Fog of War or War Crimes?

[dogday]

Jimmy Massey, the Marines' most outspoken anti-war war criminal, talks about what really happened on the road to Baghdad

In the wake of the James Frey debacle -- and its tractor-powered disinterment of similar thinly veiled literary hoaxes surrounding the louche and love-starved -- it's rather conspicuous (or perhaps not) that Jimmy Massey's name has failed to resurface in the broadsheets.

If you haven't heard of him, Massey, a former Marine staff sergeant who spent 12 years in the Corps before being medically discharged with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and becoming a key figure in the peace movement with Veterans For Peace, rose to infamy last November after St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris (followed lockstep by hawkish blogger Michelle Malkin) discredited claims made by Massey in his book Kill, Kill, Kill that he'd been party to (and a participant in) war crimes during his tour in Iraq with a Combined Anti-Armor Team (CAT) platoon.

Although Harris and Co. vehemently disputed Massey's claims of killing innocent civilians on the road to Baghdad, Harris has admitted that he doesn't read French (the language in which Massey's book was published) nor was he ever directly embedded with Massey's unit. Malkin, for her part, failed to return various emails, which is telling, considering the fact that the claims made in "Kill, Kill, Kill," which is also being published in Spain, were corroborated by three other Marines in Massey's platoon in interviews with the same French-American investigative journalist who ghost-wrote the book with Massey.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/33533/

[Virginia Dare]

1. This war is going to end up as an ugly, ugly stain on this country...

Thousands of irreparably damaged people, both physically and psychologically. I think there are some terrible things going on there, it makes me sick to my stomach.