Army: Chilling Iraq stories untrue

NEW YORK — A magazine gets a hot story straight from a soldier in Iraq and publishes his writing, complete with gory details, under a pseudonym.

The stories are chilling: An Iraqi boy befriends American troops and later has his tongue cut out by insurgents. Soldiers mock a disfigured woman sitting near them in a dining hall. As a diversion, soldiers run over dogs with armored personnel carriers.

Compelling stuff, and, according to the Army, not true.

Three articles by the soldier have run since January in The New Republic, a liberal magazine with a small circulation. The stories, which ran under the name "Scott Thomas," were called into question by The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine with a small circulation. The Standard last month challenged bloggers to check the dispatches.

Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry, since has come forward as the author. The New Republic said Beauchamp "came to its attention" through Elspeth Reeve, a reporter-researcher at the magazine he later married.

The Army said this week it had concluded an investigation of Beauchamp's claims and found them to be false.

"During that investigation, all the soldiers from his unit refuted all claims that Pvt. Beauchamp made in his blog," Sgt. 1st Class Robert Timmons, a spokesman in Baghdad for the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan., said in an e-mail interview.

The Weekly Standard said Beauchamp signed a sworn statement admitting all three articles were exaggerations and falsehoods.

The New Republic said on its Web site that it has conducted its own investigation and stands by Beauchamp's work.

In its note posted Aug. 2, it said, "We checked the plausibility of details with experts, contacted a corroborating witness, and pressed the author for further details. But publishing a first-person essay from a war zone requires a measure of faith in the writer. Given what we knew of Beauchamp, personally and professionally, we credited his report."

After the pieces were questioned, the magazine said it extensively re-reported his account, contacting dozens of people, including former soldiers, forensic experts, war reporters and Army public-affairs officers.

The New Republic said it also spoke to five members of Beauchamp's company, all of whom corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes but requested anonymity.

In the note, the magazine said the incident with the disfigured woman took place in Kuwait, not Iraq. The magazine also said the Army took away Beauchamp's cellphone and his computer and he "is currently unable to speak to even his family."

The Associated Press has been unable to reach Beauchamp, and the Army said details of the investigation were not expected to be released. Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., said granting a writer anonymity "raises questions about authenticity and legitimacy."

"Anonymity allows an individual to make accusations against others with impunity," Steele said. "In this case, the anonymous diarist was accusing other soldiers of various levels of wrongdoing that were, at the least, moral failures, if not violations of military conduct."

He added that he also was troubled by the relationship between Beauchamp and Reeve, his wife, who works at The New Republic.