This War's John Kerry?

[thedrifter]

This War's John Kerry? <br />
Posted by: Dean Barnett at 9:22 AM <br />
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Scott Thomas has outed himself. His real name is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and he has penned the following self-pitying letter to The New...

[thedrifter]

Reacting To Scott Thomas Beauchamp
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 10:48 AM
The posters at the FreeRepublic thread are very rough on the soldier, but most of the ire should be directed at the Beltway geniuses at the New Republic who allowed this young man to publish a column that would obviously lead to the controversy it quickly ignited, as well as to the blowback from his fellow soldiers for the general slander he perpetrated. Having to use a pseudonym in an era of milblogging was the obvious giveaway that the piece would start an investigation.

Sliming the war and the people fighting it requires sacrifices, of course, and the New Republic's editors were willing to let Beauchamp make his on behalf of their cause.

I note that the second post on a blog believed to be Beauchamp's, the soldier notes "I'm reading On The Road again." Amazon.com notes that this book "is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers."

The shade of Walter Lippman has suffered enough in recent years, but here's another chapter in the decline of a once great magazine with which to torment it.

Michelle Malkin has much much more.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

“Scott Thomas” steps out of the shadows Update: The blog of “Sir Real Scott Thomas” Update: His MySpace page Update The soon-to-be wife of Scott Thomas Beauchamp?
By Michelle Malkin • July 26, 2007 08:35 AM

Update 4:15pm Eastern. Dean Barnett on the end of the beginning of the “Scott Thomas” affair…

TNR employed as its Baghdad correspondent a guy who was there specifically to mock the war effort while he hopefully advanced his own career as a writer by doing so. Beauchamp’s champions (not that I’m aware of any) have the potential defense that he was a young man who didn’t know any better. TNR’s editors do not. They gravitated to Scott Thomas Beauchamp because he would have the “moral authority” necessary to slander the troops with impunity, a moral authority that Franklin Foer and company of course lack.

One other note: Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s life will be a smoldering ruin when this affair has run its course. His partners in crime at The New Republic will still have jobs and careers. Will they see Scott Beauchamp in their nightmares? And will they see the 160,000 honorable and noble troops that together they conspired to malign?

Just fyi: Here’s Reeve quoting Beauchamp in one of her articles in 2004 for The Columbia Missourian at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Update 2:54pm Eastern. Ace reports that the soon-to-be wife of Scott Thomas Beauchamp is…TNR staffer Elspeth Reeve. According to the TNR masthead, she’s a reporter-researcher for the magazine. Or was? According to Discarded Lies, a TNR staffer was fired this morning. That staffer was the source of the leaks…Update again…I just called TNR’s office and left a message for Reeve. She still works there. Will see if she calls back.

Allah weighs in at Hot Air:

We’ve been getting tips similar to the ones Ace has about Beauchamp being intimately connected to someone on the TNR staff. He claims to have a source within TNR itself (although not anymore, perhaps — more on that in a bit) who thought Beauchamp was either married to someone who works there or was recommended by someone married to someone who works there. There are a lot of “Scott Beauchamps” in the world, no doubt, but if this is a coincidence, it’s a fabulous one…There’s some ambiguity about whether they’re married yet or just planning: the Wedding Channel thing says October but a tipster pointed me to the comments on this MySpace page. Check the May 19 entry for Ian Cognito (Beauchamp’s alias) and you’ll see he says he was married the week before. Whether they’re married or engaged isn’t really important but there you go, for the record.

Thanks to liberrocky for finding the Wedding Channel thing and thanks to Ace for summing this up nicely:

It’s all so Plame-ish. As Gracie wrote to me, of all the embeds and milbloggers and real journalists they could have picked for the job, they instead chose to go with a very partisan, very inexperienced blogger just out of “laziness.” Just because they knew him. Just because it was easy.

I actually think part of the reason was that they knew Beauchamp’s politics — he having put them on display on his goofy blog — and so, just like with Valerie Plame, they knew the report was going to come back the way they wanted it when they sent him. But Gracie says it’s just Occam’s razor: Laziness.

Allah’s own summary: “So now the dilemma for TNR: If they find out that Beauchamp’s been exaggerating or outright fabricating in his Iraq stories and they come down hard, they probably lose Reeve too. Then again, they’ve already allegedly lost one employee over this — follow the link to Ace’s site and see what became of his TNR source, “gracie” — and if it turns out Beauchamp’s a liar then Foer will probably be hitting the bricks too, so what’s one more staff vacancy?

