If it's anything, the Drudge Report is a good place to find developing stories around the Internet that otherwise wouldn't have made it buried beneath the classifieds in the traditional print media. If you can ignore the gossip and character smears that Drudge pushes from back-page tabloids to the front pages of major outlets, such as with the case of John Edwards haircut and The Politico, and read between the lines, you will occasionally find something worth talking about.
Today, amongst the various headlines and about halfway down the page, there was a link with the title, "NOT AGAIN! Doubts raised on NEW REPUBLIC'S 'Baghdad Diarist'..."
Intrigued, I dutifully followed the link to a short New York Times article written by Linda Story, which, in that particular piece of award-worthy investigative journalism, was a scant 380 word rehashing of accusations made by The Weekly Standard - a neo-conservative magazine that was founded in 1995, whose current owner happens to be News Corp.
That it is owned by a corporation controlled by Rupert Murdoch doesn't mean that these allegations are automatically false - or true for that matter - only that a more keen eye than normal may be called for when trying to get to the bottom of whats going on. Given that what we have here is one upstart conservative magazine attacking its long established liberal competitor, it could very well turn out to be nothing more a spat between rivals. Often, and I think this is the case today, the storm that forms around the controversy is more interesting and insidious than that which spawned it.
The New Republic has been in print since the early 1900s, and like any magazine or paper that has been around for nearly a century, it has had its problems with fabrication and ethics violations amongst management before. A former associate editor for named Stephen Glass had been outed for fabricating many, if not all, of his feature stories for the publication in 1998. Other writers have been fired for plagiarism and unethical conduct over the years, though such happenings is, as I said, hardly any different than that which has occurred the New York Times and other outlets.
The current controversy stems from diaries written by "Scott Thomas", a pseudonym used by a man who claims to be an American solider currently serving in Iraq. The United States Army issued updated regulations earlier this year that prohibited active-duty soldiers from writing personal blogs without prior permission from their superiors. The blanket ban also appeared to cover civilian contractors as well as soldiers families, and would appear on its face to be prior restraint - an unconstitutional form of censorship, even in the military when it is this broad.
While the courts have routinely recognized that the military has greater latitude in deciding when and what soldiers can say, such a broad ban as this one seems like a bold attempt to explore new boundaries that would essentially prohibit anyone serving in the military or related in some way to the military from speaking out about anything at all. Since the military has made no arguments that such a clampdown was necessary due to previous security problems, it seems to be not much more than a lock down on whistle blowing, and precisely the kind of information leakage that has obviously upset many people this past week.
Thomas, in regards to these rules as well as out of fear for retribution from his superiors for providing unflattering accounts of the war in Iraq under their command, has written three articles for The New Republic since January of this year without identifying himself. The most recent, entitled "Shock Troops", has the soldier recount experiences from his time in Iraq which include being despicably cruel to a disfigured female solider, and later, listening to his friends laugh about purposefully running over dogs in the streets with their armored vehicles.
When a friend of Thomas made a scene one afternoon, declaring his inability to eat while sitting near "that fucking freak", instead of defending his fellow wounded patriot, Thomas instead joined in on the "fun." "Yeah man, I love chicks that have been intimate -- with IED's" he wrote, "It really turns me on--melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses..." He suggested a calendar full of pictures of disfigured female soldiers posing with their destroyed vehicles, bringing laughter from his friends until the unidentified female "slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground."
Thomas continues his diary by claiming that in the same instant that he was laughing and verbally torturing a fellow service member who gave more for her country physically - in a way that won't heal and can never be forgotten - than he ever has, he also felt ashamed of his actions and tempts readers with sympathetic anecdotes of helping disabled children in college, as if that somehow made up for what he'd done.
The stories of working at a summer camp as a youth, along with the story in the mess area, have been been challenged at the Weekly Standard, along with other soldiers allegedly serving at the base where Thomas claims to be stationed, as fabrications and outright lies.
It doesn't seem possible to judge the validity of these diaries based on examinations of the writings alone. For those like myself who have never served, tales such as this seem far fetched to say the least. It's easy to take offense at the notion that people in our military could act this way, shattering the perception that our soldiers, unlike those of every other nation, are good natured people who kill if they must, die if necessary, but fight with dignity and live honorably through their actions.
