Marine who confessed to abuses lied to gain celebrity

St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Salt Lake Tribune ^ | 11/6/2005 | Ron Harris

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

WASHINGTON - For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who would listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Among his claims:
Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters.
Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head.
Tractor-trailers were filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery.

Massey's claims have gained him celebrity. Last month, Massey's book, Kill, Kill, Kill, was released in France. His allegations have been reported in nationwide publications such as Vanity Fair and USA Today, as well as numerous broadcast reports. Earlier this year, he joined the anti-war bus tour of Cindy Sheehan and he's spoken at Cornell and Syracuse universities, among others.

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey's claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn't.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and reporters from the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.

Massey, 34, was discharged in December 2003, shortly after returning from Iraq due to depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

He began turning up in the press and broadcast last spring with stories about military atrocities. Massey's primary thrust has been that Marines from his battalion - some of whom, he told a Minneapolis audience were ''psychopathic killers'' - recklessly shot and killed Iraqi civilians, sometimes, he said, upon orders from their commanders.

[VOA]

bump

[Diddle E. Squat]

FYI

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

No joke, just like Kerry. If this guy is such a wonderful human being with a conscience who is telling the truth, why didn't he refuse to shoot kids in the head and blow up people in their houses and all the other atrocities that supposedly happened? Instead, he's bitching about it after the "fact". He's breaded and fried no matter what he does now.

This is like Kerry and his supposed atrocities. Would you want a guy in the White House who gassed villages and burned little kids without question? If he's such a great guy, why didn't he do anything at the time? He's utterly trapped by his own words.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

A hundred bucks for a 2-CD set? Even cutting the price to fifty is a crock. Liberalism has formed a scum layer on his brain.

[nuconvert]

"The paper's editor resigned yesterday"

Interesting

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Some papers are picking up on it now (better late than never, I suppose). It's a good question, where were they before? The following Google search result is less than impressive. Meanwhile, he's still on the lecture circuit gettting paid to spread his garbage.

Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3441670

Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002606782_massey06.html

Salt Lake Tribune: Original posted article

Five years from now, he'll have blown through the money and be working at Winchell's Donuts. And he'll always have the first-hand knowledge that he is a scumbag liar. That's something he can never escape from. A million dollars is a pittance compared to that heap of trash on his character.

[Beckwith]

It's fuggin' Gomah!

[elli1]

Part of the problem is that lies get spun a in whole lot less time & effort than the job of debunking them requires.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Yep, the damage is already done and media scum have infinitely more power to smear and denigrate than they do to right the wrong, even if they really cared to do so. The hype is on page A1 above the fold, the retraction page is on A16 in the bottom corner, the size of a postage stamp.

[SmoothTalker]

He should be charged with treason.

[elli1]

Not just 'breaded & fried' but stoned, too.

Jimmy: Well, my daily life consists of having to take 6 different medications just to make it through the day. I have had to try and learn how to live my life with PTSD and so far it has not worked too well but it is getting better. I spend a lot of time with my wife who schedules my media requests and I work on writing my memoirs. At this point, I am just trying to take things one step at a time.

Jimmy & Jackie Massey Interview

I'd suggest that if he were to dispense w/ the lying, he would be able to cut back on some of the meds.

[Salamander]

He can be medicated.....:)


http://www.astonishedhead.com/images/OVOID_123.swf


[ya gotta follow the link to the flash movie]

[Eva]

This story was buried on about page 26 of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, despite their unrelentless coverage of Cindy Sheehan and the anti-war freaks.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Yeah, it's not easy to be a martyr. His depression is difficult to deal with, but not too difficult to interfere with him being a media attention whore. In a few years, when his 15 minutes are gone and he's working a crappy job, the anti-depressants will be replaced by beer and pot, which is cheaper than Ritalin and Prozac that he was prescribed for his "depression".

[bnelson44]

Send a note of thanks to Harris at rharris@post-dispatch.com and letters to the editor at letters@post-dispatch.com.

[Ultra Sonic 007]

I'm just shocked. Shocked I tells ya.

[freema]

Thank you.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

From the interview:

recruiting duty was giving him high blood pressure

Yeah, it's a real bummer to work 9-to-5 and go home every night while your fellow Marines are living in the field and getting 4 hours of sleep a night. Cry me a river, Jimbo.

