Posted on 07/19/2007 8:29:29 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Over at the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb continues to do yeoman’s work tracking down that very suspicious looking New Republic story from "Scott Thomas", a man purporting to be a soldier in Baghdad. Goldfarb’s doing such a good job, if he keeps it up through the day I may consider having him on as a guest this evening when I’m pinch-hitting for Hugh
The New Republic dispatch from the pseudonymous soldier related several horrific tales, all of which seemed too horrifically perfect to check or corroborate:
Goldfarb reports: "The first episode puts 'Thomas’s' unit at a 'chow hall' at an unnamed base. A woman eating there is wearing 'an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn’t really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor.' The woman's face is described as having been 'more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head,' by an IED. She sits down for lunch next to the men. Here's how 'Thomas' describes what happens next:"
We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.
“Man, I can’t eat like this,” he said.
“Like what?” I said. “Chow hall food getting to you?”
“No—with that f**king freak behind us!” he exclaimed, loud enough for not only her to hear us, but everyone at the surrounding tables. I looked over at the woman, and she was intently staring into each forkful of food before it entered her half-melted mouth.
“Are you kidding? I think she’s f**king hot!” I blurted out.
“What?” said my friend, half-smiling.
“Yeah man,” I continued. “I love chicks that have been intimate—with IEDs. It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses . . . .”
“You’re crazy, man!” my friend said, doubling over with laughter. I took it as my cue to continue.
“In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? ‘IED Babes.’ We could have them pose in thongs and bikinis on top of the hoods of their blown-up vehicles.”
My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground…
Goldfarb again: The next episode is every bit as shocking. Indeed, the behavior it describes is a clear violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The author claims that his unit stumbled across a mass grave filled with the remains of Iraqi children, and, rather than report the find, chose to desecrate the corpses:
"About six months into our deployment, we were assigned a new area to patrol, southwest of Baghdad. We spent a few weeks constructing a combat outpost, and, in the process, we did a lot of digging. At first, we found only household objects like silverware and cups. Then we dug deeper and found children’s clothes: sandals, sweatpants, sweaters. Like a strange archeological dig of the recent past, the deeper we went, the more personal the objects we discovered. And, eventually, we reached the bones. All children’s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades. We found pieces of hands and fingers. We found skull fragments. No one cared to speculate what, exactly, had happened here, but it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.
"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.
"The private wore the skull for the rest of the day and night. Even on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull. He observed that he was grateful his hair had just been cut—since it would make it easier to pick out the pieces of rotting flesh that were digging into his head."
The third episode?
"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. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America—providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle’s tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver’s hatch.
"One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book.
"The second kill was a straight shot: A dog that was lying in the street and bathing in the sun didn’t have enough time to get up and run away from the speeding Bradley. Its front half was completely severed from its rear, which was twitching wildly, and its head was still raised and smiling at the sun as if nothing had happened at all."
Aside from the manifest implausibilities in these accounts, the story seems a little too perfectly calculated to tug at our hearts and provoke outrage. Note that the victims are women, the disabled, children and house pets. Perfect. Or certainly too perfect to fact check. And given the fact that the soldier/author needs anonymity to tell his tales out of school, fact checking would be impossible anyway.
PERSONALLY, I FIND THIS TO BE ONE OF THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS incidents of the war. I’ve spent much of the past couple of weeks speaking to men who have served in Iraq to prepare a piece for the next issue of the Weekly Standard about what I call the Next Greatest Generation. These are amazing men, doing amazing things. The TNR piece has maligned every individual who is serving our country in Iraq, including all the men I’ve spoken with.
So what exactly happened here? There are three possibilities, and none of them paint TNR in a flattering light:
a) The soldier is not a soldier at all, and made up stories out of whole cloth.
b) The soldier is a soldier, but made up stories or embellished them to such an extent that they ultimately bore only a passing resemblance to reality.
c) The soldier is a soldier, and what he said is completely true.
Let’s start with the last one. Even if everything happened exactly as TNR’s pseudonymous scribe relayed it, running a story like this one is astonishingly unfair. The story’s publication, without rebuttal, redress, comment or any attempt to put into context of the tens of thousands of soldiers who are serving their country honorably is unconscionable. The obvious desired effect of the article is to paint our soldiers as a roving band of sociopaths and lunatics. It remains an oddity that despite how much the media and the press support the troops, they still revel in stories like this one and rush to print them.
