Pants on fire: Today on his Delphi forum, Micah Wright finally comes clean: Despite his repeated claims to the contrary, he was never an Army Ranger:

"This entire Army Ranger thing is a stupid lie which has its roots back in college. When I was in the Army ROTC (and I really was, trust me), I met a lot of Rangers, and got to know some of these amazing men. They always impressed me with their inspired competence and their commitment to one another. Though I enjoyed my time in Army ROTC, I decided that eight years of military service was not for me and I left the program. That ended my involvement with the military. But once I was out of the Army ROTC program, there was a lingering impression among friends that I had been in the Regular Army.

"Skip forward years later to 2002. It's post-9/11. We'd bombed and invaded Afghanistan. The War On Terror had officially begun. The Patriot Act had passed. Thousands of Muslims had been swept up and held on secret charges. America was becoming a scary place.

"That's when I started creating my propaganda posters. I took familiar and iconic war propaganda images from World War II, replaced their text with new messages urging the viewer to reject the lies that they were being fed by the President, and by the news media to which America turns for the facts.

"Immediately upon putting the Remixed Propaganda posters on the internet, I received some of the most appalling and hateful email that I'd ever imagined possible. It was an ugly time in our country and people were lashing out in anger and fear against perceived 'domestic enemies.' I got countless death threats and letters accusing me of being a 'traitor' for speaking out against George Bush. I should have my eyes gouged out, knees broken, be shot in the face, killed like a rat with a shovel, on and on. I received such a deluge of these letters that I began to seriously worry about my safety. I even had my phone number de-listed after some threatening phone calls.

"In that atmosphere the old Ranger lie came easily to mind. I put up a 'companion page' to the posters which claimed that I was a military veteran and who were these people to tell me what I could or could not say? I was a Veteran, dammit, not just a Navy fry-cook or an Air Force typist, either, I was a former Army Ranger! I was interested to see how that one piece of information juxtaposed against the posters would change people's minds about what they were seeing.

"After posting the webpage saying that I was a former Ranger, the number of death threats dropped drastically. I still got hate mail, but it was now of a different sort, telling me that my opinion was idiotic or that I had been misled. My fellow Americans seemed to believe that if you had served in the military, this gave you leeway to say what you felt ... but if you were NOT a veteran, God forbid you should think opposite of what everyone else thought. Did any of that justify my lie? No. But it made it easier to tell. Too easy.

"Then I was contacted about doing a book of the posters. The editor knew the work was good, but that wasn’t the best part. Here, he said, was a man who had been to war but who was AGAINST war! That would be the sales hook! A simple confession at that moment would have ended the lie—and, I felt, my hopes for publication. I chose to continue the lie and to claim that I -was- indeed a Ranger. What would it hurt, I thought, it's not like I'm applying for a job as a policeman or something, I'm just writing a book, right?

"And so the Big Ranger Lie grew and grew and grew... and eventually grew out of my control. ...

"... So why come clean now, you ask? Why shouldn't I continue on, seeing how far I can push it? Well, frankly, I'm sick of it. The corporate-media-hoax part of the joke isn't fun any longer, and the personal side has never been fun. I'm sick of lying to my friends, to employers, to my fans, to myself. I'm not a Ranger. I've lied to so many people about this that it's made me physically ill. I haven’t been able to sleep and I’ve just about given myself an ulcer. The phone would ring and guilt, terror and panic would grip me: is this the day that I get found out? Or is it NPR wanting to do a story on me? How long should I compound the media hoax? To lie to more people? The waiting has become too much. I'm killing the hoax and I'm stopping the lies.

"The cat’s out of the bag now... I've finally told the truth. I wish I had a long time ago. In the last year dozens of real Rangers have been killed or wounded overseas--how can I keep lying in the face of that kind of dedication? When I read about the death of Pat Tillman, who sacrificed a high-paying football career in order to join the Rangers, I felt like even more of a fake and a heel. It's time it all ended: I'm not a Ranger, I was never a Ranger and I'm sorry for ever saying that I was. I apologize to every Ranger and to the families of every Ranger."

(Link via Newsarama.)

Note: The same message appears on Wright's website in an entry dated April 15, 2004, and titled "Mea Culpa."