When We Become The Enemy

The New York Times tells us here today that...

In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said in sworn statements.

…

After removing the blindfolds and handcuffs, the three soldiers shoved the four bodies into the canal, rejoined other members of their unit waiting in nearby vehicles and drove back to their combat outpost in southwest Baghdad, the statements said.

As I read the horrific details of this story, my mind kept coming back over and over again to one name, and that is Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

As this New York Observer story tells us of Beauchamp’s tales that appeared in The New Republic (hat tip to Media Matters for the link)...

The stories Scott Thomas (Beauchamp’s alias) told were almost too bad to be true.

There was the Iraqi boy whose tongue is cut out for talking to Americans; the dog eating a corpse lying in the street; the troops mocking and sexually harassing a woman whose face had been damaged by an I.E.D.; and the soldier who wore a part of an Iraqi boy’s skull under his helmet.

And on July 18 (The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb) said so, asking other military bloggers to check out the stories of the anonymous columnist and find out whether they were true.

“Is it possible that American soldiers would be so sadistic?” Goldfarb asked rhetorically, referring to the mocking of the I.E.D. victim and then, in turn, to each of the stories told in TNR’s “Baghdad Diarist” column.

Soon, the right-wing blogosphere had taken up the cause. Bloggers exploded with rage that an anonymous soldier might be telling tall tales that maligned the dignity of American troops serving in Iraq. Only, it was not completely clear where the doubts were coming from initially—other troops found the stories implausible and wrote in to Mr. Goldfarb and others to say so; to many, the stories were simply too upsetting to be possible.

Just to jog our memories, the Beauchamp story was one full of gray areas, much like war itself. Some of his claims did not hold up to examination (e.g., the burned woman Beauchamp described was in Kuwait before he was stationed in Iraq). And even though five other members of Beauchamp’s company corroborated his anecdotes, the Army Public Affairs office supposedly proved the allegations to be false (according to Goldfarb, though I give him no credence). And The New Republic basically was left with egg on its face over the episode, even though senior publication staffers worked diligently to validate the story (perhaps to cover up some sloppy initial “chain of custody” maintenance on the story, as noted here).

All I know is that this is yet another product of the harrowing, torturous treatment our military has endured in Mesopotamia. Yes, those who committed this crime should received the full weight of the law in their sentence, but I somehow can’t help but feel that a sense of willful blindness we may have towards what our military still endures over there – “success” of the surge or no – makes us complicit to a degree in the fact that they’re stuck in conditions where this behavior could take place (complicit because we’re not all screaming our heads off to start getting them out of there, and I don’t absolve myself when I say that).

And another thing - Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp suddenly looks a lot more credible.