It's not hard to see why the Standard would be skeptical of Beauchamp's writings. While the stories are not implausible (certainly American GIs have done more sinister things in Iraq--Abu Ghraib, for one), his narratives feel overdrawn and that should have alerted TNR editors. His characters "shake with laughter" and slam their cups down on tables. The private who unearths the top of a skull doesn't just wear it as a cap to entertain his buddies, he keeps it on for the rest of the day and night. "Even on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull," Beauchamp writes. The Bradley driver who likes swerving to hit dogs, does more than just kill them; in one case, he slices a dog in two. "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."

Beauchamp, who is 26 and married to a TNR reporter/researcher, blogged on his own Web site before his deployment in Iraq. Editors at the magazine say they had been looking for a GI who could write about his experiences in Iraq and felt that giving Beauchamp anonymity would free him to tell the truth without risking retribution. That sounds reasonable, given what whistle blowers often endure. But Beauchamp might have felt the decision also freed him to embellish the truth. And while TNR editors still labor under the dark editorial cloud of writer Stephen Glass's fabrications in the late 1990s, they apparently gave Beauchamp's “Shock Troops” only a standard fact checking.

But neither is The Weekly Standard clean in this fight. In the blog by Michael Goldfarb that first raises doubts about Beauchamp, there is a partisan smugness, a gotcha undertone. A later column by Standard Editor William Kristol, the neocon stalwart, is laced with ideological nastiness. Instead of restricting the argument to standards of good journalism, they effectively accuse TNR editors of running a smear campaign against troops in Iraq. "I think this story fits really well into their narrative and the left's narrative of the soldier as both victim and perpetrator of the war," Goldfarb told me in a phone interview from his home in Boston. Kristol summed it up this way: "The left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support."

As political mudslinging goes, charging the other side with turning against the troops is among the ugliest of accusations. And in the case of TNR, which was famously pro-war despite a liberal bent, it seems especially inapt. Few publications have contemplated (not to say agonized over) their evolving position on the war in Iraq as honestly and as publicly. As editor in 2003, Peter Beinart argued so forcefully for the war, he alienated a good many TNR readers. When he left the job last year, he explained in a parting column why he had changed his mind. To this day, TNR has not editorialized in favor of a quick withdrawal. But it has run long articles by war critics, including a piece last month on the "overhyping" of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq. The author, Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, has lost his own son in the war.

How will the quarreling end? Goldfarb, citing an unnamed military source, says Beauchamp recanted his TNR allegations during questioning by military investigators. If true, the magazine's young editor-in-chief, Franklin Foer, could face pressure to step down. But TNR editors doubt Goldfarb's reporting. They are waiting to hear from Beauchamp on exactly what he told investigators. For now, commanders have confiscated his cell phone. And, yes, his laptop as well.

The author has contributed freelance pieces to The New Republic in the past.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.