Smoke 'em out

More popular bloggers than I have taken up this issue (referred to in brief below) which started through a nice catch, as usual, from Crooks & Liars. But Bill O'Reilly in order to make a cheap point, excusing torture, accused American Soldiers, specifically the 82nd Airborne, of committing the Malmedy Massacre.

American soldiers, of course, did no such thing. Rather, the German 1st Panzer mowed down troops, mostly from the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion (the 82nd was 10 miles away and had nothing to do with this incident). Whether the massacre was calculated, or the result of panic, is less clear, but there is no doubt that dozens of American soldiers were killed after having surrendered.

Many American soldiers escaped the massacre by fleeing, among those that escaped was the actor Charles Durning.

It was one of the best known outrages against American troops of the Second World War, particularly in the European Theatre. Any American who has done more than a cursory study of World War II -- and by that I mean pretty much watched the "History Channel" for a few hours, knows about the Malmedy Massacre.

But to have a different take on it requires a deep resevoir of sympathy for the right-wing nut job view of history. A view of history, where even tragedies inflicted on American soldiers have to be glossed over to make excuses for the Nazis.

Steve Gilliard through a Kos Diarist found and expounded on an item which could have been the source of O'Reilly's twisted history through Ann "Dry Hump McCarthy's Tombstone" Coulter:

somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy.

O'Reilly outrageously slandered the American Army, by accusing it of perpetrating a war crime of which its soldiers were the victim. He should not be allowed to get away with it. There, are, of course, outrages that occur from all sides in all wars, but that doesn't excuse this -- nor does it excuse the behavior of the American military in this war. War outrages should always be exposed -- and never excused.

You may chastise Mr. O'Reilly if you wish:

oreilly@foxnews.com