With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005 11:24 a.m. EST
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Marine's Atrocities Claims Not True
For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling newspapers, magazines, broadcast media and college audiences about the atrocities he and other Marines committed in Iraq.
Earlier this year he joined Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war bus tour, and his book "Kill, Kill, Kill” was recently released in France.
A song titled "The Ballad of Jimmy Massey” has even hit the airwaves.
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Few investigated Massey’s claims about killing innocent Iraqi citizens or questioned whether or not his horror stories were true.
They weren’t.
A blockbuster report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch blows the lid off Massey’s claims once and for all and shows them to be at best, exaggerations – or at worst, demonstrably false.
Massey, 34, went to the Middle East in January 2003 and took part in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He was discharged in December 2003 after suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Here are several of Massey’s allegations, and what the Post-Dispatch found out about the claims:
• Massey said in a May 2004 radio interview and elsewhere that he had seen a tractor-trailer filled with the bodies of Iraqi citizens who had been killed by American artillery, and even described how "the plasma from the body and skin was decomposing.”
When told by the Post-Dispatch that the paper’s photographs and eyewitness reports revealed that the bodies in the trailer were all men and most were in uniform, Massey admitted he’d never seen the bodies and instead had received his information from "other Marines.”
• Massey told his audiences that Marines in his unit shot four civilian Iraqi men in a red Kia automobile. Sometimes he said the car failed to stop at a checkpoint, other times he claimed the Marines stormed the car.
Sometimes he said three of the men were killed while the fourth was wounded; other times he said the fourth man was "miraculously unscathed.”
The Post-Dispatch reports: "There is no evidence that any of the versions occurred.”
• Massey often tells various versions of an incident when he and other Marines fired on a group of innocent demonstrators in Baghdad during the first week after the Marines arrived.
Massey has said he and the Marines killed four of the demonstrators, but at other times he claimed they had killed nine.
The Post-Dispatch states: "In interviews with more than a dozen Marines and journalists who were in the military complex that morning, none can recall such an incident.”
The paper quotes Ron Haviv, an independent photographer embedded with Massey’s unit, as saying he never saw any demonstrators. "Basically, the only people who were on the streets in the first week were there to loot,” he said.
• According to Massey, the Marines shot a 4-year-old girl in the head. He claimed he saw the body, and while touring with Sheehan in Alabama said of the horrific sight: "You can’t take it back.”
But when interviewed by the Post-Dispatch, Massey confessed that he had never seen the girl.
He had claimed the shooting occurred when troops fired on a car at a checkpoint. But "no 4-year-old died in the incident or was even wounded, according to witnesses including a Post-Dispatch photographer at the scene,” the newspaper disclosed.
• In speeches Massey has said he personally shot a 6-year-old child – sometimes saying it was a boy, other times claiming it was a girl.
"That’s war,” he told a Cornell University audience in March. "A 6-year-old girl with a bullet hole in her head at an American checkpoint.
When interviewed by the Post-Dispatch, Massey admitted he had never shot a child, saying "I meant that’s what my unit did.”
He couldn’t name any Marine who could corroborate any of his stories.