I haven’t blogged about the - now false - “Badhdad Diarist” simply because others such as The Weekly Standard were on it since the get go. Then I read fellow Heading Right blogger, Rick Moran’s post which got a lot of airing out yesterday - especially by Ace.

Now it appears that in fact PFC Thomas Beauchamp’s “stories” were found by the Army to be false.

“An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

The brief statement, however, left many questions unanswered. Just last week The New Republic published on its Web site the results of its own investigation, stating that five members of the same company as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who had written the anonymous pieces, “all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one soldier, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)”

Private Beauchamp had revealed his identity after The Weekly Standard online and conservative bloggers expressed doubts about their veracity. As the Baghdad Diarist, he wrote that one soldier had jokingly worn the remnant of a child’s skull on his head. In another issue, he said he and a soldier had mocked a terribly disfigured woman sitting near them in the mess tent. Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic said that after Private Beauchamp revealed his identity, the Army severely curtailed his telephone and e-mail privileges.

Private Beauchamp is married to a reporter-researcher at the magazine, Elspeth Reeve.”

The shameful way the Ny Times treating the Army investigation is indicative of the real problem behind this story and no doubt the battle will go back and forth between New Republic, The Weekly Standard and the blogsphere. Nevetheless, at this time we know the story to be false.

Moran’s point was that no matter what the truth it won’t change the fact that Iraq is lost (Rick fell off the ‘Stay the Course’ wagon a long time ago), and so it’s not important. Of course Rick is wrong, as we know the surge is in fact working, but I digress.

However the story is very important from one standpoint and it might be key to why The New Republic is sticking so hard to it’s story. I mean you would have to ask just what exactly is the big deal to say, “We goofed”?

Well, you could look at the sad fall into disgrace of Dan Rather to get the answer. You’ll remember that he sticks to his “fake but accurate” delusion until this day . It’s called “Journalistic God Complex”, or an inability to accept the fact that they got the story wrong.

But when you get down to it this is more about the battle between the old and new medias. The MSM by and large first ignored the blogs thinking them run by pajama wearing fools with half a wit who made up stuff as they went along.

After the Dan Rather episode however, the media began to wake up and finally joined in the blogging fun. But don’t think for a minute that the MSM elite doesn’t absolutely loath being “fact checked” by the ’simpletons”.

Yet, the fact that their “Diarist” was found to be fraud is important from another very important standpoint. The fact that false information given in a time of war is not child’s play. It not only undermines moral, but by it’s accusations you could tell from the outset that it was designed to sabotage the progress that the surge has made, especially at winning the hearts and minds of the populace.

It cannot be dismissed that the The New Republic itself - along with Beauchamp - committed not only journalistic fraud, but undermined the war effort - otherwise known as (shall we say it?) treason and should be held to account. The only way to do that would be for the appropriate agency to open an investigation into the New Republican and all the details to how this story came about.