Via Metafilter

Metafilter – where the consensus is overwhelmingly that Bush is a criminal and the overthrow of Saddam was a disaster – have had a couple of recent posts to shake their readers up a bit. First there was this sad little saga:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Among his claims:

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 claims have gained him celebrity. Last month, Massey’s book, “Kill, Kill, Kill,” was released in France. His allegations have been reported in nationwide publications such as USA Today, as well as numerous broadcast reports. Earlier this year, he joined the anti-war bus tour of Cindy Sheehan, and he’s spoken at Cornell and Syracuse universities, among others.

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey’s claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn’t.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated – according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

The “Kill, Kill, Kill” book (love that title! – has he been reading Pinter’s poetry, I wonder?) seems to be going down pretty well with the French. Massey obviously knew just how to massage those preconceptions. From “Un Lecteur de Paris”:

[O]ui, les révélations du sergent Massey confirment la brutalité du corps d’élite américain mais il va beaucoup plus loin : il décrit parfaitement la banalisation de l’acte de tuer, la déshumanisation des soldats et leur nécrophilie car tuer est devenu un sport pour eux — un peu comme les tortures d’Abu Ghraib.

Trans: Yes, Massey’s revelations confirm the brutality of the elite US troops, but they go much further: they describe perfectly the banalisation of the act of killing, the dehumanisation of the soldiers, and their necrophilia, because killing has become a sport for them – a bit like the tortures of Abu Ghraib.

The other reviewer is less complimentary: only the totally naive would treat an account like this as a revelation. That US troops are brutal thugs will come as no surprise to a person of sophistication.

And then there was a link to Norman Podhoretz’s piece in Commentary, which effectively nails a few of the “Bush Lied” myths. Didn’t go down too well.