For Our Freedom

From Investor Business Daily:

Posted 11/11/2005
Media Bias: If American support for the liberation of Iraq is declining, it is in no small measure because of the way the media trumpet the words of liars and distort the words of heroes.

Former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was discharged in December 2003 shortly after returning from Iraq, reportedly suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress, and almost immediately became a media darling with his tales of U.S. soldiers routinely committing war crimes and atrocities.

He claimed that he had shot a 4-year-old in the head. Scores of media outlets ran stories with headlines like, "I killed innocent people for our government." He was a featured guest on National Public Radio, colleges lined up to invite Massey to speak, and he was with Cindy Sheehan's roadshow.

The Washington Post breathlessly reported on Massey's December 2004 sworn testimony at a Canadian asylum hearing for U.S. Army deserter Jeremy Hinzman in which Massey said: "I do know we killed innocent civilians, including the driver of a car who got out with his hands up." Massey is quoted as saying, "But we kept firing. We killed him."

Except none of it ever happened, as St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris has documented. Reported Harris: "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 in Massey's unit."

As with Dan Rather's story on President Bush and the National Guard, many in the media and the anti-war crowd ran with it because they wanted it to be true. So intense is their anti-war angst that The New York Times took the words of a dead American hero and selectively edited them until they agreed with the Times' anti-war editorial position.

Marking the 2,000th American soldier killed in Iraq with a story about soldiers killed after multiple tours of duty, the "paper of record" quoted part of a letter written by Cpl. Jeffrey Starr of Snohomish, Wash., before he was killed in a gun battle in Ramadi on his third tour of duty on April 30.

After his death, Starr's family found the letter on his laptop computer written to his girlfriend, Emmylyn Anonical. She decided to make the letter public, saying, "The reason I chose to share that letter was the part about why he was doing this, not the part about him expecting to die."

Yet that part was what The New York Times found "fit to print," because it fit its position that young Americans are being used as cannon fodder in an unjust war. It was the part where Starr said, "I kind of predicted this; this is why I'm writing this. . . . A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances."

But Starr was not a pessimist who felt doomed in a war without purpose and without chance of success, as the part the Times chose not to print shows:
"I don't regret going, everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom. Now this is my mark."

We hope Sen. Ted Kennedy and his kindred spirits read Cpl. Starr's letter. It is up to us to stay the course and ensure he has not died in vain. We owe him, and so many others, a huge debt.