Webloggin » The New Republic is Full of Crap, Falls Short on Defensive Mea Culpa Over Fake Troop Slandering Series

The New Republic finally published a half-hearted apology and pseudo-explanation of their culpability surrounding the fake troop slandering “Baghdad Diarist” series that they published over the summer. Editor Franklin Foer’s explanation of how they were willingly duped is by itself a gutless defense of the failure by the editors at The New Republic to even do the most basic task of validating slanderous accusations against the troops that painted many as immoral hate filled killing machines that took pleasure in making fun of and deriding Iraqis that had been killed or maimed in war. To add insult to injury the TNR series reached as far as possible to stir up troop hating emotions by reducing the soldiers to subhuman garbage that took delight in talking about dogs eating the brains of dead Iraqi’s and soldiers running over stray dogs with tanks.

When reading the TNR explanation keep in mind that Foer frequently defends the actions of The New Republic by evoking the difficulty of verifying first hand accounts from a war zone. The irony in such a defense is that the soldiers and their families that are being slandered have no way to defend themselves from the dishonest character assassination coming from the American left because they are having to deal with other issues such as defending themselves from head chopping terrorists to protect the freedom of speech the editors at TNR covet so haphazardly.

The Baghdad Diarist series is basically the lefts’ latest attempt to resurrect images of Kevin Dillon bashing in the brains of a retarded toothless one legged South Vietnamese civilian in front of his helpless mother in the lefty anti-Vietnam screed “Platoon“. “Holy shit, d’you see that fuckin’ head come apart, man?” – Bunny, Platoon.

Not surprisingly both “Platoon” and many of the Baghdad Diarist entries such as “Shock Troops” carry very similar leftist subplots.

Here are some brief outtakes that I gleaned from the IMDB Platoon synopsis.

A young recruit in Vietnam faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man. - Link

Deceit, dishonor, and the loss of innocence seem to take more casualties than bullets in this war classic. - Link

Quotes from Platoon:

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us.

I told the padre the truth, man: I like it here. You get to do what you want. Nobody fucks with you.

[after Pvt. Taylor doesn't shoot a disabled Vietnamese guy] Fuckin’ pussy, man. He’s laughing at ‘ya. Thats the way the gook laughs. I bet your crying your little heart out aint ‘ya? About Sandy and Sal and Manny. [Bunny beats the guy's brains in with the butt of his shotgun]

Before I discuss the load of crap that TNR editor Franklin Foer is passing off as an excuse it is best to revisit some excerpts from Foer’s hopeful fantasy series.

Shock Troops

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.

I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America–providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle’s tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver’s hatch. One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book.

“So, you killed a few dogs today,”I said skeptically.
“Hell yeah, I did. It’s like hunting in Iraq!” he said, shaking with laughter.
“Did you run over dogs before the war, back in Indiana?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied, and looked at me curiously. Almost as if the question itself was in poor taste.

In his second story, he described dogs eating the brain of a corpse. He ended with a slice of dialogue with a soldier he called Hernandez:
“I took his driver’s license,” I said.
“You did?” questioned Hernandez.
“Yeah. It said he was an organ donor.”
We chuckled in the dark for a moment, and then looked out the window into the night. We didn’t talk again until we were back at our base.

It took The New Republic 4 months to fully admit that they had been duped by Beauchamp although the Scott Beauchamp accounts had been immediately questioned and discredited from very early on. This latest explanation all but admits that TNR has been caught red handed in disseminating a fabricated attack against the troops yet Foer continues to attack those that dared to question the farcical Beauchamp accounts. The TNR investigation yields a 10 page response that has to be read fully to completely understand the depths these leftists will go to protect themselves from culpability in furthering enemy propaganda aimed at demoralizing the troops and their support. TNR not only willfully denigrated the troops, they acted in a manner that was designed to do so, all the while hurting morale, damaging the United States in public opinion both abroad and at home and giving hope to the terrorists and their backers who were counting on the American left to do the very thing that The New Republican prides themselves in doing; slandering the U.S. military effort to protect citizens at home and in Iraq.

For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations that stories we published by an American soldier then serving in Iraq were fabricated. When these accusations first arose, we promised our readers a full account of our investigation. We spent the last four-and-a-half months re-reporting his stories. These are our findings.

When Michael Goldfarb, a blogger for The Weekly Standard, left me a message on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July, I didn’t know him or his byline. And I certainly didn’t anticipate that his message would become the starting point for a controversy.

BULLSHIT. The New Republic editors absolutely did want to start a controversy. The only problem was that the hopeful controversy, one that painted the troops as cold blooded monsters that took pleasure in deriding victims of war and happily ran over dogs, was a lie. The New Republic editors wanted this controversy so much that they didn’t truly bother to research the story before running with it. What they didn’t anticipate was that they would be outed so easily and quickly.

