by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
T<\/b><\/span>he New Republic<\/i>\u00a0magazine recently ran into big trouble for publishing a first-person account of military savagery in Iraq. The author, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, used the pseudonym “Scott Thomas” to write of the debasement of war that he claims he saw in the cauldron of Iraq.<\/p>\n But it was soon discovered that one of the gruesome “wartime” incidents the private described \u2014 the author, desensitized by war, mocking a disfigured woman \u2014 took place in Kuwait\u00a0before<\/i>\u00a0his unit actually went into Iraq.<\/p>\n And when, post-publication,\u00a0The New Republic<\/i>\u00a0rechecked Beauchamp’s other suspicious anecdotes and assured its readers they were at least still accurate, the magazine would not identify the sources it used for verification.<\/p>\n The result of keeping these sources anonymous is that the reading public still can’t believe the once-anonymous Beauchamp’s account \u2014 or what his New Republic editors are now saying.<\/p>\n Anonymity on rare occasions may have a place in protecting whistleblowers or honest journalistic sources fearful of retaliation. But lately it is being misused in a variety of different contexts to destroy people and institutions \u2014 and as a way for authors of all sorts to avoid responsibility for what they write.<\/p>\n Not long ago, a nameless CIA operative published “Imperial Hubris,” a scathing analysis of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Eventually, word spread that the author, called “Anonymous” on the book jacket, was one Michael Scheuer.<\/p>\n In the meantime, both the Washington press corps and the CIA had played a sort of coy game of gossiping in private about the real identification of the author while publicly maintaining the mystique of an anonymous authoritative insider whose station was too high up and too covert to be disclosed.<\/p>\n But once Scheuer was publicly identified, the world could examine what he had to say on various topics. People weren’t impressed \u2014 especially by Scheuer’s assertions in interviews that Osama bin Laden\u00a0shouldn’t be identified as a\u00a0terrorist , and that the Holocaust Museum in Washington was a means to make Americans feel guilty about the Holocaust.<\/p>\n M<\/span>ore often, the misuse of anonymity involves journalists’ “unnamed” sources. Michael Isikoff wrote a story in 2005 for\u00a0Newsweek<\/i>, apparently based on an anonymous but “solid, well-placed” source, who told of callous military guards at Guantanamo flushing a Koran down the toilet.<\/p>\n The account turned out to be false, but the supposed blasphemy may have caused riots in the Islamic world \u2014 and untold damage to the prestige of the U.S. military at a time of war. Yet Isikoff never identified from whom he got such a tale or why he rushed to print something so explosive based on evidence so shaky.<\/p>\n Then, of course, there was CBS anchorman Dan Rather, whose career imploded over the use of anonymity. An unnamed source had given CBS News a supposedly authentic memo showing that George W. Bush had weaseled out of many National Guard obligations. But despite Rather’s insistence that the anonymous source was reliable, bloggers easily demonstrated how the document was an abject forgery.<\/p>\n What can we learn from all this \u2014 while savoring the irony of authors and journalists fudging on their own ethical standards\u00a0as they race to uncover the supposed ethical lapses of their government officials?<\/p>\n If an “I accuse” author like Scott Thomas Beauchamp or Michael Scheuer avoids using his own name, or reporters like Dan Rather or Michael Isikoff won’t name a source for a potentially history-changing story, there is often a good suspicion why: they apparently don’t look forward to questions about why \u2014 and how exactly \u2014 they wrote what they wrote.<\/p>\n Instead, anonymity gives them free rein as judge and jury, exempt from cross-examination. This “trust me” practice goes against the very grain of the American tradition of allowing the aggrieved the right to face his accusers.<\/p>\n Sometimes the result of this increasing abuse is more lasting damage to the authors than any temporary discomfort of fending off cross-examination. Beauchamp is now a disgraced storyteller.\u00a0The New Republic<\/i>\u00a0has lost whatever credibility it had regained after its embarrassment several years ago of printing false stories by Stephen Glass, the lying reporter who likewise used anonymous sources.<\/p>\n Scheuer sounds goofier each time he gives an interview \u2014 and the credibility of his once anonymously written “Imperial Hubris” shakier and shakier. Isikoff has never quite recovered his journalistic reputation. We all know what happened to Dan Rather.<\/p>\n And all this nemesis\u00a0is as it should be. Anonymity is a vicious but seductive Siren that lures its heedless listeners to shipwreck on the shoals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The New Republic\u00a0magazine recently ran into big trouble for publishing a first-person account of military savagery in Iraq. The author, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, used the pseudonym “Scott Thomas” to write of the debasement of war that he claims he saw in the cauldron of Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[755],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Vj","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3778,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-pseudo-histories-of-the-iraq-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":3553,"position":0},"title":"The Pseudo-Histories of the Iraq War","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 17, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Three recent books about the \"fiasco\" in Iraq \u2014\u00a0Cobra II\u00a0by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor,\u00a0State of Denial\u00a0by Bob Woodward and just plainFiasco\u00a0by Tom Ricks \u2014 have attracted a lot of attention, and sales. All three well-written expos\u00e9s repeat the now well-known argument that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2006"","block_context":{"text":"October 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/october-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10417,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10417-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":3553,"position":1},"title":"\u201cPushing Back\u201d Iran by Reuel\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cPushing Back\u201d Iran by Reuel Marc Gerecht Image credit:Poster Collection, US3436, Hoover Institution Archives. On both the left and the right, there is a consensus in Washington that the United States needs to \u201cpush back\u201d against the Islamic Republic\u2019s nefarious actions in the Levant, Iraq, and Yemen. The clerical regime\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1695,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/so-what-happened-to-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":3553,"position":2},"title":"So What Happened to Iraq?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 19, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Six years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Ayad Allawi, then prime minister of the appointed Iraqi Interim Government, was a puppet of the United States. Last month, though, the Allawi-led Iraqiya alliance won, by a narrow margin, more parliamentary seats than any\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4388,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/footnote\/","url_meta":{"origin":3553,"position":3},"title":"Footnote","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 18, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Criticism and correction on numbers of protesters in Holland by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Recently, in response to \u201cRemembering World War II,\u201d readers from the Netherlands wrote to suggest that my reference to \"thousands\" of Dutch protesting President Bush's arrival in Holland was in error, and contradicted their own\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2005"","block_context":{"text":"May 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/may-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":543,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iraqi-irony\/","url_meta":{"origin":3553,"position":4},"title":"Iraqi Irony","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Amid all the stories about the ongoing violence in Syria, the most disturbing is the possibility that President Bashar Assad could either deploy the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that his government claims it has, or provide it to terrorists. 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