The “Scott Thomas” Lies

I’m real late to this party but wanted to chime in a bit with kind of a rundown of the story from the beginning.  The story I’m talking about is the "Scott Thomas" reporting done from Iraq….or that is what we are supposed to believe anyways.  As I’m sure you know it all started with this story by Scott:

We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.

"Man, I can’t eat like this," he said.

"Like what?" I said. "Chow hall food getting to you?"

"No–with that fucking freak behind us!" he exclaimed, loud enough for not only her to hear us, but everyone at the surrounding tables. I looked over at the woman, and she was intently staring into each forkful of food before it entered her half-melted mouth.

"Are you kidding? I think she’s fucking hot!" I blurted out.

"What?" said my friend, half-smiling.

"Yeah man," I continued. "I love chicks that have been intimate–with IEDs. It really turns me on–melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses . . . ."

"You’re crazy, man!" my friend said, doubling over with laughter. I took it as my cue to continue.

"In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? ‘IED Babes.’ We could have them pose in thongs and bikinis on top of the hoods of their blown-up vehicles."

My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.

~~~

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.

~~~

know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America–providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle’s tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver’s hatch. One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book. The second kill was a straight shot: A dog that was lying in the street and bathing in the sun didn’t have enough time to get up and run away from the speeding Bradley. Its front half was completely severed from its rear, which was twitching wildly, and its head was still raised and smiling at the sun as if nothing had happened at all.

Which has caused a bit of a firestorm throughout the blogosphere.  The depiction of sadistic brutality reminds many of us of a certain Winter Soldier and many called bullshit. 

Now this was last Thursday.  By Friday the emails began coming into the various milblogs from troops stationed at the same camp as this "Scott Thomas" supposedly was stationed at.  The first email hit Blackfive:

Sir,

I am and have been an avid reader of your milblog for many years and wanted to answer your request for help with the entry about the TNR article ‘Shock Troopers’.

I am one of the many thousand American soldiers at FOB Falcon.  We do have an IA Battalion here, but they are on a completely isolated portion of the camp.  I don’t mean to contradict your trusted source about the ownership of this place, but I’m sitting in my barracks right now typing this email here on the FOB.  Without naming units or giving specific personnel counts, I can assure you this is definitely an American post.

In the 11 months I’ve been here I’ve never once seen a female contractor with a burned face.  In a compact place like this with only one mess hall I or one of my guys would certainly have noticed someone like that.  There are a few female contractors, I think maybe a dozen, but none fit the horrific description given in that article.  Further, I’ve personally seen guys threatened with severe physical harm for making jokes of any kind about IED victims given the number of casualties all the units on this FOB have sustained.  It is not a subject we take lightly.  Gallows humor jokes do get told, but extremely seldom and never about anyone they actually know or are in the presence of.

Given the friends in the S-2 shop of my battalion and how often I talk to them about what’s going on in our AO and AI I can also tell you no reports whatsoever have been sent up – or down from MNCI – about a mass grave of any kind.  We find bodies all the time, sure, but graves?  None.

The part about running over the dog, in my opinion, is somewhat plausible, but I doubt the PL or CO of that individual would let them do it more than once if they valued the lives of their men at all.  The vehicles we drive are all top heavy and violent swerving to hit a dog is not advisable.

As for the human skull bit, I know that any NCO worth his salt, and most certainly a PSG or higher, would literally crush a Joe for taking his ACH helmet off in the middle of a mission only to put a portion of human skull on his head.

You’ve probably received multiple emails about all this already, but I just wanted to help crush the bullshit surrounding this story.  Thank you for your milblog and for all you do for us overseas.

So this guy has been at FOB Falcon for 11 months and has not seen nor heard of a burned female soldier.  So we know that at least since August of 2006 no burned woman. 

Then Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard started receiving some responses:

I was based at Falcon last year for six months with the 101st Airborne. I never saw a woman who fits Thomas’s description. That’s not conclusive since I haven’t been there for almost eight months. But I can say this. The dining facility at Falcon is not large (maybe 200 yards by 50 yards) and the tables are very close together. I cannot remember eating a meal without having an officer or a senior NCO in earshot — none of whom would tolerate such cruelty for a moment. Moreover, Falcon isn’t that large and the faces become familiar quickly. One gets used to and comes to know everyone pretty easily.

I can’t definitely refute the mass-grave or dog-chasing stories, but both sound implausible. Again, I can’t imagine an officer and several NCOs all letting a junior soldier act in such a manner. Nor can I imagine soldiers driving so cavalierly, not just because of the IED risk, but also the danger of damage to a vehicle. The driver would have to repair the damage, which cuts deeply into their sleep-IM-video game time.

Now this guy doesn’t say when he started his rotation at FOB Falcon but he does say for six months last year.  So even if he was there during the same time as the first email above that adds up to 14 months and no burned female.

