As the case of controversy over the truthiness of The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist†was the catalyst for writing “The Big Picture(s),” I note that TNR now states that it can no longer stand by the stories spun by Pvt. Scott Beauchamp. (h/t HotAir)
Of course, TNR editor Franklin Foer takes ten 14 pages to make that announcement, including various complaints about conservatives and the Army, while leaving out a few salent points. For example, while Foer notes that Michael Goldfarb, a blogger for The Weekly Standard, got the ball rolling based on “tipsters,” he fails to tell his readers that that these “tipsters” were actually described by Goldfarb as “several people with experience in Iraq.” And Foer writes that “regardless of the Standard’s ideological motives, the doubts about ‘Shock Troops’ resonated,” without telling his readers that the reason they resonated was because the skeptics were often people with military backgrounds who could explain in great detail what smelt like fish in Beauchamp’s tales.
Foer also is still misleading his readers about the supposed corroboration of Beauchamp’s stories:
It wasn’t just the testimonials from the soldiers in his unit. Among others, we had called a forensic anthropologist and a spokesman for the manufacturer of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Nothing in our conversations with them had dissuaded us of the plausibility of Beauchamp’s pieces.
Mind you, it was one of the other soldiers in the unit that told TNR that the story of mocking a disfigured woman happened in Kuwait, contradicting Beauchamp’s underlying theme that serving in Iraq dehumanized him. Moreover, this is what Foer says of another of the supposed corroborating soldiers:
When the “Shock Troops” controversy emerged, Kiple was in the process of leaving the military and was being held at a base in Germany. He told me the Army had removed him from Iraq on mental health grounds. Once in Germany, he had gotten into trouble for “out on the town stuff” and “resisting arrest.”
Foer then writes that “Kiple understood that he didn’t make the ideal witness, given his current predicament.” It’s less clear that Foer and TNR understood it.
Moreover, as I have previously noted regarding the supposed corroboration from Beauchamp’s unit:
Foer has been provided with evidence that contradicts Beauchamp. His own so-called “corroboration†actually contradicts Beauchamp on the details of each story in “Shock Troops.†The melted woman is at the wrong table in the wrong country. What was “clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground†is now a graveyard (as the WS figured). The dogs are killed by an entirely different method than the two methods Beauchamp described.
Hypothetical: A murder investigation. The suspect says he has an alibi. He and his girlfriend were at the movies on Friday night. They saw “Becoming Jane†with Anne Hathaway. The girlfriend is questioned. She says she was with the suspect at the movies, but it was Saturday night, and they saw The Simpsons Movie.
Juries in courtrooms every day in this country would apply their common sense and conclude that the alibi is BS. TNR would conclude that the girlfriend “corroborates†that she and the suspect went to the movies.
As for the other corroboration, Foer does not tell his readers that the “spokesman for the manufacturer of Bradley Fighting Vehicles” told Bob Owens that it was highly unlikely, if not impossible, for the Bradley story told in “Shock Troops” to have been correct.
Foer complains about leaks from the Army, but further fails to inform TNR’s readers of the results of the Army’s official investigation, which found, for example, that Beauchamp admitted he did not witness the targeting of dogs and saw only animal bones near Combat Outpost Ellis (except to imply that Beauchamp was coerced into the latter, though even TNR’s version carefully leaves open the more likely possibility that it was only animal bones).ÂÂ
Foer now admits that having Beauchamp’s wife, Elspeth Reed, fact-checking one of his stories was a conflict of interest, but he fails to note that Foer himself injected her plea for Beauchamp to stand by his stories into a September phone call between TNR editors and Beauchamp – which reads much more like pressuring Beauchamp than any of Foer’s innuendo about the Army – even while admitting doing so put him in an “awkward” position. And while Foer reassures TNR readers there are new policies in place to prevent this in the future, he does not mention that Reeve is apparently no longer in the employ of TNR.
Foer also engages throughout in addressing the suspect stories in a disjointed, fragmented narrative, which allows him to avoid having to account for what Beauchamp actually wrote. For example, Foer never states whether TNR has any confidence at all that Beauchamp saw a “Saddam-era dumping ground,” though even TNR’s prior statements on the case suggest that they know it was not.
Of course, at this point, no one had any reason to believe that TNR would be any more straightforward in its modified limited hang-out than it was in its Potemkin re-reporting or its initial publication of the Private’s fables. The only real surprise was that they did even this much, rather than remaining in their bunker, hoping memories of the smears they published would fade. Had Foer chosen to be more open and honest with its readership — even at this late date – I could have offered more than the sound of one hand clapping.
Update: TNR is getting an eyeful in the comments to Foer’s piece.
