The New Republic has made another statement on the “Shock Troops” article, and Ace has analyzed the semiotical contextuality, finding it less than compelling.

I’ll start with this:

In the first, Beauchamp recounted how he and a fellow soldier mocked a disfigured woman seated near them in a dining hall. Three soldiers with whom TNR has spoken have said they repeatedly saw the same facially disfigured woman. One was the soldier specifically mentioned in the Diarist. He told us: “We were really poking fun at her; it was just me and Scott, the day that I made that comment. We were pretty loud. She was sitting at the table behind me. We were at the end of the table. I believe that there were a few people a few feet to the right.”

The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp’s on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit’s arrival in Iraq. When presented with this important discrepancy, Beauchamp acknowledged his error. We sincerely regret this mistake.

Error? Mistake? He was off by an entire country and something like nine months?

This is what TNR terms an “error,” a “mistake”? And when they “fact-checked” this beforehand, how did their “rigorous editing and fact-checking” miss the fact this took place in another country, before actual deployment?

I’m reminded of Steven Wright’s joke: “The other day I was… oh wait, that was someone else.”

Could happen to anyone, really. Common mistake.

Read the whole thing…

UPDATE at 8/2/07 3:18:32 pm:

Also see Michael Goldfarb:

So we’re back to where we started: Has anyone ever seen a badly disfigured woman at Camp Beuhring, or any other camp in the Middle East which might subsequently be revealed as the scene of the crime?