This mission could not have been done without your help, both financial and via moral support. Thanks to your contributions and the hospitality of the U.S. military, I was able to file over 40 articles, dispatches, and updates from the field, which were published on my site, at RedState, on http://www.VetsForFreedom.org (where I kept a diary while deployed), and in such publications as Human Events, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard (online), The Washington Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the American Thinker, the Jerusalem Post, and the Hawaii Reporter. Thanks in large part to your help, readers of these and other publications were able to gain information and understanding of the war in Iraq that they otherwise would not have.

I cannot thank you enough for your assistance, as without your support, dedication, and readership, this literally would not have happened.

The job is not finished. There is so much more information, and there are so many more stories, that are not making their way out of Iraq at this point, if for no other reason than the fact that there are not people on the front lines to see and report them. This task is largely left to independents like myself, Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, Michael Totten, J.D. Johannes, and very few others — and we depend on the amazing following and generosity of people like you. Few know how expensive (and costly in terms of time away from any regularly-paying job) it actually is to go to Iraq and spend months at a time being shot at, blown up, etc. for the sole sake of getting accurate, eyewitness, on-the-ground information out to the American people.

One trip generally costs $20-25,000.00 to make. Despite the apparent belief of some, I neither tailor my news to get donations, nor do I actually receive very many in response to specific stories. In fact, I’ve finished “in the red” financially both times that I went to Iraq this year. That, combined with the fact that I am currently planning a return trip to the front lines for early next year, means that I cannot lay off fundraising (something that I hate to do more than almost anything) even for one minute. So, with that having been said, if you (or anybody that you know) is interested not only in getting real, accurate, eyewitness information from the front lines in Iraq, but is interested in investing in actual media accuracy in this war, please come yourself, or send them, to http://www.jeffemanuel.com and click the “donate” link on the right sidebar.

Another option, which is 100% tax-deductible, is to support Bill Roggio’s Public Multimedia, Inc, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to up-to-date and accurate reporting on The Long War through the training and placement of frontline embedded reporters.

If you believe that this is a worthy cause — and many of you have already shown that you do — then I humbly ask that you consider contributing to one or both of these embedded reporting funds. Again, without you, this cannot happen.

Thank you again for your assistance, both past and future. It is an honor to have represented you to our soldiers in Iraq, and I look forward to doing it again soon.

-Jeff Emanuel

TNR is pathetic. P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C. That’s about all I have to say to and about them. With TNR’s latest, under the bus STB goes once again. Seriously, this is one reason I think that STB is no longer the bad guy: (a) he’s not talking, so they can say whatever they want, and (b) there’s no way he has a battered wife/Stockholm syndrome severe enough to keep going back to them after all of this.

As far as Beauchamp goes, I’m still 100% willing to stand by what I said yesterday, and to proceed in good faith with the belief that he is learning from his mistakes. He can easily prove me wrong, but as a young (and formerly younger) man who has made more than his share of “Oh S**t!”s, and has learned from them to become who he is today, I will give STB that benefit of the doubt, and trust that he is doing the same.

That is all.

Four U.S. paratroopers faced impossible odds, against dozens of dedicated enemy fighters.

Not all would survive — but all would become heroes.

Sergeant First Class Rodolfo Cisneros, Red’s Platoon Sergeant (ranking noncommissioned officer), ordered an immediate radio check with Reaper. He had a bad feeling about the gunfire and explosions that sounded like they were coming from the exact direction of the northern OP. The radio call received no answer – enough reason for Cisneros to call for the QRF to move immediately, as the unit’s standard procedure regarding overwatch operations was that, in the event of a lack of communication with an OP, the QRF should assume that they have been compromised and move to their location immediately.

Lt. Smith ordered another check – again, nothing. Upon the second failed radio call, he ordered the four-Humvee quick reaction force to roll out of Uvanni and to make for Reaper’s location as fast as possible. As the Humvees sped out of the Iraqi Patrol Base, Smith continued trying to raise the sniper team on the radio. He did not know that their radio had been destroyed by a grenade, and could only hope that the sounds echoing down the alleyways from the north – which sounded like a full-blown battle at this point, complete with automatic and single-shot gunfire, as well as frequent explosions – were not coming from Reaper’s location.

