"The editors then ask Beauchamp to cancel scheduled interviews with the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK."

Why would these 'journalists' want to supress the news? Now they want to censor what the subject of a news story says and where he says it? Aren't they always telling us that 'we have a right to know'?

I'm on the second page of the first document, and I already feel if the leaker should ever disclose his or her ID, I'd like to buy them a beer. Or a brewery.

Bob Owens has done yeoman's work on this story from the beginning, and has been one of the few keeping the pressure on (or, at least keeping the story alive despite TNR's best efforts to ignore it in the hope it would fade away). I would have been disinclined to agree with his assessment on the future of Foer, Scoblic, and Zengerle, though - had it not been for the leak of the transcript.

You see, Confederate Yankee and a few other conservative commentators aside, there has been no great and swelling demand by TNR readers to get to the bottom of the story. Their liberal readers understand it was only another "fake-but-accurate" arrow in the sling of the anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-American media archers, and were perfectly willing to accept that. For the left, a lie exposed is always quickly forgotten as they MoveOn to the next lie. No big deal.

The transcript, however, must have come from the inside - and one suspects that, even on the inside of TNR, only the highest honchos were privy to its contents (their internal security has been tightened ever since they fired a staffer for "leaking" the pertinent fact that Beauchamp was MARRIED to a "TNR fact-checker").

Someone is feeling pressure from somewhere - perhaps a major donor threatened to bolt, or maybe the other Big Media types on the DC Cocktail Circuit were incensed that the CBS crew had to fall on their swords in 2004 while TNR seemingly just walked away from their own train wreck without so much as a bruised ego.

When the insiders with enough juice to HAVE a copy of the transcript begin to leak it, someone will have to go. And not a moment too soon, either.

They'll finger the leaker as someone without much power and can them as proxy.

I doubt it came from TNR. Most likely it came from someone in the army. Of course, if that's the case they can always try and shift the target to the bad leakers.

where is barney et. al. to insist that the stories are still true?

I gotta say, I feel a smidgen sorry for TNR in that beauchamp and his fiancee screwed them big time. I think they really are trying to get the truth out of beauchamp now so they can dismiss the stories or not. Obviously, they should have been more open from the start, and just said that they are trying to verify the stories, instead of saying that they already did. Actually, on second thought, screw them.

Totally agree--read the whole first installment with TNR editors--they have no ethics or morals.

They're trying to play Beauchamps wife against him, and they are trying to "manage" the story. They are asking him not to recant, even though they must realize it's a story full of bull.

These people are creepy.

And, they bought him a "lawyer" obviously to try to get him to shut up.

Unbelievable.

Pretty quite in trolldom.

I suspect a "fake, but accurate" defense soon...

Barney? Nogo? Brian? Hello?

*crickets*