Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely says the journalistic credibility of embattled NBC News anchor Brian Williams is shot.
"He's history as far as I'm concerned," Vallely said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"What some of these individuals try to do is to enhance their own image, come off looking like some kind of a hero or a war hero — and what happens is the truth finally comes out."
On Wednesday, Williams, who is one of NBC's biggest stars, recanted his longtime claim of being aboard a helicopter forced down by a rocket-propelled grenade during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes Williams was nowhere near that aircraft — but on another aircraft that took no fire.
Williams, who apologized on his nightly newscast,
told Stars and Stripes: "I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another."
Vallely says he does know why.
"So they can present themselves in a combat environment as some kind of a hero, they enhance the story and they get caught up in it over the years and that's what's happened to Brian Williams," he said.
"We'll see his credibility, respect, almost gone now except for maybe some of the stalwart progressives at NBC that want to keep him around."
Vallely, founder of Stand Up America, which promotes the principles of the U.S. Constitution, said he has seen others inflate the truth in a bid to promote themselves.
"We saw it with Hillary Clinton in Bosnia. I even witnessed it several times when I was in a combat zone in Vietnam," Vallely said.
"[Williams] is caught up in his own manifestations of that experience and the lie and the story.
"I can remember in Vietnam and Saigon, where many of the correspondents hung out at the hotels there with just a few getting out there in the combat areas. But yet you'd hear stories coming from these reporters."
Vallely's mention of Clinton, the former secretary of state, was in reference to her false claims in 2008 that she had landed in Bosnia under sniper fire.
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