Proof that the "Debunking" of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp Story was a Conspiracy to Defraud

We've seen this scam before. Suddenly, from different, seemingly independent sources, new "evidence" emerges to force a "whom-do-you-believe" debate about something that was on nobody else's radar screen. Josh Marshall noted how suspicious it was that suddenly the Army and the right wing media was going after Scott Beauchamp, who wrote about his experience as a soldier in Iraq. Yet Marshall entertained the possibility that there might be something there. "Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales, " he wrote. "He wouldn't be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic."

Actually, getting caught up in a debate over Scott Thomas Beauchamp's veracity is the essence of the trick. Magic tricks and frauds are all about distractions. Three-card monte works because, while the cards are being shuffled, your eye is distracted. Money laundering works because, after a series of sham transactions, regulators are distracted from the origins of illegal proceeds.

The trumped-up cause celebre over Beauchamp's articles is a fraudulent scheme, executed through a series of tricks, designed to create one big distraction. The essence of the scheme is to compel a debate about a trivial subject -- the details of Beauchamp's dog-bites-man stories -- in order to sow confusion that distracts us from the bad news in Iraq. To analogize, it would be as if Fox News forced the Red Cross to debate the quality of food at Thereisenstadt, in order to distract everyone from the packed trains moving eastward.

For everyone's benefit, I'll schematically outline the sequence of deceptions that constitute the overall fraud, which was spearheaded by Fox News. It's an indictment against behavior that, while protected by the First Amendment, is highly immoral. The evidence shows beyond all reasonable doubt that Fox News and cohorts engaged in the same intentional deception in order to create the same false impressions.

Those false impressions include the following:

1. Trivial pranks committed by soldiers, as reported by Scott Beauchamp in The New Republic, are "shocking atrocities."

2. In fact, those "atrocities" are so "shocking" that they seem far fetched and barely credible because no other reporting suggests anything similar is tolerated by the military.

3. Yet despite these red flags, The New Republic did not authenticate Beauchamp's reporting before publication.

4. Ergo, The New Republic published Beauchamp's stories in order to slam the U.S. war effort, not to provide accurate reporting.

5. In addition, The Weekly Standard has offered hard evidence disproving the occurrence of the specific incidents, whereas The New Republic has nothing that backs up Beauchamp's version.

6. Beauchamp's stories, which have been conclusively discredited, are emblematic of the inaccurate and negative reporting by the mainstream news media covering Iraq.

I'll walk through the written evidence that proves the dishonest and deceitful intent of Charles Krauthammer, Morton Kondracke, Fred Barnes and others. We know their deceits were intentional because their characterizations of the incidents described by Beauchamp as shocking and as atrocities is so at odds with everything else being reported about Iraq. Also, they all characterize the reporting as not having been properly vetted and authenticated prior to publication, which they also know to be untrue. The consistency in their deceptions, and their known affiliations with Fox News, is evidence of the conspiracy.

At first blush, this scheme to defraud appears to conform to the standard Republican template used to smear truth tellers. Using the standard template, the first step is to focus on something trivial and argue that it's important. The second step relies on some government abuse of power to make the trivial item seem important. This abuse of power is also used to punish and malign the truth teller. The standard template has been applied to Joseph Wilson, Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill and others.

Once again, an abuse of government power was used to malign and punish the target, Beauchamp, and to make the trivial element seem important. The Army, which has insufficient time and resources to investigate negligent homicides of Iraqi civilians by U.S. military, conducted an "investigation" over these pranks, pressured Beauchamp to sign statements under duress, and prevented Beauchamp from contacting anyone in the outside world. The Army announced that its investigation had discredited Beauchamp's reporting. The Army announcement also lent a veneer of legitimacy to the entire disinformation campaign, enabling it to cross over into mainstream media coverage.

But here's the difference, the reason why the whole "news" story is fabricated out of whole cloth. Joseph Wilson and Paul O'Neill had conveyed important messages about government policy, so there was at least some legitimate basis to question their credibility. Scott Beauchamp wrote about his personal experiences the same way David Sedaris wrote about his personal experiences. The episodes are individual, idiosyncratic and goofy. No intelligent adult would rely on his articles to infer anything about government policy in Iraq, or about the status of the troops.