Update x2:  Consider the following bit from Foer:
For the past four-and-a-half months, we’ve been reluctant to retract Beauchamp’s stories. Substantial evidence supports his account. It is difficult to imagine that he could enlist a conspiracy of soldiers to lie on his behalf. And they didn’t just vouch for him–they added new details and admitted gaps in their own knowledge. If they were simply lying to protect him, they likely wouldn’t have alerted us to Beauchamp’s Kuwait mistake. Furthermore, our conversation with Cross confirmed important underlying premises–the existence of bones, Bradleys running over dogs.
These soldiers apparently including Kiple (removed from Iraq on mental health grounds) and — as MayBee notes in the comments below — one of Beauchamp’s friends, about whom Foer writes: “over the course of a number of e-mail exchanges with him, our faith in him has diminished.” In Foer’s world, the fact that these soldiers contradicted Beauchamp (on the Kuwait story) still corroborated Beauchamp generally.
The “Cross” mentioned above is Major John Cross, the executive officer of Beauchamp’s battalion who led the official Army investigation:
Cross conceded that bones were found in the area surrounding Beauchamp’s combat outpost. He guessed that the bones came from animal carcasses. Bradleys, he told us, unintentionally hit dogs.
Cross does not corroborate the claim of a “Saddam-era dumping ground.” Cross does not corroborate stories of soldiers deliberately killing dogs with Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
Yet the obviously shaky words of Kiple and one of Beauchamp’s buddies, combined with Cross not corroborating Beachamp’s stories, made TNR reluctant to retract. Given the mealy-mouthed formulation of “we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them,” it’s far from clear that TNR has learned anything from this episode.
Comment by Dan Collins on 12/1 @ 5:22 pm #
How dare you travesty this paragon of infuckingtegrity?!!
Comment by Dan Collins on 12/1 @ 5:23 pm #
Good day, Sir!
Comment by MayBee on 12/1 @ 5:38 pm #
I wonder what this means:
Comment by centralcal on 12/1 @ 5:47 pm #
Maybee: Sharp as a tack, as usual! I was like you when I read that earlier this afternoon. “…our faith in him has diminished.” It must have been really bad.
Comment by Swede on 12/1 @ 7:01 pm #
Oh, foer sure?
Foer crying out loud, can’t we just foerget this unfoertunate episode?
All is foergiven.
As soon as you pull your foerskin over your foerhead.
Pingback by Blue Crab Boulevard » Fourteen Pages And Run For Cover on 12/1 @ 7:05 pm #
[...] going to go to links here instead of quoting each. The post is getting too long. The Jawa Report, protein wisdom, Riehl World View, Sweetness & Light, The American Pundit, Winds of Change, Right Voices, [...]
Comment by B Moe on 12/1 @ 7:16 pm #
“I wonder what this means:”
HALLIBURTON!
CHENEY!
ROVE!
OMG ABU GRAHIB!!1111!!!one!!!!!!!
Need anything else translated, let me know.
Comment by Lost My Cookies on 12/1 @ 7:32 pm #
“he does not mention that Reeve is apparently no longer in the employ of TNR.”
He didn’t have to. They’ve been trying to pin this on her for weeks, looks like they finally did. I started to get that feeling somewhere’s around page 26.
They threatened her job in their interview with Beauchamp, my guess is she read the tea leaves and bailed before they could fire her.
I hope those two have a really good relationship, because between active duty and the New Republic, they are going to have a rough couple of years.
Anyway, what’s with 14 pages? Reads like the note I sent to the bank when I went for my first mortgage explaining the late phone bill from college that showed up on my credit report. The first one was a pages-long whine about my four roomates and who’s girlfriend talked to her mom on Long Island, who moved out when, etc… two years later it was “I was behind in accounts receivable.” I think he was drinking when he wrote it.
Comment by Ric Locke on 12/1 @ 7:48 pm #
Well, sorta. What you’re looking at is a classic reaction to cognitive dissonance.
Dan Riehl picks up on a rather simpler example embedded in the whole. As I said over there, according to Teh Narrative homosexuality should work on “conservatives” the same way a silver cross does on vampires. When we don’t react that way it causes tension in the moonbat sensorium: Teh Absolute TRVTH is apparently contradicted by what is laughingly referred to as the Real World. In the case of Sanchez, what they do is keep bringing it up. If they mention it often enough, eventually some “winger” will react as expected and Teh Narrative will be vindicated, restoring proper levels of acetylcholine and putting the world back on its proper axis.
The reason TNR fell on Beauchamp’s articles in the first place is that they comport with Teh Narrative; in fact, the matters in them are part of Teh Narrative (which is why Beauchamp submitted them in the first place.) Contradicting Beauchamp’s stories contradicts Teh Absolute TRVTH and sets off a suppressed panic attack. The rambling, contradictory, accusatory, self-congratulatory prose that results is a slightly more literate version of a Foul Ole Ron monologue. Millenium hand, and shrimp!
