The Anti-War Left's Favorite Fake Marine
mattog...@aol.com
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 16, 2005
Jimmy Massey was until recently the anti-war movement's favorite
Marine. A former Marine staff sergeant, Massey had returned from Iraq
in 2003, after being honorably discharged on the grounds of
post-traumatic stress syndrome. At which point, he took up an
altogether different mission: waging a vicious disinformation war
against his former comrades. The driving theme of his one-man smear
offensive was his charge that the Marines in Iraq had not only killed
dozens of innocent Iraqis, including children, but that they had
positively delighted in their murderous handiwork. As Massey told it,
the U.S. Marines were not soldiers but "psychopathic killers." They
did not so much guard Iraq's streets as terrorize them.
Massey's malicious charges-since comprehensively debunked by, among
others, embedded reporter Ron Harris-had the virtue of comporting
with the anti-military preconceptions shared by not a few of the
war's opponents. When he insisted that he had purposely lied in his
past life as a military recruiter, in order to conscript impressionable
innocents into America's nefarious wars, Massey echoed the standard
refrain of the anti-war Left. When he told of importuning his military
superiors about the "killing of innocent civilians," only to be
icily ignored, Massey conjured up the caricature of American soldiers
as cold-hearted death-dealers. When he blamed Iraq's insurgency on
the supposed brutality of American troops, Massey lent authority to the
inverted worldview espoused by critics of American foreign policy. If
Cindy Sheehan's slain son Casey entitled her to a share of absolute
moral authority on all martial matters, then Jimmy Massey, the reformed
leatherneck who dared to speak the truth about the savagery of
America's marauding Marines, was morality made flesh.
He was treated accordingly. Massey's media whirlwind began in the
spring of 2004. Featured in countless magazines, including the glossy
pages of Vanity Fair, and newspapers-the Associated Press penned no
fewer than three stories about Massey-Massey was also invited to
share his tale of terror on National Public Radio. Colleges jostled for
his presence; he became a fixture on the anti-war speaking circuit,
most recently as a member of Cindy Sheehan's anti-war bus tour.
So compelling were the details of Massey's story-spiced with
poignant anecdotes about 4-year-old Iraqi girls expiring in his
arms-that the media outlets who sought him out could not be troubled
to assess their accuracy. Indeed, a look back on the indulgent media
coverage that attended Massey's two-year holiday from scrutiny
reveals a pattern, especially among left-wing outlets, of dispensing
with routine journalistic practices like minimal fact-checking in order
to believe the worst about the conduct of America's military men and
women.
Among the first to air Massey's story was the far-Left radio program
Democracy Now! In the course of a May 2004, interview, Massey laid out
a number of scurrilous charges, which he would hawk in the ensuing
months, with varying degrees of consistency, to all who would listen.
Chief among them was his claim that U.S. Marines had indiscriminately
slaughtered Iraqi civilians. "I would say my platoon alone killed
30-plus innocent civilians," said Massey, who described American
actions in Iraq as "basically committing genocide." In a gripping
scene that he would recount time and again, Massey recalled an Iraqi
child dying in his arms, the victim, in his telling, of a U.S. machine
gun. The U.S. military, Massey said, took a "better them than us"
view of the killing of Iraqi children. More than a year would pass
before the truth emerged: There was never any evidence that an Iraqi
girl died in the shoot-out Massey described. On the contrary, several
witnesses, including an on-the-scene photographer who captured the
incident on his camera, have since said that, Massey's account
fictive quite apart, no girl was even wounded on the occasion.
At the time, however, Massey pressed ahead. He insisted that, on one
occasion, his unit had fired upon a peaceful crowd of Iraqis
demonstrating against the American presence in the country. Massey even
recalled "discharging my weapon as well into the demonstrators."
That story, too, would not survive investigation: After conducting
interviews with over a dozen Marines and journalists, reporter Ron
Harris concluded that no such incident occurred. Ron Haviv, a
photographer embedded with Massey's unit, further told Harris that
there were no protestors or demonstrations at the time Massey claimed
the shooting occurred, an account that squared with the recollections
of other witnesses. Despite being asked by Democracy Now! host Amy
Goodman whom he held responsible for the atrocities allegedly committed
by U.S. Marines, including himself, Massey unhesitatingly answered,
"the president of the United States"-the veracity of his claims
was never called into question.
