Former Asheville recruiter reveals judicial string-pulling

[G_j]

http://www.agrnews.org/issues/309/localnews.html#2

Former Asheville recruiter reveals judicial string-pulling

By Mike Ferner

Nov. 18 — He trolled for teenagers in North Carolina high schools, barked orders at recruits in boot camp, and pulled charred civilian corpses out of cars in Iraq. Now Jimmy Massey is making good on his promise to tell the whole world what he learned as a Marine.

For the first 10 years, Massey loved being in the USMC. With a quick mind and an easy manner, he and his superiors knew he’d make a great recruiter. And by the luck of the draw, he was assigned to the area around Asheville, NC, not far from where he grew up.

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“There’s a whole network within the community to enable recruiters to make their quotas -­ the sheriff’s department, police department, schools all the way up to the local congressional office.”

Massey recalled that at one point, “There was a congressional investigation brought up against me. I enlisted someone who was handicapped. I should have been in deep shit, but the Marine Corps swept it under the rug by stating that the kid had fraudulently enlisted. I got a call from Congressman Charles Taylor congratulating me on the work I had been doing, and he sent me an autographed picture.”
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And high school students weren’t the only people he got to know well. “We knew the names of the district attorneys in every county and went to them to get certain charges reduced or dismissed on kids we were recruiting. We took flowers to the secretaries in the clerk of courts offices. The clerk of courts can make a lot of things appear and disappear. We got to know people working in hospital medical records so we could check out, say, if a certain kid had asthma or not. We’d ask other kids ‘what about Johnny Smith?’ to find out if he had problems or if he might be interested.”
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&**Making good on his promise to tell the whole world what he learned as a Marine, Massy talks to Amy Goodman about killing innocents and his experience in Iraq:


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/24/148212

Now another US soldier who participated in the Iraq invasion and occupation has begun speaking out. Twelve year Marine veteran Jimmy Massey joins us on the line from North Carolina.


Marine Staff Segt. Jimmy Massey (Ret.), former Marine staff sergeant who was honorably discharged in December after serving 12 years, most recently in Iraq. He is speaking to us from his home in Waynesville, North Carolina in the Smokey Mountains.
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AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your experience there?

STAFF SERGEANT JIMMY MASSEY: Really, what led up to my disgust with the war was the civilian casualties that we were inflicting. We were given intelligence reports -- the civilian casualties really started taking place after we left the town of Anu Mannia on the drive north towards Baghdad. We were getting intelligence reports from higher command saying that the Fedayeen and Republican Guards were trading in their uniforms for civilian clothes, and they were mounting terrorist attacks against U.S. soldiers and marines using guerrilla-style tactics, suicide bombings. They were using civilians as human shields. They were loading down stolen ambulances and police cars with explosives. So, as we progressed on towards Baghdad, our fears and anxieties were heightened, and also due to the lack of sleep, some of us had less than 48 hours of sleep getting into Baghdad. So, whenever we were placed into these situations where civilian vehicles were coming up to our checkpoints, and not heeding our warning shot, we were lighting them up. What I mean by lighting them up, we were discharging our weapons, 50 cals and M-16's into the civilian vehicles. When we would do this, we were expecting secondary explosions, ammunition to be cooking off or actually have the occupants in the vehicle fire back at us. However, none of this ever happened. When we would go to search the vehicles, we would find no weapons, and nothing to link these individuals with -- these individuals with terrorists acts. And this happened continuously through the fall of Baghdad. I would say my platoon alone killed 30-plus innocent civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: How would you realize what you had done? Can you give us a specific example?

STAFF SERGEANT JIMMY MASSEY: Sure. Sure. A car would roll up to our checkpoint. And prior while we were still in Kuwait, we had actually made up Arabic road signs to place out in front of our checkpoint area warning the Iraqis to slow down. That didn't help. We would verbally tell them stop and we would fire a warning shot. When we would light the cars up, you know, we would go through and search the dead occupants as well as the vehicles, and we would find nothing that directly linked them to any type of terrorists. They were just average civilians that were trying to flee out of Iraq -- or excuse me -- out of Baghdad, out of the city limits because of the invading American force. They were scared. But with the intelligence reports that we were given, it was very hard for us to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. We ultimately started looking at everybody in Iraq as a potential suicide bomber or terrorist from women to children to old men. We didn't know who the enemy was.
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[G_j]

1. kick

[Stone_Spirits]

2. we met this person

at a Veterans For Peace vigil. It takes a lot of guts to do what he is doing. :toast:

[G_j]

3. "I killed Innocent Civilians For My Government"

his sign has shocked a number of people, just what is needed. :toast: