Claims of Baghdad Diarist Confirmed

Over the past eight months, an anonymous author has been writing diaries for The New Republic purportedly based on his personal experiences as a solider serving in Iraq. Nicknamed the 'Baghdad Diarist' by my anonymous editor at Associated Content and Matt Drudge, that solider revealed his own identity in a public statement published by TNR after conservative magazine The Weekly Standard accused him of not being a soldier in the American armed forces and of fabrication.

William Kristol wrote an editorial for Weekly Standard where he is an editor, entitled "They Don't Really Support the Troops", briefly mentioning the then growing scandal over the identity and veracity of the Baghdad Diarist. In his article, Kristol accused liberals and Democrats of turning against the troops serving in Iraq for supporting what he believed to be false, defamatory, and in many instances shocking claims - all without a single shred of evidence that the diarist was lying.

Weekly Standard reprinted many comments from veterans - many of them also anonymous - supposedly debunking every radical claim printed by The New Republic. A great many of them were ripe with flaws of their own and even under the best of circumstances, they only amounted to unsubstantiated speculation.

Once the diarist revealed himself as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a Private stationed at Forward Operating Base Falcon, criticism immediately turned from "he's not a real solider" to "he's lying because all that stuff is impossible". Prominent conservative pundits such as Michele Malkin had a field day with the controversy, insisting still that nothing Beauchamp said could possibly be true, either because other veterans said so, or because they were so terrible that believing an American solider would be capable of such cruelty was to accept that American armed forces were not the perfect angles we all wish they could be.

As was the case with Kristol and Malkin, they would take that logic and twist it until to them, it meant that anyone who would listen to Beauchamp's claims "Don't Really Support the Troops."

U.S. Army soldiers in Baghdad.

Credit: U.S. Government

Copyright: U.S. Government