That's why Michael Goldfarb's breathlessly obsessive coverage of the status of the Army investigation and about incidental details (e.g. Can a Bradley Fighting Vehicle cut a dog in half?) is nothing more than a fashion commentary on the Emperor's New Clothes.

1. Trivial pranks committed by soldiers, as reported by Scott Beauchamp in The New Republic, are "shocking atrocities."

There are good reasons why you probably never heard of Scott Beauchamp or the Baghdad Diarist at The New Republic. He was an unknown writer at a niche circulation magazine writing about nothing terribly remarkable. Here's how the right wing media introduced him and his work:

"For weeks, the veracity of the New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the Army private who has been sending dispatches from the front in Iraq, has been in dispute. His latest "Baghdad Diarist" (July 13) recounted three incidents of American soldiers engaged in acts of unusual callousness. The stories were meant to shock. And they did.

"In one, the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle amused himself by running over dogs, crippling and killing them. In another, a fellow soldier wore on his head and under his helmet a part of a child's skull dug from a grave.

"The most ghastly tale, however, was about the author himself mocking a woman whom he said he saw "nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq." She was horribly disfigured, half her face melted by a roadside bomb. As she sat nearby, Beauchamp said loudly, "I love chicks that have been intimate -- with IEDs. It really turns me on -- melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses." As his mess-hall buddy doubled over in laughter, Beauchamp continued: "In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? 'IED Babes.' " The woman fled." Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, August 10, 2007

That's right. For weeks, The Weekly Standard and Fox News have obsessed about the veracity about stories that involved no physical harm to another human being. Yet,

"The stories were meant to shock. And they did. The most ghastly however, was about the author himself mocking a woman..."

I mean, obviously, if this stuff is true, that The New Republic says, it is horrible, it is criminal offenses by American troops over there." Fred Barnes, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007

Pretty florid stuff, pretty dramatic, pretty disturbing..." Brit Hume, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007

It is pornography. It really is military pornography, is what it is. It smacks of being dreamed up. Now, maybe it will be turn out to be true. But it just is so over- the-top that it is almost too bad to be true." Morton Kondracke, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007

"TNR's 'Investigation' Reveals Beauchamp Was Always a Monster" The Weekly Standard, August 2, 2007

Reality Check on the magnitude of the offenses that they labeled "atrocities."

As anyone who ever attended public high school can tell you, there are always a couple of troublemakers who, when they act out, make the other boys laugh. Those who said Abu Graib was the result of a few bad apples seemed to be saying the same thing. In today's Army, 10% of the new recruits come in under "moral waivers" which overlook prior criminal records.

Think about it. If 10% of new recruits have criminal records, how likely is it that you will find soldiers acting like juvenile delinquents?

Let's examine the incidents one at a time.

a. Using a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to run over dogs, crippling and killing them.

No question, it's disgusting. Is it something uniquely associated with the depravity of wartime? This suggests otherwise. Any other reported cases of bad apple soldiers who mistreated dogs? Check out this, this, and this. Spc. Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno suggested that the problem was systemic.

b. Cruel remarks about a woman's appearance.

"Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father." John McCain at a 1998 Republican fundraiser

Misogyny in the military? Anyone who professes shock is guilty of willful blindness.

"The former Army specialist is one of dozens of military women interviewed by The [Sacramento] Bee who say they faced some kind of sexual harassment while in the combat theater in Afghanistan or Iraq. Though publicity about sexual misconduct in the war zone has focused on rape, female soldiers said unwelcome advances, demeaning comments - and a feeling that being alone around male comrades in arms meant being unsafe - were far greater concerns.

"I think every female (soldier in Iraq) has been sexually harassed," said Sgt. Yolanda Medina of Long Beach, who is doing her second tour there with the California National Guard's 2668th Transportation Company."

I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection." "The Private War of Women Soldiers," Salon, March 7, 2007

c. Playing with a human skull.

"One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit. As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included."