The other two possibilities are close enough together that I’ll take them on as a package. Given TNR’s responsibility to protect its brave truth-teller’s identity, we can safely posit that at the very least the stories ran uncorroborated. According to every letter that I’ve received from either active duty or retired military personnel, there are numerous incidents in the piece such as improper diction and basic unfamiliarity with Army protocol and equipment that give the author away as a fabulist. (For much more on this, check out Goldfarb’s post at the Daily Standard.)
SO WHY DOES THIS MATTER? It’s a common trope on the left that they support the troops. Those of us who have read the leftwing blogs and the New York Times editorial page the last four years have found it impossible not to get the sense that even though they purportedly support the troops, they sure do seem to relish every setback the troops incur. Some members of the American left have conjoined every car bomb and every casualty with a tiresome political agenda.
With this piece, you have one of the most respected bastions of liberal opinion bending journalistic rules to publish a story that paints our soldiers as sadistic sociopaths. If TNR had run the story by a single person familiar with the military situation in Iraq prior to publication, that person would have called into question their correspondent’s reporting. And yet a story like this one was apparently too delicious to subject to any intellectual or factual scrutiny.
For what it’s worth, I sent an email to The New Republic’s online editor last night asking what TNR had by way of corroboration for its story. I’ve gotten no response. I’ve also invited The New Republic’s editor-in-chief, Franklin Foer, to come on the show tonight and defend his magazine’s publication of the story. I’ll keep you apprised.
During Vietnam, the left famously turned on the military. With the military still determined to fight even though the left wants to see “our children” come home, is a sequel to that sorry drama perhaps in production?
Clifton Hicks has written a LOT of stuff. The more I read, the more it sounds like Scott Thomas:
http://www.alternet.org/asoldierspeaks/40431/
Look at this comment by a Hicks sympathizer and journalist:
Laufer: They all got me. They’re just emotionally wrenching. [But] there’s one guy that I’m particularly fascinated by and find inspirational: Clifton Hicks. Clifton Hicks is a fascinating guy because when he speaks about his experiences, it’s a combination of this harsh military lexicon of crude language and images with a poetic understanding and interpretation of the events that he experienced. He’s from the backwater of the Southeast and he was sending reports home that his father put up on the family blog. He was harshly critical of the war and the command in these blogs, and that got back to his commanders. He was sentenced to hard labor, as I recall, reduced in rank and fined, and applied for conscientious objector status, [which] eventually he did get.
But he tells stories on himself, and that’s one of the things that’s amazing to hear — these guys who are indicting their own actions. He tells these ghastly stories of the things he did or experienced that helped him realize the war is wrong, and two things in particular always stand out in my mind. One is that, due to confusion, and seemingly not malicious confusion, a wedding party was shot up and he was involved in the cleanup after it. A young girl, I think she was six, was killed. There was no report filed, according to him. The U.S. troops just saw that they’d killed her and kept on going because it was not a factor of consequence.
Hearing stories like this puts into context the atrocities that we’re hearing about, not to in any way suggest that the majority of the troops over there or even a consequential number of them engaged in this sort of thing, but it allows one to see how an immoral policy and resorting to violence to solve political problems can lead to individuals doing horrific things that they would never consider. Bad enough that this girl was killed and left, and his compatriots would defecate into the containers for MREs, the meals that are distributed to the troops, and then offer them to hungry Iraqis, because this was a way for them to get back at the Iraq that they learned to hate. And he talks about learning to hate Iraq and learning to hate Iraqis even though it’s contrary to his personal beliefs and upbringing.”
Does this not sound like a review of “Scott Thomas”?
Another FR post that is more comprehensive. TNR has obviously intentionally published made up garbage. They should be sued for John Edwards money.
So I guess you guys/gals heard where he stole the skull story from already?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,445133,00.html
Putting this out so the info’s upfront:
Does “Scott Thomas” Really Exist?
http://weeklystandard.com/Weblogs/TWSFP/TWSFPView.asp#2034
More from men at FOB Falcon. According to this soldier, it is highly likely that “Scott Thomas” is describing real events.
Franklin Foer has stood by his story, but has yet to deliver a single bit of evidence supporting his story. Not a shred. He is trying to do two things: Downplay the incidents, calling them mere practical jokes - and claiming that he is getting reports corroborating Mr. Thomas. If so, show us. It is very weak to publish things and then claim that you have gotten full corroboration, but no one can be revealed.
Remember Dan Rather’s behavior on being caught. “The story is true” he said. He stonewalled, said everything was fine, and that we should trust him. Turns out nothing was true. That seems to be the case here as well. Support your story, hope they get tired and go away. But an officer from FOB Falcon has more details:
Hey Matt:
Here are the facts as best I have established them, along with the actions I have taken here at Falcon.
