TNR's Thomas Beauchamp's stories found false

Confederate Yankee has been in contact with Col. Steven Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus. As to the "fabulist" stories recounted by Private (PV-2) Scott Thomas Beauchamp Colonel Boylan writes, an investigation of the allegations were conducted by the command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

Notice the claims were not merely uncorraborated but "found to be false". Scott Beauchamp was found to be a liar after a formal military investigation into his stories and this finding did not even take more than a week!

Chris Muir has the perfect storyline for The New Republic's urban myth here.

As to what will become of Beauchamp the Colonel writes, as there is no evidence of criminal conduct, he is subject to Administrative punishment as determined by his chain of command.

So we have a disgraced "diarist" who has been shown to have written fables for gullible leftists wanting to believe that the members of our armed services are a bunch of knuckle-dragging sociopaths followed by a self-satisfied, soon-to-be-disgraced editor clinging to the futile hope that those fables will become true.

Franklin Foer told ABC News, "We showed the stories to people who'd been embedded in Iraq to make sure that it all smelled good. We talked to one of the members of his unit to confirm the woman, a female contractor. We talked to a medic who'd served in Iraq to make sure that a woman could be in an FOB. We spent a lot of time with him on the phone asking hard questions."

So Foer spent a lot of time on the phone talking to an equally anonymous source as his original author "asking hard questions" to try and shore up his faulty story and this is suppossed to pass for fact checking. Beauchamp now claims the the story he wrote about the disfigured woman who was mocked by servicemen while in the "chow hall" occured not outside of Baghdad but at Camp Buehring in Kuwait. (Yeah, that's the ticket!) First we are suppossed to believe that this outrage occured just outside of Baghdad then the location of the story is changed and we're asked to believe that too and still believe Beauchamp and Foer.

Hugh Hewitt reprints a letter written to Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard who has been following this story closely.

I have been at Camp Buehring for 9 months, and it is the only "staging" and training area for troops going north. I would like to think I am well-tuned to the activity here on camp, but I would be deluding myself if I said I knew everything going on here at Buehring. If Scott Beauchamp came through Kuwait, he came through Buehring, period.

If he saw a burned woman here, then I would like to know where she is, because I haven't seen her in the whole 9 months. That's not to say she doesn't exist - she could - but I haven't seen her, at least not here. Maybe she was visiting from another camp. The chances of him getting off Buehring to go to another camp are very slim, just because of the OPSEC measures and restrictions on travel. Again, not to say it is impossible, just very unlikely.

This story is a non-starter that only Franklin Foer and a small klatch of leftists will cling to with the same fervency as Dan Rather does to this day with his Texas Air National Guard "scoop".