More:

I served 4 years in the Army, including service in Desert Storm, and was in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle battalion, the 1/9 Cav Regiment out of Ft. Hood.

As with most things written by the the traitorous media, the Shock Troop story is a collection of lies, complied by sissy leftist who don’t even do enough research to make their lies believable. Sort of like the story of flushing a Koran down a toilet.

I’ve been in the drivers seat of a Bradley, and as Stuart Koehl says, you have terrible visibility on the right hand side. The engine is over there, and it’s like trying to put a Ford Excursion in a parking space for a compact car.

The closest you can see on the right side is probably 15 feet away, and that would be with the seat all the way up, and the hatch fully opened back. No trooper is going to ride down a road in Iraq sitting that high, he’d be a sitting duck for a sniper. They either roll with the hatch fully shut, looking through the periscopes for visibility (think driving a sub down the street), or at most, with the hatch at half-cock, where you look though a slit (think sitting in a trash can with the lid on your head).

You’re not going to be able to see a dog over there, so that’s one lie.

Another lie is running things over with the Bradley. Take a look at the front it. The first thing that sticks out is the tracks, which are also the most vulnerable part of it. If you went around running into buildings or concrete barriers with your Bradley, you’d throw a track, and after your BC (Bradley commander) put his boot up your ass for being a dumb-ass, you’d spend the rest of your tour demoted down to sitting in the dreaded side turret jump seat between the driver and the rest of the crew, breathing diesels fumes, mixed in with BO and MRE gas from the dismount team.

Other lies – how does a dog sit in the road and get run over by an armored vehicle? How many dogs have you ever seen run over like this? Dogs aren’t dumb, they get out of the way of a 23 ton armoured vehicle. The Bradley is not a Formula 1 race car either – the usual rolling speed is about 20-30 MPH. The article makes it sound like the BFV (Bradley Fighting Vehicle) is some sort of Klingon warship with a clocking device and a sound silencer, capbale of sneaking up on sleeping dogs and running them over before they can get up and move the 2 feet they’d have to get out of the way.

Then there’s the story of a dog getting run over, with the two sections twitching around. Notice how it’s written for shock value, with some lie about the head just staying there. The tracks of a Bradley are pretty wide – it’s not a tire, it’s a track. That would have to be one damn big stray dog to be cut in two by a Bradley, and still have identifiable parts on either side. Besides, how did he know what happended after he had run it over? Did he stop, get out of his vehicle, and walk over to it to take a look? You don’t have real view mirror on a BFV.

Ian Kress
US Army, 1989-1993
MOS 11H (Infantry – Anti-Armor)
1/9th Cav Regiment, 1st Cav Division, Ft Hood.

And:

From the description of the dog-killing incident, the Bradley driver slowed the vehicle down and tried to do a skid turn. When you turn a tracked vehicle like a Bradley, you do it through differential braking–you slow down the inside track and accelerate the outside track, so the vehicle skids through the turn. Anyone who has ever seen it done will tell you it would be just about impossible (a) to catch a dog like that (dogs have better reflexes than tracked vehicles).

But even assuming that this guy was the world’s greatest track driver, I still think the story as presented is pure BS. According to the story, the dog is on the right side of the vehicle, because the driver turns right to run it down.

I am looking now at a 1/32nd scale model of a Bradley, and I can say with some assurance that the driver’s hatch is on the left side of the vehicle. Immediately to the driver’s right is the engine compartment, the cooling grill of which rises above the level of the driver’s hatch, making it impossible to see anything on the right side of the vehicle. Even if the driver was head-out, he still couldn’t see anything to his right below the level of the top deck (all armored vehicles have significant blind spots close in, which is why they need dismounts to protect them from RPG guys in foxholes). So, if, as the blog says, the driver "twitched" the Bradley to the right, he must have used extrasensory perception in order to catch the dog. Because there’s no way he knew the dog was even there.

In my opinion, the whole thing is a shaggy dog story.

And:

I find this all highly dubious. To say the least.

A guy mocking the wounded in a chow hall? Let’s just leave out the fact this mystery woman may have been a colonel or a senior NCO who would have dropped the bomb on him, for all he knew. "Chuckles" is liable to get his butt kicked all over the chow hall pulling a stunt that. I’ve never heard of anything like that and can’t imagine it happening in public. Gallows humor off in some corner – hey, people can be idiots – but no one’s a big enough idiot to do that.

Hunting dogs in a Bradley? Most any squad leader would "re-focus" that guy on his job. And most of our guys like dogs (I used to have to order guys to get rid of dogs they adopted – disease prevention, and it broke my heart). Again, that’s the kind of stunt that would get a guy clobbered.

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.

Either these things didn’t happen, or this guy is as much of a slimeball as his pals. I’m betting both are true.