1. I was notified of the New Republic blog entries yesterday (Friday) by documentarian JD Johannes, who had spent time with us as an embed in May. He was concerned about the reports, but also expressed doubt in their veracity. He provided the New Republic and Weekly Standard response to the blog entry links.
2. I was able to immediately refute the assertion that a mass graveyard of children’s skeletons was found; an event such as this would have been reported during the construction of Coalition Outpost Ellis, the only such COP that exists in the area the blogger described (rural, south of BIAP).
3. The stories of the burned woman and hitting dogs with Bradleys can’t be as decisively disputed, however, I have not encountered a woman matching that description at any time on Falcon since arriving here on 17 Feb. You would think that someone with such visible wounds would stand out in memorable fashion. This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a visitor at some point, but I find the account of Soldiers mocking her dubious at best.
4. I immediately notified MAJ Lamb of MND-B PAO, who advised me to send him the link and pertinent information on the New Republic’s blog posts, which I did. He informed me of his intent to engage the CENTCOM blog team to see if they could take action, and at the very least, make them aware of the situation.
5. I contacted the only unit in our brigade that has Bradleys, 1-18 IN, and advised their XO of the situation, recommending that they talk to their Soldiers about Army values and the Warrior ethos, reminding them of the rules for blogging in uniform and also reminding them of integrity and telling the truth. The bottom line: If you put something out there you should be willing to put your name next to it and stand by it. That he and New Rpublic are insisting on anonymity is very telling here.
Per COL Boylan’s request, I have prepared the following:
1. There was no mass grave found during the construction of any of our coalition outposts in the Rashid District at any time. Such a discovery would have prompted an investigation and close attention paid at levels higher than ours to making sure that the victims were properly interred and attempts would have been made to determine their identities. It is difficult to fathom that a unit’s leadership would condone Soldiers disrespecting the remains of anyone in the fashion described.
2. Due to the threat of IEDs, our combat vehicles are driven professionally and in control at all times. To be driving erratically so as to hit dogs or other things would be to put the entire vehicle’s crew at risk and would be gross dereliction of duty by the noncommissioned officer or officer in charge of the vehicle. Drivers aren’t allowed to simply free-wheel their vehicles however they see fit, and they are *not* allowed to be moved anywhere with out a vehicle commander present to supervise the movement. Therefore- claims of vehicles leaving the roadways to hit animals are highly dubious, given the very real threat of IEDs and normal standards of conduct.
3. As for the alleged woman with severe burn scars, we have nobody matching that description here at FOB Falcon. As Soldiers, we practice the value of Respect: “Treat people as you want to be treated.” If the blogger and his friends can’t live the Army value of respect, I have little doubt that someone around them who does would have made an on-the-spot correction. The Falcon dining facility is not a spacious one. Anyone being rude, loud or raucous calls immediate attention to himself. It is hard to fathom that anyone would be able to get away with such callous behavior without somebody intervening and stopping it from happening.
Major Kirk Luedeke
Public Affairs Officer
4th IBCT, 1st ID
It still could have happened. Officers are not around all the time. But it is very, very unlikely. It sounds more like a soldier with a gift for writing has exercised his imagination. And he knew to go to the New Republic to print his fantasies.
http://www.penraker.com/archives/009410.html
Research Call. Need confirm re: Middle Initial
This the guy?
http://www.ivaw.org/user/286
Read this... scroll down some:
http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2007/06/iraq-snapshot_11.html
Also covering the topic yesterday was Heather Wokusch (OpEdNews) who covers the cases of Kyle D. Huwer, Clifton F. Hicks and “John” (a psuedonym). John self-checked out and is back in the US avoiding his family (”avid Bush-supporters; his uncle works for a weapons manufacturer and his stepfather, for an oil company”) but has some contact with his girlfriend “Sarah” who notes the difference between media in Germany and in the US, “Watching the news here [US] really makes me angry, people are so detached from reality. They increse the troop deployments from 12 to 15 months, and no one besides the military families recognizes it. They are sending back national guard people for multiple deployments, no one recognizes it. You hardly hear anything about what that puts on the families, emotionally and financially. I’m deeply mad and sad about that at the same time.”
John explains to Wokusch the transformation he had while serving in Iraq and notes, “It was not what I was expecting at all. There are people in Iraq making HUGE sums of money profiting over poorly supervised and ill-run government contracts. When you hear about the cost of the war in Iraq, it’s this kind of thing that’s doing it, not the body armor, having to pay the soliders a couple of meager extra bucks, or armoring the humvees. It’s paying KBP $90 for every time I turn in my laundry while paying poor Pakistani and Filipino workers who work long hours with no days off for years at a time (and handling thousands of bags of laundry) $15 a day.” [Note: Heather Wokusch’s article also contains an audio-visual stream option.]