ON THE ROOF of the apartment building, Morley and Moser were taking AK-47 and PKC (a 7.62mm Russian-made machine gun) fire from both stairwells. As they spun around to return fire, they saw several small, dark objects flying onto the roof from the stairwell – hand grenades. Morley recognized that the situation was rapidly deteriorating, and knew that, though his team currently occupied the high ground in the emerging battle, they could not hold out for very long due to their vast disadvantage in numbers. Seeing that Willis, who was next to the team’s radio, was busy firing into the stairwell through a window on the enclave’s north side, and not knowing that one of the first hand grenades tossed onto the roof had disabled it, Morley made a dash across the roof to call for the QRF.

He never made it there.

As Moser fired into the door from his corner in an attempt to suppress the enemy assault, he saw Morley appear to stumble and go down, his weapon skidding across the rooftop toward the stairwell door. His first thought was that the team leader had tripped and fallen; a moment later, though, his brain registered the truth: Morley had been shot. A burst of gunfire from the southern stairwell across the dividing wall had scored a direct hit, with one round striking Morley directly in the forehead. He was dead before hitting the ground.

Dogtags hang from an M4 rifle in the combat memorial for Sergeant Josh Morley, Reaper Two’s team leader. Morley was killed by machine gun fire while sprinting across the rooftop toward the radio to call for the QRF.
(photograph by Paul French)

However, despite their use of underhanded tactics, their attempts to pull Republicans to the Democrat side by threatening to otherwise paint them as being evilly against children, their refusal to compromise, and their shutting the minority party out of the writing of the legislation, Congressional Democrats have been both surprised and dismayed to see support for their position decline, rather than increase, over the course of the debate. The vote on the second-try SCHIP bill saw only one Representative, Vern Ehlers (R-MI), defect from the position taken on the first SCHIP vote – and he crossed over to the nays, rejoining his party on the side of realism and fiscal restraint.

The fight will continue past this week. Federal funding for SCHIP in its current form ends on November 15, so at the very least an extension of the current program will have to be agreed upon and passed. However, the Democrats have made the massive expansion of government-controlled healthcare too large a priority in their 2007 legislative agenda, and have spent too much money and political capital on it, to let it go at that. The issue will almost certainly come up again in the not-too-distant future, though likely not as a stand-alone. According to a source on Capitol Hill, the Democrats’ most likely course of action would be to bury SCHIP into a bill that Republicans would ordinarily overwhelmingly support, like a military quality-of-life bill or another piece of legislation that addresses a GOP staple issue, thereby forcing Republicans to appear to be voting against – and President Bush to be vetoing (if he maintains a firm commitment) – both the military and children, an apparent lose-lose situation.

That, though, is a bridge that must be crossed when it is reached. For now, the GOP has once again scored a legislative victory, as Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor again produced the necessary number of Republican voters to limit this latest attempt at government healthcare expansion to a total well-short of a veto-proof majority. This gives the President the flexibility to continue doing the right thing on this matter, as well. The war on this issue is far from over, but as long as each battle is won, the GOP remains far closer to overall victory than to defeat.

After the story of our “ban on Ron Paul supporters” (a misnomer) was taken to the press (without our being consulted about the facts or the details), several stories came out about the policy, and they were, of course, run with by members of the leftosphere and the fake-rightosphere. Included in the latter was fake-conservative (and strikingly detached from reality) Andrew Sullivan, who said:

I don’t think I qualify as a Neo-Nazi or a Code Pink activist. Full Wired story here. But here’s a simple message to Ron Paul supporters. You’re welcome here. The Dish believes in expanding the range of debate among conservatives, not crushing it. And any cursory look at the degenerate state of American conservatism would not lead you to think your problem is too much diversity of opinion.

Need some evidence that Sullivan, whose IQ has apparently deteriorated to a number lower than the aggregate total of letters in his last name, is both detached from reality and 100% not interested in “welcoming” the MoRon wing of the political spectrum to his site?

As usual, he does not have comments enabled, either on that post or on any other. Now, Sully can, of course, feel free to come here, where we have open comments, and explain exactly how it is that having a site that nobody can comment on serves to “[expand] the range of debate among” anybody — as well as how there is any “diversity of opinion” there, save for counting himself and his opinion multiple times (something which I wouldn’t put past him).

You see what you’re doing, Sully? You’re censoring Ron Paul’s supporters. They can’t post anything at all on your site — you are clearly violating their right to freedom of speech.

Oh, and by the way, “the degenerate state of American conservatism”? What’s degenerate, friend, is fake-conservative, censoring liars like yourself.

