The Daily Background

The family of Pat Tillman is telling the press that they don’t trust a new Pentagon report released Monday which says that there was no deliberate cover up over the circumstances of Pat’s death. And who can really blame them; the Pentagon lied to them and the entire country about the tragic circumstances surrounding Tillman’s death, which occurred in 2004 in Afghanistan.

Everyone was told that Tillman died heroically defending his men while fighting off an enemy attack. It came out later that it was his own men who shot him to death after they confused him with Taliban forces. His family was led to believe that he died a hero’s death, fighting for somebody else’s safety, but instead he was just killed as part of a horrific accident.

And the whole thing was used cynically and shamefully by the Pentagon and Administration for publicity purposes. The new report (which the family has waited for for years- literally) says that mistakes were made but that there was no concerted cover up to purposefully hide the real story behind Tillman’s death.

It also says that high-level military official “made up” a story behind Tillman’s death because they didn’t know the real cause of it, even though his commanding officers and those in his unit knew what really happened ever since the incident occurred. And if that really was the whole truth (Tillman’s family thinks there’s more to it than that), would that really be any better than a deliberate cover-up? Because if they just made up a story, that means they don’t care about the truth just as much as they wouldn’t have cared about the truth if there was an actual cover-up.

We have to view these types of things in context, as I imagine Tillman’s family does. And the context that we have is that the Pentagon has engaged in cover ups of this type of thing before, and has used this type of thing for propaganda purposes before (there’s really no other way to put it).

For instance, take the case of Jessica Lynch, who the country was originally told was kidnapped by the Iraqi Army in 2003 when her unit was ambushed. Later on, the BBC discovered this wasn’t true: her unit had been ambushed but they left her behind and her weapon malfunctioned and she became unconscious.

She was brought to a local Iraqi hospital by some civilians. Then the Pentagon went in with special ops teams in the middle of the night, pointed their guns at doctors, handcuffed other patients to their hospital beds, and “rescued” Pfc Lynch from the Iraqi hospital. And they had one of their PR specialists tag along with a camcorder in “night vision” mode, and they handed over a pre-edited video of the incident to the American press, which gobbled it up (still frame at right/below).

And there’s more history than that. There’s the incident of Matty Hull, the British Lance Corporal of Horse who- like Tillman- was killed by friendly fire. He burned to death in his armored car after American Air Force pilots who mistook his convoy for an Iraqi one. They weren’t following protocol because they were in a hurry to get back to base, and as a result hastily fired on Hull and his comrades even after there were indications that it was a British convoy, not an Iraqi one (the Air Force pilots somehow convinced themselves that the orange markers on the top of the cars, which are meant to identify coalition forces, for rocket launchers that were mysteriously painted orange).

Even though the Pentagon had a totally damning video in which the pilots verbally admit that they have struck a British convoy and that they weren’t following protocol, the pilots weren’t disciplined and the tape was kept secret, and the whole incident was covered up. And the British government was complicit, until the tape got leaked, at which point the Pentagon was essentially forced to cooperate as well. Hull’s family, like Tillman’s, has been fighting for years for the truth about what happened to their son.

Or there’s the equally-tragic case of Alyssa Peterson, the military specialist who was deployed to Iraq and committed suicide after she was ordered to torture Iraqis. The Pentagon covered that up too, until the press discovered that she didn’t really die from a mysterious-but-benign “weapon malfunction” on her base. Her family was lied to as well, also for years.

The point is, for a war that was supposed to be the most open and transparent war ever (according to the Pentagon, explaining their decision to “embed” the media with US units), the military has hardly been forthcoming about incidents that don’t reflect well upon them– especially incidents that don’t reflect well on military leadership and those high-up in the chain of command.

I would not be surprised if some people call the Tillman family “conspiracy theorists” or “unreasonable” for believing that they still haven’t been told the full truth and wanting a congressional investigation. But consider that there have already been four other investigations into Tillman’s death. And each subsequent investigation has revealed that the previous one was shoddy and did not provide a complete picture of what really happened. What’s to say this one is any different?

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