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):
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.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!
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.
4 comments:
TNR didn't just retract the stories based on the "technicality" of STB's wife's role as fact-checker. Here's what the editor wrote:
"When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories."
As for your main point, that "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," I think you are overlooking the Army's legitimate interests in the matter. It has already been conceded by TNR that STB may have presented false or at least exaggerated accounts of the events he claims to have witnessed. These had the effect of portraying American soldiers in a negative light. Moreover, even to the extent STB's stories were true, they weren't (so far as we know) representative of the actions or feelings of the soldiers serving in Iraq. The Army has a legitimate interest in not having its soldiers being falsely portrayed in the media as being cruel and sinister. It also has a legitimate interest in making sure that a soldier's attempt to moonlight as a war correspondent doesn't undermine morale or otherwise conflict with his duties. Given these facts, it doesn't strike me that the Army is lurching into the "political" realm by reacting as it did to the Beauchamp affair. It is simply protecting its legitimate institutional interests.
Your charge that the Army has conspired to personally and publicly "ruin" STB is silly. The ONLY thing preventing STB from emerging from this whole episode smelling like a rose is TNR's declaration that he quite possibly included falsehoods and exaggerations in his supposedly true-life accounts of his experiences in Iraq.
Regarding your consternation over the Army's selective leaking of documents to "right-wing" bloggers, I would agree in principle that the Army should be officially neutral in ideological debates. However, it's not at all clear the Army violated this principle in regard to the STB affair. First, the matter in dispute in the STB affair was not a question of ideology, but rather a question of the conduct of Army troops. As discussed above, the Army had legitimate interests in addressing STB's accounts of troop conduct separate and apart from the "political" issue of whether U.S. troops should be in Iraq.
Second, is there any evidence to support the dire, conspiratorial characterization of these leaks, or is it simply an article of left-wing faith that the Army is quietly seeking to assume an active role in the political process by forming alliances with members of the right-wing blogosphere? Isn't it possible -- indeed, likely -- that the leaks were the product of an individual, acting on his own authority, rather than the upper brass attempting to undermine the very notion of civilian control of the military?
If there's a scandal here, it's a journalism scandal, not a military scandal. TNR took a chance on a young and inexperienced solder-journalist who was in over his head. It blew up in their faces. Predictably, the kid suffered as well. TNR's critics were largely vindicated. Attempts to find larger meaning to this episode appear to be based on wishful thinking among those who wanted the story to come out the other way.
Interesting - someone found this post. I wonder how. Thanks for the thoughts, bd. Just to make it clear, this is a private blog (oxymoron?) to help me keep track of links for use as future course assignments. Any thoughts accompanying the links are half-formed at best, and they do not address all aspects of an argument as they would if inteded to be read by anyone else but me.
In this case, a classroom discussion of the STB affair will take place after about 11 weeks of studying other occupations in their historical contexts. By the time we get to Iraq, students will be well aware of an military's legitimate interest in fact-checking and generally controlling all stories out of the occupation zone. I also have some checking still to do on what exactly the code of military justice says about soldier journalism of this type; it makes a difference to the case what if any regulations he violated.
Part of what makes this affair so interesting grist for an assignment is the fact that pretty much everyone is in the wrong: STB for exaggerating his facts for comedic effect, TNR for not realizing he was doing so, the right-bloggers for yet again gleefully denying all misconduct simply because one case did not stand up under scrutiny, and the Army for inappropriately mixing itself in civilian politics.
As you've obviously picked up on, bd, it's the last item on the list that bothers me the most. In the big picture, STB's individual case is meaningless. But the Army's handling of the matter must be placed in context with the administration's treatment of Abu Ghraib, Jamil Hussein, Pat Tillman, the fall of the Saddam statue, the so-called Petreus Report, and the mad ravings of Petreus' spokesman linked in this post. The Army at this point understands that to win a counterinsurgency requires the support of the locals and of civilians at home. So yes, it is defending its institutional interest. But it ill serves democracy's interest for the military to treat the American public as targets of propaganda. When the Army takes responsibility for shaping domestic political will in support of a lengthy occupation, increasing numbers of Americans become the enemy.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I happened upon this blog through the magic of a Google blog alert. It's supposed to notify me via email whenever someone blogs about "bilal hussein." For whatever reason, however, it doesn't seem to screen the entire universe of blogs. Most of the hits are from rather obscure sites.
If you'll indulge me one more comment on the Beauchamp controversy, while it's understandable that opponents of the war would want the military to behave in a completely neutral fashion with respect to the question of U.S. involvement in Iraq, is this not akin to wanting NASA to be neutral about the benefits of space exploration?
It seems to me the military always has an institutional bias in favor of "the mission" (whatever that happens to be), as well as considerable power to propagandize in support of the mission. The question is whether the military's efforts to shape public opinion in this instance constitute such an extreme overreaching on its part as to threaten the principle of civilian control. This I don't see. Whatever one thinks about such instances of military "propaganda," most Americans seem to want the U.S. to get out of Iraq. Thus, efforts to manipulate public opinion in favor of a prolonged occupation don't appear to be having much effect.
In short, I believe that while the military generally supports the mission, and has generally done whatever it could to portray its conduct of the war a success, this is all par for the course given the military's institutional interests. I would be surprised to learn that our military is any more aggressive in promoting a president's pro-war policies today than it was in previous eras. So while the individual controversies you mention may be worthy of study and debate for other reasons, I think it overstates the case to suggest that what the military has done with respect to propaganda constitutes a significant threat to democracy.
Best of luck with your course.
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