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Notes on a ScandalA soldier in Iraq decided to write about his experiences. He never suspected he'd start a warThis article is from the September issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here. 
A PRIVATE AFFAIR When Scott Beauchamp's shocking essay spurred a media frenzy, his journalist wife, Elspeth Reeve, had his back "Shock Troops" is a grim first-person account of the dehumanizing aspects of war. In a tone vacillating between shame and detachment, Beauchamp, under the byline "Scott Thomas," recounts with squirm-inducing detail how he and his buddies were becoming so callous they openly mocked a gruesomely disfigured woman—the apparent victim of a roadside bomb—when she sat down for a meal in a military mess hall. Among neoconservative war apologists and self-anointed superpatriots, discrediting the story became a crusade: Beauchamp must be proven a liar, and TNR must be humiliated"I love chicks that have been intimate—with IEDs. It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses...," Beauchamp quotes himself as saying, loud enough so the woman could hear. He continues: "My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall." Playfully referring to her as the Crypt Keeper, they made her a running gag. In another passage Beauchamp describes a fellow soldier picking up a hair-clumped fragment of human skull while digging at a military base and donning it "like a crown." As the soldier "marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter." And then there was the private "who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over"—dogs especially. His preferred method was to "suddenly swerve and catch a leg or tail in the vehicle's tracks." At a time when the military and the war's defenders were working hard to play up the achievements of Bush's troop surge, the New Republic's searing account of soldiers acting like sadistic teenagers was bound to raise a lot of hackles. The blowback began almost immediately. Leading the charge was Michael Goldfarb of the conservative Weekly Standard. In a blog post published on July 18, Goldfarb, now a chief communications aide to John McCain, took issue with several claims in the story and suggested that Beauchamp had made them up. Other right-wing commentators quickly piled on, casting suspicion on nearly every detail in the piece, from whether "Scott Thomas" was really a soldier at all to the physics of maneuvering Bradleys to the likelihood of soldiers wearing bits of human bone as beanies. To some, the whole affair looked like the second coming of Stephen Glass, the prolific young TNR writer whose fictitious articles almost brought down the magazine in 1998 and inspired the 2003 film Shattered Glass. But Beauchamp was of only tangential interest to the neocon attack squad. The real target was the venerable New Republic, which its attackers generally loathed as a liberal rag—despite TNR's early and vituperative support for the war. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol penned a piece called "They Don't Really Support the Troops," arguing that the Beauchamp story proved that the "antiwar left" sought the "slander of American soldiers" using "fiction presented as fact." Among neoconservative war apologists and self-anointed superpatriots, it became a crusade: Beauchamp must be proven a liar, and TNR must be humiliated. After a series of increasingly panicked communications from his editors, Beauchamp published a brief statement using his real name on TNR's website to defend his article's accuracy. The statement only intensified the attacks, however, and a few days later Goldfarb filed a blog post that seemed to checkmate his opponents. Citing an unnamed source "close to the investigation," he reported that Beauchamp had signed "a sworn statement" for the army conceding that the events in "Shock Troops" were "exaggerations and falsehoods." The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press all eagerly jumped on the story. The only problem was that Goldfarb's contention was false. Major John Cross, who investigated the "Shock Troops" scandal for the army, confirms, "[Specialist] Beauchamp—he's been promoted since this story broke—never recanted his articles in any sworn statement." But the Weekly Standard, despite casting endless aspersions on TNR's journalistic ethics, has never bothered to retract its story, and the falsehood became a propaganda victory. Despite enormous efforts on the part of Beauchamp and his wife, Elspeth Reeve, who was then a TNR intern, to vindicate him, the public pressure on TNR continued to build. 
FOER SWORN In the midst of a media war, New Republic editor Franklin Foer had to choose whether to stand by his writer Today, he is still in the army, stationed in Germany, and is slated to return to Iraq this fall. Beauchamp spoke to Radar to give his side of the story for the first time and to put the ordeal to rest before he goes back to battle. 