Scott Beauchamp

To me, that passage reads like something by David Sedaris. Is your reaction like Morton Kondracke's?

"It is pornography. It really is military pornography, is what it is. It smacks of being dreamed up. Now, maybe it will be turn out to be true. But it just is so over- the-top that it is almost too bad to be true." Morton Kondracke, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007."

Pornography? If Kondracke reads the passage below, he'll be masturbating for the next six months:

"We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon."

The Nation, July 30, 2007

2. In fact, those "atrocities" are so "shocking" that they seem far fetched and barely credible because no other reporting suggests anything similar is tolerated by the military.

"Just the terminology, and the writing of this, reminds me of Penthouse Forums. It is pornography. It really is military pornography, is what it is. It smacks of being dreamed up. Now, maybe it will be turn out to be true. But it just is so over- the-top that it is almost too bad to be true."

Morton Kondracke, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007

"I would say that some of it looks invented, and the rest embellished." Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007

It's the stories that he weaved about the people in the unit that you spent time with, prancing around, putting child skulls, the skulls of an Iraqi child on their head and apparently under their helmet, which seem very hard for me to imagine could be done. I mean, I was there. Even I was in Iraq. And it would be hard to put anything, even a headband underneath a helmet.

But then also, the cruelty that he alleged that his unit was involved in, laughing at a woman who was disfigured by an IED. And it just doesn't seem to pass the smell test, does it, J.D.? ,

Michelle Malkin, The O'Reilly Factor, July 27, 2007

"Many of these allegations have been challenged unlikely or even impossible by bloggers identifying themselves as troops in Iraq. The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol tells the Washington Post'."appears the articles are frauds and that no one individual has confirmed any part of them.'

All of Beauchamp's accusers making their living are news people whose job requires them to keep abreast of news coverage about the Iraq War. The have staffs working for them who scan the press - especially the liberal press whom they love to malign - every day. There is no way they can credibly assert they were unaware of the avalanche of documented reporting from high profile news outlets about abuses committed by the U.S. military in Iraq.

And no one who is aware of the other news coverage can honestly professed to be shocked by the incidents described by Beauchamp. And, in terms of atrocities, the difference in order of magnitude is so vast between Beauchamp's anecdotes and the many reports of reckless and indiscriminate killing of unarmed civilians that no one can fail to miss the scheme to create a lot of diversionary noise. Again, it's the equivalent of being shocked at the medical care at Therseisenstadt. So when all the usual right wing suspects have the same phony reaction to Beauchamp's stories, then we know it's a conspiracy promote the same false impression.

In terms of making the point, the limited sampling below smacks of overkill. You can skim by, but it may give you a sense of what the right wing media wants you to ignore.

"Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians.... Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished."

"One of the Marines charged with murdering civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005 knew that only women and children were huddled in a back bedroom in a house there, but he opened the door and shot them anyway, his squad-mate testified Tuesday." Washington Post, July 18, 2007

"The civilian death toll in Iraq is, by all accounts, frightful. Car bombs enact a terrible toll, and this is widely covered by the press almost every day. But civilians who die at the hands of American troops get much less attention. There are many reasons for this. The incidents are widely scattered and usually do not involve large numbers at one time. The U.S. military rarely admits wrongdoing -- in some cases, it may not even know that anyone has died. The media, amid horrible violence, has trouble investigating.

"But a recent episode involving a single casualty has drawn unusual attention - only because the youth happened to be the son of a Los Angeles Times employee in Baghdad. _"Tina Susman told the story last Tuesday in the L.A. Times. The boy was 17, but she did not name him, nor identify the father.

"Susman, the paper's Baghdad bureau chief, wrote, 'U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents. In this case, the boy was the son of a Los Angeles Times employee, which provided reporters knowledge of the incident in time to examine it. Witness and military accounts of the shooting offered a rare look into how such killings can occur.

