On Tuesday, November14, Retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis will speak at Grand Valley State University’s (GVSU) Allendale campus on “the Future of Iraq.” The event, which takes place from 5:00pm to 7:00pm at the Cook-DeWitt Center, is touted as a lecture by a “foreign affairs analyst” who will talk about the current situation in Iraq and the future of the country and US soldiers stationed there. There is no mention of the fact that Maginnis served as a part of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Military Analyst Group, was a former Fox News military analyst, is well-connected to the religious right, has a history of making false statements about Iraq, and has supported interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. According to information gleaned from GVSU’s website, the lecture is being sponsored by the International Relations Organization, the GVSU Armed Forces Association, the Middle Eastern Studies Department, and the Student Life Fund.

During the time that Maginnis was a military analyst with Fox News, he made a variety of baseless and misleading claims according to the media monitoring organization Media Matters. In December of 2002, Maginnis asserted that chemical warfare was going to be a large component of the Iraq War as the Iraqi military was “going to have ... almost booby-trapped use of some chemicals in some built-up areas where civilians are going to be casualties” and in January of 2003 claimed that the Iraqi military would have “smallpox material that’s been weaponized” hidden in residential areas. On February 3, 2003, Maginnis claimed that the United Nations’ weapons inspections failed to find weapons because the teams may have been “infiltrated” by Iraqis and that information got to “the wrong people” who then cleaned up sites before the inspectors arrived. Just before the war started, Maginnis along with Bill O’Reilly on the O’Reilley Factor agreed that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) would be found in Iraq within a month of the invasion. Maginnis has continued making similar statements since the invasion of Iraq and has argued that in Iraq the United States is killing terrorists “over there and not over here” echoing the common Republican justification for the occupation of Iraq that asserts that it is necessary to fight “terrorists” in Iraq rather than on the streets of the United States and has used al-Qaida and insurgent interchangeably. On CNN in October, Maginnis argued that the plan for winning the Iraq War is “very simple” as the United States just has to “kill the enemy.” In that same interview, Maginnis described Iraq as being a central component of “the War on Terror” as “the people that bombed us in New York City at the Twin Towers” have chosen to fight the United States in Iraq. Of these “jihadists,” Maginnis says that “we’ve killed a lot of them, but we haven’t killed, clearly, enough.”

Beyond supporting the occupation of Iraq, Maginnis has also supported the detention and interrogation of “terrorists” at Guantanamo Bay. In September on MSNBC, Maginnis explained that interrogators behave professionally, that new intelligence is coming out of there all of the time, and that he personally witnessed interrogators giving prisoners candy to get them to talk. Maginnis has asserted that prisoners at Guantanamo do not need to be held in accordance to the Geneva Convention because they legal prisoners of war because they do not abide by the rules of war. Moreover, Maginnis argued that prisoners “try to kill us everyday” and that keeping them there keeps them “off the streets.”

In addition to his role in the military, Maginnis also has a long history of involvement with the religious right that continues to this day. In the 1990s Maginnis served as Vice President of Policy at the Family Research Council, which is one of the major religious right lobbying organizations. During that time, Maginnis opposed allowing homosexuals in the military—a position that he still holds—and also blamed the “radical feminist views embraced by the modern military” for making the military a “liberal Petri dish.” Maginnis favors excluding gays outright from military service because he claims that it undermines the “cohesion” of military units, despite research showing that gays can serve without compromising military objectives. Maginnis helped create the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, arguing that if gays could not be excluded from the military that they should not be allowed to serve openly. His exclusionary and discriminatory views have not been restricted to gays, as Maginnis has also argued that women should not be allowed to serve, that the military should think carefully before allowing Muslims to serve at West Point, and that Wiccans should be excluded. Maginnis has asserted that women should not be allowed to serve because they allegedly lack the strength of men and because military service undermines their value as the “bearers and nurturers of future generations,” two arguments that reflect the patriarchal views held by the religious right with whom he is closely aligned. He has also suggested that Muslims should not be allowed to attend West Point, with Maginnis arguing in October of this year that the military should be selective when admitting Muslims, questioned the decision to build religious facilities for Muslims at West Point, and questioned the loyalty of Muslims in the military. Maginnis asserted that Muslims might place the ideas in the Koran, specifically the “coming Caliphate—the domination of Islam across the world—and your [a Muslim’s] personal obligation to it,” above the goals of the military and suggested that Islam was inherently extreme by stating that cadets would have to be moderate or “not faithful to the tenets of Islam.” As part of a religious right boycott of the Army in the late 1990s, Maginnis wrote a paper arguing that Wiccans in the military threatened unit cohesion, morale, and efficiency and that consequently their religious rights should be limited. It is worth noting that Maginnis consistently uses the “unit cohesion” justification when seeking to exclude groups or to justify positions advocated by the religious right.