Thus the lies continued. In an October 2004 interview with Mother
Jones, Massey declared that Marines had routinely opened fire on
unarmed civilians at roadblocks and repeated his claim "that his men
killed 30 civilians in one 48-hour period." Massey also took the
opportunity to cast himself as a free-speech martyr, stating that he
had been fired from his job in Waynesville, North Carolina, on account
of his opposition to the war. "Massey got a job as a furniture
salesman, then lost it after speaking at an antiwar rally," the
magazine faithfully reported. It was another compelling chapter in
Massey's self-made narrative, and suffered only from being wholly
untrue. When later pressed about the story by the St. Louis Post
Dispatch, Massey admitted that he had actually quit his job; his views
on the war played no role in the decision. "I left on good terms,"
Massey would later say. For Mother Jones, firmly in the anti-war camp,
such details were too good to check.
Further out on the fringes of the Left, Massey's story was seized as
a symbol of the evils of the American military. Reproducing without a
hint of skepticism Massey's accounts of attacks on innocent
civilians, the World Socialist Web Site in November of 2004 professed
it to evidence the "brutality of the US military's retaliation
against the growing resistance of the Iraqi people..." That same
month, the radical webzine Counterpunch embraced Massey's frequent
insistence that he had lied as a military recruiter. This became, in
Counterpunch's view, proof positive that the American military would
"swindle recruits" into joining the service. (Counterpunch was
hardly alone in purveying that claim. As late as this September, Vanity
Fair was making use of Massey's confession to bolster a report about
"patterns of unethical recruiting" in the U.S. military.)
By March of 2005, Massey's popularity among the war's foes had made
him a sought-after speaker. Appearing at Sienna College in upstate New
York, at the behest of the resident peace studies department, Massey
delivered himself of a poisonous harangue against American troops. The
targeting of Iraqi civilians, he declared, was in keeping with the
strategy of U.S. military leaders. "They were painting a picture that
every civilian in Iraq was a potential terrorist, regardless of age or
sex," Massey said. For effect, he even likened U.S. forces to Nazis:
"Abu Ghraib, Auschwitz, what's the difference?" mused Massey.
Those remarks, like so many before, went unchallenged by the press. The
Albany Times Union, which covered Massey's appearance, declined to
address the substance of his charges. (The paper's editor, Rex Smith,
now regrets the paper's passivity; he recently acknowledged that the
paper's coverage of Massey could have "benefited from some
additional reporting.") And the Times Union wasn't the only local
paper that neglected journalistic protocol and unquestioningly reported
Massey's slanderous allegations. The Post Standard of Syracuse, for
instance, recorded Massey saying that the Marines' kill-or-be-killed
discipline taught them to "put a bullet into a 6-year-old, which is
what I did." Massey would later disavow the confession, telling the
St. Louis Post Dispatch that he had never fired on a child: "I meant
that's what my unit did," he later said. For that charge, too, no
proof was ever produced.
For their part, the more unhinged opponents of American military
efforts in Iraq were happy to ignore the omission. Karen Kwiatkowski a
retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force and a crank columnist
for the obscure, libertarian-anarchist site LewRockwell.com, wrote
swooning tributes to Massey and similarly disgruntled defectors. Men
like Massey, Kwiatkowski breathlessly opined, are "the kind of
soldiers and marines we need to recruit in droves." As for the truth
of Massey's charges, Kwiatkowski harbored no doubts. "The
atrocities they revealed were not only actual and factual," she
pronounced in a June 2005 column, citing Massey as a dispositive
authority.
Meantime, Massey, not content to muddy the Marines' name on American
shores, made himself available to a credulous foreign press. In a March
2005 interview with the Italian communist newspaper Il Manefesto,
Massey offered the following assessment of the Marines he had once
served alongside: "We are all just murderers. We kill innocent Iraqi
civilians all the time. That's the way it is.... they don't want to
talk and admit that killing terrorists is not our mission. It's to kill
innocent civilians."
That theme pervades Massey's unsubtly titled new book, Kill, Kill,
Kill, released last month in France. American publishers passed on the
opportunity to distribute Massey's accumulated calumnies, but a
French imprint grabbed at the chance to defame America's men in
uniform. If preliminary accounts are any indication, the book does not
disappoint on this score. Written with the radical French journalist
Natasha Saulnier, herself a veteran vilifier of American troops, the
book recycles many of the now-discredited claims that initially vaulted
Massey to his status as anti-war icon.
Massey writes that the terrorist attacks in Iraq can be imputed to the
military's alleged attacks on civilians, what he calls the
"brutality that the Iraqi people saw at the start of the invasion."