Clifton Hicks is now discharged and some may remember his story from Peter Laufer’s
Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq. In the book Laufer recounts how Hicks father posted one his son’s letters home (from Iraq) online and the military’s response was “a Field Grade Article 15” (p. 185) which Hicks learned after his woke him up one morning kicking his cot and, pay attention easily shocked Heather Hollingsworth-types, cursing at him. “They were going to throw me in jail for treason.” After he was demoted to private and fined $800, Hicks applied for CO status. Hicks told Laufer, “If I don’t get it? I have other avenues of approach to get home. I’ve told them I am not going back to Iraq” and would rather go to prison but “[i]t won’t come to that, though, because I think I’m too smart for that to happen to me. Civil disobedience is an option — just refuse to put the uniform on. Maybe a hunger strike. There’s all kinds of things you can do. It’s looking like they’ll approve it. But if they don’t, I have Plan B, Plan C, all the way up to desertion” (p. 187). Laufer’s chapter on Hicks ends with Hicks being told he will receive CO status and a discharge. [Reminder, Laufer now hosts a two hour program each Sunday morning on KPFA from 9:00 to 11:00 am PST. The program is not yet named — though it is airing — and Laufer’s program airs in Larry Bensky’s old time slot.]
Note: Ummm... Germany BTW, that site is full of traitors in the worst sense of the word. But now we know who a lot of them are and who they use. Sick.
Can we say Ops and friggin traitors yet?
Check this out: A GI against the war site... or so it seems
They bold this clip (3/4 down):
One was former US Army Specialist Kyle D. Huwer, who served for one and a half years before, as he puts it, “I finally came to my senses and realized that what I was doing was wrong.”
Another was former US Army Private Clifton F. Hicks, who served from the summer of 2003 to late 2005. Hicks says, “I joined to defend the people of the United States, and when I found our Army was not doing that, and that I was in fact being used to further the goals of evil men, I began to question my involvement in such an organization.”
Who’s this though? Have a clue?
http://www.albasrah.net/en_articles_2007/0607/GI%20Special%205F19_200607.htm
Go see:
http://www.albasrah.net/index.php
Oops... i’m behind. Still searching, don’t believe it.
July 22, 2007
Response by Clifton Hicks to Ray Robison
letter to the editor
Ray Robison has recently published a blog entry wherein he claims that I may have authored a story in The New Republic under the false name of ‘Scott Thomas’.
Ray, I did not author that piece. Perhaps the reason you find so many similarities in my writing and that of Mr. Thomas’ is because we were both in Iraq, serving in the same awful war with the same impossible mission; thereby witnessing similar events! In the mean time Ray, I’ve a couple of bones to pick with you so allow me to set about correcting some of your errors here, I’ll start at the top.
1. “Hicks was granted conscientious objector status and a release from the Army after receiving administrative punishment for unprofessional conduct. Since then, and especially recently, he has tapped into the anti-war establishment for self-promotion.”
I was Honorably discharged (not “released”) from the US Army after serving some thirty odd trying months in a front line combat unit. My discharge had nothing to do with any “administrative punishment,” the nature of my separation from the military was completely honorable, legal, and professional. And I have not “tapped into” the anti-war movement for “self-promotion,” in recent months I have reluctantly accepted a couple of interview offers, that is all.
2. “Here Hicks expresses that “we... were happy to have killed” an Iraqi child. His own words!”
Please allow me to remind you, Ray, that you were not in that house in Baghdad in 2003, you did not see or feel what we saw and felt that night. You shouldn’t butcher other people’s quotations to piece together your own illegitimate excerpts. In other words, we did not kill that child, and we were not happy about it.
Ray, I don’t know if this Scott Thomas character is real or not, nor do I care. I sure as Hell don’t know if what he’s saying is the truth, and I admit I didn’t bother to read “Shock Troops”, it doesn’t interest me for obvious reasons. It could be fake, or it could be real, you and I will probably never know. All I can vouch for is my own story, and whether or not you or anybody else believes that story is of no consequence to me. Those who stood at my side every step of the way, those brave young comrades of mine, are the only men who might confirm or deny anything I have ventured to say in the past.
Clifton Hicks
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/07/post_59.html
-Dang, hope he caught the IP
You know it’s a shame that our troops even feel like they have to answer questions about this BS... here goes:
http://www.mudvillegazette.com/milblogs/
Just alerting some folks on this Scott Thomas story....and your note....
http://www.americanprowler.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11769
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