"Shock Troops", "Scott Thomas", and war reporting comtroversies

So TNR publishes a piece called "Shock Troops" by a "Scott Thomas", who writes about all the terrible things he and his buddies did over in Iraq. Another entry in the 'war is hell' genre, with a heavy dose of self-reflection on the implications for one's morality, sanity, etc. (Point #1: this is a great bit of soldier storytelling, whether fiction, semifiction, or nonfiction is hard to tell.)

Needless to say, the warbloggers are not pleased. They call it a made-up hack job whose purpose s to smear the troops. Now the "Thomas" has revealed himself as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, real soldier and aspiring writer, they find other ways to ignore reality. That's what they do best. (Point #2: the story is the latest exhibit of the right blogosphere's descent into cultural combat straight out of Weimar.)

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has the best piece I've read on the controversy surrounding the story. He connects it to a video he saw once of college students abusing baboons they were supposed to be experimenting on:

I saw not only cruelty to animals, but also a profound failure on the part of the professors who should have been there to prevent this sort of thing from happening. .... [A]nyone who puts a student in a morally dangerous situation like this has an obligation to try to see that they get out of it without moral injury. But no one did that for these students. They were left to find their way on their own. And that's just wrong.

(Point #3: the story itself, whether true or not, reflects the condition of the military as designed by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Lack of leadership at the top creates atrocities at the bottom.)

(Link to the original story itself will have to wait until TNR gets its shit sorted out with my subscription. Starting to hate their customer service as much as their increasing illiberalism.)