Anonymous No More

Beauchamp is a member of Alpha Company in the Army 1st Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, serving at Forward Operating Base Falcon in Baghdad. He said he did not use his full name "because I wanted to write honestly about my experiences, without fear of reprisal."

Maj. Kirk Luedeke, a spokesman for the base, said by e-mail: "We are conducting a formal investigation into the allegations made by Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp in the New Republic, so given that situation, I am unable to comment on the matter until the investigation is complete."

In his blog, called Sir Real Scott Thomas, Beauchamp quoted Vice President Cheney as explaining in 1991, when he was defense secretary, why the United States ended the Persian Gulf War without taking Baghdad. Beauchamp added that "we laugh harder at CSPAN than comedy central. Silly republicans."

Beauchamp, who was based in Germany when the blog entries were posted in 2006, described his career this way: "I shoot, move, communicate, and kill . . . the deaths that I inflict secure the riches of the empire."

As conservative bloggers yesterday continued to challenge the veracity of Beauchamp's accounts, Foer said: "It is really unfortunate that someone like Scott, who was really only trying to tell his particular story, has become a pawn in the debate over the war and the Weekly Standard's efforts to press an ideological agenda."

Weekly Standard writer Michael Goldfarb responded: "The piece struck me as implausible, and what we did is to raise questions that are completely legitimate. There's nothing ideological about raising these questions when people make claims and don't back up the charges."

Some quick react: Andrew Sullivan, a former New Republic editor:

"I can't see the crime here -- unless he fabricated something and we don't know that. So why the craziness?

"Partly, I think, new media hatred of TNR. Partly that Thomas is obviously a liberal Democrat who's also a soldier. But mainly, it seems to me, the conservative blogosphere has taken such an almighty empirical beating this last year that they have an overwhelming psychic need to lash out at those still clinging to sanity on the war. This Scott Thomas story is a godsend for these people, a beautiful distraction from the reality they refuse to face.

"It combines all the usual Weimar themes out there: treasonous MSM journalists, treasonous soldiers, stories of atrocities that undermine morale (regardless of whether they're true or not), and blanket ideological denial. We have to understand that some people still do not believe that the U.S. is torturing or has tortured detainees, still do not believe that torture or murder or rape occurred at Abu Ghraib, still believe that everyone at Gitmo is a dangerous terrorist captured by US forces, and still believe we're winning in Iraq. If you believe all this and face the mountains of evidence against you, you have to act ever more decisively and emphatically to refute any evidence that might undermine this worldview."

TownHall's Dean Barnett sees a man with a big fat agenda:

"Finally, we have reached the end of the beginning of the 'Scott Thomas' affair. Of all the sad media misadventures we've seen over the past four years, this one will almost surely go down as the most pathetic.