I am assuming that 469 is the post where Grampa Dave posted John S.'s report of Majied's confession.
I disagree with you that that was a turning point. Let me explain. To some of us it was crystal clear from Majied's statements in the first Elliot Minor story that Majied was, shall we say, embellishing the truth. (It jumped out at me, and it was probably even clearer to Travis than to me). There's embellishing (i.e. anything written by Marcinko) and embellishing (complete fabricated bullshit). Majied was in Category #2 for anyone familiar even broadly with SEALs and their Vietnam operations. He could have been no living SEAL because the only SEALs that cam close to five years in Vietnam are very well known individuals -- in a small circle.
Let me give you an example. You meet me in the corner bar. If I were to claim that I played for the Detroit Tigers, say, in the 1980s, and had a .366 batting average, some folks might be impressed. But anyone familiar with baseball statistics or the Tigers would know I was lying. Indeed, that claim is farfetched enough that anyone tuned into baseball would immediately get suspicious and check it out. If I said, "my name is now swami Brahmaputra cause I joined the Hare Krishnas, and I won't tell you what my old name was," while I may not have proved I was a phony to a criminal court standard, I am certainly at the preponderance-of-evidence point of civil jurisprudence, and way over the line of common sense.
That is analogous to the situation here. Majied's claims were outlandish.
I have run into wannabees everywhere -- seen people with bogus MIT doctorates in business, caught guys in the military wearing extra badges (a career-ending screwup, that), met more "fighter pilots" and "astronauts" in aviation than there ever were. The worst kind is when somebody dies and the family tries to authenticate these kind of claims that the guy's kids grew up believing. I don't know why people do this: my best guess is too much TV and a feeling of inadequacy about their achievements, in extreme cases, and in a mild case like Majied, well, he was just trying to lend some authority to his statement, I suppose. Some guys can't resist, in retirement, making a good career better.
Why did he do that? The guy is a Navy vet and that's good enough for me, but he had to make that statement, a statement that was as obviously false to some of us as if he had said he was Pope, and then we had a duty to respond.
I do agree that John S. of LeanWrite handled it well. Majied has claimed that he has gotten abuse by phone, and anybody who did that handled it all wrong. He is still a human being and deserves respect for what he has done, as long as he retracts claims of things he has not done. I don't believe anyone has overturned (or even tried to) his claim of retiring from the Navy as an E-9 Master Chief, quite an achievement in itself.
Lesson to the rest of us: resist the craving for an "improved" resume. There are people out there who know.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
The baseball star analogy is perfect.