A comparative occupations course would do well to consider the unique problems of occupation in a media age. Media policy and control have always been useful in war, but today in Iraq they present doubled difficulty. Each soldier can also be a reporter -- sometimes without knowing it, simply through their cameraphones. The Scott Thomas Beauchamp affair of 2007 is a natural case study for this problem. This is my effort at a comprehensive link collection to guide a student through the affair using the original documents.
The
initial TNR piece ("Shock Troops") was a war story out of occupied Iraq in which the pseudonymous narrator and other soldiers make mean-spirited comedy out of the tragedy surrounding them. A
roundup post at Obsidian Wings chronicles the outrage that ensued. (TNR links are tricky; I tried to get stable ones. If they fail over time, check the issues for July-August, October, December 2007.) The roundup is two weeks after publication, and Thomas has just revealed himself as a soldier... The right had at first denied his very existence, as they had with Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein.
In the middle phase, as Private Thomas' story is challenged in the media and by the Army, some left-academic blogs revealed a connection between this single incident and the larger context of the right's "
One Endless Rathergate". (Jon Swift provided a
comprehensive roundup of winger crybabiness).
To get a flavor of the venom slung during the exchanges, you have to go into the original red-side posts.
Glen later chronicled the National Review and respectable-right media's reactions (in the context of wondering why they were later excusing plagiarism in their own ranks.) Example:
They repeatedly posted one self-righteous attack on TNR after the next over what they insisted was TNR's reckless, even deliberate, deceit. They re-printed a vicious anti-TNR rant by Charles Krauthammer, first published in The Washington Post, in which Krauthammer accused TNR of publishing the Beauchamp stories only because "it fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar Left."
For the intelligent left,
some of the
comments on threads like these are just gold. It's an amazing new world when there is so much expertise on so many subjects available for exchange. One former military guy expresses what's been my take all along (without the real-world cred to back it up, but hey, I read a lot):
Having spent 22 years in the Army, I can say with some emphasis that there is almost nothing that most privates, and NOTHING that some privates, won't do, including incredibly stupid, hitting-self-in-head-with-hammer type of things. So the idea that this stuff didn't happen because "they wouldn't do it"? don't make me laugh.
And remember, you're talking about a bunch of 19-year-old guys with guns in a pretty much broken down Third World country. If your squad leader/PSG/1SG are weak, bored, stupid or distracted? Let the fun begin!
There's an epilogue to the affair in which the Army puts STB on lockdown, conducts a bunch of interviews and concludes that they cannot verify the stories -- on which they are pronounced an illegitimate leftist plot... by the supposedly left-leaning TNR.
TNR did their investigation, the story held up. Their
statement in the August 2 issue had a revealing last bit:
Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.
They followed this up with a "Scott Beauchamp Update" in October as this thing was still going on. It underscores the broader significance of the episode for the manipulation of the media by an unchecked executive fighting a counterinsurgency in a media age.
The New Republic is deeply frustrated by the Army’s behavior. TNR has endeavored with good faith to discover whether Beauchamp’s article contained inaccuracies and has repeatedly requested that the Army provide us with documentary evidence that it was fabricated or embellished. Instead of doing this, the Army leaked selective parts of the record—including a conversation that Beauchamp had with his lawyer—continuing a months-long pattern by which the Army has leaked information and misinformation to conservative bloggers while failing to help us with simple requests for documents.
Glen Greenwald wrote on the Army's selective leaking of documents to right-wing bloggers (while they at the same time withheld them from TNR's FOIA request), a move right out of the Bush administration playbook. Glen fears that the Army under Petraeus is getting as politicized as everything else under Bush's influence.
A few days later Glen received "a bizzare, unsolicited email" from Petraeus' spokesman. (He's posted the full text here.) But Glen noted that this was no refutation:
Col. Boylan does not deny the central point of my post, because he cannot: namely, throughout the Beauchamp matter, the U.S. Army has copied almost exactly the standard model used by the Republican Party's political arm in trying to manage news for domestic consumption: namely, they deny access to the relevant information only they possess while selectively leaking it to the most extremist and partisan elements of the right-wing noise machine: in this case, the Drudge Report, Weekly Standard, and right-wing blogs.
(Another aspect of the story is the military's cooperation with right-wing bloggers in the persecution of Jamil Hussein, who is still being held without charges 1.5 years after the Malkin flying monkey brigade first fingered him as a terrorist-sympathizing reporter. The same tactics are even more effective against foreign journalists trying to operate in occupied Iraq.)
Glen concluded:
I would think Col. Boylan would have more important matters to attend to than writing me emails about how Alan Colmes is the "real talent" and how I lack the balls to go visit him in Iraq -- beginning with finding out who has been working secretly with right-wing outlets in the Beauchamp and Bilal Hussein matters, if he does not already know. The linchpin of a republic under civilian rule -- as well as faith in the armed services by a cross-section of Americans -- is an apolitical military. Like all other branches of the government intended to be apolitical, this linchpin is eroding under this administration, and that ought to be of far greater concern to Boylan and Petraeus than hurling petty insults.
Later, hilarious denials from the Colonel that he sent the email. Snotty, dismissive tone that
stands in stark contrast to the extremely eager and cooperative conduct in which they engage when passing on information to the right-wing blogs and pundits whose political views are apparently aligned with theirs. That takes us back to the first and most important point -- the U.S. military, which has an obligation to conduct itself apolitically and professionally, appears in many cases to be doing exactly the opposite.
All that's in Glen's blog linked above. John Cole posted
here on the issue, highlighting the long-term danger to our democracy that this implies. Politics is being outsourced to veterans and officers who cannot be criticized, and a significant segment of the officer corps seems likely to go along with a brewing
Dolchstosslegende should we ever abandon the occupation.
TNR retracted the story on a technicality -- it turned out one of the fact-checkers for it was STB's wife. According to their final account of the investigation showed, under weeks of pressure from both TNR and the Army, small cracks began to appear in the story. (Such as the fact that Iraqi driving liscences have no organ donor status about which to joke. STB admitted he added the detail as a joke.) There are real issues here about journalistic standards, but none of them touched the major points of the piece. But journalistic misdemeanors like these were a way for TNR to avoid the felony charge of treasonous reporting, to which they now tacitly pled guilty.
In the end, Army collaborated with right-wing bloggers to ruin personally and publicly an American citizen whose words could be taken as harmful to the cause of the occupation. STB's act of free speech (leaving aside, for the moment, his technical loss of constitutionally protected speech while in uniform) did not even contain political content. No political party was named, no individual politician or officer called on the carpet. No policies criticized. It was a war story -- a banal one, even, to those who have read the literature of war since 1914. But the administration well knows the anti-war and anti-occupation political consequences of showing the true face of these beasts. And so this media generation's war stories must be carefully controlled not to criticize war and occupation, but to support it.
True believers of the Army line consigned Thomas himself to the category of lair and denied him any present or future in national conversation. They gained another reason to ignore unpleasant stories in the "liberal media" of which they believed TNR to be a part. And they demonstrated to soldiers on the ground that they could only speak if their words matched propaganda.
And this of course is the goal of the right-wing outrage machine: to silence real reports coming out of Iraq so that all we have to rely on is official truth. This allows them to control the message coming out of the occupation zone. They can then continue to justify the occupation by planting hopes of success and eliminating images of violence.
