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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Iraq : Media : Peace |
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When A Marine Speaks Truth to Power: Why I Stand By My Interview With Sgt. Jimmy Massey |
Current rating: 0 |
by Paul Rockwell
(No verified email address) |
23 Jan 2006
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I welcome an opportunity to respond to the Harris charges. I stand by my interviews with the man who, at great expense to himself, speaks truth to power. Massey’s story is corroborated, and it is authentic. He is one of the most cogent, decent persons I have interviewed in 20 years of journalism. In contrast, his detractor is a jingoist whose own dispatches from Iraq are full of inaccuracies, omissions, fawning praise for commanders who made huge mistakes of judgment and who sent Marines to their death on the basis of fraud. |
I first interviewed Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey for the Sacramento Bee, May 16, 2003. The tall, hard-core Marine who served his country for over 12 years once trained infantry soldiers at boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina. He was a recruiter in Waynesville, North Carolina, before he began that fateful march—"the evil journey"—toward Baghdad in 2003.
When I talked with him a year and a half ago, he was open, direct, willing to answer any kind of question. But it was painful for the homeboy from the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina to recall the horrific events which changed his life forever. In the Sacramento Bee interview, "I Killed Innocent People For My government," Massey not only expressed remorse for killing innocent civilians, he called attention to the systematic war crimes of American commanders, for whom Iraqi life is cheap. He talked freely about the illegal use of cluster bombs, the effects of depleted uranium, the pattern of checkpoint massacres. In short, he blew the whistle on the Marine Corps to which he was devoted, with full knowledge that, like all truthtellers in war, he would eventually face virulent attacks.
Many of the episodes—the experiences that turned Massey not only against the war, but against the misogynist and racist culture of Marine life—are now recounted in full in his forthcoming book, "Cowboys From Hell." It’s an autobiography the Marine Corps does not want published.
Cowboys From Hell is a kind of Pentagon Papers of the Marines. In his confessions we see Massey’s platoon gun down a man with his hands up. Demonstrators are shot. An unarmed driver in a Mercedes is shot dead at a checkpoint. Two occupants of a Toyota are wrongly killed. Wounded by American bombing, a small child dies in the arms of one of Massey’s buddies. When Marines fire 50-caliber rounds into a tractor, a sixty-year-old man loses his livelihood. In one definitive episode,when three occupants of a car are massacred at a checkpoint, a survivor on the ground looks up at Massey and says: "Why did you kill my brother? He did nothing wrong."
With co-author Natasha Saulnier, who helped corroborate Massey’s story, Massey also describes the kind of anti-Arab hatred that drives the military conduct of the war. In one episode, the 5th Marines ransack the Rasheed military compound. Office windows are smashed, cabinets overturned. Massey remembers a picture of a penis going into Saddam Hussein’s mouth. The 5th Marines spray paint vaginas on the walls next to racist graffiti—"Fuck you Hajjis." Anti-Arab racism is ubiquitous.
Here is a story that destroys the myth of American virtue, the ideological cocoon in which some journalists are still embedded.
Harris Makes False Claims Against Massey
On November 5, 2005—a year and a half after Massey made his revelations public—the St. Louis Post Dispatch published a front-page attack on the outspoken Marine. Ron Harris, a pro-war, embedded correspondent, questioned Massey’s claims about civilian carnage. He challenged Massey’s personal motives, the veracity of his story, and called him a liar. Subsequently, Harris launched a campaign against Massey in the mainstream media. Jingoistic papers, like the New York Post, quickly published the Harris attack. The Sacramento Bee also buckled under pressure. According to editorial page editor David Holwerk, the Bee should “have done more to check on Massey’s charges.” Before its disclaimer, the editors never consulted with me, the author of the original article. And according to Jimmy Massey, the Bee never even discussed the issues raised by Harris with Massey himself. In an editorial a week after the Bee's mea culpa (fraught with ambiguity) the paper called for a continuation of the occupation.
I welcome an opportunity to respond to the Harris charges. I stand by my interviews with the man who, at great expense to himself, speaks truth to power. Massey’s story is corroborated, and it is authentic. He is one of the most cogent, decent persons I have interviewed in 20 years of journalism. In contrast, his detractor is a jingoist whose own dispatches from Iraq are full of inaccuracies, omissions, fawning praise for commanders who made huge mistakes of judgment and who sent Marines to their death on the basis of fraud. On April 14, 2003, in a final dispatch from his first tour (he mistakenly believed it would be his last), Harris proclaimed an end to the war two weeks before Bush made a fool of himself proclaiming mission accomplished from the USS Abraham Lincoln. Like Judith Miller, who promoted fantasies of weapons of mass destruction in the New York Times, Harris “got it wrong.” Unlike Massey and independent journalists, Harris never saw the resistance coming because he relied completely on the self-serving claims of the officers with whom he was embedded. Journalists who announced victory in April 2003 were oblivious to the seething discontent and the reckless killing of innocent Iraqis that caused it.
