The New Republic's "Jayson Blair" moment?

The current issue of The New Republic contains an article called "Shock Troops," which purports to detail barbaric behavior by American troops in Iraq. The author, writing under a pseudonym, claims to have been one of those soldiers. The article itself is behind a subscriber wall at the TNR site, so I won't see the whole article until I pick up a copy, but here's one incident as reported in The Weekly Standard's coverage:

About six months into our deployment, we were assigned a new area to patrol, southwest of Baghdad. We spent a few weeks constructing a combat outpost, and, in the process, we did a lot of digging. At first, we found only household objects like silverware and cups. Then we dug deeper and found children’s clothes: sandals, sweatpants, sweaters. Like a strange archeological dig of the recent past, the deeper we went, the more personal the objects we discovered. And, eventually, we reached the bones. All children'€™s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades. We found pieces of hands and fingers. We found skull fragments. No one cared to speculate what, exactly, had happened here, but it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.

One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit. As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included.

The private wore the skull for the rest of the day and night. Even on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull. He observed that he was grateful his hair had just been cut—since it would make it easier to pick out the pieces of rotting flesh that were digging into his head.

If this and the other events are true, then that unit has a serious problem: those idiots need to be punished, and their NCOs and officers need it for failing to maintain discipline.

IF they're true.  The author of The Weekly Standard piece, Michael Goldfarb, raises serious questions about the veracity of the accounts, as do several people who've written to him. For example, a California Army National Guard lieutenant colonel writes:

The skull skull-cap? From a little kid? Walking around with it on for a day? Nonsense - sounds like that scene in "Jarhead" with the corpses. And apparently there were no officers or NCOs around for over 24 hours. Right. Most of my junior enlisted boys would have slapped him silly.

I'm not Pollyana, and ugly things happen. But my trial lawyer and my colonel BS detectors are both flashing red. To believe this crap, you have to want it to be true. 

If this guy saw improper conduct, he needs to report it up his chain of command. No senior guy is going to look the other way and let his career go down the toilet protecting wounded-abusing, dog-killing kid corpse desecrators.

I'm suspicious, too. There are of course jerks in every military, but these sound to me like stories made up by someone who read M*A*S*H or Catch-22, or thought Oliver Stone's war films were documentaries. And then there's TNR's shielding of the author behind a pseudonym: anonymous sources always set off my BS detector -- it's too easy to say whatever you want when you don't have to take responsibility for it. 

Which leads back to The New Republic's role in this. Was this rigorously fact-checked before publication? With charges this serious, I would hope so. Or is this a case of another left-liberal publication's desire to paint the war in a bad light being so strong that they'll run with a story that fits their preferred narrative, with only the most cursory supervision? 

To be honest, my bet is on the latter. There have been too many occasions in recent years when the press has been shown to be far more concerned with selling a scandal than with the truth -- or to be peddling deliberate falsehoods. Aside from the Jayson Blair fiasco mentioned in the subject line, try searching Eason Jordan, "fake but true," fauxtography, and "BBC apologizes."

The New Republic's long been on my short list of quality political magazines, pushing a mild left-liberalism that's at least occasionally sensible. But, if these charges turn out to be fantasies, they'll have descended to the level of the New York Times.

LINKS: More at Hot Air, Op-For, Black Five, The Corner, Power Line, and Little Green Footballs.