Slandering the Troops in Order to Defeat Them
In the presence of an embedded reporter, in March 2003, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Weapons Company, mocked an Iraqi civilian who was trying to communicate with Marines:
They were just two farmers on their way across a familiar field to the nearby town to get gasoline for their vehicle, when suddenly they were on the ground surrounded by men in uniforms pointing weapons at their heads.
"Keep your head down," shouted Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, 31, of Waynesville, N.C.
While they waited for interrogators to arrive, O'Neill showed one of the Iraqis pictures of enemy vehicles in a 500-plus-page manual. The man motioned that he didn't recognize any of the vehicles.
The men, who did not speak English, tried to communicate with their hands.
"What, you feel like break-dancing?" joked Massey. "Know any songs by Michael Jackson?"
A little more than a year later, Massey implied to the Associated Press that excessive 9/11 rhetoric might have contributed to the atmosphere that facilitated the Abu Ghraib abuses:
"Soldiers were encouraged to make the incorrect links," said Jimmy Massey, a former Marine sergeant from Waynesboro, N.C., who served in Iraq, then quit the force and has affiliated with an anti-war group called Veterans for Peace.
Massey said "a bunch of innocent civilians" were killed by his platoon and he attributed these deaths in part to military intelligence reports warning of potential terrorist attacks by non-uniformed Iraqis.
"You put a bunch of Army or Marines out in the desert and tell them to guard these supposed terrorists, and they're going to start inventing ways to keep themselves busy," Massey said.
In between these two press mentions, Massey lost his swagger in Iraq, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, received a discharge, and began decrying war crimes ?- first to French media, but increasingly in the United States. Suffice to say, it's been a rough, but exciting, year for Sgt. Massey, and thanks, in part, to left-wing blogs, the months to come look to be even more exciting.
The domestic buzz began with an interview that Massey gave to anti-war activist Paul Rockwell for the Sacramento Bee, and some of what he says therein is eerily familiar:
Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?
A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people.
The accounts that Massey relates aren't pleasant. "Trigger happy" American military personnel throwing the corpses of Iraqi civilians in a ditch. Orders from "senior government officials" to wipe out peaceful demonstrators. Marines firing on Iraqi motorists with their hands up at checkpoints. "Fallujah is just littered with civilian bodies." The 31-year-old sergeant told his commanding officer, "We're committing genocide."
According to a February 11 piece in the Waynesville Mountaineer, on April 15, 2003, one year to the day after he was pulled from his duty as a recruiter in North Carolina, Massey approached his commanding officer in Iraq confessing depression. The next stop was a visit to a Navy psychiatrist:
"You have every right to feel the way you feel," the doctor told him.
But did he, Massey wondered? Civilians might be sickened by the killing, but a Marine is not supposed to be. "I was the ultimate war machine, all blood and guts. I was embarrassed. I was supposed to be able to handle it." ...
In the morning Massey was called into the commanding officer's room. He was not cut out to be an officer in the Marines, the superior told him.
"He told me, 'You're a poor leader,' 'You're faking it,' 'You're a conscientious objector,' 'You're a wimp,'" said Massey. "You don't respond to that. You just stand there and take it. But my sanity was not worth the U.S. Marine Corps."
Massey spent the next six months or so in California, apparently sorting out his discharge, with a lawyer "who defended American soldiers after the Mai Lai attack in Vietnam." On November 14, he received the verdict that his would be "a medical retirement." Massey described the incident that precipitated this change, and threatened his sanity, in a French article put into circulation in early April. Translated in the Chronogram:
It was very warm that day, and Baghdad hadn't fallen completely. A red Kia Spectra sped toward our checkpoint at about 45 miles per hour. We fired a warning volley above it but the car kept coming. Then we aimed at the car and fired with full force. I made eye contact with the driver. The Kia came to a stop right in front of me, three of the four men shot dead, the fourth wounded and covered in blood. When he saw that his brother, the driver, was dead, he collapsed and fell to the curb, waving his arms frantically. And when we were pulling his brother out, he started running and screaming, 'Why did you kill my brother?! We didn't do anything!'
In that piece, by Natasha Saulnier, the accusations escalate. Regarding the desecrated contractors:
When I read about the mutilated, charred bodies of the Blackwater mercenaries in the news, all I thought was that we did the same thing to them. They would see us debase their dead all the time. We would be messing around with charred bodies, kicking them out of the vehicles and sticking cigarettes in their mouths.
