Bob Owens, the Confederate Yankee, has debunked another claim made by Private Beauchamp in his columns for the New Republic. This is from Beauchamp's second dispatch, titled "Dead of Night":
As we slowly started moving back toward the Humvee, we could hear the dogs filling in the space behind us. I turned around and saw their green eyes flashing in the deep shadow where we'd left the body. Part of me thought we should have shot the dogs or done something to keep them from eating the body, but what good would it have done? We only would have been exposing ourselves to danger longer than we needed to.
Back in the Humvee, Hernandez started talking to me without looking in my direction. "Man, I've never seen anything like that before," he said.
"What? A guy killed by a cop?" I asked.
"No, man, zombie dogs. That shit was wild," he said, laughing.
Something inside of me fought for expression and then died. He was right. What else was there to do now but laugh?
"I took his driver's license," I said.
"You did?" questioned Hernandez.
"Yeah. It said he was an organ donor."
We chuckled in the dark for a moment, and then looked out the window into the night. We didn't talk again until we were back at our base.
Owens sent a couple of quick emails and was able to discover that the Iraqi DMV does not, in fact, provide driver's with the option of donating their organs. Owens quotes from an exchange with Hassan Elsaadaoui, a CPATT liaison with the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad:
I think in the Iraqi or Muslim tradition they don't accept this practice of donating organs. Maybe in the future, it will be possible. There is no indication now on the back side of Iraqi driver's license. Also our medical system and doctors are not ready for this type procedure, because of the situation. They do not have the equipment and many of the very good doctors are now outside the country.
Owens has other experts saying the same thing...organ donation is not common in Iraq, and there is certainly no indication of organ donation status on the Iraqi driver's license. Go read the whole thing. Was Beauchamp's buddy just joking? Was the whole story a joke?
Update: Owens now wonders if the whole thing isn't a joke...I read it that way, too. But I think his update pretty much captures my sense of the thing:
Is Beauchamp merely making a joke above? I admittedly didn't read it that way, but it very well could be the case.
The first experience most of us had with Beauchamp was with his last article first, and his allegation that he verbally assaulted a burn victim. It doesn't seem much of a stretch from abuser of the burned to robber of the dead, so I took his comments at face value as a real claim.
I suppose that it is just an indication of just how little credibility TNR and Beauchamp have that it isn't easy to tell his joking fake claims from his sincere fake claims.
