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Ex-Marine Blames Iraqi Attacks on US "Genocide"
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"Overall,
we have to look at the (Bush) administration in terms of responsibility
for the atrocities and the murder at the checkpoints," Massey said.
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PARIS,
October 6, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A former US
Marine blamed Thursday, October 6, incessant resistance attacks in
occupied Iraq on the American "genocide", accusing the US army
of training soldiers to be desensitized.
The
daily attacks now doled out to US-led forces and Iraqi civilians are
"because of the brutality that the Iraqi people saw at the start of
the invasion," Jimmy Massey, a former staff sergeant, told Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
In
a book released Thursday in France, he charges that US military training
has created troops so desensitized to violence that battleground
brutality in Iraq is rampant and has helped fuel the resistance seen
there today.
He
writes that he and other Marines in his unit killed dozens of unarmed
Iraqi civilians because of an exaggerated sense of threat, and that they
often experienced sexual-type thrills doing so.
Massey,
who left Iraq in May 2003, wrote the book after being discharged from
the Marines with a diagnosed case of post-trauma stress syndrome.
"It's
been a healing experience," he said. "It's allowed me to close
a lot of chapters and answer a lot of questions."
In
French
Massey
said his book, Kill! Kill! Kill!, was being released first in
France -- and in French -- because he "didn't find an American
publisher."
Natasha
Saulnier, a French journalist who helped him write the work, said she
believed the US companies were reluctant to touch the book because its
"controversial" nature threatened commercial interests and the
US public's image of their fighting forces.
Although
the target of criticism from serving members of the US military -- some
of whom see the book as score-settling by a disgruntled Marine forced to
leave the services -- Massey has received significant interest in his
book in France.
His
next few days, he said, are to be spent being interviewed by media
outlets.
His
publisher said that, while an English language version of the book was
still pending, a Spanish edition would be coming out early next year.
"Genocide"
In
the book, Massey writes that at one point he told an officer that the US
military campaign "resembles a genocide" and that "our
only objective in Iraq is petrol and profits."
He
recalls that he and a group of Marines were near Baghdad when a group of
10 Iraqi men started to protest near them, yelling out anti-US slogans.
At
the sound of a gunshot, , Massey said he and his men fired on the group,
killing most of them, only to find out later that none of them was
armed.
He
also recounts several episodes at checkpoints where civilian cars failed
to stop and their unarmed occupants were shot to death.
"Overall,
we have to look at the (Bush) administration in terms of responsibility
for the atrocities and the murder at the checkpoints," Massey said.
The
former Marine questioned "the level of brutality instilled in the
Marines."
Massey,
a chubby-cheeked man with short hair and glasses, said in the lobby bar
of a Paris hotel that the casual violence exhibited by him and his men
was the deliberate result of combat training approved by the very
highest US authorities.
Later
revelations of abuse by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison and
elsewhere were symptomatic of the breadth of the problem, he maintained.
The
briefings they received, Massey said, made US troops view "everyone
as a potential terrorist -- they put fear and panic into my
Marines."
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