Remember Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the soldier in Iraq who wrote a piece last month for the New Republic in which he recounted stories of (a) mocking a disfigured woman, (b) a fellow soldier who wore a piece of a child’s skull he had found, and (c) another fellow soldier who ran over dogs with his Bradley fighting vehicle?
Well, TNR has just put up their investigation into Beauchamp’s piece, which included talking with “current and former soldiers, forensic experts, and other journalists who have covered the war extensively, [and] five other members of Beauchamp’s company.”The result? They “all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously.” The only error they uncovered was that one of the incidents apparently took place at an Army base in Kuwait, not Iraq.
As for the reaction from the right, which has been loudly insisting for a couple of weeks that the whole thing was a fake?
Cue the crickets.