Iraq vet: "We're comitting genocide in Iraq" - Political Discussion

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exclusive58
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Registered: 04/16/04
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Iraq vet: "We're comitting genocide in Iraq"

#4310423 - 06/18/05 09:01 AM (17 years, 9 months ago)

Former Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, a 12-year Marine veteran, lives in Waynesville, North Carolina, a small town in the Smoky Mountains just outside of Ashville. He is one of a growing number of American soldiers returning from Iraq who have become outspoken opponents of the war.

Massey entered Iraq as part of the initial US invasion in March 2003. He witnessed?and in some cases participated in?the killing of innocent civilians. During a single 48-hour period, he says, he saw as many as 30 civilians killed by US gunfire at highway checkpoints.

The brutality of the US military?s retaliation against the growing resistance of the Iraqi people transformed his view of the occupation and changed him for life. Massey, horrified and unable to reconcile himself to what was taking place, began to speak out to his superiors. He was eventually medi-vaced out of Iraq and diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Labeled as a conscientious objector by his commanders, Massey sought legal counsel and won his honorable discharge in December 2003.

In Iraq, Massey was brought face to face with this involvement. The initial invasion took on the character of a one-sided slaughter, with the world?s strongest military power armed with the most technologically advanced weapons, on the one hand, and a disarmed and virtually defenseless military of a country already devastated by a decade of sanctions, on the other.

?You have to look at what was the overall goal of the mission. That was pretty evident when, eight months before we even left to go to Kuwait, the Marines were training to shut down and take over the Ar Rumaylah oil fields. We had detailed schematics and terrain models of all of the oil fields outside of Basra, and once we took care of those, all that was left was the ride into Baghdad.

?We were like a bunch of cowboys who rode into town shooting up the place. I saw charred bodies in vehicles that were clearly not military vehicles. I saw people dead on the side of the road in civilian clothes. As a matter of fact, I only remember seeing a couple of bodies in military uniform the whole time.

?There wasn?t a whole lot of direct fighting to speak of. There were some firefights?I mean I had bullet holes in the side of my Humvee?but it wasn?t like major combat action. We took the highway the whole way up to Baghdad. They had no artillery; they had no air support. They were so weakened by all the sanctions. All of their equipment was in very bad shape. Most of their hardware was left over from the war against Iran. The first Gulf War just devastated them. I don?t think they had the will or the opportunity to fight.?

?As far as I?m concerned, the real war did not begin until they saw us murdering innocent civilians,? he said. ?I mean, they were witnessing their loved ones being murdered by US Marines. It?s kind of hard to tell someone that they are being liberated when they just saw their child shot or lost their husband or grandmother.?

Massey manned a number of US military checkpoints on Iraqi highways in the months following the invasion. He described how, when cars failed to stop, out of confusion or otherwise, the order was to ?light them up? or open fire. It was at one of the checkpoints that Massey?s attitude toward the war reached its turning point.

?We signaled a car to stop and when it didn?t we opened fire. They were innocent civilians. We found no weapons, no explosives?nothing. Somehow, and I have no idea how he could have done it, but one guy got out of the car and he wasn?t badly wounded. He was the brother of one of the men bleeding to death in the car. He looked at me and asked, ?Why did you kill my brother. What did he do to you?? There were 30-plus civilians killed over two days at these checkpoints.?

Massey described the chaotic and reckless character of the roadside checkpoints and the indifference of the military leadership to the culture of the people that they were there supposedly to help.

?When you put your hand up in the air with a closed fist, in the Marines it means you want them to stop,? he said. ?But, as we later learned, it?s actually the international sign of solidarity. It has a totally different meaning for the Iraqis?to them it was a sign like hello. And that was just one example of how we were not trained properly to understand the cultural differences between us and them.

?The bottom line is they [the military command] don?t see the need to teach culture and humanity to men whose singular purpose is to kill. And that was just one of the cultural miscues. I blame the top of the chain of command, from the President down to Tommy Franks [the former commander-in-chief of US occupation forces] to General [James] Mattis [commander of the First Marine Division]. They all knew that the military was not trained properly when it comes to dealing with Muslim culture and a foreign land. But that was not our purpose for being there.?

In the midst of the widespread killing of civilians, Massey was struck by the callousness of the military command and the lack of humanitarian assistance they were offering the Iraqi people. This further deepened his doubts about the true purpose of the war.

?We actually left all of the humanitarian MRE?s [Meals Ready to Eat] in Kuwait,? he recalled. ?We were supposed to give these out for relief, and we left them in Kuwait. They were just for show when the film crews came into the camps. We also had this big show with the medical supplies that we were prepping for Iraqi casualties. We were supposed to get in there and take care of them.

?But I?ll give you an example of what we actually did. After we shot up this car with civilians, I called in the corpsmen to bring in stretchers. They came in and put two men on stretchers. Five minutes later, they brought them back and dumped their bodies on the side of the road. They were still alive. They were riddled with bullets?one guy was just rolling in agony on the side of the road.?

At the time, intelligence reports were streaming in describing insurgents and rebels driving ambulances and civilian cars. In a growing atmosphere of fear within US military ranks, the entire Iraqi population was now viewed as the enemy.

?We?re thinking everyone is a terrorist,? Massey recalled. ?Here we are on no sleep, and there are intelligence reports coming in right and left about suicide attacks and the Republican Guard and so on?attacks being mounted against American forces. So cars come driving through our checkpoints, and our orders are to light them up. The amazing thing about it is that we were telling the Iraqis the exact opposite. We were telling them to keep their schools open, keep the hospitals open, to go about their normal routine??we?re not here to hurt you, we?re just here to overthrow Saddam.? So these people were just doing their normal routines, and they were getting frickin? blasted for it.?

A recent study estimated the number of Iraqi deaths since the start of the war in March 2003 at around 100,000. When asked if this number seemed accurate, Massey responded:

?Yes, but that of course does not include the thousands more who will be dying from disease because of a lack of medical supplies, clean water, or proper sanitation. It does not include the hundreds of thousands that died in Iraq before the war even began from the sanctions. We are committing genocide in Iraq, and that is the intention.?

It is now well established that all of the pretexts for launching the unprovoked war in Iraq were based on manipulated intelligence and lies. In its drive toward war, the Bush administration fraudulently exploited the September 11 attacks to spread fear and panic throughout the country, and this, as Massey notes, was very effective in the South, where he is from.

?What do you tell a kid that just came back from war with the economy the way it is and the lack of jobs, who?s just got finished murdering innocent civilians because his government has violated every law in the Geneva Conventions?? Massey asked. ?You expect him to come back to the US and be a productive citizen? What do you do? For me, I keep hanging on to one thing that my grandfather used to say: ?The truth shall set you free.? I?ll keep talking as long as people listen.?

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/vet-n11.shtml

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