Regarding operations with Task Force 121, including representatives of the Delta Forces, Navy Seals, and CIA Paramilitaries:
We would go into villages and stick C-4 explosives on the doors of supposed Saddam loyalists, and we would ransack their houses like the Gestapo. The Spooks would wait until we blew them up and secure the occupants inside, then they would go in. They never found anything except for large quantities of money. ... The Spooks would put [the occupants] on the floor and take over. We would leave and I don't know what happened to them but I heard from intelligence reports that some occupants were blown up.
Massey tells of firing on targets the nature of which only "higher headquarters" knew, and Massey didn't trust that the targets weren't civilians. Sprinkled throughout Saulnier's piece are supposedly corroborating accounts from other sources. An anonymous 23-year-old Marine tells of defecating on "run over dead Iraqi bodies." The same source asserts:
One day, I watched as the Marine Corps pushed the bodies of 47 Iraqis into a mass grave with a bulldozer. I don't know if they were civilians but they looked like it because some of them were wearing dress shoes like loafers. Our sergeant was looking for bombs with metal detectors. Then he went out on the bodies and picked them for jewels and money. He also took their IDs and sold them to Marines for trophies to show off when they'd come back to the us.
This slanderous tone is the building rumble. Saulnier quotes a rhyme of unclear origin ?- "Throw some candy in the school yard / watch the children gather round / Load a belt in your M-50 / mow them little bastards down!" ?- that appears to have inspired other French accounts, first translated on Islamonline.net:
Massey cited instructions of commanders disregarding lives of Iraq civilians as one of many reasons still driving him nuts.
"Throw candies in the school courtyard, and open fire on children rushing to snatch them. Crush them," he recalled officers as saying during drills.
Thus do the dark, libelous accusations of the anti-war Left from the days of Vietnam reappear. Instead of napalm, we get cluster bombs. Back to the interview with Rockwell:
Q: Cluster bombs are also controversial. U.N. commissions have called for a ban. Were you acquainted with cluster bombs?
A: I had one of my Marines in my battalion who lost his leg from an ICBM.
Q: What's an ICBM?
A: A multi-purpose cluster bomb.
Q: What happened?
A: He stepped on it. We didn't get to training about clusters until about a month before I left.
Q: What kind of training?
A: They told us what they looked like, and not to step on them.
Q: Were you in any areas where they were dropped?
A: Oh, yeah. They were everywhere.
Q: Dropped from the air?
A: From the air as well as artillery.
Q: Are they dropped far away from cities, or inside the cities?
A: They are used everywhere. Now if you talked to a Marine artillery officer, he would give you the runaround, the politically correct answer. But for an average grunt, they're everywhere.
Q: Including inside the towns and cities?
A: Yes, if you were going into a city, you knew there were going to be ICBMs.
Presumably, Massey means ICM (Improved Conventional Munitions), not ICBM (InterContinental Ballistic Missile),* but the point is clear: to raise visions of massacres and indiscriminate killing, simply ignoring claims and evidence of meticulous care to minimize casualties. Rockwell asks about the specter from the 1991 Gulf War, depleted uranium, and Massey includes it in his declaration of genocide to his commanding officer:
He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the depleted uranium we're leaving over here, we're not going to have to worry about terrorists. He didn't like that. He got up and stormed off. And I knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my commanding officer.
In no previous article has Massey mentioned DU. Rockwell, on the other hand, included the matter in his document "U.S. War Crimes in Iraq: A Prima Facie Case," which he apparently "respectfully submitted to the International Criminal Court."
This is how the anti-war forces seek to defeat the U.S. military. Seeping from conspiratorial Web sites and foreign anti-American rags into the mainstream consciousness like leech-filled swamp water rising through the floor boards, the level of conceivability for accusations notches up as time goes on ?- as September 11 recedes and as the election approaches. Whatever their motivation, and whether or not they believe the sunny delusions about the world scene after an American defeat, those who enable, promote, and lend credibility to this propaganda assault must be faced and stared down this time around the historical cycle.
Our nation cannot afford to follow either John Kerry or any Generation X versions of the anti-war veteran. Jimmy Massey cannot escape the implications of what he is declaring to all the world by laying blame with the President based on clichés about war for oil and lies about weapons of mass destruction. And we who understand the importance of success cannot afford to keep our heads down.
BINGO! 
Or, is it perhaps people doing what they always wanted to do in the expected chaotic aftermath of war? 