Time For President To Come Clean On Tillman Cover-Up

[ProSense]

Time For President To Come Clean On Tillman Cover-Up

Our guest blogger is Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and veteran of the Iraq war.

The worst way you can further exacerbate the pain survivors of a fallen soldier feel, is to keep them wondering why and how their loved one died. Now past three years since former NFL star Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan, his mother, Mary Tillman, and her family do not have answers. Unfortunately, documents meant to put the investigation into his death to rest are only bringing up more painful questions, rather than calming them. What’s worse is that the case could start to have serious repercussions with internal confidence in the Armed Forces.

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that among the files on the case that the news agency obtained were details of Army medical examiners being unable to convince the military to look into whether Tillman was intentionally killed. According to the documents, the wounds they found were inconsistent with the government’s original official story that Tillman was cut down by Afghani fighters and looked more like he was killed by an American M-16 just a mere 10 yards away.

After an investigation, the government changed the story — that Tillman was a victim of friendly fire, an honest mistake, because he was mistaken for the enemy. The recent revelations now cast this conclusion into serious doubt. You don’t mistake someone from 10 yards away. But, was it murder or negligence? Was this a deliberate homicide?

President Bush is not helping at all. With these new details, and his decision to invoke executive privilege in the Tillman investigation, the President is certainly sending the signal that he has something to hide.

It is inevitable, then, that unless the President comes clean, rumors about Tillman’s death will take hold. By stonewalling, there is no way to stop people from wondering, “Was the man the White House used to promote the war ordered to be killed because he was becoming increasingly critical of the war in Iraq?” It was well known that Tillman was critical of the decision to go to war, and had often read and quoted Noam Chomsky. I don’t personally believe such a conspiracy to be the case, but until the President comes clean, rumors like that will continue to grow. Every officer knows that if a soldier in their command is killed they must write the family and tell them the truth, for exactly that reason. Why can’t the man who sent Pat Tillman to war, and used his death for political gain, have the courage to tell a family what happened to their son?

more

[SammyWinstonJack]

1. K & R!

[Rick Myers]

2. Tilman was about to become the biggest 'anti-war' voice!

And they killed him! And now, executive privilege!?!?!? That means Bush or Cheney are somehow involved directly!!!

:kick: and R

[Horse with no Name]

17. They had the opportunity to silence Tillman

Make no mistake, if they had the opportunity to silence Sheehan, they would have.
But they couldn't, so they did the next best thing. They radicalized her (with the help of their media lapdogs).

[hedgehog]

3. Kick - the Tillman story really gets interesting when you find out that Bush has evoked executive

privilege rather than discussing it. Why would he be involved in the first place? I can understand a cover-up at lower levels, but the White House involvement really stinks.

[AndyTiedye]

8. getting away with murder is now an "executive privelege"

[cascadiance]

30. I think he may be trying to protect his loyalists in the military that might be future "coupsters"..

If Bush and Cheney have the future planned that Paul Craig Roberts has diagrammed in recent weeks, they will need the military to work for them, not against them. That means they need some well-placed individuals in the military to ensure this is possible. If all of those involved in doing this coverup of Tillman's story are also his "lieutenants", he cannot afford to have have them removed from the military. Thus the coverup! Otherwise their whole master plan of fascist government transition might go down the drain... My other posts on this...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2931311&mesg_id=2931404

[AndyTiedye]

32. Packing the Air Force Brass With Raving Fundies May Be Part Of That Plan

[bleever]

4. K5R.

:thumbsup:

[ChazII]

5. Pat,

Fork 'em


Anyone who is or was a Sun Devil understands.

[panader0]

6. From what I've heard, the angle of the wounds prove that the

shoots were from close range. He was murdered, hence the cover-up, because he saw the wrong doings and would not be the poster boy recruiter bush wanted. Combine this ith the earlier post about Jessica Lynch's rescuers dying mysteriously, oh yeah, and the US attourneys who died mysteriously and you get close to the truth about this MIHOP administration.

[fightthegoodfightnow]

7. Bush Clean Up the CoverUp? Bush is the CoverUp

They took Tillman and fed him through the Rove propaganda and history rewrite machine they own in that house.

[frogcycle]

9. My view

(ok, I confess, I posted this elsewhere earlier - but threads sink and get replaced...)

It was a "hit."

Not an accident. Not a comrade "losing it" and deciding spur-of-the-moment to off him because of his attitude, or a grudge, or something. Cold, calculated murder for hire.

• He had been bandied about as a big poster boy for the war when he joined.
  
• He was being very outspoken about opposing the Iraq debacle, keeping a journal many knew about, and had made arrangements to meet with an antiwar activist author.
  
• His "coming out" against the war was going to be really, really bad pr for the cabal.
  
• He was sent from Iraq to Afghanistan on some sort of temporary redeployment.
  
• The unit headed out on a mission, a Humvee broke down, and despite the platoon commander's objections as unsafe, the platoon was split up with one group going ahead, the other dealing with the disabled Humvee.
  
• When the two groups encountered each other later, there was this skirmish due to "mistaken identity" and he took three rounds from an M16 in the forehead from no more than ten yards away.
  