Always the Good Guys, doing The Right Thing. Everything is justified, in the name of The Cause.
Invariably, there are two narratives that come from war: those of honorable intentions gone wrong, and those of vicious cruelty and despair. It is perhaps the nature of war that once you've condoned the killing of other people as a means to an end rather than a mortal necessity for life itself, that all the evils that live on the other side of that line come out to play.
Unless you were there, you can't ever know for sure which story is true. In all likelihood, they both are to some degree or another.
While this begun in The New Republic with the three diaries by Thomas, the first real challenge came via the Weekly Standard on July 18th, with a call to ring-wing conservative blog readers to somehow falsify the stories as told by Thomas. The latter of two initial examples of incidents recounted by Thomas, neither of which I've described above, had to do with "dogs feast(ing) on a corpse in the street."
To give some idea of just how gruesome the war in Iraq is and how even basic research can prove or disprove certain things happening, there have been previous unchallenged reports of insurgents using the bodies of dead dogs as cover for IEDs. In a video special called "War Zone Diary", journalist Richard Engel reported having personally seen starving dogs feasting on dead bodies in the streets. Engel bribed his way from Kuwait into Iraq on the eave of the war, capturing video interviews with Iraqi's and later insurgents without the constraints faced by embedded the media.
We know almost certainly that such things do happen in Iraq, thanks to people like Engel who have risked their lives by reporting from Iraq without protection from the military, going where the story goes rather than where the military takes them, which means that the recounting by Thomas of dogs savaging dead bodies is factually correct. It does not mean such things were actually witnessed by Thomas himself, however, only that because there is ancillary evidence, it cannot be reasonably claimed that such a story is fictional in its entirety simply based on Thomas' identity being unknown.
Weekly Standard, in quoting the story about the wounded female soldier as I did, had this to say about the incident: "But consider: these are enlisted men who, by the author's own account, don't know who this woman is or what rank she might hold."
Is it a nitpick, or a nugget of inconsistency that warrants further digging? I counter by asking you to consider that Thomas never said his friends didn't know the identity of the woman in his story. The Standard extended Thomas' ignorance to the entire table, and then used the entire tables ignorance as evidence of logical inconsistency.
Given the sheer number of people working in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and lord knows how many private contractors, it doesn't seem unreasonable that people eating together at a base might not be familiar with everyone around them. It is, at best, extremely weak evidence as far as logical inconsistencies go. It raises more questions, but answerers none.
There seems little point in arguing point-for-point every accusation made by the Standard. Most of them are nothing but conjecture without evidence of any kind to support the possibility - or lack thereof - of such events taking place in one of America's longest running wars in history.
I will take a moment to argue against this one single point though, simply because something I've seen with my own eyes cast doubt over the assumptions made by the Standard. Says the mag, "One simple fact renders this tale highly implausible. Such erratic driving is likely to greatly increase a vehicle's exposure to roadside bombs, which insurgents frequently hide in the corpses of animals, or beside trash-strewn curbs."
This referring to the claim by Thomas that "I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs."
A video made the rounds on the blogs and YouTube a while back that showed footage recorded from inside what appeared to be either a Humvee, or a large truck of some kind, attempting to navigate through heavy traffic in Iraq in a convoy of some sort. The vehicle never came to a complete stop once during the entire video, and in many instances, didn't even slow down for traffic directly in front of it.
The truck slammed into the back of civilian vehicles, one after another, ramming them to the side of the road and into other cars, and possibly innocent pedestrians and buildings. It seems likely that if this is the standard practice for military travel through traffic, that a number of civilians have been killed by such reckless actions in the past. The vehicles at one point when faced with the rear of a bus which they couldn't possibly ram out of the way, pushed over a low cement medium and proceeded towards their destination in the oncoming traffic lane.
According to those familiar with such situations, such driving tactics are necessary to minimize the damage done by IEDs and ambush attacks which will often take place when military vehicles get stuck in traffic. Required or not, it isn't hard to understand how quick Iraqi citizens become resentful of the continuing occupation when such things happen on a daily basis.
