GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

From John Kerry to Scott Beauchamp: History of the “Winter Soldier Syndrome”

by

A must read this morning from Michelle Malkin.

The tale of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the discredited “Baghdad Diarist” for the discredited New Republic magazine, is an old tale: Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldier’s tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldier’s ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud.

Beauchamp belongs in the same ward as John F. Kerry, the original infectious agent of the toxic American disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome. The ward is filling up.

U.S. military investigators concluded this week that Beauchamp concocted allegations of troop misconduct in a series of essays for The New Republic. “The investigation is complete and the allegations from PVT Beauchamp are false,” Major Steven Lamb, a spokesman for Multi National Division-Baghdad, told USA Today.

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Ever since John Kerry sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and accused American soldiers of wantonly razing villages “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan,” the Left has embraced a small cadre of self-loathing soldiers and soldier wannabes willing to sell their deadened souls for the anti-war cause. Think Jimmy Massey, the unhinged Marine who falsely accused his unit of engaging in mass genocide against Iraqis. Think Jesse MacBeth and Micah Wright, anti-war Army Rangers who weren’t Army Rangers.

Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits. Exposing Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his brethren matters because the truth matters. The honor of the military matters. The credibility of the media matters. Think it doesn’t make a difference? Imagine where Sen. John Kerry would be now if the Internet had been around in 1971.

Read the whole thing…. it is not only a complete chronicle of the “Scott Thomas” saga (to date), but a wake-up call to those who still think American liberals “support the troops”… or ever have since Vietnam.

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Bob at ConfederateYankee has a great summary on l’affaire Beauchamp as well this morning.

Someone please explain to me why we should have any faith at all in what Franklin Foer, Jason Zengerle, and the other editors and reporters at The New Republic. They’ve proven they have not fact-checked articles they claim to have fact-checked prior to publication, the have not proved a single named credible source to support their charges, and they refuse to admit that their time-shifting, country-hopping “burned woman” claims have completely undermined the premise of the entire article.

All of the fact-checking and original source material has come from the blogosphere, however!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Comments

  1. Bruce, thanks especially for Confederate Yankee’s link. His assembled list of facts is devastating.

    Here’s some added color, linked to by Confederate Yankee, that I hadn’t known of. An enterprising milblogger e-mailed Beauchamp’s own First Sargeant (a.k.a. “Top”). (Beauchamp’s unit has a Web site.) Top replied:

    …Numerous soldiers within my unit have served on several deployments and this is my third year as a First Sergeant in this unit. My soldiers conduct is consistently honorable. This soldier [Beauchamp] has other underlining issues which I’m sure will come out in the course of the investigation. No one at any of the post we live at or frequent, remotely fit the descriptions of any of the persons depicted in this young man’s fairy tale. I can’t and won’t divulge any information regarding this soldier, but I do sincerely appreciate all the support from the people back home. Again, this young man has a vivid imagination and I promise you that this by no means reflects the truth…

  2. “Discredited”?
    “Devastating”?
    Yet the TNR stands by their first statement.
    They say that the 5 soldiers who serve with him “corroborated his accounts.”
    Are those 5 soldiers lying too?

  3. Further,
    Many on the left believe that soldiers are capable of great things and capable of bad things.
    To truly honor the soldiers, both the good and the bad should be illuminated. That makes them more human and therefore more praiseworthy

  4. No, gil. The TNR is lying – or at least making untrue statements, let’s say. Again: going by the *known facts*, not your conspiracy theories and hopes.

    You just don’t want to see it. So you’re not going to see it… nyah nyah nyah on us… whatever… blah…

    But even going by the TNR’s fables: 5 soldiers have corroborated their accounts of *what*, gil? Do you even know anymore?

    I’m absolutely certain that TNR did find 5 soldiers to corrobrate that there is a country called Iraq… that they are there.. that Beauchamp is the guy married to TNR’s staffer, and in their unit… that Beauchamp is his real name… etc.

  5. Further,
    As Paul McNellis, SJ, put it the other day:

    NR is in effect saying, we know that bad things happen, therefore something like what we published probably happened at some time. Yes, but did it happen when and as you said it did? It may not matter to TNR, but it matters to the soldiers at Foward Operating Base Falcon. They have been accused of dishonorable behavior. If the accusation is false, they have been slandered.

    The truth matters, gil. Those of us who support the troops for real, know that. Those of us who support the troops for real, know that some are capable of bad things; and that, the United States being fundamentally good and moral, it has policies and procedures whereby (genuinely) bad troops are dealt with. From past encounters, gil, I know that you don’t know either of those things.

  7. If TNR is “standing by” their story, why were the “Shock Troops” stories deleted from their website? Odd behavior, especially if they have corroboration.

    I confess I get a guilty laugh watching the desperate denial from the left unfold.

  8. Also, what part of the following does gil not understand?

    Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp… signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods…

    “Sworn statement”… a different category from pumped-up articles you sell to TNR to get your start as an anti-war writer.