• There was no enemy contact, no enemy fire, no damage to any equipment or personnel from enemy fire.
  
• His journal vanished; his uniform was burned.
  
• The Dr. that did the initial exam recommended an inquiry, but it was not done.
  
• The official story that came out was a complete fabrication, encountering enemy forces, his being heroic, getting the silver star posthumously for valor, blah blah blah.
  
• later it was amended to acknowledge "friendly fire" but still the details were off. The distance was not acknowledged; enemy involvement was still alluded to - blamed on the "fog of war"
  
• There are reports that word went out to all who had any knowledge of it that they must keep mum (credit to hisownpetard for this addition)
  
• most recently, the administration invoked "executive privilege" rather than provide information.
  

You do the math.

The most telling evidence, in my opinion, is, as with the Sherlock Holmes 'dog that did not bark', the lack of any alarm bells going off anywhere when it first occurred. Captains and majors and colonels don't instigate coverups like this on their own, with such a high-profile soldier. The communications necessary to pull it off - getting the fabricated story straight, running it up the chain of command, getting all the witnesses on board - just DOES NOT HAPPEN that fast. As Wes Clark said (either on MSNBC or Charlie Rose - I forget) decisions like this don't even happen at the 2 or 3-star level.

So if it was unplanned, somebody had to get all the way to the top to start the wheels turning on the coverup, and then it had to be implemented before anyone said anything else. It just doesn't happen that way.

As much as I think the 9/11 conspiracy theories suffer from the simple fact that you can't keep something like that quiet with the number of people who would be involved, now that we KNOW this was a coverup conspiracy, i don't believe it could have been pulled off without advance planning.

Our dear leader (b or c; take your pick; but I vote c) put out a hit on him. I firmly believe that, and will until it is proven otherwise.

And that explains all the obfuscation that we see. Not just this incident; if there is this then there are no doubt more. They know that if even some of the truth comes out as to what they have been up to, they are going to prison for a long, long time.

[eridani]

11. Stan Goff doesn't think it was a planned hit

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/080806_tillman_files7.shtml

I admit that something is really fishy here though--would you consider doing an email dialog with Goff and letting us know how it went?

[eridani]

12. In March 2007, Goff wrote a piece on Tillman for Huffington Post

--called Safe World, Dark World. The page can no longer be found.
http://www.topix.com/hockey-players/richard-scott

[frogcycle]

18. Thanks for the link - my comments:

I read his Installment 7; went back and read the others as well.

It seems like the only place he and I differ, and I would have to defer to his experience as making his opinion carry a whole lot more weight than mine, is on whether it was preplanned (ie, a "hit").


He makes the point that such an operation would not be left to a second lieutenant and an infantry sergeant, and further uses the sequence of unexpected occurrences that put Tillman where he was and created the circumstances at the moment he was killed to say that rules out it having been a carefully scripted operation. He concludes that the improbability of its having been a hit means it was not a hit. And that is a reasonable position to take.

He also says, though:

"I came straight from the bowels of this system, and I have written three books exposing the worst aspects of the military. If they haven’t cut my brake lines or shot me when I’m out fishing yet, then they didn’t kill Pat Tillman because he criticized the war in Iraq and read a book by Noam Chomsky."

This smacks to me of letting his ego get involved. Maybe his books "exposing the worst aspects of the military" just haven't been picked up on Rove's radar. And Tillman's criticism had not yet gone public - he had not started making the talk show rounds or whatever Rove might have imagined was about to happen. So with all due respect to Stan Goff's experience, being the skeptic that I am, I wonder if his conclusion that it "could not have been a hit" isn't slanted a little bit by a preconceived notion that surely that jock-turned-ranger could not be of more significance to the cabal than "an alumnus of Delta Force" with three books published. His dismissive "read a book by Noam Chomsky" speaks volumes. It is a much-overused ploy to denigrate someone's importance or significance by understating it without denying it. Yeah, Paul Revere went riding one night - so? A VERY common Coultergeist ploy, btw.

I am not saying he is not correct in reaching his conclusion; I have nothing whatsoever but the bits of info in the news with which to reach mine. He uses probability, and so do I. Neither of us has actual facts.

I do submit though, that with the "outsourcing" of military activities to such outfits as Blackwater and others less publicized, and the overall secrecy, paranoia, raw ambition and cloak-and-dagger activities of this administration, particularly the cheney "shadow government" I don't think it implausible that non-military (well, not active duty) person(s) could have been involved. How much of the Humvee "breakdown" and other events could have been manipulated and made to look like random, unpredictable events? I have no idea. He mocks those of us without his experience by saying "It doesn’t matter what you see in the movies," and goes on to suggest that we poor ignorants are akin to medieval believers in witchcraft because we don't have knowledge. Another touch of ego and arrogance that makes me question not necessarily his facts, but the way he elects to view them and the conclusions he draws.

Perhaps I am just another conspiracy nut. I discount the WTC planned-demolition flights of fancy as just being to complicated to have pulled off, and I then dismiss the further arguments that the handling of the aftermath shows it was expected, was manipulated to the cabal's advantage, and thus must have been planned by those who benefited.

