Scott Thomas - the bloggers have spoken

I didn't post about the Scott Thomas affair when it came out as I was short of time and other people were doing excellent work. For those who don't recognize the name, he published these articles at The New Republic: Shock Troops, Dead of Night and War Bonds (Shock Troops is still available online but the other two have fallen off public availability and are now only available to subscribers unless you know the Google trick...) Here are a few lines from Shock Troops:

One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit. As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included.

One more:

I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs.

A number of military bloggers noticed that Scott Thomas had very little knowledge of how things work. Running a Bradley into a concrete barrier would severely damage it -- it is armored but not invincible to collision, there is a big big difference. His other posts show little or no accurate knowledge about guns. It was doubted that he was even in the military. Bit by bit, the story came clear. Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup of facts at Hot Air:

Scott Thomas revealed
He�s Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division. He�s also calling most of his critics chickenhawks, even though most of his critics a) served in the military and/or b) have been to Iraq or c) both. The pre-amble to Pvt Thomas� letter is one more exercise in silliness from TNR:

Although the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published, we have decided to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail. This process takes considerable time, as the primary subjects are on another continent, with intermittent access to phones and email. Thus far we�ve found nothing to disprove the facts in the article; we will release the full results of our search when it is completed.

It�s actually not that complicated, guys. Was there or was there not a mass grave that contained the bones of children underneath everyday, mundane household items? If there was, Pvt Thomas� writings could be true, but if there wasn�t � and we know that there wasn�t � then they can�t be true. Are the Iraqi police the only ones who use Glocks in Iraq? If they are, his writings could be true. If they�re not � in a country awash in weapons, they�re not � his writings contain fabulism.

That�s the bottom line. There�s no need to blame the lack of a good fact check a week after the saga erupted on the difficulty of tracking down witnesses to all the events Thomas claims to have witnessed. All one needs to do is check the basic checkable facts he reports. That wasn�t done before publication, and hasn�t been done yet.

I�ll probably have more to say on this later, once I�ve sifted through Pvt Thomas� account more thoroughly.

There follows page after page after page of facts about Scott Thomas, his life, his prior writings, his politics, the fact that he is engaged to another reporter at The New Republic... Thomas is a rotten journalist and needs to STFU (or stop pushing opinion pieces as factual).