  9. Going off-topic… but still on Iraq: Michael Yon’s column from last Sunday is a must-read.

    gil, this bit is for you:

    Clearly, not every terrorist in Iraq is Al Qaeda, but it is Al Qaeda that has been intentionally, openly, brazenly trying to stoke a civil war… Anyone who says Al Qaeda is not one of the primary problems in Iraq is simply ignorant of the facts.

    Why would Yon make such a pronouncement? And what makes him qualified to? Well, “read the whole thing”.

  10. Let’s see. The Army refuses to release details about the investigation; we’re simply supposed to believe Beauchamp lied because they said he did — but we don’t get the evidence of that. Army authorities have independently told several reporters that Beauchamp did not sign anything to recant his story. And the Army will not allow Beauchamp to talk to anyone outside the Army.

    Forgive me, but I’m just a tiny bit suspicious this may play out like so many exposes by the right wing allegeing fictionalizing by the media. We shall see, but it’s obviously premature to be claiming the Army has done anything other than made an assertion without sharing any facts in the case.

  11. Army authorities have independently told several reporters that Beauchamp did not sign anything to recant his story.

    Oh really? Citation, please. 🙂

    The Army refuses to release details about the investigation…

    But that’s none of your business, caligraphic. For the Army, this is an internal, personnel / disciplinary matter. In fact, I’d bet you a Coke that the Army is obligated by law to keep confidentiality.

    By contrast, TNR is in a position to release as many details of their own efforts at corroboration as they care to. Not only has TNR failed to, as detailed in the Confederate Yankee piece linked by Bruce; they’ve even “disappeared” the original Beauchamp pieces from their Web site!

  12. caligraphic, I’ll even help you on that citation. Fron today’s New York Times:

    …The New Republic… spoke[] to Major Lamb and asked whether Private Beauchamp had indeed signed a statement admitting to fabrications. “He told us, ‘I have no knowledge of that.’ He added, ‘If someone is speaking anonymously [to The Weekly Standard], they are on their own.’

    Is that Major Lamb “[confirming] several reporters that Beauchamp **did not** sign anything to recant his story”? (caligraphic’s words, emphasis added) Why, no it isn’t. 🙂 It’s only a refuse-to-confirm. And why might Major Lamb issue a refuse-to-confirm? In his words:

    ‘We don’t go into the details of how we conduct our investigations.’

    Natch; as I mentioned earlier, it’s still a disciplinary / personnel matter for the Army, subject to confidentiality until layers of bureaucracy determine otherwise. But what can the Army tell the public? From the article:

    “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

    Thus clearing the impugned public reputations of Beauchamp’s unit.

  13. The Army can’t release personal details. There are laws. When I was active duty dealing with personal information there was a constant drone-mantra-refrain citing the law we’d get in deep doo doo with if we screwed up handling someone’s information. Something like the Privacy Act of Seventy-something. Might have a new one by now.

    It wouldn’t surprise me to know that those that think that the Army can and *should* release information from their investigation also had a complete cow about the new wire tapping law.

    As for Beauchamp’s fiction… no one disputes that soldiers deal with war with dark humor or jokes and actions that we’d find inappropriate… but so do NURSES and EMT’s and POLICE. But somehow no one writes stories showing how being a nurse sucks away a person’s humanity.

    I’ve read accounts of the war that were personal and harsh and more importantly, showing that true side of war, made the humanity of the soldier relating the story starkly vivid. More human, not less. It’s not at ALL that Beauchamp related unsavory things. It’s that he portrayed a culture that was dehumanizing and pervasive… he felt guilt at being rude to the woman with the melted face but see what the war made them into? (Though we know he hadn’t *been* to the war yet.) People focus on the incidents and ignore the subtext completely when it’s the subtext, the framing, the base assumptions, that are what is wrong.

    Yet I read defenses about Beauchamp’s tales that seem to admit it well enough that the stories are NOT about rude soldiers or Young Men Behaving Badly but are clearly about the way that military service takes people and turns them into monsters. They like Beauchamp because fiction or not, he told the Truth… the Truth that so many want to deny… that the military creates killers (not protectors) that it deliberately strips away humanity (rather than fostering it) and all those stereotypes that they believe so desperately and which turn soldiers into something different and separate that we can’t ever quite comprehend.

    *Good* stories from the war, even if they are about bad things, help us to identify intimately and starkly with human beings. *Bad* stories from the war dehumanize soldiers into something foreign to our experience.

  15. When will people just plainly see that the Iraq War is a huge success?!?!? I just don’t understand how people can think that things are going not so well in Iraq. These people are just delusional!!

  17. It reminds me of CBS’ “handwriting expert” during Rathergate.

    The handwriting expert was legit. CBS showed him a photocopy of some Bush commander’s signature from one of the forgeries, in isolation from everything else, and asked in essence, ‘Does this signature look like it could be legit?’ He replied in essence, “Sure, if you put it that way, and in isolation from everything else, that signature could be legit’. Mapes/Rather then claimed to the world that the expert had fully authenticated the CBS forged documents. The expert said, Nuh-uh.