THE HOT JOINTS » The New Republic

TNR Editor: “Bush Never Lied To Us About Iraq”

Chris Jones — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:15:45 +0000

Just when I start losing hope that anyone in the liberal media will ever be honest again, the unexpected happens. The New Republic is one of the many liberal rags that this blog and others have been pretty hard on at times. However, one assistant editor in particular at TNR needs to be called out today for his exceptional honesty.

James Kirchick wrote an incredibly honest and accurate piece in today’s L.A. Times that must be causing him a significant amount of grief with his far-left colleagues. Kirchick details why the narrative that “Bush lied” is completely false.

Highlights:

In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate’s 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that “the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress.”

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

That’s only a small part and I encourage everyone to read the entire article. It’s about time someone on the left was honest about the whole “bush lied” nonsense. There’s no question we were wrong about Saddam having stockpiles of WMD, but nobody “lied.”

Thanks to Newsbusters for pointing out this story, it’s an important one.

-Chris Jones

Army Releases Documents From The Scott Beauchamp Affair

Chris Jones — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:20:39 +0000

From Confederate Yankee:

Documents released by the Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base Florida, in relation to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests files for documents relating to the military investigation into the Scott Thomas Beauchamp “Shock Troops” article in The New Republic magazine.

The following are the never-before published statements of soldiers interviewed in the course of the investigation. Names are redacted per federal privacy laws.

CLICK HERE TO READ DOCUMENTS

The documents basically confirm once again that Scott Beauchamp was and is full of sh*t. He tried to smear the Army with a string of outrageous falsehoods that the liberal media swallowed up as fast he could invent them.

The New Republic clung to his lies for as long as possible before issuing a half-hearted retraction all the while leaving the door open to the possibility that maybe his stories could be true.

Other guys in his unit were shocked when they read his blog and saw all the bullsh*t stories he concocted. When asked if PFC. Beauchamp was a reliable soldier, every single person interviewed said he was a terrible soldier who had in fact been AWOL on two occasions.

I can’t believe they’re keeping such a dishonorable scumbag in the U.S. Army. He’s a disgrace to his unit, the U.S. Military, and to his country.

I hope the other guys in his unit dragged his sorry ass out into the desert and gave him a savage beating.

-Chris Jones

New Republic Finally Admits Baghdad Diariest Is A Lier

Chris Jones — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:43:56 +0000

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

L.A. Times Carrying Water for Scott Beauchamp The Lier

Chris Jones — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:28:17 +0000

For some reason the media just can’t stop carrying water for The New Republic over Scott Beauchamp the lier. The left wing media continues to rally around TNR desperately clinging to the hope that Beauchamp’s lies will somehow become true.

The latest TNR apologist and Scott Beauchamp cheerleader is Tim Rutten who wrote a ridiculous piece for the L.A. Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies and distortions that Confederate Yankee was kind enough to list one at a time. Take a look.

-Chris Jones

The New Republic STILL refuses to retract Beauchamp Lies

Chris Jones — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:23:43 +0000

The New Republic is nothing but a joke. They literally have no credibility left to damage. Even in light of the documents we posted this week from Drudge proving Scott Beauchamp is a f*cking liar, TNR still refuses to admit the stories are bullshit.

It’s hard to believe this is really happening! Scott Beauchamp’s wife Ellie works at TNR and is desperate to keep her husband from being exposed as the lying piece of sh*t he is.

Anyone can read the transcripts and army documents we posted this week and clearly see Beauchamp is a lier, and he completely hung TNR out to dry.

Yet they STILL refuse to admit their “phony soldier” made the whole thing up.

-Chris Jones

New Republic’s Phony “Baghdad Diarist” Documents

Chris Jones — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:48:30 +0000

Yesterday, Drudge posted documents proving that The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” is a liar, and a “phony soldier.” We posted links to each of the documents, but for some reason the links went bad.

Here is a repost of Scott Beauchamp documents:

Document #1
Document #2
Document #3

-The Hot Joints Staff

New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” Confirmed a Fraud

Chris Jones — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:30:34 +0000

Looks like Matt Drudge has delivered the goods once again! It should be fun watching The New Republic try and deny this one. At this point TNR has about as much credibility as Dan Rather which is pretty much none.

This would be an appropriate time for Rush Limbaugh to use that “phony soldier” line again.

-Chris Jones

From the Drudge Report:

The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained internal documents from the investigation of THE NEW REPUBLIC'S "Baghdad Diarist", Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance from the Iraq War front.

The documents appear to expose that once the veracity of Beauchamp's diaries were called into question, and an Army investigation ensued, THE NEW REPUBLIC has failed to publicly account for publishing slanderous falsehoods about the U.S. military in a time of war.

Document 1: Beauchamp Refuses to Stand by Story (Beauchamp Transcript Part 1)

THE NEW REPUBLIC has been standing behind the stories from their Baghdad Diarist, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, since questions were first raised about their accuracy over the summer. On August 10, the editors at TNR accused the Army of "stonewalling" their investigation into the stories by preventing them from speaking with Beauchamp. The DRUDGE REPORT has since obtained the transcript of a September 7 call between TNR editor Frank Foer, TNR executive editor Peter Scoblic, and Private Beauchamp. During the call, Beauchamp declines to stand by his stories, telling his editors that "I just want it to end. I'm not going to talk to anyone about anything really." The editors respond that "we just can't, in good conscience, continue to defend the piece" without an explanation, but Beauchamp responds only that he "doesn't care what the public thinks." The editors then ask Beauchamp to cancel scheduled interviews with the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK.

Document 2: Beauchamp Admits to "Gross Exaggerations and Inaccurate Allegations" (Beauchamp Transcript Part 2)

The DRUDGE REPORT has also obtained a signed "Memorandum for Record" in which Beauchamp recants his stories and concedes the facts of the Army's investigation -- that his stories contained "gross exaggerations and inaccurate allegations of misconduct" by his fellow soldiers.

Document 3: Army Investigation: Tales "Completely Fabricated," Beauchamp Wanted to be Hemingway

The third document obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT is the Army's official report on the investigation into the allegations made by Private Beauchamp. The Army concluded that Beauchamp had "completely fabricated" the story of mocking a disfigured woman, that his description of a "Saddam-era dumping ground" was false, and that claims that he and his men had deliberately targeted dogs with their armored vehicles was "completely unfounded." Further the report stated "that Private Beauchamp desired to use his experiences to enhance his writing and provide legitimacy to his work possibly becoming the next Hemingway."

The report concludes that "Private Beauchamp takes small bits of truth and twists and exaggerates them into fictional accounts that he puts forth as the whole truth for public consumption."

Developing...

THE HOT JOINTS » The New Republic

TNR Editor: “Bush Never Lied To Us About Iraq”

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