It looks like I may have been too quick to accept TNR‘s reported corroboration of (most aspects of) their Iraq diarist’s dispatches: The Weekly Standard is reporting that the author has recanted. Though, of course, now that he’s been named, there are obviously reasons to take that with a few heaps of salt as well. I’ll hold off on drawing any further conclusions there until we have more details.
But I do think the shock and horror Ace of Spades and Meryl Yourish are expressing at TNR‘s lax fact checking procedures is misplaced. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have a soldier write anonymous (and therefore unaccountable) dispatches, but if that’s what you’re going to do, it just doesn’t sound all that feasible to be calling up sources to check his anecdotes given that you’re trying to preserve his anonymity. Beyond that, the sort of fact checking they seem to believe should have been routine—things like calling every source to confirm quotations—is not the usual practice at most of the political magazines I’m familiar with. Normally, the goal of fact checking is to catch errors, taking for granted that that the writer is not deliberately fabricating stories. Which means you check spellings, and confirm that any statistics are accurate and up to date, but generally accept that the reporter is honestly recording any material he saw or heard himself. Maybe I’m wrong here: Is it the routine practice of National Review or The Weekly Standard to confirm the accuracy of every quotation in a story with its source? The lesson I’d take away, if it turns out these stories were concocted, isn’t that this was a failure of fact-checking, but that when a story is intrinsically difficult to thoroughly fact-check, you need to be very certain about the writer.
Addendum: Cathy Young makes an interesting observation:
Far less attention has been paid to the curious matter of Beauchamp’s first diarist piece, "War Bonds". In it, Beauchamp chats with a friendly Iraqi boy while changing a flat tire, only to find out the next day that the boy, who called himself "James Bond," had his tongue cut out by insurgents for talking to Americans. This horrifying tale abounds in improbabilities — above all, the fact that a month or two later Beauchamp sees the same kid back on the same streets, hanging around Americans and waiting for handouts, smiling happily and sprinting after a soccer ball. His spirits are apparently undampened by the mutilation or by fear of further reprisals, and his family has not thought to keep him off the streets, or maybe try to get out of that neighborhood. None of it rings true — though I’m certainly not denying that the insurgents could have done such a thing. (For more analysis of that piece, see my post at The Y-Files.) Of course, no one questioned that story because no one has a political or emotional stake in disproving atrocities by insurgents.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Jon H // Aug 7, 2007 at 10:32 pm
“The Weekly Standard is reporting that the author has recanted.”
You should know better than to believe those hacks.
2 Jon H // Aug 7, 2007 at 10:33 pm
And by hacks I mean the Weekly Standard.
TNR has not been able to corroborate the supposed ‘recantation’.
3 maurice // Aug 8, 2007 at 6:59 pm
I never heard of Pvt Beauchamp before his third article. When I read it, what struck me, as a former Marine, as completely implausible, was that taunting of a burned woman.
Most people who have served will tell you the same: There would have been a literal, physical beating had someone overheard that. Not rhetoric, but an actual beating.
A lot of people who haven’t served don’t get that. That’s why they don’t understand how so many people could suddenly say “WTF?!” upon reading it, after the earlier stuff went by.
Now, consider the convenient moving of the chow hall location. And that’s what it is: convenient. The one thing that was easy to disprove was the presence of a burned woman at FOB Falcon. Suddenly, Beauchamp’s friends say it was elsewhere; He was “mistaken.”
But, if it was elsewhere, that goes against the whole premise of the series, doesn’t it? And how does a young man make a mistake like that? I mean, he saw her *every day* at the FOB Falcon chow hall, right?
C’mon..
4 Jon H // Aug 8, 2007 at 9:38 pm
“There would have been a literal, physical beating had someone overheard that. Not rhetoric, but an actual beating.”
Riiiight.
By that logic, surely someone must have overheard, and beaten up, the group of soldiers who plotted to rape and murder a young girl and kill her family. So clearly that murder plot couldn’t have been carried out.
5 maurice // Aug 8, 2007 at 11:36 pm
“Riiiight.”
Hey, believe what you like, it makes no difference to me.
But if you think that a chowhall full of soldiers is going to sit there and allow a wounded woman to be abused, then I have to believe you’ve never been in the military. Not_gonna_happen. Ask any soldier or Marine.
But it’s all going to come out very shortly, as the military is going to be pushed to the point where they have to release their investigation details.
6 Jon H // Aug 13, 2007 at 12:45 am
“But if you think that a chowhall full of soldiers is going to sit there and allow a wounded woman to be abused, then I have to believe you’ve never been in the military. Not_gonna_happen. Ask any soldier or Marine.”
Yeah, because soldiers and Marines never mistreat or disrespect women. I bet the bargirls of Asia would disagree. Also: Tailhook.
Spare me. There are good men and women in the military. There are bad men and women in the military. For every unblemished saint in uniform there’s surely two or more green 18 year olds whose sense of humor and propriety were formed by listening to Bubba the Love Sponge or Opie and Anthony or Howard Stern.
(Just to be clear, unblemished saints are as rare in every walk of life. If anything if the military does have a 1:2 ratio of saints to creeps it would be considerably better than in the civilian world.)