“Scott Thomas” has revealed himself with this statement:
The New Republic adds that they will “go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail.” It’s good to finally know the author’s name, but there is nothing here to confirm the events as described by Beauchamp. Right now, we have no reason to believe that his stories are anything other than what we first suspected them to be: a “pastiche of the ‘This is no bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell.” If the stories are true, we regret that Beauchamp has been forced to take “time out of his already insane schedule” of ridiculing IED victims, desecrating children’s corpses, and killing stray dogs to “play some role in an ideological battle that I never wanted to join.” But, as Dean Barnett points out this seems more than a little disingenuous considering that his blog reveals that he joined this war “just to write a book” and that he “misses political arguments. There seems to be a consensus with all the boys overseas…we laugh harder at CSPAN than comedy central. Silly republicans.” That Beauchamp chose to reveal himself at this point also seems a bit disingenuous, since the military has already launched an investigation and, courtesy of JD Johannes, we’d already identified his unit four days ago. If we’d gotten that much information, it was only a matter of time before somebody besides his editors started asking him “hard questions.” We still want to know: 1) Dates. When did he mock the woman at the mess hall? When was the soldier wearing and playing with the child’s skull? With dates, these incidents can be verified. 2) Names. He can argue that he would get the dog-killer in trouble by naming him, but how about the names of soldiers who witnessed the event at the mess hall and those who saw the guy with the kid’s skull? Real live witnesses can verify the incidents.
