ABCNews.com has just posted a story about TNR’s Baghdad diarist:
Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic, said that he has met Thomas here in the States and that he is “absolutely certain” that he is a soldier in Iraq. “Not an ounce of doubt,” he told ABCNEWs.com. Asked about how he attempted to verify Thomas’ military credentials, Foer said, “I’ve got many, many data points to back that up” although one of those proofs didn’t include a military e-mail account.
As for the specific accounts in the stories, Foer said that the articles were rigorously fact-checked before they were published. “We showed the stories to people who’d been embedded in Iraq to make sure that it all smelled good. We talked to one of the members of his unit to confirm the woman, a female contractor. We talked to a medic who’d served in Iraq to make sure that a woman could be in an FOB. We spent a lot of time with him on the phone asking hard questions.”
One can imagine how that went:
FOER: … Right, okay, so in this part where you and your buddy are making fun of “IED girl,” you write that he “stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes.” Would it be fair to say that, in a sense, the pile of mashed potatoes is Iraq and the spoon is Bush’s illegal war?
THOMAS: Yeah, you could say that.
FOER: Perfect. Okay, just one more question. All this stuff about mocking the wounded and desecrating mass graves and running down dogs in your tanks and things… don’t get me wrong, this is great stuff, but some of us just had this nagging feeling like, you know, maybe it would be hard to get away with some of this stuff without an officer or somebody putting a stop to it, right?
THOMAS: Oh no. Even the officers have turned into numb psychopaths. It’s the senselessness. The senselessness of the war.
FOER: Gotcha. That makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up.