Misleading Headline Of The Day

“Army Say Soldier’s Articles for Magazine Were False” reads the headline for this New York Times story. This is the same army that, we have now found, lied to us about Abu Ghraib and Pat Tillman and about a lot of other things related to the events of the past four and a half years. This is also the same New York Times that employed pro-Iraq-War and PNAC shill Judith Miller and still employs Jeff Gerth.

And when you actually read the article, you find that what the Army says and what its own troops say are two very different things:

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

The brief statement, however, left many questions unanswered. Just last week The New Republic published on its Web site the results of its own investigation, stating that five members of the same company as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who had written the anonymous pieces, “all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one soldier, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)”

Meanwhile, the righty bloggers are wetting themselves over the latest emanation from Matthew Goldfarb at Rupert Murdoch’s bastion for the PNAC Platoon, the Weekly Standard. When last I checked, Goldfarb was claiming, using bogus testimony from a grifter, male prostitute, gay porn star and right-wing mascot named Matt Sanchez, that Beauchamp never existed. Now, as the NYT story notes, Goldfarb is claiming that Beauchamp signed a statement recanting what he wrote — except that there’s no evidence that he actually did so, other than the word of the not-at-all-reliable Matthew Goldfarb — who may just be once again typing out the dictation of his favorite gay porn star. (And of course the Army now has conveniently curtailed Beauchamp’s phone and internet privileges, so he can’t now state his side of the story unless he resorts to carrier pigeon.)

The righty bloggers will go to any lengths to justfiy trying to destroy Beauchamp rather than admit they are wrong, just as they gleefully worked to endanger the life of Jamil Hussein, another person who said things that contradicted their pretty view of Iraq.