Say Anything Blog

Here’s the biggest reason why, according to them:

In the first, Beauchamp recounted how he and a fellow soldier mocked a disfigured woman seated near them in a dining hall. Three soldiers with whom TNR has spoken have said they repeatedly saw the same facially disfigured woman. One was the soldier specifically mentioned in the Diarist. He told us: “We were really poking fun at her; it was just me and Scott, the day that I made that comment. We were pretty loud. She was sitting at the table behind me. We were at the end of the table. I believe that there were a few people a few feet to the right.”

The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp’s on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit’s arrival in Iraq. When presented with this important discrepancy, Beauchamp acknowledged his error. We sincerely regret this mistake.

Ace notes:

Error? Mistake? He was off by an entire country and something like nine months?

This is what TNR terms an “error,” a “mistake”? And when they “fact-checked” this beforehand, how did their “rigorous editing and fact-checking” miss the fact this took place in another country, before actual deployment?

I’m reminded of Steven Wright’s joke: “The other day I was… oh wait, that was someone else.”

Could happen to anyone, really. Common mistake.

It’s a huge mistake, and on a fact that’s actually pretty important for the context of Beauchamp’s *ahem* “reporting.”  Stephen Spruiell points out why:

That’s a rather significant detail to flub, given that the author’s intent was to illustrate the morally deadening effects of war.

Quite right.  Beauchamp’s insinuation was that the war in Iraq was turning our troops into…well…the sort of people who would mock a disfigured woman.  Except that now we learn that this happened in Kuwait, before these soldiers were even deployed to the actual war zone.

So what, then, is Beauchamp’s point?  That he and one or two of his fellow soldiers are the sort of assholes who would make fun of a disfigured woman?  Something that has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Iraq?  Not exactly enlightening journalism.

The article linked above has a number of other items the folks at TNR are claiming as “vindications,” but they’re trying to skirt the most damning elements of this controversy: None of these stories were thoroughly fact-checked until well after they’d been published, and now that we are getting the entire context of them we’re learning things that cast them in a much different light.

That’s not exactly a feather in TNR’s hat.