Suckered At The New Republic

I read Richard Miniter's article with great interest and it was good to see that Miniter went after those supposedly compassionate leftists who talk about gay rights and all the rest but had no problem attacking McGee's sexual orientation because he wasn't politically oriented in a fashion they saw appropriate. The double standards and hypocrisy are astounding, and while it makes for an interesting subplot of the larger problems for TNR, the fact remains that TNR is still unable to actually verify Beauchamp's stories except with anonymous sources and by omitting key details that threaten the house of cards built up by TNR's editors to cover their original follies.

Plenty of questions continue to swirl around Beauchamp's articles, and TNR's responses claiming that they've verified the stories ring hollow, especially when one realizes the way the editors at TNR have parsed their responses. They've fundamentally altered the location of one of the most awful episodes recounted - the dining hall incident that was initially indicated to have occurred inside Iraq at FOB Falcon - to one that happened in Kuwait even before Beauchamp entered Iraq.

An insider-turned-whistleblower and the fabricator’s former fiancée, as well as other sources, have spoken to PajamasMedia.com—providing a plethora of new details that raise new questions.

Those questions include: Did the fabricator’s wife, Elspeth Reeve, fact-check her husband’s articles? Did her staff position make other fact-checkers go easy on him? Why didn’t Reeve’s knowledge of Beauchamp’s character and history make her skeptical of his work? (Remember the old journalist saw: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”) Did Foer’s friendship with Beauchamp affect the fact-checkers or provoke Foer to defend him in the face of mounting evidence? And, why was the whistle-blower the only New Republic staffer to be fired? Finally, what does the magazine intend to do to ensure that it does not get fooled again?

Meanwhile, bloggers that TNR excoriates, such as Confederate Yankee's Bob Owens and Ace of Spades, have tracked down named sources at MNF-I, the manufacturer of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and have drawn upon their own military experience or time spent in Iraq, including Blackfive, Michael Yon, Greyhawk and Matt Sanchez, to shoot down various factual and logical inconsistencies. Other bloggers have done quite a bit to publicize the mess and to ask questions of their own.

All told, the bloggers have shredded the so-called fact checking done by TNR prior to the publication of the stories, and shown that TNR's post publication fact checking is not only wanting for completeness, but that it shows the same kind of ideological blinders that TNR claims pervades the criticism of TNR's handling of the matter in the first place. Indeed, TNR has purposefully withheld knowledge from its readers that the US Army discounted the stories, that it completed an investigation that resulted in those claims being found baseless and in the realm of myth and urban legend, and that Beauchamp was free to talk to whoever he saw fit within the limits of operational security, but that he has chosen not to talk to anyone - including TNR's editors. TNR had claimed that Beauchamp was operating under a gag order from the Army. All these inconsistencies and omissions do a grave disservice to TNR and its readers, and the longer that TNR puts up with this nonsense, the worse off TNR will be.