Posted on 11/10/2005 7:43:22 AM PST by Hadean
When the Abu Graib story broke, thanks to Mary Mapes of Rathergate fame, the mainstream news media collectively hyperventilated. In fact, the venerable New York Times ran more stories about the abuse at that Iraqi military prison than any other news story in recent history. The allegations leveled against the US military fit perfectly with the liberal media's view of American soldiers and intelligence officers: that they are brutal, ruthless killers and torturers. Even Democrat politicians appeared to become unhinged with their vitriol as they pointed to media reports regarding Abu Graib and, to a lesser degree, the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba military detention center. Senator Dick Durbin likened our military to Nazis, our detention centers to gulags, and our tactics to the killing fields of Cambodia. Senator Ted Kennedy complained the Saddam's torture chambers were under new management, meaning United States Armed Forces Management.
The news media practically celebrated their prowess at revealing the horrors occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, even making up some stories such as the Koran being flushed down a toilet at Gitmo's military prison. Sometimes the blogosphere and talk radio caught the deceptions, other times they remained unrefuted. The idea of women's panties being placed on the heads of captured combatants even filtered into America's entertainment media. Most journalists appeared to equate women's undergarments used as sombreros with bamboo splinters shoved under one's fingernails. Of course, newsmen overreacted to this fashion faux pas because they prefer to wear their panties around their waists.
Then, like manna from heaven, the mainstream media's prayers were answered: they found Marine Sergeant Jimmy Massey -- or perhaps he found them. Massey confirmed the reporters' worst suspicions about the US armed forces. Or so they thought.
Massey, fresh from the battlefields and streets of Iraq, told reporters and anyone who'd listen to him that Marines murdering innocent Iraqi civilians. Also, Sgt. Massey described the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.
Newspapers, magazines and broadcast news organizations used Massey as an eyewitness to the rampant brutality they suspected but now could prove. Finally, the war on terrorism provided its own John Kerry, who, during the Vietnam conflict, told similar stories about atrocities committed by US servicemen. During a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey told frightening tales of how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, murdered and mutilated scores of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Some of his claims, repeated often by the mainstream news media and the MoveOn.Org crowd include:
Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters.
Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head.
A tractor-trailer was filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery.
Massey's stories garnered him a certain degree of fortune and fame. He received a sweetheart book deal and his allegations are covered in top US publications such as Vanity Fair and USA Today. He even joined the antiwar bus tour of Cindy Sheehan so that he could horn-in on her massive media attention. In between TV and radio appearances and giving speeches at universities across the nation, the Marine non-commissioned officer hosted book signings where he described the horrors inflicted by America's sons and daughters on the innocent Iraqis.
It's no surprise that news organizations circulated Massey's eyewitness testimony without any sort of corroboration and without investigation. Except for the Marine Corp, most people hearing Massey never questioned Massey's honesty. After all, he was a decorated Marine veteran with 12 years of experience under his belt.
Then something strange occurred: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch began to question Sgt. Massey's tales of atrocities and misconduct by US Marines. Soon embedded reporters who shared MRE's with our fighting men and women also began to wonder about the stories being told by Sgt. Massey. The Marine Corps conducted their own investigation and reported that Massey's allegations were totally unsubstantiated.
Some journalists who bothered to investigate Massey discovered he even lied about his life after returning from Iraq. For instance, he told reporters that he lost his civilian job because his superiors didn't much care for his antiwar grandstanding. It was later discovered that Massey quit his job in order to devote more time to antiwar activities and his pursuit of celebrity. Some observers suspected that, like Senator John Kerry, Massey wished to use his stories of Iraq in order to begin a political career.
When a few journalists began to succeed in casting doubt on Sgt. Massey's allegations, he backtracked from allegations he made in a 2004 radio interview and elsewhere that he had seen a tractor-trailer filled with the bodies of Iraqi civilians when Marines entered an Iraqi military prison outside Baghdad.
He told listeners that the scene was so bad "that the plasma from the body and skin was decomposing and literally oozing out of the crevices of the tractor-trailer bed."
According to reporters, he repeated the story in a Post-Dispatch interview. But when told that the newspaper's photographs and eyewitness reports had identified the trailer contents as all men, mostly in uniform, Massey confessed that he had never seen the bodies.
He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he received his information from "intelligence reports." When asked if those reports were official documents, he answered, "No, that's what the other Marines told me."
Massey's stories seemed to morph on a daily basis. For example, he would tell his audiences and interviewers of an event he said he'd never forget: Guys in his unit shooting civilian Iraqis in a red automobile.
