The New Republic and "Scott Thomas"
If you haven't been keeping up with it, the New Republic is under fire for some stories that they published by "Scott Thomas," who's supposedly a soldier serving in Baghdad. Thomas recently wrote a piece called "Shock Troops" that described soldiers engaging in a variety of abhorrent behavior, from mocking a woman disfigured by an IED, to running down dogs with a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb has kept an impressive roll call of the soldiers and bloggers calling BS on various parts of the story. One of the things he notes:
The blog at the American Spectator has some great stuff on "Shock Troops." John Tabin finds more suspect information in a previous story by "Scott Thomas". In his second piece for the New Republic titled "Dead of Night," "Thomas" had written,
Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.
Now I won't claim to be a firearms expert by any means, but it just so happens that I fired a Glock 9mm not two weeks ago at a pistol range, and unless my eyesight is completely busted, the shell casings were round. Given that I reloaded the magazine several times in a row, I'm pretty sure that's the case. Now I suppose it's possible that the Glock 9mm I rented was the round casing model, while the range keeps the square casing model for the more regular customers, but does anyone think that's the likeliest explanation?
The silence from TNR management, particularly given their past experiences with their staff making stuff up, is deafening.