There are two key reasons why Massey deserves our trust and why Harris deserves our derision.
1. Contrary to Harris, Massey’s claims about civilian casualties are corroborated on tape by his own platoon members.
On CNN, Ron Harris claimed that “nobody checked Massey's story.” “Nobody ever interviewed the Marines.”
Harris and CNN are wrong. A Danish journalist and an independent journalist in the U.S., Massey’s own publisher and co-author were all involved in gathering testimony. Here are some of the recorded remarks of platoon members regarding the killing of innocent civilians:
One platoon member from Camp Pendleton, California, states, “Civilians get in the way. Yes, there were civilian casualties, women and children as well....We didn’t check them up to see if they had weapons. Yes, that was at the checkpoint where all the stuff happened.”
Regarding shooting of women and children, another said, “We were all pissed off. Nobody was doing it on purpose.”
Another conceded, ”Jimmy was just as much a part of what we were doing. We were assuming they were terrorists. There were no explosives.”
In typical jarhead language, another revealed, “Iraqis had it coming. They’re scumbags anyway.”
The St. Louis Post Dispatch still refuses to publish Massey’s point-by-point answer to Harris.
2. The Harris claims against Massey contradict the official, early statements from the Marine Corps itself.
For a long time, the Marine Corps tried to ignore—or rather it tried to bury—the Massey story. Massey’s platoon members were told to avoid making comments. The Marine Corps confiscated Massey’s address book and cut off communication with his comrades. When Massey hired his own military lawyer, raising the possibility of an open, on-the-record investigation of checkpoint killings, the Corps backed down. While Massey was ostracized, he was never subject to a court martial. Even after he confronted his lieutenant about atrocities in the field, the Corps never filed charges. Lying about commanders in war time is a serious offense, the kind of offense no military system overlooks. Make no mistake. If the Marine Corps had evidence that Massey lied, he would probably be in prison today. Instead, he got an honorable discharge, and the Corps provided temporary medical attention for PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder.
When he returned home to Waynesville, North Carolina, Massey kept talking. He is too patriotic to remain silent in the face of great wrongs against innocent people, including wrongs against troops who are trapped in atrocity-producing situations. But even as Massey spoke out in early 2004, the Marine Corps avoided any open confrontation over the facts.
In researching my article, my early attempts to reach the Marines were stonewalled. However, on February 4, 2004, three months before I published my interview in the Sacramento Bee, Major Dan Schmidt, Massey’s former Commanding Officer, wrote in the North Carolina Mountaineer: “There is no profit for anyone in discrediting his story in any way.” By the end of the year, after Massey spoke on French radio, the BBC, at hearings in Canada, and Democracy Now, his story began to seep into the mainstream media. The Marine Corps was forced to respond. In December, 2004, MSNBC interviewed Major Douglas Powell about Massey. Powell stated directly: “We’re not saying he’s lying. But his perception of what the situation was in relation to the rules of engagement, and what was justified, is different than ours.”
In 2004, the Marines acknowledged at minimum that Massey was not lying. Suddenly in November 2005, Harris called him a liar.
What changed? It was only after the publication of Massey’s riveting autobiography in France—and the pending threat of publication in the U.S.—that Harris launched his attack on Massey. Character assassination of a Marine of conscience is, in effect, part of a movement to silence the witnesses to war. The Harris pro-military campaign comes at a time when more and more veterans are returning home with reports about the incompetence of commanders (who are unable to explain why the biggest military system in human history is crippled by a disorganized, spontaneous resistance). Returning soldiers are speaking out about the ongoing violations of the Geneva Conventions, about their own sense of betrayal at risking and taking life on the basis of fraud. Two soldiers—Aidan Delgado, who witnessed war crimes at Abu Ghraib, and Camilo Mejia, who served 9 months in jail for refusing to participate in the occupation—are also preparing books for publication. By sowing distrust, Harris is fomenting a media backlash against soldiers who break the code of silence.
Jimmy never expected to be welcomed by the American press, the same press that promoted fantasies about nonexistent weapons, that proclaimed mission accomplished in defiance of reality. A soldier who speaks truth to power is not without honor, save in his own country.
One wonders why Jimmy ever came forward at all. He was a successful Marine. He invested twelve years of his life in service to his country. The pay was good. He could have come home a hero in the local press in North Carolina.
When I asked Massey a year ago why he gave up the rewards of silence, he gave a simple answer: Only the truth can heal. And he later wrote:
“When I am on my death bed and I have to face God with all the sins I committed throughout my life, when I come to the sin of killing innocent people in Iraq, I know I will only be able to meet my Maker if I tell the truth now.”