By the weekend, the Standard’s editor, William Kristol, published an editorial that, without evidence, pronounced the Diarist an open-and-shut case. Kristol wrote, “But what is revealing about this mistake is that the editors must have wanted to suspend their disbelief in tales of gross misconduct by American troops. How else could they have published such a farrago of dubious tales? Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support.”

William Kristol was correct yet TNR is still hiding behind shields like “without evidence”; pretty ironic considering that the series itself was wholly without evidence.

But, regardless of the Standard’s ideological motives, the doubts about “Shock Troops” resonated. All over the blogosphere, people who presented themselves as experts claimed that the events described in the piece could never have happened. Some of these assertions were vague and meaningless– “They are not ‘Shock Troops.’ They are our best and bravest,” Kristol wrote–as if our soldiers were plaster saints immune from the traumas of war. But others were more specific and troubling. Denizens of FOB Falcon insisted that they had never seen a woman who matched Thomas’s description; some familiar with the Bradley asserted that it couldn’t be maneuvered to kill dogs; others claimed that any exhumation of bones would be reported up the chain of command as a matter of course.

Are you kidding me? Regardless of the Standard’s ideological motives??!!! Only a true jerk could apologize for their own ideological motives by hiding behind the perceived ideological motives of the people that caught you in a lie. Someone should ask Foer whether or not a person needs to be ideologically motivated to defend the troops of the United States against the fanatical lies of a left wing publication. Why even characterize these people in the terms “who presented themselves as experts” when the fact remains that these people were absolutely correct in calling TNR to the mat for publishing a series of slanderous lies?

TNR didn’t even have the decency to use an independent fact checker. When it turned out that it was learned that TNR used Beauchamp’s wife for that role they were once again called out. Why in the world would the “expert journalists” at TNR use the wife of the author in question as a fact checker? Foer has an answer for that as well but it is a lie by omission because Beauchamp’s wife is not just any fact checker, she is a reporter at The New Republic.

But there was one avoidable problem with our Beauchamp fact-check. His wife, Reeve, was assigned a large role in checking his third piece. While we believe she acted with good faith and integrity–not just in this instance, but throughout this whole ordeal–there was a clear conflict of interest. At the time, our logic–in hindsight, obviously flawed–was that corresponding with a soldier in Iraq is logistically difficult and Reeve was already routinely speaking with him. It was a mistake–and we’ve imposed new rules to prevent future fact-checking conflicts of interest.

Oh yeah, a simple mistake. TNR has been in business for about 94 years and they have finally imposed this rule to prevent conflicts of interest. In other words TNR is just now implementing a policy to protect readers from its own writers. A little too late for that isn’t it?

Foer repeatedly gives the excuse that first hand accounts from soldiers in Iraq are hard to verify.

Fact-checking of first-person articles about personal experiences necessarily relies heavily on the author’s word and description of events.

Facing the difficulties of verifying the piece, but wanting to ensure its plausibility before publication, we sent the piece to a correspondent for a major newspaper who had spent many tours embedded in Iraq.

But the reporter doubted the tale of the disfigured woman.

With first-person narratives, of course, especially in war zones, there are limits to what can be independently verified.

Fact-checking is a process used by most magazines (but not most newspapers) to independently verify what’s in their articles. Beauchamp’s anonymity complicated this process.

we gave him the benefit of the doubt.

But then with amazingly nonchalant candor Foer admits that the first day of their investigation boded ill for the Scott Beauchamp diaries.

As we began our re-reporting of Beauchamp’s pieces, we searched for the easily verifiable bits of information that would serve as crucial benchmarks. And, on the first full day of our investigation, it didn’t look good for Beauchamp.

Suddenly the first day yields results even though all the other tireless efforts prompted TNR to run with the series. Sorry, not cutting it. There was a desire to to have the Baghdad Diarist stories to be true. TNR and all the other leftists hate the military so much that any sense of professionalism went out the door and was replaced with the contrived machinations of radical left wing anti-American bigots.

The people that Foer and friends slandered are the sons and daughters of families throughout the United States. They put their lives on the line every second of every day so that idiots like Foer can have a place to speak freely. Yet Foer and the New Republic have such a warped sense of what is going on over in Iraq that they willfully went with a story that they hoped would be true even though red flags were going off everywhere. Rather than repair the damage that had already been done they dug in deeper, went on the attack and dragged this on for months in the hope that people would forget. These people don’t deserve to be informing others because they are incapable of wielding the responsibility necessary to act professionally and objectively.