Blackfive
Mudville Gazette
Op-For (and also here).
Haft of the Spear.
Bob Owens writes about his experience with Glocks and quotes Michael Yon, currently embedded with troops in Iraq.

(Since Lipscomb doesn't seem to understand how blogs work, I suggest he read the comments on the posts above, as well as the actual posts. On blogs, comments by knowledgeable readers often supply the most relevant information about a story.)

In addition to Yon, former embed Air Force vet Bryan Preston and current embed JD Johannes debunk the story. Michael Goldfarb also quotes Yon.

But Lipscomb isn't as impressed with reporting from the Sandbox as he is with calling the DOD or the Pentagon to talk to "someone with military experience."

Perhaps instead of trying get this kind of crap "fact-checked, to the extent possible" (whatever that means) some of these publications could actually take advantage of some expertise available right in their hometown in DC... It is just a local call away.

Many journalists use it all the time. It is called the Department of Defense.

Although Lipscomb doesn't link to the source of that quote, he's criticizing Franklin Foer defending his source to Howard Kurtz.

Foer said he and another editor have met "Thomas," whose identity the magazine is protecting to shield him against retaliation from his superiors. He said the soldier's three columns were fact-checked, to the extent possible, before publication, and that he is now trying to resolve the critics' objections "to my complete satisfaction."

But for either Foer or his critics, is a bland official statement from a DOD functionary preferable to painstaking debunking from a whole host of soldiers either now at, or just returned from, the front lines? Lipscomb lumps The New Republic and its critics together, when their approach to the story could not be more different.

Of course who would EVER expect a New Republic editor or a Weekly Standard editor to check with the Infantry School at Benning or the Armor School at Knox… or the Ordnance testing ground right there in Maryland which are responsible for the capabilities and adoption of weapons systems, when they could “fact check” with Google… or Wikipedia for that matter? . . . Where do they GET these kids? Doesn’t anyone know how to report and fact check a source with stories too good to be true anymore?

Okay, so fact-checking is in order. I challenge Lipscomb to find one source among the many I linked to who got their "facts" from Google or Wikipedia. The New Republic? We don't know yet.

Lipscomb also claims that

. . . days pass, until a blogger -- a Marine Reservist and a student at Columbia University in New York City, presently in Iraq interviewing the troops -- gets a Public Affairs officer in Iraq to reply courteously that the TNR piece is BS.

No disrespect to Matt Sanchez, who would probably defend his fellow soldiers against Lipscomb's disdain, but he posted on July 21st. Goldfarb's call for info was posted on July 18th, and within six hours he had responses from ten bloggers, of whom five are military, and responses kept pouring in the next day and the next, including emails from reporters embedded with the troops. That's what happened while "days passed." But nothing makes an impression on Thomas Lipscomb but "a Public Affairs officer in Iraq," who is open to charges by skeptics of the military that he is just giving the party line. I would think an "investigative journalist" wouldn't be content with that.

Major Kirk Luedeke, the Public Affairs Officer at FOB Falcon, responds to the charges with scrupulous care, but how did he get the news about the bogus stories in the first place? The supposedly childish Wikipedia-fan bloggers tipped him off:

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.

Once again, a professional journalist disses bloggers while displaying fewer investigative skills than they. I don't even pretend to be a blogger reporter, I'm more of an essayist. But I found all these links and composed this post in an hour - why couldn't Thomas Lipscomb?