Kurt A. Schlichter
Lieutenant Colonel, Infantry, California Army National Guard
Commanding 1st Squadron, 18th Cavalry and Rear Element, 1st Battalion, 160th Infantry

Then Steven Spruiell wonders how and why some soldiers would change a flat tire in the middle of a "excrement canals":

"Scott Thomas" has written three pieces for The New Republic. In the first of these, he refers to a neighborhood in Baghdad he says all the soldiers call "Little Venice" because the sewage pipes are always broken, flooding the streets with canals of sewage.

~~~

But then there’s this odd detail in the story. Thomas writes that, as he and several other soldiers were changing a tire on their Humvee, "a short but unusually healthy-looking Iraqi kid approached out of my periphery wearing an Adidas hat and snowboarding t-shirt, his lower torso swallowed by one of Little Venice’s excrement canals."

So this kid allegedly approached the men changing the flat through sewage that came up to his waist. Wouldn’t waist-deep sewage make changing a flat tire a little difficult? Was this Humvee crew equipped with scuba gear?

Michael Goldfarb received an email which would place this tire changing story into doubt:

HMMWVs [Humvees] are equipped with a special type of "run flat" tire–there is a solid rubber doughnut wrapped around the rim inside the pneumatic tire. If the inflatable gets punctured, the vehicle settles down on the run-flat insert, which allows it to be driven out of the battle area. The adjustable tire pressure system might keep the tire inflated if it has only a small hole, but its real purpose is to match ground pressure to the road surface for maximum traction. HMMWV tires are huge, heavy, and most vehicles don’t carry a spare. A drop-down spare tire carrier has only recently become available as an option on Up-Armored HMMWVs.

Rich Lowry receives an email disputing the fact that a Saddam era gravesite would have a skull with hair still attached to it (as "Scott Thomas" claims that it did have).

Now imagine what that looks like — a "perfectly preserved" piece of human skull that has been buried for no fewer than five years and perhaps many more, deep in the ground in a desert climate and surrounded by bare bone fragments. Form a mental image. Now ask yourself:

Does that piece of skull have hair attached to it? CAN it? Hair isn’t woven directly into a human skull. It’s attached by roots to flesh, which is in turn wrapped around the skull (as I understand it) and held in place by a combination of muscles and tendons (which attach muscle to bone). Is it possible that after such a passage of time, in such conditions, tendons were so well preserved that hair was still clinging by its roots to chunks of flesh that remained attached to the skull? Surrounded by other bones that were NOT attached to any flesh, as evidenced by the ease with which the "witness" was able to identify them like so many verses of the Hokey Pokey?

He also received an email from a person who worked in Doug Feith’s office at the time of these supposed incidents calling the assertion that the whole military camp was placed on top of a mass gravesite absurd:

After the initial invasion, massive resources were put into finding and identifying mass graves.  We actively searched these things out – even putting satellites and ground maneuver units to work to help find them.  It was a HUGE effort.  Few remember, and few American reporters ever cared, but uncovering Saddam’s atrocities was important business in Iraq.  And it was big news for the Iraqis. We made sure to publicize all of the mass graves and to preserve them.  It was not only a humanitarian and PR issue, but a legal one (we were preserving evidence for the court cases that would inevitably come).  Without question, the military would have had standing orders to report something like this.  Not to be too crude, but this would have been a major find. 

Confederate Yankee also disputes the portion of a previous article done by "Scott Thomas" in which a square backed shell casing is described:

Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.

Many people have keyed in on the fact that no Glock pistol (or any modern mass-produced commercial or military firearm, for that matter) has ever fired a 9mm cartridge that had a square case rim as "Thomas" so poorly and inaccurately wrote here. What Thomas was ineptly trying to describe is that the striker of Glock pistols can leaved a squared mark on the primer of a fired shell, as opposed to the more common rounded edges of marks of firing pins of most other pistols.

But far more damning than Thomas’ incompetence is the demonstrably false assertion he made that "the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police."

Glock pistols have been on the commercial market for decades, and are quite common worldwide. Glocks are a common and favored handgun on the Iraqi black market:

Glock pistols were also easy to find. One young Iraqi man, Rebwar Mustafa, showed a Glock 19 he had bought at the bazaar in Kirkuk last year for $900. Five of his friends have bought identical models, he said.

There are literally dozens of stories of Glock pistols being recovered from insurgents, terrorists, and militiamen. They have been captured in cordon-and-search operations, in targeted raids, in weapons caches, and of course, from the dead and wounded in violent confrontations.

And Ray Robison has some compelling evidence that this writer, Scott Thomas, is in fact Clinton Hicks.  Hicks is a former soldier who has been attached to the anti-war crowd for some time telling sensational and shocking stories.  Dan Riehl doesn’t think it’s Hicks tho.

The Public Affairs officer at FOB Falcon has also chimed in:

Hey Matt:

Here are the facts as best I have established them, along with the actions I have taken here at Falcon.

