Earlier this month we brought you the on-going story of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a US Army private who published a series of ‘Baghdad Diaries’ in the New Republic under the name Scott Thomas.
Thomas told a dark story US soldiers 
in Iraq acting in various dishonorable and sadistic ways.
This brought forth a storm of charges from the right-wing blogs and the Weekly Standard claiming that the diaries were fabrications. Then TNR did its own reinvestigation of the diaries and found that with the exception of one error, the stories checked out.
Post media critic Howard Kurtz has been writing about these criticisms in his column. And tomorrow he reports that now the US Army has determined that Beauchamp’s claims were “found to be false.”
Kurtz got a few more statements from an unnamed “military official” who would not go on the record “because the probe is confidential.” And he was told that the investigation into the truth of Beauchamp’s article will not be released. The unnamed official further explained that the Army will not prosecute Beauchamp but rather deal with the matter administratively “by having his cellphone and laptop confiscated.”
For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, the statement announcing the investigation and its verdict appears not to have been a public release but rather a statement released uniquely to the Weekly Standard. That’s how the Kurtz article reads and some quick reporting on my part suggests this is in fact the case.
And it gets better.
The Weekly Standard, which has been leading the charge against Beauchamp, says another unnamed military official told the magazine that not only had the Army found Beauchamp’s written accounts to be false but that Beauchamp himself has now signed a recantation of all his claims. So case closed; he fessed up. Yet when TNR contacted the Army public affairs a Maj. Steve Lamb told them: “I have no knowledge of that.”
So what’s up here?
Beauchamp makes his charges. The US Army allegedly investigates and finds the highly embarrassing charges to be false. But no information will be released about which of his charges were false, how they were false or how they were determined to be false.
They then punish Beauchamp by preventing him from having any communication with the civilian world. And if that’s not enough, an unnamed military source tells the Standard that Beauchamp has undergone a successful self-criticism session and has recanted everything. But an Army spokesman tells TNR that he’s not aware of any confession or recantation.
We can at least be thankful that the matter is being handled with such transparency.
Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales. He wouldn’t be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic. But it’s hard not to have some suspicion that the Army has put itself in charge of investigating charges which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the Army; that it has provided itself a full exoneration through an investigation, the details of which it will not divulge; and it has chosen to use as its exclusive conduit for disseminating information about the case, The Weekly Standard, a publication which can at best be described as a charged partisan in the public controversy about the case.
This hardly inspires much confidence.