It is then not difficult to believe that these aggressive driving tactics have become a game to some in the warzone. The military is a vast collection of people, and a number of misfits are bound to turn up in places where their warped sense of decency allows already reprehensible actions to escalate into greater levels of depravity.
I again quote for you the accusation made by the Weekly Standard, that "..such erratic driving is likely to greatly increase a vehicle's exposure to roadside bombs, which insurgents frequently hide in the corpses of animals, or beside trash-strewn curbs."
Video from Iraq has proven exactly the opposite, that driving tactics such as these are in fact common practice designed to avoid IEDs, and when done by malcontents the likes of which we've already seen at Abu Ghraib, can most certainly get worse than it already is.
The Weekly Standard choose - based on scant evidence that is anything but solid logically - to discount Thomas' stories as false, and then challenge the right-wing blogs to scour the earth for evidence that would prove their thus-far unfounded assertions.
A number of former service veterans of former wars came forward to contest claims that a vehicle called a Bradley could be used to accurately target and run over dogs in the street. Though some of their arguments seem persuasive on face, the Standard repeats them without requiring any proof from their readers that they too are in fact current service members or bona fide veterans, apparently showing no interest in proving the veracity of the people they use to provide "evidence", while demanding that and more from Thomas for his stories.
The double standard is as striking as it is blatant.
As is the case with the Standard's methods of logic, these readers left a lot to be desired. Claims that these actions would have been quickly put to an end by superiors who weren't as off kilter was Thomas' friends would appear to be, seem less convincing when you again look to past atrocities such as Abu Ghraib. We know from history that wars provide an environment ripe for the kind of judgment degradation necessary for these acts of cruelty, and it is unreasonable to expect that officers would be any more immune to these failings than enlisted personnel would be. With many soldiers now on their fourth consecutive tour in Iraq, the potential for these things happening increases every single day.
A number of readers simply attribute the story to left-wing pansies that want to paint the soldiers as butchers in order to curry public favor for their agenda to end the war, never bothering to refute the possibility that such things did actually happen - choosing instead to simply attack those who (allegedly) are exposing these acts in the first place.
The Standard, while in the same breath criticizing The New Republic for giving anonymity to Thomas, gives anonymity to a person who wrote in to the magazine claiming also to be a service member at FOB Falcon that contradicts claims by written in the Thomas diaries.
"One active duty soldier who asks that his name be withheld writes in: I was based at Falcon last year for six months with the 101st Airborne. I never saw a woman who fits Thomas's description."
No evidence is provided whatsoever that this anonymous person, like Thomas, has ever been in the military or served at Falcon. Perhaps he or she has, and perhaps not. Certainly when the Standard builds most of its critical case against Thomas based on the simple fact that they don't know his identity, to then go and report as true the writings of other anonymous people is deeply unethical and hypocritical, to speak nothing of the fact that there exists a potentially year-long gap at which this person served at Falcon, and when Thomas was there along with the unidentified female.
Later, in an updated post on the story, a reader's lone evidence is presented that a claim by Thomas about the physical characteristics of a shell casing is a lie, just because his Google search came up blank.
Another comment is sent in, where a reader says that he knows "for sure that the round fired by the Glock 17 (their standard 9mm service pistol) fires the same round as the 9mm Beretta, the M9 (known in the civilian world as the 92... I know quite a bit about guns, and I have NEVER heard of a 9mm round with a 'square back'."
The reader is not identified, the entire message is not posted, and no evidence is given towards this persons expertise - or lack thereof - in firearms and ammunition. The original post which featured the email later admitted that "Several readers suggest that the 'square back' line may be an oddly-phrased reference to a distinctive imprint left by the Glock's firing pin." Such an admission was never posted on the Weekly Standard website, after this email was cited as proof of Thomas lying.
After bombardment from the Weekly Standard and other conservative blogs, New Republic editor Frank Foer responded to criticism by saying that he is absolutely certain that Thomas is in fact a soldier serving in Iraq. Foer claims to have "..spoken extensively with the author of the piece and have communicated with other soldiers who witnessed the events described in the diarist" and goes on to say that none of those conversations have cast doubt on the diaries written by Thomas.