"She revealed that since February, stringers for the newspaper across Iraq have reported at least 18 incidents of American troops firing wildly with at least 22 noncombatants killed. Surely this only scratches the surface, as Walter Pincus observed yesterday in a Washington Post >article on the "solatia" or condolence payments that I have often written about. Thousands of such payments have been made by the U.S." <em>Editor & Publisher, June 19, 2007

"KENTUCKY -- A US soldier convicted by a military court in the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family has been sentenced to 110 years in prison. But as part of a plea agreement he will be eligible for parole after 10 years...Spielman, the court found, participated in the planning of the attack as the soldiers drank whiskey and played cards, and acted as a lookout...The three already convicted soldiers admitted raping the girl, Abeer Qassim al-Janabiat, and said Pte Steven D. Green shot her parents and younger sister. Pte Green then raped the girl and killed her and they poured kerosene over her body and set it on fire in an attempt to hide evidence of the crime, they testified." Associated Press, August 4, 2007 [There was no mention that the alleged ringleader had entered the Army as a moral waiver: "He arrived at the very moment that the Army was increasing by nearly half the rate at which it granted what it calls ''moral waivers'' to potential recruits. The change opened the ranks to more people like Mr. Green, those with minor criminal records and weak educational backgrounds. In Mr. Green's case, his problems were emerging by junior high school, say people who knew him then." New York Times, July 14, 2007]

"The internet is alive with videos of contractors seemingly using Iraqi vehicles for target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved." The Guardian , August 1, 2007 (an article about the abuses by private contractors in Iraq)

3. Yet despite these red flags, The New Republic did not authenticate Beauchamp's reporting before publication.

"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.)" The New Republic, August 2, 2007

Here's a smoking gun. Eric Burns, Jane Hall, Jim Pinkerton and Cal Thomas all profess to be journalists who comment on media coverage of major issues. Before the program Fox News Watch on August 11, 2007, they know the topics to be discussed and they come prepared. This show has a staff that would access the latest information from The New Republic, which was published online the day before the show. There is no way they could profess to knowledgably speak on this topic and yet be ignorant of such information.

They all collectively represent implicitly or explicitly that it had no evidence to back up the reporting, that no fact checking was performed at the time and that the reporting represents the journalistic equivalent of Steven Glass' reporting of years ago (Glass made up stories out of whole cloth). Some, like Pinkerton, explicitly lied and yet none of the others mentioned the steps taken by The New Republic to authenticate the reporting.

BURNS:[The Army] investigated and say none of this happened. The New Republic is conducting its own investigation. ["Is conducting its own investigation," but no mention of authentication done prior to publication or confirmations after the fact.]

And I'll begin by point out that Steven Glass used to work for "The New Republic". [False and misleading comparison, because Beauchamp's work was fact checked and Glass's was not.]

HALL: Steven Glass wrote a lot of stories that were fabricated. This has given a lot of ammunition to people who think that people who are opposed to the war, which The New Republic probably is, were willing to believe the atrocities. I have to say, it doesn't look as if this guy -- it looks as if there's some fabrication. We don't really know because the Army hasn't commented. The "Weekly Standard" has been all over this. As a primary cheerleader of this war, they should check their own coverage as well as this guy.

BURNS: Jim, you occasionally say that a story is too good to check. Is it your feeling it might be the case here? We don't know positively. [Implies the story has not been checked when the opposite is true.]

JIM PINKERTON: The New Republic, in its own slimy way, supported the war. And then public opinion turned, most of the staff, but not the owner, shifted ground on it. And they're desperate to catch up with the left. And they're willing and eager to lie about it.

BURNS: That's plenty of -- Jim, that's a very strong statement.

PINKERTON: I'll say it again, they're willing and being tore lie.

5. The New Republic published Beauchamp's stories in order to slam the U.S. war effort, not to provide accurate reporting.

JIM PINKERTON: The New Republic, in its own slimy way, supported the war. And then public opinion turned, most of the staff, but not the owner, shifted ground on it. And they're desperate to catch up with the left. And they're willing and eager to lie about it.

6. In addition, The Weekly Standard has offered hard evidence disproving the occurrence of the specific incidents, whereas The New Republic has nothing that backs up Beauchamp's version.