Massey said Marines fired at the vehicle after it failed to stop at a checkpoint. Then he said the Marines stormed the car. Sometimes he said three of the men were killed immediately while the fourth was wounded and covered in blood; sometimes he said the fourth man was "miraculously unscathed."
Sometimes he said the Marines left the three men on the side of the road to die without medical treatment while the fourth man exclaimed: "Why did you shoot my brother?" In other versions, he said the man made the statement as medical personnel were attempting to treat the three other men, or as the survivor sat near the car, or to Massey personally.
There is no evidence that any of the versions occurred, according to the Post-Dispatch.
In one tale Massey often spins, he and his fellow platoon members fired upon a group of innocent demonstrators who protested the Marine presence in Baghdad. Massey said that the demonstrators were protesting the Marines' presence. Supposedly the Marines heard a shot and in panic began shooting protesters.
There were different versions of that story, as well. In one version, the demonstrators were near a checkpoint. In another version, they were outside a prison on a road about 200 meters away. In still another version they were from 5 to 15 miles from Baghdad International Airport.
Not satisfied with denigrating his fellow soldiers in his own country, Massey told a version of the story before an immigration hearing in Canada. He was displaying his support for an American soldier trying to flee to Canada. He told Canadians, that he and the Marines killed four of the demonstrators. But in other interviews, the number jumped to 10 demonstrators. In another nine demonstrators were murdered but one crawled away.
During the investigation into Massey's allegations, many Marines and journalists who were in the military complex the morning of the alleged massacre, none could recall such an occurrence.
In fact, they said that during the first week to two weeks inside Baghdad, they never saw any protesters. Ron Haviv, an independent photographer embedded with the unit, told the Dispatch-Port that he never saw any protesters or demonstrators, with or without signs.
"Basically, the only people who were on the streets in the first week were there to loot," said Haviv, who has covered conflicts across the globe, including the first Gulf War, Haiti, Yugoslavia and Russia.
Lt. Kevin Shea, the commander of Massey's platoon, recalls that on the morning after they arrived, about 20 Iraqis from a nearby community did approach the Marines to ask what was happening. Shea said that he had explained what the Marines were doing and that the Iraqis had gone back to their homes.
In a speech in Syracuse in March, the Post Standard newspaper quoted him as saying, "The reason the Marines teach you discipline . . . is so that you can confront the enemy and kill him. . . . Or so you can put a bullet into a 6-year-old, which is what I did. "
In the interview with the Post-Dispatch, Massey said he never personally had shot a child.
"I meant that's what my unit did," he said.
He could not provide details. Nor could he name any Marine who could corroborate any of his stories.
"Admitting guilt is a hard thing to do," he said.
In other speeches, Massey has said he personally shot a 6-year-old child. In some versions, the child was a boy; at other times, a girl.
In short, there were so many holes in Massey's stories, you could march a Marine battalion threw them. When pressed for corroboration, he would confess to not seeing these incidents but being told about them by other Marines. Sound familiar? That's exactly what John Kerry said after he gave speeches and testified before congress about atrocities committed during the Vietnam War. And the news media bought his stories without the least bit of corroboration. Same as the media did with Sgt. Jimmy Massey. Why? Because too many journalists wanted to believe these phony stories. They fit in nicely with their personal view of soldiers, intelligence officers even police officers.
One question Americans should ask is why isn't Sgt. Massey locked up for the atrocities he admits he committed in Iraq? How about a special prosecutor to investigate Massey and his newfound friends and allies in the antiwar movement?
Massey should be prosecuted, but then John Kerry was never prosecuted either. Instead the idiot voters of Massachusetts made him a senator.
Kerry served in Vietnam? Who knew?
It must have been seared, seared into his memory.
clintons (pardon for pay plan) was part of the decriminalizing treason done by liberal socialists.
Sheehan undoubtedly believes him. This is probably the source for her statements that we are not killing terrorists but ordinary Iraqi citizens. She has said that over and over again.
That would be a switch, the government proving a person was not the criminal he claimed to be.
This is the Kerry/Fonda legacy.
Actually, this is the FDR legacy. His administration was riddled with Communists and included his closest advisors and confidants, as well as his wife Eleanor. A strong case can be made that WWII was fought for the express purpose of assuring the survival of Stalin and the USSR. Read The New Dealers War: FDR and the war within WWII, by Thomas Fleming.
The Korean War was a follow up by the USSR and Communist China as was the Vietnam War. As is the Communists' style, the fifth columnists here at home manned the demostrations and were rampant in the MSM.
They now also control our schools, labor unions, and Hollywood. Joe McCarthy was right and that is why he is demonized.
We are fighting for our way of life and we had better recognize it.
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