But hey, don’t worry — nobody can tell you that to your online face. After all, comments are disabled at your site.

(h/t The Pirate’s Cove)

Peter Scoblic (exec editor of TNR): What are you going to do after this job? Are you staying in the Army? …you’re not going to be able to write anymore after this…you know that, right?

Beauchamp: …I don’t really care at this point. That’s not…what is important to me…all I really care about is the job I’m doing here. I really don’t care about the media at this point. I’m sorry. I know it may sound insane from your point of view, but all I care about right now and I realize that’s the one thing I’ve learned from all of ths is basically I mean, I … what’s important to me right now is taking care of the people to the left and right of me.

…Basically I’m not saying anything about the stories to anyone anymore. …I have nothing but…the utmost respect and love for the people I’m serving with and this is really…there’s been a lot of heartache for them.

(emphasis added) Again, I believe him. Nobody else has to, but I think I understand what he’s going through, and I wish the best for him. Nobody is obligated to follow my lead, of course

[Update:] From an email from J.D. Johannes, an embedded documentarian who was at FOB Falcon (Beauchamp’s base in Iraq) with me in April and May, and who worked with STB’s unit:

I felt a subtext in that transcript. When the chips were down, and it was time to turn over the hole card, STB’s chain of command was willing to stand beside STB. Not vouch for him, not back him up, not condone his actions, but stand there with him.

The investigation, over now for nearly three months, began on Thursday, July 26 – the same day that Beauchamp “outed” himself on The New Republic’s (TNR) website, giving his full name and unit affiliation, and stating that he stood by his stories 100%. “It’s been maddening, to say the least,” he wrote, “to see the plausibility of events that I witnessed questioned by people who have never served in Iraq. …[M]y character, my experiences, and those of my comrades in arms have been called into question, and I believe that it is important to stand by my writing under my real name.”

As the results of the Army investigation now shows, those who led the charge in questioning the “events” that Beauchamp claimed to have “witnessed” – from the Weekly Standard online’s Michael Goldfarb, to embedded journalist J.D. Johannes, to writers at military and conservative websites BlackFive, RedState, the Mudville Gazette, and Ace of Spades – were correct to do so.

At the time that Beauchamp “outed” himself, The New Republic, which had published – and repeatedly stood behind – Beauchamp’s diaries, annotated Beauchamp’s “coming out” post with a statement of its intention “to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail” of the Baghdad Diarist’s stories, adding:

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.

As the Army’s investigation began in July, TNR finally began backing off of its staunch support of Beauchamp, running an editorial in which it was admitted that there were some inaccuracies in the original stories – but in which the editors also claimed to have corroborated two of the three incidents Beauchamp wrote about in their entirety.

Unfortunately, the magazine’s editors apparently expected to have their word taken that, this time, what they were saying was accurate. The tactic is, unfortunately, very typical, and demonstrates the arrogance possessed by a Fourth Estate which sees it as their duty to serve as a watchdog over all others, while being unwatchable themselves. As has been seen before, when called on a story that, like the so-called “Haditha massacre,” was simply “too good to be [thoroughly] checked,” TNR backed off a bit, made a few minor concessions, and then pulled the classic Dan Rather-esque “those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the major thrust of our report” – which, of course, is far from accurate. As my colleague at RedState.com, Dan McLaughlin, mentioned upon reading TNR’s editorial, they “have made concessions on the very things that people flagged as factually unlikely.”

TNR’s defenses were propped up by many on the left who, rather than recognizing a ship sinking under the weight of its own disregard for the truth, sought to serve as Dutch Boys and to plug up holes with further obfuscation, and by casting aspersions on those who simply sought the truth of the matter. Pundits and bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, John Cole, and Matthew Yglesias took their turns defending TNR, attacking those who questioned the veracity of Beauchamps stories, screaming “Abu Ghraib!” as a diversion, and claiming victory on the whole when the most minute of details – like the fact that Beauchamp was an actual American soldier – was shown to be true.

Unfortunately – as the bombshell results of the Army’s internal investigation show – every one of them was played for a fool, both by Beauchamp and by an editorial staff at The New Republic who knew very early on that what they had published was patently false.

It turns out that, on the first day of the investigation – the same day that Scott Thomas Beauchamp was telling TNR’s readers that he was “willing to stand by the entirety of my articles for the New Republic using my real name” – he was also signing an official affidavit admitting that all three of his articles in The New Republic were exaggerations and contained falsehoods.