"My colleague Michael Goldfarb raised questions about this account in a July 18 post on THE WEEKLY STANDARD website, asking for assistance from soldiers and veterans in assessing the truth of the stories told by "Scott Thomas." Within a day, dozens of active duty soldiers and veterans had come forward to point out errors, implausibility, and indeed the well-nigh-impossibility (in the case of the Bradley) of what was claimed." William Kristol "They Don't Really Support the Troops, The latest from the New Republic and the Nation." July 30, 2007

"During that investigation, all the soldiers from his unit refuted all claims that Pvt. Beauchamp made in his blog," Sgt. 1st Class Robert Timmons, a spokesman in Baghdad for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan., said in an e-mail interview."

Associated Press, August 9, 2007

It sounds just like the investigation at the freshman dormitory that confirmed that none of the residents on the 15th floor dropped any water balloons.

Would any of Beauchamp's soldiers hesitate confirm Beauchamp's story if it were true? According to the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army Medical Command, the vast majority of them would. Only 55% Would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent combatant; only 46% Would report a unit member for stealing from a non-combatant; only 43% would report a unit member for unnecessarily destroying private property. And only 47% think all non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect. [When Marines were surveyed with the same questions, of those percentages are significantly lower.]

So think about it. The Army wants to refute a story that caused physical harm to no person and to no one's property (they were stray dogs) and we should expect a private to come forward and thereby create trouble.

7. Beauchamp's stories, which have been conclusively discredited, are emblematic of the inaccurate and negative reporting by the mainstream news media covering Iraq.

The big message:

"It is an attack--it is a way of saying 'Look what the war has done to these people.' The author says I work with disabled in the past, and now we are turning into a monster. George Bush, of course, is destroying Iraq, destroying that neighborhood. And now we are destroying the goodness of Americans soldiers. That is what this is all about." Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Special Report, July 23, 2007

"We've seen this prefab narrative a lot. And there's this impulse in the mainstream media to turn our soldiers. And both you and J.D. were in the military. It must be annoying to see this, to turn soldiers into either victims, or criminals, and thugs." Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, July 21, 2007

"July also began with the liberal media disparaging the troops. It ended with the liberal media in retreat. The New Republic had to acknowledge that its pseudonymous soldier's account of an incident purportedly showing the dehumanizing effects of the Iraq conflict was a lie: It had taken place in Kuwait (if it happened at all), before this imaginative private ever saw the horrors of war." William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, August 13, 2007

A few final points:

I'm sure I'll get comments about allusions to the Holocaust especially by since Fox News caters to the analytically challenged. I did not compare the horrors of Iraq War to the horrors of the Holocaust. The Thereisenstadt analogy was used to make a point about orders of magnitude and - this is the important part - about the moral imperative not to look away.

As Americans, we have a moral duty not to look the other way when we send medically unfit soldiers back for additional deployments, as noted here. We have a moral duty pay attention to what our veterans say, including those brave enough to speak out, like Timothy J. Westphal, who e-mailed The Nation after it published an article for which he was interviewed.

Read his words, and you can appreciate how Time Magazine disgraced itself by giving prominence to Kristol, a man who makes a career out of shamelessly defying the Ninth Commandment.

"I will not remain silent in order to protect my hero's status nor will I forfeit my conscience to hide the truth under a shroud of patriotism. I believe the world has a right to hear my story. And I believe it is my duty as an American, a veteran and a man, to tell the truth. The fact that I contributed to what history will someday remember as a societal travesty on par with Nazi Germany's Holocaust will torment me for the rest of my life.

"I can not rely on the "only following orders" rationale to offset my guilt, take back my deeds, or justify my involvement. So my only choice is to share with others and to be honest. And I hope some of the other guys interviewed in this piece share my motivation. I want our troops to come home now. Instead, we argue amongst ourselves while our elected leaders are allowed to let politics trump moral reason. Meanwhile, the human cost of this war will continue its deadly toll, the hatred of America will grow, and the chances for a lasting peace will fade...and then, what will we do? Hopefully, the world will forgive us.

"And that's the truth.

Timothy J. Westphal
Former SSG, US Army
Denver, CO