Jimmy Massey was until recently the anti-war movement’s favorite Marine. A former Marine staff sergeant, Massey had returned from Iraq in 2003, after being honorably discharged on the grounds of post-traumatic stress syndrome. At which point, he took up an altogether different mission: waging a vicious disinformation war against his former comrades. The driving theme of his one-man smear offensive was his charge that the Marines in Iraq had not only killed dozens of innocent Iraqis, including children, but that they had positively delighted in their murderous handiwork. As Massey told it, the U.S. Marines were not soldiers but “psychopathic killers.” They did not so much guard Iraq’s streets as terrorize them.

Massey’s malicious charges—since comprehensively debunked by, among others, embedded reporter Ron Harris—had the virtue of comporting with the anti-military preconceptions shared by not a few of the war’s opponents. When he insisted that he had purposely lied in his past life as a military recruiter, in order to conscript impressionable innocents into America’s nefarious wars, Massey echoed the standard refrain of the anti-war Left. When he told of importuning his military superiors about the “killing of innocent civilians,” only to be icily ignored, Massey conjured up the caricature of American soldiers as cold-hearted death-dealers. When he blamed Iraq’s insurgency on the supposed brutality of American troops, Massey lent authority to the inverted worldview espoused by critics of American foreign policy. If Cindy Sheehan’s slain son Casey entitled her to a share of absolute moral authority on all martial matters, then Jimmy Massey, the reformed leatherneck who dared to speak the truth about the savagery of America’s marauding Marines, was morality made flesh.

He was treated accordingly. Massey’s media whirlwind began in the spring of 2004. Featured in countless magazines, including the glossy pages of Vanity Fair, and newspapers—the Associated Press penned no fewer than three stories about Massey—Massey was also invited to share his tale of terror on National Public Radio. Colleges jostled for his presence; he became a fixture on the anti-war speaking circuit, most recently as a member of Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war bus tour.

So compelling were the details of Massey’s story—spiced with poignant anecdotes about 4-year-old Iraqi girls expiring in his arms—that the media outlets who sought him out could not be troubled to assess their accuracy. Indeed, a look back on the indulgent media coverage that attended Massey’s two-year holiday from scrutiny reveals a pattern, especially among left-wing outlets, of dispensing with routine journalistic practices like minimal fact-checking in order to believe the worst about the conduct of America’s military men and women.

Among the first to air Massey’s story was the far-Left radio program Democracy Now! In the course of a May 2004, interview, Massey laid out a number of scurrilous charges, which he would hawk in the ensuing months, with varying degrees of consistency, to all who would listen. Chief among them was his claim that U.S. Marines had indiscriminately slaughtered Iraqi civilians. “I would say my platoon alone killed 30-plus innocent civilians,” said Massey, who described American actions in Iraq as “basically committing genocide.” In a gripping scene that he would recount time and again, Massey recalled an Iraqi child dying in his arms, the victim, in his telling, of a U.S. machine gun. The U.S. military, Massey said, took a “better them than us” view of the killing of Iraqi children. More than a year would pass before the truth emerged: There was never any evidence that an Iraqi girl died in the shoot-out Massey described. On the contrary, several witnesses, including an on-the-scene photographer who captured the incident on his camera, have since said that, Massey’s account fictive quite apart, no girl was even wounded on the occasion.

At the time, however, Massey pressed ahead. He insisted that, on one occasion, his unit had fired upon a peaceful crowd of Iraqis demonstrating against the American presence in the country. Massey even recalled “discharging my weapon as well into the demonstrators.” That story, too, would not survive investigation: After conducting interviews with over a dozen Marines and journalists, reporter Ron Harris concluded that no such incident occurred. Ron Haviv, a photographer embedded with Massey’s unit, further told Harris that there were no protestors or demonstrations at the time Massey claimed the shooting occurred, an account that squared with the recollections of other witnesses. Despite the fact that he answered Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman's question about whom he held responsible for the atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. Marines, including himself, “the president of the United States”—the veracity of his claims were never called into question.

Thus the lies continued. In an October 2004 interview with Mother Jones, Massey declared that Marines had routinely opened fire on unarmed civilians at roadblocks and repeated his claim “that his men killed 30 civilians in one 48-hour period.” Massey also took the opportunity to cast himself as a free-speech martyr, stating that he had been fired from his job in Waynesville, North Carolina, on account of his opposition to the war. “Massey got a job as a furniture salesman, then lost it after speaking at an antiwar rally,” the magazine faithfully reported. It was another compelling chapter in Massey’s self-made narrative, and suffered only from being wholly untrue. When later pressed about the story by the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Massey admitted that he had actually quit his job; his views on the war played no role in the decision. “I left on good terms,” Massey would later say. For Mother Jones, firmly in the anti-war camp, such details were too good to check.

Further out on the fringes of the Left, Massey’s story was seized as a symbol of the evils of the American military. Reproducing without a hint of skepticism Massey’s accounts of attacks on innocent civilians, the World Socialist Web Site in November of 2004 professed it to evidence the “brutality of the US military’s retaliation against the growing resistance of the Iraqi people…” That same month, the radical webzine Counterpunch embraced Massey’s frequent insistence that he had lied as a military recruiter. This became, in Counterpunch’s view, proof positive that the American military would “swindle recruits” into joining the service. (Counterpunch was hardly alone in purveying that claim. As late as this September, Vanity Fair was making use of Massey’s confession to bolster a report about “patterns of unethical recruiting” in the U.S. military.)