Given the number of milbloggers invested in this story and the number of guys with direct links to FOB Falcon — JD Johannes most notably and, per one of the updates above, Jeff Emanuel — the scrutiny of TNR’s findings after they publish the results of their investigation will be intense. They’d better do more than just check with Beauchamp’s buddies, who’ll naturally want to protect a pal, especially one who just got married and whose wife’s job may be on the line.”

***
Here he is…

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/07/26/scott-thomas-steps-out-of-the-shadows/

Ellie

[thedrifter]

The Baghdad Diarist, ‘Shock Troops,’ and Fabrications <br />
by Jeff Emanuel (more by this author) <br />
Posted 07/27/2007 ET <br />
Updated 07/27/2007 ET <br />
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Left-leaning The New Republic (TNR) gained new...

[thedrifter]

July 27, 2007
Pvt. Beauchamp: In Big Trouble Either Way
By Jack Kelly

If what Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp wrote in the New Republic isn't true, he's in trouble, and so is the magazine.

If what Pvt. Beauchamp wrote is true, he's in bigger trouble.

Pvt. Beauchamp is the Baghdad Diarist whose July 13 article, written under the clever pseudonym "Scott Thomas," drew much skepticism.

Pvt. Beauchamp described how he made fun of a woman whose face had been severely scarred by an IED: "I love chicks that have been intimate with IEDS," Pvt. Beauchamp quotes himself as saying, loudly, to his buddies in the chow hall. "It really turns me on -- melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses."


"My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing," Pvt. Beauchamp recounted. "The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall."

Next he described finding the remains of children in a Saddam-era mass grave uncovered when his unit was constructing a combat outpost: "One private...found the top part of a human skull...He marched around with the skull on his head...No one was disgusted. Me included."

Finally, Pvt. Beauchamp described another friend "who only really 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."

Pvt. Beauchamp described how his friend killed three dogs in one day: "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 New Republic's editors told Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard the chow hall incident occurred at Forward Operating Base Falcon near Baghdad. Since only one company of soldiers at FOB Falcon have Bradleys, the outing of "Scott Thomas" was just a matter of time.

Now that they've demonstrated their diarist is a real soldier, the New Republic's editors feel vindicated. But the issue is not whether Pvt. Beauchamp is a soldier. It's whether he's telling the truth or not. And his story stinks to high heaven. No one else at the base ever seems to have a seen a woman who fits the description of the woman in the chow hall. No mass graves have been discovered during the time Pvt. Beauchamp has been at FOB Falcon. It is physically impossible for the driver of a Bradley to see a dog to the immediate right of his vehicle.

It would be better for Pvt. Beauchamp if he made his stories up. It breaks no military rule to BS gullible liberal journalists. But if Pvt. Beauchamp is telling the truth, he and his buddies have broken so many articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that I haven't space to list them all.

It isn't only Pvt. Beauchamp who'd be in trouble. If the latter two stories are true, then his fire team leader, squad leader, platoon sergeant and platoon leader either witnessed them, and did nothing about them, or were negligent in supervising their soldiers. And if I were his company commander, I wouldn't be expecting below the zone promotion to major anytime soon.

His superiors won't be happy campers, and neither will his fellow troops, to whom he has brought unwanted scrutiny, deserved or not. I suspect Pvt. Beauchamp soon will be the guest of honor at a blanket party.

That he is Pvt. Beauchamp suggests this is not his first brush with the UCMJ. He called himself PFC Beauchamp on his Web site last September, which indicates he's been busted a stripe. He's been in the Army long enough to be a Spec 4.

On his blog (Sir Real Scott Thomas), Pvt. Beauchamp indicates he's an aspiring writer who joined the Army to establish credentials for voicing his liberal political opinions.

"I know that NOT participating in a war (and such a misguided one at that) should be considered better than wanting to be in one just to write a book," he wrote May 18, 2006. "But...maybe I'd rather be both."

But is Pvt. Beauchamp telling the truth about what he sees in Iraq?

In a blog entry for May 8, 2006, Pvt. Beauchamp describes an atrocity: "'Put a 556 in his head.' (The caliber of an M-16 rifle is 5.56 millimeters.) On the street below, the man's brown face dissolves in a thick red mist. The lights in the city's houses shut off in unison. Electricity rationing. Water rationing too. You ever tried to survive for more than a few hours in 120 degree weather?"

On May 8, 2006, Pvt. Beauchamp was in Germany, where temperatures rarely reach 120 degrees, and the electricity and water work just fine.