http://keohane.blogspot.com/2008/03/...r-soldier.html
Who is Jesse MacBeth?

On May 21, 2006 the video "Jesse Macbeth: An Iraq Veteran Speaks Out" hit the Net, and within little more than a day it caused a firestorm. In the video MacBeth claimed to have been an Army Ranger deployed to Iraq, where his unit had murdered hundreds of men, women and children in and around Fallujah in 2004. MacBeth admitted to having personally killed over two hundred civilians, many of them execution style, saying that his victims would:

"...feel the hot muzzle of my rifle on the forehead."
He recounted how his unit had slaughtered hundreds praying in a mosque, and claimed that the Rangers burned the bodies or hung them from the building’s rafters.

It was sensational stuff, but beyond perhaps his name and acknowledged membership in IVAW, everything MacBeth claimed in the video was a lie. Booted out of the Army after only forty-four days of boot camp, MacBeth was a complete fraud. He was spotted as such almost instantaneously by milbloggers when the video was pointed out to them by skeptics. At the time of the video’s release, MacBeth had been a member of IVAW for months and the IVAW logo appeared prominently in the video. After he was exposed, MacBeth resigned from the IVAW, although even his forty-four days in the military still meets IVAW’s membership criteria.

IVAW, which had had credibility problems with atrocity stories told by other members, within days distanced itself from MacBeth and the video after he was exposed, stating:

"After looking into his recent claims, we have learned that Jesse is not what he represented himself to be. Accordingly, IVAW does not in any way endorse Jesse MacBeth or any of his accounts involving military service. He -- and he alone -- is responsible for them. IVAW was not aware of the creation of the video program featuring MacBeth, and did not authorize use of our logo in the program."
Early last year, MacBeth was convicted of defrauding the VA, and sentenced to jail. There the story seems to have ended, with almost everyone’s position on the matter settled. For many on the right, MacBeth was yet another example of the anti-American and anti-military left typified by IVAW, trying to smear those serving in uniform. For many on the left, the right wing was making too much of one loose cannon in order to undermine stories of real, ongoing and even routine American atrocities. Some on the left speculated that MacBeth was likely a plant by the right to discredit the anti-war left. On all sides, MacBeth is scorned as a loser and worse.

What has not been sufficiently dealt with is how MacBeth came to the attention of the independent activist film makers at PepperSpray Productions in Seattle who made the video and why did they believe he was credible. Further, how was the expertise and contacts available to have the video and the text of the same (almost instantaneously translated into Arabic) disseminated so widely on the Internet? Jesse MacBeth, loser, didn’t do that by himself. Jesse may have been a loose cannon and worse, but MacBeth and his video was an operation, even if an ad hoc one, involving many. It only became the "loose cannon" stunt as a cover when MacBeth was exposed as a fraud.