Regards,
Ric
Comment by MayBee on 12/1 @ 7:49 pm #
The weird thing is, it looks like a defense of the stories, and then all the sudden it isn’t. But BMoe is probably right. Cheney.
Pingback by Michelle Malkin » Bombshell…TNR ‘fesses up: The Beauchamp stories are bullcrap on 12/1 @ 8:44 pm #
[...] Riehl notes Foer’s snitty ad hominem on Matt Sanchez. Q&O: TNR pulls the eject handle Karl at Protein Wisdom rips Foer for continued lack of disclosure: Foer complains about leaks from the Army, but further [...]
Comment by daleyrocks on 12/2 @ 1:35 am #
Picky, picky, picky. If you reichwingers hadn’t looked so closely we could have gotten away with it. We Wuz VIKTMIZD!!!!1!!111!!
Maybe @10 you are exactly right. He builds a defense of the stories in the face a relentless and unfair right wing attack, yet never exactly says what led them to conclude that they could no longer stand by the stories.
Complete chickenshit.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 12/2 @ 4:44 am #
“Complete chickenshit.”
Succinct.
Comment by SGT Ted on 12/2 @ 9:56 am #
Yea if it wasn’t for those wingnut stalkers, TNR would be fine.
Comment by Swen Swenson on 12/2 @ 1:46 pm #
Hasn’t it occurred to you that this was a setup from the start? Dick Cheney put Col. Beauchamp up to it in retaliation for all the bad publicity the Bush administration has gotten from TNR. They found a young sex worker with a pretty mouth to pose as Beauchamp for a couple of pix and a meet & greet with Foer. They knew he’d go for stories like this like a trout after a fat bug. And now they’re toasting each other with fine cognacs while the junior officers of the 1/18th stage a reading of Foer’s retraction, knowing he’s totally pwned! /moonbat
Okay, just thought I’d get that out of the way..
Pingback by Private Beauchamp, the Flying Monkeys and the New Republic « his vorpal sword on 12/2 @ 3:50 pm #
[...] Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, from Red State and Michelle Malkin, from Blackfive, the Jawa Report, protein wisdom, the Van der Galien Gazette, The Captain’s Quarters, Powerline and the other yowling hate [...]
Comment by Toby Petzold on 12/2 @ 3:53 pm #
Foer is a self-parodist. I read that damned thing last night and, at every turn, his first instinct is to question or belittle his critics and opponents. Only then does he resume his mea culpas.
A man of real character would have put the last paragraph first.
Comment by Major John on 12/2 @ 4:30 pm #
Bah. I’m still waiting for some sort of apology to the rest of Beauchamp’s unit. And one from Beauchamp himself. I suspect I’ll be waiting a very, very long time…
Comment by Kell Varnson on 12/2 @ 5:04 pm #
In all the sorry mess of this barnstorming, Ric and Dan Riehl’s idea that calling Sanchez a former porn actor is off-base is the sorriest. He IS a former porn actor. Just because you remember the plot, doesn’t take away from the fact that he was in porn and has admitted it.
It’s now ad hominem to mention the professional history of blogger.
Psst, did you guys know Greenwald was a lawyer? Or is that off-base.
Comment by Rob Crawford on 12/2 @ 5:27 pm #
Kell, the issue is that they’re treating his past as a refutation of what he’s reported.
Comment by Ric Locke on 12/2 @ 6:40 pm #
Kell, there’s a word for that, and the word is “balls”. Like Foer, you’re listening to your preconceptions, not reading what’s written — and the word for that is “delusionary”.
For the record: I’m fine with Sanchez, and I think most conservatives feel the same way. He did something that I find disagreeable in his youth, has now given that up, and his work needs to stand on its own merits in future. Bringing up his past in order to attempt to discredit his work is a routine ad hominem attack, easy to spot and discount.
But that’s only peripheral to my point.
Sanchez is a homosexual, and his early work was in homosexual porn. (By all accounts he was pretty good at it; I haven’t the taste and can’t judge.) According to the fixed and bigoted set of stereotypes leftoid moonbats routinely display, conservatives should react to that by shunning him and dismissing his work entirely, to the point of a gag reflex (”homophobia”). The fact that we do not react that way, and won’t, is a worldview-breaking conundrum for leftoids; the (overused) phrase is “cognitive dissonance”. Information received from outside the neat, self-reinforcing closed system that comprises Teh Narrative contradicts a basic tenet, and something has to give.