This incident is disturbingly similar what happened last year, when the Associated Press published a story based on accusations from an Iraqi policeman named Jamil Hussein. Hussein claimed that six Sunnis were burned alive while Iraqi police and military stood by doing nothing to stop it. The United States military and Iraqi police both claimed that Hussein didn't exist at all, and chastised the AP for posting a false sensation story, even going so far as to demand an apology.
The right-wing blogosphere accepted the word of the military and Iraqi police blindly, and ran with it, at one point celebrating how they finally nailed the biased and corrupt Associated Press, happily comparing it to the 60 Minutes Bush service record scandal.
Unfortunately for conservatives who had made this a banner for attacking the press that dare present negative reports of reality on the ground in the middle of a civil war, it turns out that both the U.S. military and Iraqi police had lied, and they bought it hook, line, and sinker.
From an AP report filed in January of this year: "The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media."
Is this another case of war supporting blogs and magazines desperately attacking any war critic, no matter how weak the case is, no matter how likely they will turn out to be wrong yet again, interested more in the sensation than the truth?
Perhaps, but it's difficult to say. That is the real problem with anonymous sources, isn't it? The only real credibility a person has in the world is their reputation. Without a reputation, and without evidence, it's impossible to say either way, and anything less is simply anecdotal or circumstantial.
It seems rational that a group, after so vigorously pursing a similar cause only to fall victim to their own blind need for it to be true, would be more cautious in the future to avoid repeating those same mistakes all over again. Not so, as conservative columnist William Kristoff has taken the opportunity to vent on liberals in general for this gave injustice.
Kristoff points to the unsubstantiated, and sometimes equally anonymous, comments from readers of the Weekly Standard as literal proof that some claims regarding the Bradley maneuvers are physically impossible. Ignore for the moment that all you have right now are two anonymous and unreliable parties making equally unprovable arguments about a piece of military hardware that none of the involved pundits - this writer included - have the first clue about, or are qualified to make judgments regarding.
The fact that both Kristoff and the Standard begin their criticism against Thomas on his being anonymous while granting the same anonymity to their own ilk for the sake of refuting what amounts to unprovable claims is beyond childish.
With emails in hand from like minded readers, Kristoff declares that the left - now indicting an entire political spectrum, half the country at home, and by the math, half the military force serving in Iraq today - doesn't support the troops by believing the diaries of Thomas. In Kristoff's world, and indeed in the world of the neo-con, the mere possibility of such atrocities being real is so offensive to them that simply speaking of it is sacrilege, and believing it makes you traitor. In his world, these things never happen. Not by us, no, we're the good guys, and good guys don't do these things.
How quickly those like Kristoff and the Weekly Standard forget the abuses of Abu Ghraib and the shame it brought America and her armed forces. How sad it is that we are reminded on a weekly basis that even in our storied all-volunteer military, not every person is a good guy. How much more pathetic then, that some people use such revelations as opportunities to attack their political opponents not on their differing views, but by smearing them with accusations of being unpatriotic, of hating American, of sympathizing with the enemy, and of not supporting our brethren who sacrifice themselves for our benefit, simply because liberals refuse to dismiss the possibility out of hand that there are people amongst us capable of great evil, and some of them happen to be serving in Iraq right now.
I don't know what is the truth and what is fiction when it comes to the Thomas diaries, but I do believe that Kristoff and the Weekly Standard have seized upon it as an ideological weapon of politics to attack those that disagree with them, without lending any thought or interest to the possibility that the stories told by Scott Thomas, frightening as they may be, may in fact be true.
Skepticism is perhaps one of humanities most valuable tools, and so it is sad that some in this world choose to use it to escape reason and logic instead of using it to find the truth. They seek to debunk that which they do not like, or cannot believe, instead of using it to understand.
The truth is out there, but it won't be found by those afraid that it won't fit with their neat and clean preconceptions of how a war should be fought. No blood, no suffering, fun and clean and quick to the end.
Who will find it, and when will it all end?