I’m going to explain the title to this post because most people ‘just don’t get it’. That is what a NYT typist said regarding the Killian memos (remember when the leftists were all nuts about Bush’s military service?) and Dan Rather’s sticking to the story while his career was going down in flames…the Killian memos might have been fake, but the story was accurate! yeah, right. Now this isn’t about the New York Times, this is about The New Republic. But I’ve long noticed this trend of ‘fake but accurate’ in the media…particularly the leftist media that carries water for terrorists and murderers.

Fact or Fiction? A Mission for MilBloggers - Michael Goldfarb - Weekly Standard

First, read Goldfarb’s excerpts of the New Republic’s stories, the call to action, and finally, note the email address you can use to send your comments to.

If you’re already aware of the story of the soldier wearing a child’s rotting skull with hair still attached (discovered in a mass grave nobody ever heard of) as a cap UNDER his cover, chasing a dog in a Bradley (a very loud slow-moving tank) when the dog is on the right and can run and easily outmaneuver it, there is no visibility on the right hand side because of the engine compartment and cooling system on the right hand side, not to mention a driver wouldn’t see anything on the right hand side even if he was hanging out of the hatch, the story of people in the ‘chow hall’ making fun of a disfigured woman who’d been hurt from an IED, and so on, then you can understand why the blogosphere is all in a tizzy about the series of essays at the New Republic written by the pseudononymous “Scott Thomas”. There is something that is not quite right about the stories he’s telling, and here are some of the milbloggers and bloggers who are familiar with military culture and jargon who can explain why it is that this stinks out loud.

Who is TNR’s mysterious author ‘Scott Thomas’? - Ray Robison, American Thinker

Robison pieces together the reasons why he thinks it’s a guy the anti-war left is using to pimp their message: Clifton Hicks, who now has ‘conscientious objector’ status after having been released from the service, in part, for unprofessional conduct. He compares the writing styles of Scott Thomas and Hicks, and also about journalists who’ve written about Hicks. It isn’t a stretch to think that he might have combined a couple of journalists names as a cynical private joke in order to come up with the nom de plume “Scott Thomas”. Stranger things have happened.

“Scott Thomas:” The new Winter Soldier? - Michelle Malkin

Let me make one thing clear at the outset: To question the veracity of a soldier’s accounts of war atrocities in Iraq is not to question that such atrocities ever happen. They do. But when such accusations are made pseudonymously, punctuated with red flags and adorned with incredible embellishment, the only responsible thing to do is to raise questions about his identity and agenda without fear or apology–and demand answers.

I Love the Smell of Bovine Excreta in the Morning - Sgt. Mom - The Daily Brief

• But… severely burned and maimed woman survivor of an IED explosion being driven out of the dining facility by crude mockery? (And no one remembers this woman, or the incident, or stepped in to stop it?)
• A soldier wearing a decaying child’s skull on top of his head… presumably under his cover or Kevlar for a considerable period? Taken from a mass grave that no one else ever heard about?
• And a Bradley driver making a sport of running down dogs. Wary, fast-running street dogs. With a very noisy, slow-moving tracked vehicle, which affords limited driver vision and not much maneuverability. In an environment were anything off the side of the road might be a hidden IED. Yep, sure… pull the other leg, sport, that one has bells on it.

Scott Thomas: Fact or Fiction? - OpFor

The skull-hat tale raised some mental red flags on my end, simply because of the Thomas’ timeline. The thought of a soldier (a) so grossly and openly violating the UCMJ and (b) wearing human remains for the better part of the day without an NCO or an officer spotting him is absolutely unbelievable.

1) Recent examples of warzone whistleblowing have turned out to be false (Jimmy Massey, Jesse MacBeth, Daniel Coburn) and driven by an agenda.
2) The dispatches fit a narrative.
3) The New Republic has a proven, historical susceptibility to fake journalism.

Bon Appétit, TNR - Dymphna - The Gates of Vienna

The dust-up concerns a series of essays The New Republic has published by a supposed soldier in Iraq who describes anecdotes about his fellow soldiers that are (a) horrific and disgusting, and (b) inaccurate in their details. Of course, (b) simply means another “fake-but-accurate” strand in the MSM tapestry of careless lies and half-truths woven to serve their purposes. With the MSM, f-b-a is a standard sufficient to allow them to print what the rest of us consider slanderous, but which gives them license to put their agenda into the public sphere for consumption by the willing or the unwary.

Michael Yon: The TNR troop story “sounds like complete garbage” - AllahPundit-HotAir

Busted!… New Republic’s “Shock Troops” Shocker Is BOGUS! - Gateway Pundit

Lt. Steven Glass Now Writing For The New Republic From Iraq? -Ace

Ace compares some of what was written to Kerry’s Winter Soldier testimony, and gives two great Steve Glass comparisons, one, here:

How did Glass get away with filing dozens of obviously fraudulent report, and getting them all published?

It’s dangerous to put fake words into the mouths of real people. It’s less dangerous to put fake words into the mouths of fake people, who work for fake organizations, discover fake mass graves, etc., because who is there exactly to write in a letter of complaint saying “I never said that”?

Several at The Tank:

RE: RE: ‘Shock Troops’ at TNR [W. Thomas Smith Jr.]

Battle Buddies Mudville Gazette

How far into The New Republic’s fabricated war story did I have to get to recognize it was a fabricated story? Answer: Not very far. Here’s the first line:

“What time does the Chow Hall close?” The First Sergeant repeated. The soldier began to appear confused, and was unable to respond. Something clicked in my head. “He doesn’t know what a chow hall is” I said. The term is outdated, appearing now only in old war movies on TV, but Top and I are old school. “What time does the DFAC close?” Asked the First Sergeant.

Michael Yon weighs in at the Weekly Standard

That story about American soldiers at FOB Falcon sounds like complete garbage. I spent time with them this year, and in fact keep them on the front page of my site. 1-4 CAV is an excellent unit. I emailed the commander, LTC James Crider, about the story.

Please put that horrible reporting into context of something accurate. I humbly submit this: Desires of the Human Heart, Part One

The New Republic Is A Joke - TF Boggs- Vox Veterana

For starters I believe the entire New Republic story to be a fake, no soldier would ever be able to get away with the things that the author says he did. Not even taking into consideration that most of what he said is basically impossible i.e. running over dogs in a Bradley (a Bradley cannot maneuver quick enough to run over a moving dog), a soldier wearing a human skull on his head (how exactly does a human skull fit like a hat?), and making fun of a woman scarred by an IED (a soldier who said something like that would get his ass kicked by anyone in the vicinity, including me).

Fiction At the New Republic? -Dad Manly:

Sounds to me their phony veteran might be pulling stories from movies or what he’s read. (Or from anti-war websites.)

For those who claim that the New Republic shouldn’t have to validate or confirm these claims, I’d say that the overwhelming preponderance of phonies, poseurs and charlatans among the anti-war crowd, and how regularly they are duped by phonies, should make them even more cautious. You know, if they were really interested in reporting facts, rather than furthering agendas. And oh, probably they might want to hire a military adviser who knows something more about the military than it’s filled with ignorant loser yahoos, guns are bad, and bombs go boom.

Update 8/7/07: Beauchamp recanted.