Beauchamp has not done much, or anything, to corroborate his original claims. However, nothing about the Army’s “investigation” demonstrates that they are false. The above interview adds nothing to the case, and proves nothing, even taking it at face value.
What the Army has done is produce statements from a number of people who could have been charged with war crimes for the actions described in the article, and who then swore that they did not engage in those actions. Hardly surprising.
The interview above notes only that fact. It does not demonstrate that no troops in the unit engaged in the described behavior, or even, as you claim, that the investigator “was unable to find anyone” who did. It claims only that he did not find anyone who admitted it, among those he questioned. That’s far from the same thing. The fact that he “has seen no evidence of any sort of fact checking” means nothing. As he notes, he has no information about TNR’s internal procedures, and at any rate their fact checking would hardly have included the brigade administrative officer. By their own description, it included a number of line troops who either participated in the events or heard the admissions of those who did – a claim the investigator never addresses.
In short, this interview consists only of the Army investigator’s assertion that he is satisfied by the denials of the few troops he spoke to. It does not demonstrate that the investigation was exhaustive or that those denials were true, and it has nothing to do with TNR’s fact-checking or lack thereof.
There seems to be little support for Beauchamp’s article, and that is suspicious. But accepting the Army’s own statement that it did nothing wrong, and, ludicrously, touting that as “proof” resulting from an “investigation”, is more gullible than believing Beauchamp’s assertions – which, as A.N. Feldzamen points out, report events similar to those that have been unquestionably documented in the past and are at least plausible for that reason.