1. I was notified of the New Republic blog entries yesterday (Friday) by documentarian JD Johannes, who had spent time with us as an embed in May. He was concerned about the reports, but also expressed doubt in their veracity. He provided the New Republic and Weekly Standard response to the blog entry links.

2. I was able to immediately refute the assertion that a mass graveyard of children’s skeletons was found; an event such as this would have been reported during the construction of Coalition Outpost Ellis, the only such COP that exists in the area the blogger described (rural, south of BIAP).

3. The stories of the burned woman and hitting dogs with Bradleys can’t be as decisively disputed, however, I have not encountered a woman matching that description at any time on Falcon since arriving here on 17 Feb. You would think that someone with such visible wounds would stand out in memorable fashion. This doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a visitor at some point, but I find the account of Soldiers mocking her dubious at best.

4. I immediately notified MAJ Lamb of MND-B PAO, who advised me to send him the link and pertinent information on the New Republic’s blog posts, which I did. He informed me of his intent to engage the CENTCOM blog team to see if they could take action, and at the very least, make them aware of the situation.

5. I contacted the only unit in our brigade that has Bradleys, 1-18 IN, and advised their XO of the situation, recommending that they talk to their Soldiers about Army values and the Warrior ethos, reminding them of the rules for blogging in uniform and also reminding them of integrity and telling the truth. The bottom line: If you put something out there you should be willing to put your name next to it and stand by it. That he and New Rpublic are insisting on anonymity is very telling here.

Per COL Boylan’s request, I have prepared the following:

1. There was no mass grave found during the construction of any of our coalition outposts in the Rashid District at any time. Such a discovery would have prompted an investigation and close attention paid at levels higher than ours to making sure that the victims were properly interred and attempts would have been made to determine their identities. It is difficult to fathom that a unit’s leadership would condone Soldiers disrespecting the remains of anyone in the fashion described.

2. Due to the threat of IEDs, our combat vehicles are driven professionally and in control at all times. To be driving erratically so as to hit dogs or other things would be to put the entire vehicle’s crew at risk and would be gross dereliction of duty by the noncommissioned officer or officer in charge of the vehicle. Drivers aren’t allowed to simply free-wheel their vehicles however they see fit, and they are *not* allowed to be moved anywhere with out a vehicle commander present to supervise the movement. Therefore- claims of vehicles leaving the roadways to hit animals are highly dubious, given the very real threat of IEDs and normal standards of conduct.

3. As for the alleged woman with severe burn scars, we have nobody matching that description here at FOB Falcon. As Soldiers, we practice the value of Respect: "Treat people as you want to be treated." If the blogger and his friends can’t live the Army value of respect, I have little doubt that someone around them who does would have made an on-the-spot correction. The Falcon dining facility is not a spacious one. Anyone being rude, loud or raucous calls immediate attention to himself. It is hard to fathom that anyone would be able to get away with such callous behavior without somebody intervening and stopping it from happening.

Major Kirk Luedeke
Public Affairs Officer
4th IBCT, 1st ID
DRAGONS

Through it all The New Republic (the site that published the "Scott Thomas" article) remained silent until Friday night when they said they were investigating but have already corroberated much of the story with others that were there.  Then the editor has the gall to say:

As the criticism mounts, Foer says he sees an ideological agenda.

“A lot of the questions raised by the conservative blogosphere boil down to, would American soldiers be capable of doing things like the things described in the diarist. The practical jokes are exceptionally mild compared to things that have been documented by the U.S. military. Conservative bloggers make a bit of a living denying any bad news that emanates from Iraq.”

Oh come on.  What?  Putting panties on a Iraqi prisoners head is comparable to mocking a burned female soldier, a soldier in which the writer supposedly has no idea the rank?  That’s comparable to a soldier putting a dead Iraqi’s skull onto his head and wearing it around all day? 

Oh, maybe that Koran flushing would be comparable but….that was a hoax also.

This story has so many holes in it that for this editor to defend it in this way is just pathetic.  His excuse smacks of the typical liberal mantra "We know our soldiers are bad people so it must be true," which would surprise no one.  The liberals have made a living out of ensuring every bit of bad news to come out of Iraq is heard loud and clear while anything good is smothered.

Now there are evil people in all walks of life but if your gonna write a story about such people doing things that shock people at least ensure that its plausible.  None of what this "Scott Thomas" has written is plausible, not from people who served in the same camp around the same time nor from people who know intimately the type of equipment he describes.

I can already smell 60 Minutes itching to cover this one….

Finally, JD Johannes at Outside The Wire thinks he is close to finding out who this Scott Thomas is and has it narrowed down to 100 people.

This is going to get interesting.

Curt

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