Jimmy is one of the most soulful human beings to survive the injustice and mendacity of war.
Perhaps it is time for all of us—including Harris and other embedded journalists who got it wrong—to ask forgiveness, too.
Paul Rockwell is a columnist for Inmotion Magazine.
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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The Devastation We Inflict: Two Letters from Vietnam Vets on "Collateral Damage" in Iraq |
by via Tomdispatch.com
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
23 Jan 2006
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Almost two weeks ago, I published a piece by Michael Schwartz, "A Formula for Slaughter" (http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0111-30.htm), on the brutal nature of American "rules of engagement" from the air in Iraq and the consequent proliferation of Iraqi civilian casualties. As it happened, this piece spurred powerful memories in a number of Vietnam veterans who wrote vivid e-responses in to Tomdispatch -- striking enough that I chose the two most eloquent to send out (with permission, of course) in my latest dispatch (along with a discussion of my own on the way the Vietnam experience has dogged the Bush administration in its Iraqi adventure). The first letter comes from Wade Kane, once a helicopter door gunner and crew chief in Vietnam, who wrote in from Crescent City, Florida; the second is from George Hoffman, a former Vietnam medic, from Lorain, Ohio, which he describes as being "thirty miles west of Cleveland, in the heart of the industrial rust belt, and my apartment has a scenic view of the smokestacks and the steel mill." Both in their accounts give the Vietnam analogy in Iraq painful new meaning. These are the sorts of voices we should hear far more from in this country and, unfortunately, almost never do. -- Tom Engelhardt
Wade Kane writes:
Dear Tom,
Although I'm sure we occasionally execute some innocent person after years on Death Row, we as a nation go to great lengths not to execute any innocents. Only the worst of murderers seem to reach death row. So it seems quite ironic that we accept seeing some men apparently planting a bomb on the side of a road in Iraq via a video from a Predator drone and, using that information, decide to drop a 500-pound bomb on a house where they might be hiding, a house where we don't have a clue if there are other people.
Killing innocent women and children is okay, "just" collateral damage… If this is "okay," then why wasn't what Lt. Calley did in Vietnam okay? Similarly, why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki okay, but My Lai wasn't? Somehow, when our soldiers shoot innocents at close range we are appalled, but when it is done via bombs or artillery it's "okay."
At about the same time My Lai occurred, I was flying as a crew chief/gunner on a Chinook [helicopter]. Passing a small village I thought I heard a single shot directed at my helicopter. Or maybe it was just "blade pop." Looking into the village, I could see women and children in the streets in what I'd call a "pastoral scene." I elected not to "return fire," though by my unit's rules of engagement I could have done so. About an hour later we happened to fly past that village again. There was no one in sight, but there were numerous bomb craters in the rice paddies and where homes had been. My guess is that someone else received fire, or thought they received fire, returned fire, and the pilots called for an air strike. I doubt any of the people in the village had time to flee from the attack. Never ever have I heard anything about that event, just My Lai...
I'm not guiltless. At about the same time, flying low level -- like 20 feet AGL [Above Ground Level] at 140 mph -- we passed a family tending a tapioca field. As we came by, a young boy of 12 or so picked up his hoe and pointed it at us like a weapon. I tried to swing my M-60 around and shoot him, but we were going too fast. At the time, I would have felt it was a good shoot as he was "practicing" shooting us down. Now, with young sons of my own, I'm appalled I could have been so callous.
People here got really worried about a flashlight at a Starbucks (which might have been a bomb). Had it been a bomb, which it wasn't, it would have weighed about 1/500th of what we routinely drop in residential neighborhoods in Iraq. It's like most people don't seem to realize what devastation we inflict there on a frequent basis. Today, for example, someone I know sent me some "feel good pictures" about our troops in Iraq. You know: old ladies holding up "Thanks, Mr. Bush" signs, smiling kids. Pictures she said that "just don't make the news." For "don't make the news," how about some pictures of kids that our bombs have eviscerated? Pictures of the sort that are found in Where War Lives, a Photographic Journal of Vietnam by Dick Durrance (intro by Ron Kovic).
We should be the bright light to the world, spending our tax monies on cures for malaria, not on killing innocents.
Have we no shame?
From the bottom of my heart I wish to thank those who, like yourself, are trying to bring an end to this war madness.