In other words, as TNR was “re-reporting” their stories the next week, and defending Beauchamp’s accuracy and integrity, his stories had already been officially disavowed – by Beauchamp himself – for a week.

To add insult to insult, the Army’s official report on the stories so vigorously defended by TNR did not simply cast doubt on details of Beauchamp’s diaries – it blew holes in them. Major John Cross, the investigating officer, found “that Private Beauchamp desired to use his experiences to enhance his writing and provide legitimacy to his work possibly becoming the next Hemingway,” as well as:

That Private Beauchamp is not a credible source for making the allegations that he wrote about in “Shock Troops”… He admitted that he was not an eyewitness to the targeting of dogs and only saw animal bones [not a human skull, which he morbidly claimed that a comrade wore under his helmet for the rest of the day] during the construction of Combat Outpost Ellis… . Combined with the piece of fiction that he wrote on 8 May 2006 on his blog…, I find that Private Beauchamp takes small bits of truth and twists and exaggerates them into fictional accounts that he puts forth as the whole truth for public consumption.

(Emphasis added.) Cross also recommended “that the unit send Private Beauchamp for a mental health consultation.”

So TNR and its staunchest allies went to the mat for a source and for stories that turned out to be false – and for what? Simply, it would appear, for a chance to finally show the American military (thanks to the words of one of its own) as being what they already thought them to be – uncouth, brigandish, and inhumane people who have been irrevocably damaged, both in soul and psyche, by Bush’s awful war.

If one approaches this from that angle, and sees that TNR and its allies had been waiting for just this opportunity – an opportunity not only to validate their deeply-held views of the American military, but also to break the story of a scandal in which US soldiers were the culprits – then it becomes very easy to understand why it was so important to run these articles without attempting further fact-checking (an exercise which ran the risk of showing these too-good-to-be-true tales to be exactly that).

The decision on the part of the magazine’s editors to keep covering for Beauchamp even after he had recanted his stories was an unfortunate one. That decision became inexcusable, though, after a September 6 conference call between Beauchamp and representatives from TNR, in which he not only refused to comment on their repeated pressings about whether or not the stories were, in fact, accurate, but also was no longer willing to work with them in any way to help clear TNR’s name. Said Beauchamp:

…this is the last statement I’m giving any media outlet…my final statement is thus is spun out of control in a way that has distracted me from my job and more importantly distracted me from helping protect the people around me. The fellow soldiers around me who I do love and respect and that’s way more important to me and it requires an amount of dedication that I can’t give to it if I’m caught up in all this. So, I’m going to have to…and I know it’s going to hurt my wife [a TNR employee] and I regret that, but it’s something that I have to do because it’s my job, and I swore to do it. And it’s more important to protect the people around me than to…be involved in all of this.

Already damaged by the Stephen Glass scandal, The New Republic has been left in an exorbitantly embarrassing position by another trusted writer (and the husband of one of its own researchers), who played them for fools, admitting under oath that his articles were fabrications at the same time that he was reasserting to their faces the veracity of his every word. They exacerbated that by refusing to back down one single bit, or to commission any investigation into the veracity of Beauchamp’s works, even after very obvious holes began being poked into it. Said Peter Scoblic, TNR’s executive editor, in the September 6 conference call with Beauchamp: “I’ve reviewed the reporting…and I’ve got to tell you – I can understand why there are questions being raised about the piece.”

However, Scoblic did nothing to act on that realization – and, as a result, TNR’s credibility has taken yet another massive body blow. How much longer can good-conscienced writers bear to remain with a publication whose ship of credibility has gone down by the mast? How much longer will TNR’s readership remain in place, now that they have been shown again that what is presented in the magazine’s pages cannot necessarily be trusted? How much longer with TNR’s defenders allow it to escape the savagery of their own quills, which had so recently been reserved for savaging those who dared question the magazine’s claims – lest they be savaged themselves for so willingly following Scoblic, Foer, and Beauchamp off of the cliff of truth like so many insignificant lemmings?

Wishful thinking, perhaps. It is, unfortunately, altogether more likely that those who published and defended such fallacious accounts will simply shrink back into the shadows, choosing rather to lie in wait for the next opportunity to snare the American military, and the administration which they so despise, with another story which presents itself as being “too good to be checked.”

This one, though, is over – as is The New Republic’s reputation with all who are not blind followers of the misinformation that they have proven themselves not only capable of publishing, but willing to defend.