What gives is what we conservatives laughingly refer to as “reality”. If Universe contradicts Teh Narrative, clearly Universe is in error and must be forcibly rejected. So Sanchez must continually be attacked based on his past — but not by conservatives; the attacks all come from the Left, and are phrased in such a way as to attempt to elicit the response from conservatives that Teh Narrative predicts. When that response does not occur (which it won’t), the leftoid becomes frustrated and unhappy. I had actually thought that they’d given up that tactic in this particular instance, and in fact most of them have. It’s a measure of Foer’s agitated mental state that it came to his mind.
Regards,
Ric
Pingback by Thinking Right » Blog Archive » Foer Finally Admits What The Rest Of Us Knew Months Ago… on 12/2 @ 8:43 pm #
[...] as Karl at Protein Wisdom points out, Foer’s “painfully extensive re-reporting” is full of half truths, unanswered [...]
Comment by Karl on 12/2 @ 8:53 pm #
I, for one, liked that Foer felt compelled to mention that Sanchez was a former porn actor, as it makes his ability to get the right story all the more compelling, and TNR’s debacle all the more embarrassing.
Comment by Cardinals Nation on 12/2 @ 10:13 pm #
Is it just me or does anyone else think that a bunch of 18-21 year-olds running over a few strays and participating in admittedly tasteless exchanges of “humor” at the expense of an unfortunate soul really isn’t that big a deal? I mean, seriously; is that the kind of thing that really warrants the kind of attention it received in the first place?
/cerebral sensitivity filter reactivated
Comment by Simon Owens on 12/2 @ 10:47 pm #
He didn’t take 10 pages, he took 14 pages. Correct your post.
Comment by JD on 12/3 @ 8:21 am #
So, Frankie spends 14 pages outlining his defense, and in the last paragraph, says they can no longer stand behind the story. Why?
They are still lying crap weasels.
Comment by Karl on 12/3 @ 11:01 am #
That is the question which caused me to write “The Big Picture(s),†as linked in the first sentence in the main post.
Comment by BJTexs on 12/3 @ 11:37 am #
Shorter version: “That’s right, nothing to see here just like we said. Ignore the battered, broken, bleeding bodies of professional journalists and move along … move along …”
Great work, Karl!
Comment by BJTexs on 12/3 @ 11:49 am #
It should also be noted that the semioticians (?) including El Jefe were right on the money in their analyses of Beauchamps scribblings.
John Cole? Andrew Sullivan? Greenwalds? Not so much…
I feel bad for Scott Eric Kaufman who wanted to believe Beauchamp on the basis of Scott’s experiences with other veterans. At least SEK was defending the story on literary and personal experience with others grounds rather than as a forum to attack both the war and conservatives. I sympathise with those veterans who actually suffered debilitating problems related to combat stress, those with whom Beauchamp attempted to find common cause only to have him be exposed as a narcissistic poseur.
Trackback by Ge Kitchen Appliances on 12/9 @ 2:50 pm #
Ge Kitchen Appliances
GE has the freshest ideas in refrigeration. and Microwaves
Trackback by Ge Kitchen Appliances on 12/19 @ 7:49 pm #
Ge Kitchen Appliances
GE has the freshest ideas in refrigeration. and Microwaves f
Trackback by Kitchenaid Professional on 12/24 @ 1:36 am #
Kitchenaid Professional
Quality kitchenware and cooking recipes for cooks. We now
Trackback by Ge Appliance on 3/16 @ 9:16 am #
Ge Appliance
Electrical appliance shop- Volt- Insecure Zone. she
Trackback by Recipe For Pheromones on 3/31 @ 2:57 pm #
Recipe For Pheromones
Free essential oil recipes, and descriptions of over 250 essential oils with their pictures. Phero
Trackback by Hunting Pheromones on 4/20 @ 11:50 pm #
Hunting Pheromones
- Buck Lures help mask the human scent when hunting. So before
Trackback by Ge Appliance on 4/28 @ 8:37 pm #
Ge Appliance
Example: My Kenmore or Whirlpool Electric Dryer will
Trackback by Long Satin Spandex Gloves on 4/29 @ 11:39 am #
Long Satin Spandex Gloves
Elastic Wrist Shortie Shiny Stretch Satin Spandex with matching color tulle and Shown wit
Trackback by Ge Appliance on 4/30 @ 11:40 pm #
Ge Appliance
Example: My Kenmore or Whirlpool Electric Dryer will run but does not heat. 66698 February 27th
Trackback by Abundance Tapestry on 5/5 @ 5:41 pm #
Abundance Tapestry
Abundance are part of our fine collection of woven
Trackback by Abundance Tapestry on 6/5 @ 12:08 am #
Abundance Tapestry…
This lovely throw with colors of gold, rust and green. Value Frami…