I'm the son of Dr. Henry Heimlich, known for the Heimlich maneuver. My wife and I are writing a book about my father's career. To date, our original research - which uncovered a remarkable history of medical misconduct - has been the basis for numerous print and TV reports around the country including the NY Times, LA Times, Reuters, an excellent two-part feature in Radar, etc. Last year, Brian Ross did an ABC 20/20 report about our work. I was in the middle of another case of serious journalism misconduct at TNR, one which somewhat parallels the Beauchamp mess: the publication of fabricated information, failure to fact-check, the "hidden spouse" of a TNR staffer, and more. In my case, it involved senior editor Jason Zengerle and his wife. When the matter was brought to Franklin Foer, he refused to answer legitimate reportorial questions, made false statements, and then played ostrich. The issues are documented on our website: http://medfraud.info/Ohio2nd.html Further information is available on request. Peter M. Heimlich Posted by: pmheimlich on August 21, 2008 10:55 AM As a six year veteran of the US Army, enlisted and officer, I can sadly confirm that this is the sort of behavior sometimes engaged in by combat troops who need to blow off steam. When one faces death every day, gallows humor comes to the fore. Posted by: Swifter on August 21, 2008 12:41 PM It's kind of pathetic that a yellow bellied draft dodging coward like Billy Kristol, and the rest of the neocon ilk, can slander any veteran especially an active duty combat soldier with their tripe. The Kristol's of the world do not have an ounce integrity and should be shunned by all. Posted by: becuna on August 21, 2008 1:27 PM this story really choked me up. (is there a dr heimlich in the house?) Posted by: escoBam on August 21, 2008 6:09 PM Advertisement TNR can't vouch for Beauchamp's integrity here? They're questioning an active duty US soldier's honesty? Unsure of his scrupulousness? Posted by: ocinemod on August 21, 2008 10:48 PM capitulating to an anonymous partisan digital mob is like so 2004. Posted by: littleboots on August 22, 2008 6:55 AM > this story really choked me up. Me, too. But while most people associate my father with the Heimlich maneuver, few people are aware that for 25 years, he's been promoting a quack cure called "malariotherapy." Despite having no background in immunology, he's claimed that patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, and Lyme disease can be cured by deliberately infecting them with malaria. Over the years, Cincinnati's Heimlich Institute has arranged a series of notorious human experiments on both Americans and foreign nationals in Mexico, Panama, China, and most recently in Africa, per recent published reports. Experts have compared the "research" to Nazi concentration camp atrocities and to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Thorough documentation available on the CIRCARE bioethics website: http://www.circare.org/malariotherapy.htm According to Radar's excellent article by Thomas Francis, the Heimlich Institute has been conducting "malariotherapy" experiments on sex workers in Ethiopia. The work was supervised by a car rental agent who lives in the San Francisco area. So what does this have to do with The New Republic, Franklin Foer, senior editor Jason Zengerle and Zengerle's wife? (For you journalism watchers, The New Yorker is also in the mix.) Start here: http://medfraud.info/Ohio2nd.html#anchor97635 Peter M. Heimlich Posted by: pmheimlich on August 22, 2008 11:59 AM Most of the milbloggers and others who were calling Beauchamp a liar, as far I could tell, (and including me) weren't getting the "lie" vibes from the particular events so much as the context of them. I'd expect a morbid sense of humor. I don't figure a soldier never ran over a dog. There's a reason that there is specifically a rule against taking human trophies. And the story of the scarred woman was much easier (and I made that argument at least once) if it happened on the way *to* Iraq at a place where most people were transients. It's easier to be cruel to strangers. Good writing tends to humanize soldiers, no matter how painfully. This might have been skillfully written, but in the end those getting "lie" vibes weren't getting them because they thought soldiers were saints. It was because they saw what the defenders of Shock Troops saw, which was proof that soldiers aren't human anymore, that this is how they all react, not because they are young or afraid or letting off some tension with gallows humor or some typical adolescent cruelty, but that their humanity had been stripped away. The subtext was a lie. The cost of war is enormous and I know more than one "burned" vet who still struggles five, ten, or more years after the fact. They aren't less human. They're more human if anything, more aware of human capacity for good and evil. Some people would like to think they're numb to "human" anymore. And those people were blogging great emotional defenses of the ultimate truth of Shock Troops and Scott Thomas. And it wasn't because they cared about the dog. Posted by: Synova on August 22, 2008 2:39 PM I'm surprised that you left a big piece out...how did Goldfarb (and Malkin) get their hands on internal Pentagon documents regarding this investigation?? Posted by: djonan on August 24, 2008 9:06 PM so stupid Posted by: hollygolightly on August 25, 2008 3:34 AM Radar must benefit greatly in the fact that it can lie to it's readers so easily. Ignorant cows who come to this place for salacious celeb gossip are rarely disappointed. However, this is not a serious investigative news organization. Your entire article is rife with mistakes and flat out falsehoods.. Perhaps the biggest is this particular sentence: "The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press all eagerly jumped on the story." Nothing could be further from the truth. It took Beauchamp being outed as a colossal liar and Foer fighting for his job for any of those similarly respectable news sites to pick the story up. It was shameful behavior all around. And Foer should never hold another job in journalism again. And Radar should stay away from the big boy stories. Posted by: call on August 25, 2008 4:10 PM
So your quibble is with the word "eagerly"? Adverbs are usually considered a matter of some editorial latitude. I mean, FYI and stuff. Not that you seem like ridiculous right-wing troll with a media persecution complex or anything. But to be safe, I'd suggest you stay away from propaganda organs like the AP. Immerse yourself if the comfortably insane little world of Little Green Footballs and dream sweetly of dropping nukes on Mecca. Posted by: escoBam on August 26, 2008 6:43 PM So a man admits to inhuman ,immoral ,and probably illegal behavior while suffering at war and he is called a LIAR? Then the coward editor who sat safe in the states could not stand the heat any longer and would not back him up..The man took 120 degree heat and made it but he is ashamed of his behavior and that is why he finds the need to write these letters...he is telling us what this war is doing to otherwise good men.It is destroying their moral fiber and causing them to do evl things,Anyone who does not believe that these things happen in war has not studied war,Any vet who denies that they can happen either is a liar or was lucky...As an RN of 27 years I took care of enough vets to hear their stories ....this is not new to this war but it seems to be much worse in this war. Posted by: MOSKI388 on August 26, 2008 7:12 PM |
 
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