New Republic delivers its mea culpa on Beauchamp
If you can stand the pain of working through 14 pages of finger-pointing and varied attempts at explaining how it happened, you’ll finally get to the meat of the retraction.
In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.
Besides, with the all that good soldiers-as-bad-guys crap, you guys just didn’t want to believe it couldn’t be true.
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.
Yeah, but in the meantime you and most of the left-wing bloggers and commentators out there called all of the critics of these stories - to include soldiers who had been there or who understood the situation better than you - liars, chicken hawks, and conservative wing nuts. Never mind that they were actually right.
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