The Daily Background
| CBS: Four Generals will be held accountable for Pat Tillman coverup
by Arlen Parsa
According to a CBS News report today, nine officers (including four generals) will be blamed for the coverup over the death of Pat Tillman, the NFL football player who died fighting in Afghanistan in April 2004.
CBS reports that the first high-ranking officers will be found at fault in the investigation which is years old now, into how Tillman’s family (and the entire country) was lied to about the circumstances surrounding his death.
Tillman, it was originally said, died fending off an attack from the Talian. It was later revealed that he had actually been killed by American troops in a tragic friendly-fire incident.
CBS reports that “According to a defense official, it does not appear that the IG investigation, the fifth inquiry into Tillman’s death, found any indication of an orchestrated cover-up.” Instead, it appears to investigators that senior military officers made up a story about his death because they did not know the true circumstances surrounding the incident in which he died.
However, as the new report says, “Dozens of soldiers — those immediately around Tillman at the scene of the shooting, his immediate superiors and high-ranking officers at a command post nearby — knew within minutes or hours that his death was caused by friendly fire.”
Conservatives initially hailed Tillman for heroism before it also came out that Tillman was politically liberal and disagreed with the war in Iraq. According to his brother, the late NFL star was a fan of Noam Chomsky.
Tillman’s death is only one in a series of incidents where the military originally claimed one version of events had occurred, only to have it later revealed that it was untrue.
In 2003, the Pentagon claimed that Pfc. Jessica Lynch was abducted by the Iraqi Army and rescued by US special ops forces. It turned out later that she had been “rescued” from an Iraqi hospital that she had been driven to by local Iraqis after an ambush on her unit left her wounded. Also in 2003, the military covered up the death of Spc. Alyssa Peterson, who had killed herself after being ordered to torture Iraqi prisoners by her commanding officers.
