Army Leaks Documents to Drudge
25 October 2007 9:33 am by Taylor Marsh
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Read
Howard Kurtz today?
Foer said the Army has refused to turn over supporting documents
in the case, despite a Freedom of Information Act request, and then “selectively
leaked” material to Drudge. In an e-mail to the magazine yesterday, Army
spokesman Maj. Kirk Luedeke said he was “surprised and appalled that
this information was leaked” and that the military would investigate.
This has been going on for quite a while, but yesterday it got a little murkier,
especially with the Army obviously “selectively leaking” documents
to Drudge. Here’s what he posted yesterday, in case you hadn’t seen it:
The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained internal documents from the investigation
of THE NEW REPUBLIC’S “Baghdad Diarist”, Scott Thomas Beauchamp,
an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance
from the Iraq War front.The documents appear to expose that once the veracity of Beauchamp’s diaries
were called into question, and an Army investigation ensued, THE NEW REPUBLIC
has failed to publicly account for publishing slanderous falsehoods about
the U.S. military in a time of war.
I’m no fan of TNR, especially once they endorsed Joe bomb-bomb-bomb Iran Lieberman
for president for 2004, but the
wingnuts are all a
twitter about this story and at the same time don’t care about the Army
leaking documents to Drudge very selectively. I can only imagine the contagion
of head explosions if the Army had leaked documents to me or some gigantic progressive group
blog. They’d be calling for us all to be waterboarded to get to the bottom of it.
It matters that the Army is offering Drudge information they’re not giving
to the people who are under investigation, even though both Drudge and TNR have
put in FOIA requests. Investigation is the least the Army should do. How about
a little transparency and treating both sides the same? The truth is the bottom
line in this story. But unfortunately we’re losing that thread with the latest revelations that the Army’s preferred souce is Matt Drudge.
