As I asked at the time: What the hell does it mean that “at least one” soldier had confirmed? What’s this “at least” business? Did the other soldiers confirm or not? Is he not sure if the soldiers confirmed? When did very small whole numbers — one, two, three, etc. — become too difficult to accurately tally? This statement makes sense only in this manner: ONE soldier confirmed, or claimed to confirm, the important bits of Beauchamp’s story. Other soldiers confirmed less important matters, like that there did exist a Melted Woman at all (though at the wrong base and in the wrong country) or that the country of Iraq is not, in fact, populated entirely by Immortals from Highlander and so there are indeed bones to be found of the dead.
And one of Ace’s commenters makes this excellent point:
Wait a minute – so now they’re saying Beauchamp was pressured into signing the statements Goldfarb talked about . . . but these weren’t contradictary? Why would the Army pressure [Beauchamp] to sign statements that merely backed up everything he said? They’re starting to try to nudge in the excuse of “wait, he was pressured!” without wanting to admit the Weekly Standard may have been right.
Jules Crittenden translates the statement from its original liberalese:
We’re afraid we’re not going to be able to acknowledge that our reporter is full of crap until we can prove he never saw a woman with a half-burned face. It’s the Army’s fault. They won’t open up the files of their internal investigation into the misdeeds of a rogue private. Our critics are all rightwing nutjobs, by the way, but we’re pretending to take them seriously as an indication of how magnanimous and journalistic pure we are, when in fact it’s because they have us dead to rights and we have no choice but to address them. Further, we insist on our right to support leaks only when they work in our favor. Oh yes, and … eff you.
And Little Green Footballs fixes on this segment of the TNR statement:
Here’s what we know: On July 26, Beauchamp told us that he signed several statements under what he described as pressure from the Army. He told us that these statements did not contradict his articles. Moreover, on the same day he signed these statements for the Army, he gave us a statement standing behind his articles, which we published at tnr.com.
And responds:
So The New Republic was aware that Beauchamp had signed statements for Army investigators, and must have suspected that the statements didn’t back up his articles … but TNR’s editors, for some reason, didn’t think it was important enough to mention any of this in any of their statements about the controversy. Until now. And they knew this at the same time that they published Beauchamp’s last written piece, attacking critics as “chickenhawks.”
And Dean Barnett blames TNR for failing to provide the young private with any guidance:
ONE LAST NOTE. There’s a bit in yesterday’s TNR note that reads, “Scott Beauchamp is currently a 24-year-old soldier in Iraq who, for the past 15 days, has been prevented by the military from communicating with the outside world, aside from three brief and closely monitored phone calls to family members.” Beauchamp a victim? For once, TNR’s editors and I are on the same page, but for very different reasons. If you read Scott Beauchamp’s blog, you’ll get the picture of a confused and disoriented young man. Right now, Scott Beauchamp is a very young man who has gotten himself into a very deep mess. While it’s nearly impossible to feel much sympathy for Beauchamp considering the way he has slandered his comrades in arms, TNR’s editors should have been providing adult supervision on this project. Much earlier in this scandal, I compared TNR’s editors to someone who gave a gun to a suicidal college student. Simply put, The New Republic should have and could have saved Scott Beauchamp from himself. If saving Private Beauchamp was something they truly cared about, the time to do so was several months ago when he began submitting stories for publication that were absurd on their face.
And from the only defense of TNR I can find, Talking Points Memo‘s Josh Marshall is forced to acknowledge that
Perhaps Beauchamp made this stuff up. And that’s not a throwaway line; I freely concede it may turn out to be the case. There’s no getting around the fact that the legacy of the Glass Affair puts an extra hurdle of credibility in TNR’s way.
Perhaps, and perhaps the pope’s Catholic, BUT…
But the behavior of the Army Public Affairs Office suggests that what they are pushing is not an investigation that would pass any muster in the light of day but a war against a particular article and publication.
Me…I just wonder whether the Army has really “rejected” TNR’s requests to speak with Pvt. Beauchamp in order to “protect his privacy” as the magazine says. Perhaps the Army’s failure to produce the private has something to do with the fact that he doesn’t want to talk to the editors at TNR. After all, the U.S. Army doesn’t take orders from Frank Foer–and Beauchamp doesn’t strike me as a real stand up guy.