Elsewhere in the book, Massey, rehashing the preferred trope of
anti-war conspiracists, avers that "our only objective in Iraq is
petrol and profits." Plans are reportedly underway to translate the
book into Spanish, though the recent exposure of Massey's allegations
as a series of falsehoods has not exactly drummed up enthusiasm for an
American release. Massey prefers to see his sudden shutout from the
American media as a reaction to the painful "truths" he has told
about American servicemen: "The picture that I paint within the book
is very difficult for a lot of Americans to grasp, and I understand
that," he has said.
The reality of course is altogether different. Before Massey was
revealed as a military-bashing fabulist, all too many media outlets,
both of the partisan and mainstream variety, were prepared to accept
his version of events as beyond reproach. There was no excuse for the
quiescent coverage. Even as Massey's allegations found their way into
numberless print and broadcast stories, the military was strenuously
disputing their accuracy. A military investigation completed in June of
2004 noted that Massey's "allegations were found to be
unsubstantiated in regards to law or rules of engagement violations."
Massey himself was a bundle of contradictions, variously stating that
he based his charges on eyewitness accounts, then later on unofficial
"intelligence reports," and then on the accounts of "other
Marines." Each time he was given a free pass.
That was then. Today, with his distortions, exaggerations, and flat-out
fabrications out in the open, media outlets that once indulged
Massey's venomous ravings have sought to distance themselves from
their disgraced source. The latest to recant is the Sacramento Bee,
which in 2004 ran a story about Massey without checking the merit of
his charges. "Without such checking, we should not have published the
story," the paper's editor, David Holwerk recently wrote. Other
newspapers have taken the same position. In fact, save for his
desperate defenders on the anti-war Left, many of whom regard the truth
as a necessary casualty in their assault on the American campaign in
Iraq, few are willing to vouch for Massey's credibility.
A lonely exception is Jimmy Massey himself. In a self-exculpatory
letter written last week, and reprinted on sites like Counterpunch and
numerous anti-war blogs, Massey, in all apparent earnestness, accused
his critics in the media and the Marine Corps of mounting "a smear
campaign against me..." Perhaps nothing more vividly betrays the
prejudices of some of the Iraq war's critics than the fact that, even
after the very public collapse of Massey's mendacious campaign
against American troops, they are still willing to believe him.
kyl...@yahoo.com
mattog...@aol.com wrote:
> The Anti-War Left's Favorite Marine
> By Jacob Laksin
> FrontPageMagazine.com | November 16, 2005
Why don't you support our troops, Uglyvie?
mattog...@aol.com
Why do you ask stupid questions based on what you know to be total
falsehoods?
rightwinghank
It is impossible to believe that out of thousands of men, more marines
would speak up if what he said is true....there are many christians in
the service....and
they would not stand for it. Noone else has spoken up.
He stands alone.....with his lies. He needs to be stood up against a
wall and shot.
love
hank
...............
kyl...@yahoo.com
LOL! You're right for once, Uglyvie! Any comments I made were based
upon the FrontPageMagazine.com propaganda piece you posted and
therefore based on what I know to be total falsehoods! Thanks for the
tip in, Ugly boy!
mattog...@aol.com
Mitchell Holman, is that you? If not, someone is impersonating you by
trying to throw up pathetic red herrings, and always dodging the
question.
Saving Pfc. America
"rightwinghank" <rightw...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1132144699.0...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Would that apply to Bush as well?
Saving Pfc. America
<mattog...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1132148423.4...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
You don't have a question. Every arguement you post is based on some
rightwing-kook propaganda.
Amanda Williams
@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
> The Anti-War Left's Favorite Marine
> By Jacob Laksin
> FrontPageMagazine.com | November 16, 2005
>
Tsk... Tsk... OGGLETURD "fake" is not what the article says.
You repugs just can't help lying eh?
--
AW
<small but dangerous>
MFOgilvie
We leave that to the liberals. We're just too obssessed with the
truth. It's a moral superiority thing, you know. On second thought,
you probably don't know.
Mitchell Holman
@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com:
....or just his own self-medicated fantasies.....
"Conservatives have never caused a single problem in America"
"MF Ogilvie", 9/6/02
David Hartung
You accuse Matt of lying, please prove it.
Egbert Sousč
The Secret Service might not go along with that. Someone tried to do
that from the street outside the WH. He hasn't been seen or heard
from since. Be advised.