War whoppers of the left

Michele Malkin:

THE tale of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the discredited "Baghdad Diarist" for The New Republic magazine, is an old tale:

Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldier's tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldier's ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud.

Beauchamp belongs in the same ward as John Kerry, the original infectious agent of the toxic disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome. (In the "Winter Soldier investigation" anti-war Vietnam activists publicized bogus charges of rampant war atrocities by U.S. forces.) The ward is filling up.

U.S. military investigators concluded this week that Beauchamp concocted allegations of troop misconduct in a series of essays for The New Republic. "The investigation is complete and the allegations from PVT Beauchamp are false," Maj. Steven Lamb, a spokesman for Multi National Division-Baghdad, told USA Today.

The New Republic is standing by Beauchamp's work. But Michael Goldfarb, the Weekly Standard editor who first challenged Beauchamp's writing, reported Monday that Beauchamp had "signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods - fabrications containing only 'a smidgen of truth,' in the words of our source."

To illustrate the soul-deadening impact of war, Beauchamp had described sitting in a mess hall in Iraq mocking a female civilian contractor whose face had "melted" after an IED explosion. "I love chicks that have been intimate - with IEDs," Pvt. Beauchamp claimed he said out loud in her earshot. "It really turns me on - melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses."

Beauchamp recounted: "My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall."

It wasn't true. After active-duty troops, veterans, embedded journalists and bloggers raised pointed questions about the anecdote's veracity, Beauchamp confessed to New Republic fact-checkers that the mocking had taken place in Kuwait - before he had set foot in Iraq to experience the soul-deadening impact of war. Military officials in Kuwait tried to verify the incident and called it an "urban legend or myth."

...

Ever since John Kerry sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and accused American soldiers of wantonly razing villages "in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan," the Left has embraced a small cadre of self-loathing soldiers and soldier wannabes willing to sell their deadened souls for the anti-war cause. Think Jimmy Massey, the unhinged Marine who falsely accused his unit of engaging in mass genocide against Iraqis. Think Jesse MacBeth and Micah Wright, anti-war Army Rangers who weren't Army Rangers.

Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits. Exposing Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his brethren matters because the truth matters. The honor of the military matters. The credibility of the media matters.

Think it doesn't make a difference? Imagine where Sen. John Kerry would be now if the Internet had been around in 1971.

Certainly the "fact checkers" at the dominant left wing media never challenged Kerry's bogus accounts of Vietnam. they wanted to believe it was true just like the left wingers at the BBC wanted to believe the anti war mush they put out about Iraq. The investigative journalist of the Watergate era never wanted to investigate the bogus claims of Kerry or the bad reporting of the Tet offensive. They certainly were not the ones that uncovered the problems with Beauchamps story either.