Falafel Bill’s reprehensible distortion of the events surrounding the Malmedy massacre apparently has deep roots in the proto-wingnutosphere. Today, the sharp-eyed Tristero over at Hullabaloo sheds some light as to the origin of this revisionist narrative. Turns out that it was none other than Tailgunner Joe McCarthy who first perpetuated this lie back in 1949.
From a negative WSJ review of Anne Coulter’s Treason:
Ms. Coulter’s work includes an admiring if brief biography of McCarthy’s political career. One that for some reason excludes the senator’s remarkable efforts on behalf of the members of the SS battle group who executed 86 American POWs in the Ardennes campaign in December 1944; otherwise known as the Malmedy Massacre. In his impassioned efforts on behalf of the accused–one never to be repeated in his investigative career–the senator charged that the U.S. Army had cruelly mistreated the former SS men.
The review is referring to the aftermath of Malmedy, when the Nazi perpetrators of the massacre were allegedly mistreated while in Allied custody in Landsberg Prison. If — and this is a big “if” — it turns out that Allied troops mistreated prisoners, then they should have been prosecuted. Period. We should never condone such behavior (it should be noted that the United States Senate conducted an investigation and found no such abuse).
Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound an awful lot like what happened at Abu Ghraib? What O’Reilly thought he was drawing attention to was an Allied My Lai massacre, when in fact he was citing what (if it were true) may have instead been a prototype for the horrors of the new American gulag system. Falafel Boy thought he was helping to deflect criticism for Haditha, and instead ended up reinforcing the narrative that American troops have a history of torturing prisoners of war. So, not only is O’Reilly sullying the reputations of these WWII veterans, he’s also inadvertently helping reinforce the story of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and others, something over which the wingnuts have been purple-faced ever since Seymour Hersh broke the story several years ago.
Way to go, Bill! I wish we had ten more just like you.
Note: I have no wish to lend any credence to anything uttered by that human shit-stain, O’Reilly. I merely wish to point out that yet another stone has been added to the mighty edifice of unintentional irony the right has been constructing over the last few years.
