ABC News has done its own reporting on the "Scott Thomas" mystery and has gotten the New Republic to go on record with some new information about their pseudonymous Baghdad Diarist.

According to reporter Marcus Baram, New Republic editor Frank Foer is "absolutely certain" that "Thomas" is a soldier currently serving in Iraq. Further, Foer claims to have "many, many data points to back that up," but Baram adds that an official military email address is not among them.

Foer also told Baram that the story was "rigorously fact-checked" before the magazine published it, and as evidence of that, Foer says,

"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."

As Riehl World View has already noted, "Thomas" wrote in the initial story that he "couldn't really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor." If this information was gathered beforehand, why wasn't it included in the piece? Also, when pressed on this matter more than a week ago now, Foer insisted to us that he did not know whether the woman was a soldier or a contractor. Now he says that confirming her status as a contractor was part of the fact-checking process that occurred prior to publication.

Finally, a fact-checking process that consists of sending the piece around to other reporters to make sure it "smelled good" is no fact-checking process at all. That the facts as presented by "Thomas" are within the realm of the possible is hardly enough information to support the charges "Thomas", and by extension the New Republic, have made.

At this point, the New Republic has released no more information about the incidents described in the piece than they did last Tuesday when we first raised these questions. As Foer said in yesterday's Times piece, "it’s very difficult for me to get them all on the phone to ask them the questions that I’d like to ask."

We wonder if it's possible that "Thomas" is screening his calls?