Friday, July 27, 2007

New Republic Outs Baghdad Diarist, Weekly Standard Unimpressed / Jossip

New Republic Outs Baghdad Diarist, Weekly Standard Unimpressed / Jossip:

"“Right now, we have no reason to believe that his stories are anything
other than what we first suspected them to be: a ‘pastiche of the ‘This is no
bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell.’” That’s The Weekly Standard’s
response to the self-outing of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, otherwise known as The
New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” whose Iraq war accounts have been, let’s say,
“questioned.” As the solider tells it: “My pieces were always intended to
provide my discrete view of the war; they were never intended as a reflection of
the entire U.S. Military. I wanted Americans to have one soldier’s view of
events in Iraq.”"


While the identity of the blogger has been revealed, the stories that he has written are still being attacked by the right. The stories I have heard about involved in this, do sound like they might be fiction, or perhaps they are based on true stories. For example one story is about a soldier who used a child's skull as a hat for a full day, perhaps it was a real incident where it was play with for a few moments, and the author expanded on the truth. On the other hand, there is a well known story of NATO troops that found a skull and used it as a toy, so it could have been the author localized that story.

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