By March of 2005, Massey’s popularity among the war’s foes had made him a sought-after speaker. Appearing at Sienna College in upstate New York, at the behest of the resident peace studies department, Massey delivered himself of a poisonous harangue against American troops. The targeting of Iraqi civilians, he declared, was in keeping with the strategy of U.S. military leaders. “They were painting a picture that every civilian in Iraq was a potential terrorist, regardless of age or sex,” Massey said. For effect, he even likened U.S. forces to Nazis: “Abu Ghraib, Auschwitz, what's the difference?” mused Massey.

Those remarks, like so many before, went unchallenged by the press. The Albany Times Union, which covered Massey’s appearance, declined to address the substance of his charges. (The paper’s editor, Rex Smith, now regrets the paper’s passivity; he recently acknowledged that the paper’s coverage of Massey could have “benefited from some additional reporting.”) And the Times Union wasn’t the only local paper that neglected journalistic protocol and unquestioningly reported Massey’s slanderous allegations. The Post Standard of Syracuse, for instance, recorded Massey saying that the Marines’ kill-or-be-killed discipline taught them to “put a bullet into a 6-year-old, which is what I did.” Massey would later disavow the confession, telling the St. Louis Post Dispatch that he had never fired on a child: “I meant that's what my unit did,” he later said. For that charge, too, no proof was ever produced.

For their part, the more unhinged opponents of American military efforts in Iraq were happy to ignore the omission. Karen Kwiatkowski a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force and a crank columnist for the obscure, libertarian-anarchist site LewRockwell.com, wrote swooning tributes to Massey and similarly disgruntled defectors. Men like Massey, Kwiatkowski breathlessly opined, are “the kind of soldiers and marines we need to recruit in droves.” As for the truth of Massey’s charges, Kwiatkowski harbored no doubts. “The atrocities they revealed were not only actual and factual,” she pronounced in a June 2005 column, citing Massey as a dispositive authority.

Meantime, Massey, not content to muddy the Marines’ name on American shores, made himself available to a credulous foreign press. In a March 2005 interview with the Italian communist newspaper Il Manefesto, Massey offered the following assessment of the Marines he had once served alongside: “We are all just murderers. We kill innocent Iraqi civilians all the time. That's the way it is.... they don't want to talk and admit that killing terrorists is not our mission. It's to kill innocent civilians."

That theme pervades Massey’s unsubtly titled new book, Kill, Kill, Kill, released last month in France. American publishers passed on the opportunity to distribute Massey’s accumulated calumnies, but a French imprint grabbed at the chance to defame America’s men in uniform. If preliminary accounts are any indication, the book does not disappoint on this score. Written with the radical French journalist Natasha Saulnier, herself a veteran vilifier of American troops, the book recycles many of the now-discredited claims that initially vaulted Massey to his status as anti-war icon.

Massey writes that the terrorist attacks in Iraq can be imputed to the military’s alleged attacks on civilians, what he calls the “brutality that the Iraqi people saw at the start of the invasion." Elsewhere in the book, Massey, rehashing the preferred trope of anti-war conspiracists, avers that “our only objective in Iraq is petrol and profits.” Plans are reportedly underway to translate the book into Spanish, though the recent exposure of Massey’s allegations as a series of falsehoods has not exactly drummed up enthusiasm for an American release. Massey prefers to see his sudden shutout from the American media as a reaction to the painful “truths” he has told about American servicemen: “The picture that I paint within the book is very difficult for a lot of Americans to grasp, and I understand that,” he has said.

The reality of course is altogether different. Before Massey was revealed as a military-bashing fabulist, all too many media outlets, both of the partisan and mainstream variety, were prepared to accept his version of events as beyond reproach. There was no excuse for the quiescent coverage. Even as Massey’s allegations found their way into numberless print and broadcast stories, the military was strenuously disputing their accuracy. A military investigation completed in June of 2004 noted that Massey’s “allegations were found to be unsubstantiated in regards to law or rules of engagement violations.” Massey himself was a bundle of contradictions, variously stating that he based his charges on eyewitness accounts, then later on unofficial “intelligence reports,” and then on the accounts of “other Marines.” Each time he was given a free pass.

That was then. Today, with his distortions, exaggerations, and flat-out fabrications out in the open, media outlets that once indulged Massey’s venomous ravings have sought to distance themselves from their disgraced source. The latest to recant is the Sacramento Bee, which in 2004 ran a story about Massey without checking the merit of his charges. “Without such checking, we should not have published the story,” the paper’s editor, David Holwerk recently wrote. Other newspapers have taken the same position. In fact, save for his desperate defenders on the anti-war Left, many of whom regard the truth as a necessary casualty in their assault on the American campaign in Iraq, few are willing to vouch for Massey’s credibility.

A lonely exception is Jimmy Massey himself. In a self-exculpatory letter written last week, and reprinted on sites like Counterpunch and numerous anti-war blogs, Massey, in all apparent earnestness, accused his critics in the media and the Marine Corps of mounting “a smear campaign against me…” Perhaps nothing more vividly betrays the prejudices of some of the Iraq war’s critics than the fact that, even after the very public collapse of Massey’s mendacious campaign against American troops, they are still willing to believe him.