After many months of denial and stonewalling The New Republic has finally admitted that Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a lier. The so called “Baghdad Diarist” spun terrific tales of cruelty by U.S. troops in Iraq, which he has sense admitted to the Army were false.
“We cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them,” Editor Franklin Foer wrote of the dispatches by Scott Thomas Beauchamp. “Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.”
In the New Republic case, Foer acknowledged a key “mistake” in checking on whether Beauchamp lied or exaggerated in writing that U.S. soldiers had made fun of a disfigured woman, run over dogs for sport and played with an Iraqi child’s skeletal remains. Foer said Beauchamp’s wife, Elspeth Reeve, then a researcher at the magazine, was assigned “a large role” in checking the story. While Reeve acted in good faith, he said, “there was a clear conflict of interest.”
Foer said he recognizes that some of the corroboration was coming from “Beauchamp’s buddies” and that the private “sounded defensive and evasive” in trying to explain why he initially placed the allegedly disfigured woman in Iraq rather than Kuwait.
-Chris Jones