Wade Kane
War time:
SP/5 Wade O. Kane RA 14952996
Co. A, 228th AVN BN (ASH)
1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)
June ‘67 to June ‘68
Door Gunner on Chinook 64-13137, Aug '65 to Nov '67
Crew chief/door gunner on Chinook 64-13140, Nov '67 to June '68
Occasional ramp gunner various Co. A Chinooks, Feb '68 to June '68
Campaigns/Battles:
The Que Son Valley & LZ Leslie
Battle for the Citadel at Hue during Tet '68
The relief of the Marines at Khe Sanh
The April ‘68 A Shau Valley campaign
George Hoffman writes:
Dear Tom,
I want you to know that many Vietnam vets really have had a hard time dealing with this unnecessary war in Iraq that has taken the lives of so many innocent Iraqis as well as American men and women serving there. I am sure that the reason I have such deep feelings about this war is that, as a medical corpsman in Vietnam, every day for a year I had to go into a hospital, face such casualties, and deal with them on such a visceral level.
I served in Vietnam as a medical corpsman from May 31, 1967 to May 31, 1968 at the 12th USAF Hospital in Cam Ranh Bay. Besides treating wounded soldiers, the facility also had a special ward for Vietnamese nationals. Usually they were the officials and relatives of the Thieu administration, highly educated and employed in government positions. But occasionally the patients were peasants, average people whom the Americans were supposedly trying to win over to our side (the hearts-and-minds issue). And they were usually patients wounded by shrapnel -- "collateral damage." And, of course, having been wounded by the Americans, they were angry at them and their hearts and minds were lost to the other side, the supposedly evil VC guerillas.
With that bit of unfortunately necessary personal information, let me move on to your latest dispatch. I understand the rationale of the Bush administration's policy of air supremacy which seems logical in military terms, but it is a complete failure in diplomatic terms. I am sure that many thousands of innocent Iraqis, whose only sin is that they lived next to some house with insurgents, or in that house, have been murdered in these so-called surgical air strikes with precision bombs; and, as in Vietnam, these operations are becoming a major reason that Americans are losing Iraqi hearts and minds as well turning Iraqi civilians into insurgents.
In addition to the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, most of whom remain ignorant of the horrible reality for Iraqi civilians in these operations, the average American citizen seems to have taken the bait of the Bush administration's propaganda about how the war is being prosecuted, hook, line, and sinker. Civilians really have no concept of how horrible "collateral damage" can be and it will be a hard lesson to learn, since major media outlets basically refuse to report on this issue.
Of course, the insurgents love the American policy of air supremacy, because each new wound and/or death is a great tool for recruitment to their side. I think it is more than a coincidence that the married couple, who traveled from Iraq to Jordan and were found to have lived in Fallujah, were among the suicide bombers that participated in the attacks in the hotels in Amman. In one article that I read, a reporter stated that residents in Fallujah were quietly celebrating the attacks. Remember, the siege of Fallujah in November 2004 leveled close to two-thirds of all the buildings in that city. As the grunts used to say in Vietnam, payback is a real motherf----r.
Related to the siege of Fallujah is another issue that hasn't been well reported by the mainstream media. During the siege, the American forces used white phosphorus artillery rounds. I treated soldiers in Vietnam, who had been wounded by shrapnel coated in white phosphorus or, as the grunts nicknamed it, Willy Peter. Unlike napalm, Willy Peter shrapnel burns until it completely oxidizes with the air. So it burns through the skin and down to the bone. Again, the American military commanders in Iraq have used a weapon which turned Iraqi civilians against their so-called liberators and put them into the camp of the insurgents. As more American troops are redeployed out of Iraq, due to the political pressure applied to the Bush administration since Rep. Murtha came out so strongly against the war, I am sure that the field military commanders have been told to keep American casualties to a minimum, so they are likely to rely even more upon a policy of using air supremacy to take out insurgents.
One last personal observation: I suspect that, in the coming decades, historians will look back on the war in Iraq in the same way they now do on the war in Vietnam. Both wars were predicated on a false premise (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution versus Iraq's nonexistent WMD and Saddam's nonexistent links to Al Qaeda's jihadists) and blindly accepted by congressional representatives who had the moral fortitude of jellyfish. LBJ's [President Lyndon Baines Johnson's] propaganda about nations in Southeast Asia falling like dominoes to the communists fits all too well with Bush's assertion that making Iraq a democratic model in the Middle East will mean the surrounding kingdoms and dictatorships then fall like so many dominoes to democratic reforms. Widespread illegal domestic spying on American civilians during Vietnam matches the current warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency and the American military's TALON program. Finally, as with key officials in LBJ's administration, the very officials who influenced President Bush to prosecute this unnecessary war are the first to leave the administration when domestic criticism is directed at them. Of course, here I am referring to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was the architect of the Vietnam War, and Paul Wolfowitz, who served a similar role in the war in Iraq. They both fled to the World Bank, where each later admitted that he had discounted the resolve and determination of the enemy; and, in Wolfowitz's case, that he was surprised when the war became a guerilla-style one.
If I had one word to describe the most essential quality of both the New Frontiersmen in LBJ's administration and the neocons in the Bush administration, that word would be hubris.
Sincerely,
George Hoffman
© Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch
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