Fiddling With Themselves While Rome Burns

The insaneosphere is consumed by a fire - no, not the one that could cause a major blackout in San Diego. No, this fire concerns Scott Thomas Beauchamp, whose writings for The New Republic about life in Iraq have been "discredited" even though nobody discredited them. Drudge (no link) claims to have new information proving that Beauchamp's stories were false. Except they don't prove anything.

I would tell you what I thought of the leaked documents if the links at Drudge worked. From Kevin’s snippet, it appears that the latest transcript show that Beauchamp basically told everyone to piss off, that he just wanted everything to go away. Or, precisely what anyone with a brain would have predicted he would do (note the date I wrote that- 10 September) once the nutters had the brass jumping down his throat.

And then Drudge pulled everything back. And the "confession" isn't a confession, even according to The Cornerites.

Baghdad Diarist [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

We're hearing from The New Republic that the Drudge story isn't the damning evidence it suggests to be ... stay tuned.

UPDATE: An editor there e-mails: "Go to the story and click on the link that he claims is to Beauchamp’s confession. It’s not there. The only Beauchamp document is one were he acknowledged receiving some other memo. Nothing even close to a confession there." At the moment I can't access any of the documents that are flagged in that "Developing" story....

Hey guys, a substantial portion of the West Coast is on fire. Want to keep it together? Do a little prioritizing, maybe? Or do you want to have to clean the umpteenth egg from your face?

Question

Is it the policy of the New York Times to print articles based on confidential Army reports that they've only released to partisan outfits, that are contradicted by concurrent reports? I don't think that we're any closer to the truth on the Scott Beauchamp issue, and yet the NYT gives the imprimatur of closure. Their article is a he said/she said article without any on-the-record statements about the veracity of his reports. This sounds right to me:

Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University, called the Army’s refusal to release its report “suspect,” adding: “There is a cloud over the New Republic, but there’s one hanging over the Army, as well. Each investigated this and cleared themselves, but they both have vested interests.”

Yet the New York Times comes down squarely on the side of one vested interest. The one that has been shown to lie about Pat Tillman, EFPs in Iraq, etc., etc.

Not only do we not know what the truth is, it doesn't matter at all relative to the Iraq war (yes I approvingly cited Rick Moran). The guy who got 110 years in jail for raping and murdering an Iraqi civilian and her family isn't a figment of anyone's imagination. Other soldiers tell stories the right wing apologists don't like, too many and too similiarly for all of them to be false. This quote, for example...

Some say that Iraq cannot be in a civil war because the country's major institutions are not fighting each other with conventional military forces. But this is too formulaic and restrictive for what I saw and heard. On the streets of west Baghdad, almost every person I spoke to told me of a close relative or friend who was killed by Sunni insurgents or Shiite militia members.

...is something that I'm sure will be criticized ("how do we know EVERYONE he spoke to had a friend killed?"), but at some point the preponderance of evidence resists this stupid game. Going after the low-hanging fruit of particular anecdotes doesn't nullify the totality of the failure in Iraq. Rather than pounding away on their laptop, these keyboard warriors need to face reality.

Thugs and Mob Generators

I have sort of followed this flap between The New Republic and the conservative noise machine over a diary posted anonymously by "Scott Thomas," a soldier in Iraq, about atrocities and ethically dubious behavior committed during the war. The reports of beating Iraqis and running over dogs and other "fog of war" stuff didn't fit with the rose-colored worldview of the insaneosphere, so they immediately decided it was a fake.

Then Scott Thomas Beauchamp himself revealed himself as the soldier and author.

So the insaneosphere did what anyone who supports the troops would do: they went after the soldier personally.

MICHELLE MALKIN DEMONSTRATES HOW TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS. Try to intimidate them. When they drop their anonymity to add credence to an article you doubt because it conflicts with your worldview, post their picture on your blog. Post their MySpace page on your blog. Quote people calling them a "pretentious ass" and a "strange chap. Write vaguely threatening lines like "Milblogger/ documentarian J.D. Johannes is headed back to FOB Falcon in Iraq in a few weeks, where Beauchamp’s unit was located (and which Johannes guessed correctly). Johannes has some words for the TNR writer." Find and post their college poetry.

Shit happens in war. Furthermore, that shit that happens has an impact when you're engaged in an occupation and trying to win hearts and minds. It's been true since the DAWN of war; "raping and pillaging" and "the spoils of victory" are fairly old concepts. That the insaneosphere thinks that this war is somehow different, somehow being fought by 150,000 carbon copies of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, is insane, and made all the more so by attacking anyone

The vast majority of our troops serve with honor. Some are beaten down psychologically by the horrors of combat and do something stupid. The military has a system in place to deal with that but it appears to be missing some incidents. That's the bottom line. And when you put troops in an unwinnable situation and in the middle of a civil war without a clear sense of mission, these incidents go up. Period.

But the insaneosphere doesn't want to deal with that, so they attack a member of the military personally. It's revolting. It's grade-A thuggery. To protect the President and his failed war, they will frag an American soldier. Nice people.

UPDATE: Yglesias:

That's just crazy. All these people need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense. And they need to think a bit about the epistemic situation they're creating where information about Iraq that they don't want to hear -- even when published in a pro-war publication -- can just be immediately dismissed as fraudulent even though the misconduct it described was far, far less severe than all sorts of other well-document misconduct in Iraq.

There's this perpetual sense from the nutters on the right that as long as confusion and doubt can be placed into one story then the totality of the literally thousands of similar stories in Iraq are rendered moot. These people are shameless.