http://www.vetsforfreedom.org/troopb...em.aspx?id=384

3/12/2008 1:07:19 PM
VFF Investigation: Credibility and Verification
Credibility and Verification

by Vetsforfreedom.org Co-founder Mark Seavey


“What do you make of this clown?”

That was the email that started it for me. The “clown” in question was uber-ranger Jesse Adam MacBeth, self proclaimed warrior of the millennia. His credibility took enough of a hit in the first 10 seconds of the accompanying video that I had to keep pausing the video to let the chuckles subside and wipe the tears out of my eyes.

Here’s MacBeth’s “ranger school” photo.



The more perceptive, or at least conscious, among you would easily note that his beret is going the wrong way, his T-shirt is the wrong color, and his sleeves are rolled the wrong way. The fact that he appears to be a “soup sandwich on a stick in the rain” might also occur to you.

Blogs today, mil blogs in particular, are now becoming the surrogates for truth. A title formerly carried by the main stream media. This change can be seen all across the spectrum. No longer can the media be expected to filter out fraud and phonies. After you finish reading Bellavia’s House to House and Lutrell’s Lone Survivor, you owe it to yourself to read Glenn Reynolds An Army of Davids and Mathew Currier Burden’s (Blackfive) The Blog of War. For me, the first sign of the change came when Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs went toe to toe with Dan Rather over the Bush National Guard Memos and managed to beat him with a simple animated .gif file.

By contrast the MacBeth fiasco was for me a feeding frenzy. It wasn’t one person or one blog that took on MacBeth, it was like a wounded animal falling into a school of piranhas. Everything from his faked DD214 to his preposterous video were pored over and ridiculed. When his actual DD214 was released showing that he had served for 44 days, there wasn’t a soul out there who was surprised.

I got beat to the punch (again) today by Obiter Dictum, who is customarily at least 2 steps ahead of me. Go and read his post for more on Macbeth, and the willing dupes who propped him up. But somehow IVAW "Iraqi Vets Against The War" not only signed off on this guy, but allowed him to appear at their events spouting his ridiculous stories. As Denis says in his post:

IVAW had been giving MacBeth assistance, credibility and a platform for charging Americans with gross atrocities, but only after the video came under skeptical scrutiny did IVAW seek to even verify MacBeth’s claim of service in Iraq!

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.

I'll bet you if you watch the video real close you will see Obama holding up the note cards with Hillary working the boom and John Kerry writing the script.

I love the stutter.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk..._the_lies.html

Photo courtesy Sears Portrait Studios


My Ranger School Class


Landing in Iraq


The disturbing face of American empire

Beating a dead horse.

You say "phoney soldiers"

I'm seeing this one kid who was found out over a year ago.

Not fair! Toby just sited a liberal opertunistic anti war blunder that happened a year ago by the IVAW! Foul! Foul!

Plus, you're saying soldiers when in fact, there was one guy.

Ofcourse you also have the one that are caught red handed Lieing! I love this arguement!

http://www.vetsforfreedom.org/troopb...em.aspx?id=384

Post the name of anybody else in IVAW who was not a serviceman.