If recruiting duty was kicking his ass, no wonder he played the depression/PTSD card to get out of Iraq.

Jimmy was eventually medi-vaced out of Iraq and diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Labeled as a conscientious objector by his commanders, Massey sought legal counsel and won his honorable discharge in December 2003.

Translation: Jimmy was a problem child from day one and the Marines got sick of dealing with him. A commander would rather do his job fighting a war than have to constantly babysit a chronic screwup who can't use the toilet without supervision.

America is becoming an increasingly militaristic society, where poor people have been encouraged to sign up as the front line. The bottom line is, for the Halliburtons and Enrons war is good, but for the poor and for all of the soldiers coming home, especially the ones coming home wounded, there’s not much of a future.

Yeah, that GI Bill for college and experience beyond McDonald's provides no future at all. A guy would have been better off working at a car wash after high school, eh, Jimmy? The military, like anything else in life, is what you make of it. You can continue a military career, step over to higher education, or you can be a disgruntled screwup who filches off all his problems on somebody else--like you, Jimmy.

My mother is a strict Southern Baptist woman and she instilled certain values into me. She taught me the difference between right and wrong and told me that I should always follow my gut and that I should stand up for what I believe in.

That's why I'm lying about killing kids and burning villages, and my stories of committing atrocities don't jibe with my supposed good values.

I saw charred bodies in vehicles that were clearly not military vehicles. I saw people dead on the side of the road in civilian clothes. As a matter of fact, I only remember seeing a couple of bodies in military uniform the whole time.

That's because terrorists don't wear uniforms, you freak.

The real war did not begin until they saw us murdering innocent civilians. I mean, they were witnessing their loved ones being murdered by US Marines. It’s kind of hard to tell someone that they are being liberated when they just saw their child shot or lost their husband or grandmother.

So the dancing in the streets that even CNN and MSNBC was showing was just a ruse, right Jimmy?

And here is a pic from April 2003. More people being raped and shot by the Marines:

Marines from Task Force Tarawa hand out needed food and supplies to Iraqi citizens near An Nasariyah, Iraq while in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Official U.S. Marine Corps photograph taken Lance Cpl. B.J. Nealy

DR: Was there any humanity in the military’s dealing with the Iraqi people?

Jimmy: That was not our purpose. Let me give you an example. We actually left all of the humanitarian MRE’s [Meals Ready to Eat] in Kuwait. We were supposed to give these out for relief, and we left them in Kuwait.

So what is this, Jimmy, boxes of sawdust? It makes a hell of a lot of sense to ship MREs 12,000 miles so that they can sit in warehouses in Kuwait. Let me guess, the water bottles are actually battery acid.

Children would follow U.S. soldiers everywhere, Ken Cabral said, asking for MREs (meals ready to eat) or pens and paper. "Anything we had, they'd want," he said. When Mr. Cabral began to pose for this picture, more and more children kept crowding in, he said.

Army Spc. Kirsten Frederickson, 308th Civil Affairs Battalion, surprises an Iraqi girl when she removes her kevlar helmet near the Iraqi town of An Najaf. "Just look at the faces of these little girls. When I take my helmet off and show them I'm a woman, their eyes open wide. I'm showing them there's a chance for something different in their lives. Cultural change is a long process, but it's got to start somewhere," Frederickson said. U.S. Central Command photo by Army Master Sgt. Chris Calkins

As British and American troops roll by, Iraqi children from the port city of Umm Qasr give them a hearty and happy greeting. U.S. Central Command photo by Army Master Sgt. Chris Calkins

Common reaction from people whose family members are constantly being beaten and shot, eh, Jimmy?

[Tribune7]

Oh Pleeeze. Yeah the poor reporters have nowhere to go, no one will listen to them. Give me a break!

?????? The reporters who were embedded with this guy are calling him a liar.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Great link and it describes this jagoff to a tee. This guy spent 3 years as a boot camp instructor and 3 years as a recruiter (in an interview linked here , his wife describes how stressful recruiting duty was and how it caused his blood pressure to be high; good lord, what a Nancy-boy), during which time he was already goldbricking. The first time he saw any real action, he was a problem child who got jettisoned for PTSD because the Marines got sick of babysitting him. So then he comes home and "confesses" to his "war crimes", which are disproven by embedded reporters, guys in his unit, and his own conflicting lies. But this guy is a credible source? The parallels to Kerry here are uncanny.