Yet here I am pretty much doing the same thing. It would have been complicated to pull off; a lot of people had to be kept quiet, and if the humvee breakdown was not staged then it certainly must have caused the conspirators to have to do some scrambling.

But I submit it is not out of the realm of possibility that an event was planned for which the initial report of an ambush and firefight with 10-12 "enemy" fighters might have in fact withstood scrutiny. Some of the random events which could not, of course, have been counted on to make the plan work as it did, may have in fact been disruptions to the real plan, resulting in improvisations which did not hold up to scrutiny.

And I stand by my assertion that the attempted coverup, which was kicked into gear immediately and eventually exposed by inconsistencies that may have stemmed from those unplanned events, is not just indicative of the most cynical and corrupt of behavior, but also of prior knowledge.

So it comes down to this: We are both guessing on that point. There is sufficient cause to conduct a thorough investigation which does not rule out premeditated murder with foreknowledge by persons other than the perpetrators.

Let the evidence determine whose guess is right.

As to an email dialogue, sure I'd consider it, but would not expect much of it. I have nohard facts that he does not have. The differences in perspective are slight. I don't think we know enough to rule anything in or out. He thinks he does. He bases that on his experience, and I have nothing to counter that. I want more investigation before drawing a final conclusion. My post "My view," is only that. It is what I think an investigation might find. Until that investigation occurs, and actual facts are available, I am unlikely to change that view. So aside from pleasantries, I doubt the dialogue would get very far.

[eridani]

24. Agreed. Nobody really has the necessary info without a better investigation

Goff may well be letting ego get in the way--he's well known to a number of progressive/anti-war activists with military connections, but not widely outside of that circle. Tillman was relatively famous and had already been used by the Bushies in one of their propaganda storyboards.

Still, I wonder why HuffPo no longer has the article he wrote in March of this year on the subject. URLs for posts of that vintage and earlier are readily accessible. A falling out with HuffPo? He changed his mind about his analysis and withdrew the article himself? I don't have time to follow up on it right at the moment.

[hedgehog]

13. Please clarify - do I understand you to say that there was no enemy

fire in the vicinity when this happened? I had thought part of the unit was under fire and that Tillman was killed when his group entered the field to give assistance.

[frogcycle]

15. you understand me correctly

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/26/ap3958728.html

_ No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene - no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.

another revelation I forgot to list:

_ Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.

[hedgehog]

16. So the scenario is this:

Group 1 moves ahead and either starts firing and/or reports that it is under fire.

Tillman's group catches up and tries to assist.

Tillman and his grioup come under fire from the first group and Tillman is shot despite efforts by his group to identify themselves as Americans.

If this is so, just what was the first group firing at? Why did they open fire and continue to fire?

[frogcycle]

19. wikipedia has this:

The Army Special Operations Command initially claimed that there was an exchange with hostile forces. After a lengthy investigation conducted by Brigadier General Jones, the U.S. Department of Defense concluded that Pat Tillman's death was due to friendly fire aggravated by the intensity of the firefight.

A more thorough investigation concluded that no hostile forces were involved in the firefight and that two allied groups fired on each other in confusion over an exploded mine or remote controlled bomb.

emphasis added

I haven't found the most recent "official" account, not sure where Wiki writer got that

[frogcycle]

22. more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/03/AR2005050301502.html

In interviews with Jones, soldiers who were with Tillman when he died said they immediately reported that other Rangers, riding in a Humvee, emptied their weapons at his position on a hill without first identifying whom they were shooting. Perceiving they were in a heated firefight, the soldiers rounded a corner and used several high-powered weapons to kill an Afghan Militia Force soldier working with the Rangers before pausing and turning their guns on Tillman. About 65 meters away, Tillman had been waving his arms and throwing a smoke grenade to signal his unit that he was not an enemy fighter.

[malaise]

31. Great post n/t

[Bjorn Against]

10. Why should Gore have to come clean, he wasn't involved was he?

Oh wait you weren't talking about the President, you were talking about the pResident.

I get it now, and I forgive the typo.

[bonito]

14. K&R n/t

[frogcycle]

20. The original news story

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4815441/

Read the details of the "ambush" reported by this public affairs Lt Col, note that it was within 24 hours of the incident, and a "local Afghan commander" reported how many enemy fighters were killed, and how many escaped.

I just don't buy it that the local folks on the ground spun this yarn that fast. Much more likley they had the story ready, and the facts on the ground didn't quite fit due to unforeseen circumstances but they stuck with it anyway.

Probably there was supposed to be a "firefight" and nine dead enemy were supposed to be available to show to the press.

Somebody did not have the good sense to abort the mission when the humvee broke down, or whatever it was that turned it into a point-blank headshot with no "fog of war" for cover.

Yet another rovecheney "gang that couldn't shoot straight" op.

[Tom Rinaldo]

21. I love VoteVets.org

They took the lies out of "Swiftboating", then turned it against the Republicans. Talk about hitting hard from a place Republicans never dreamed they would have to defend themselves from, that's VoteVets.org

And the President should be called on to actually support the troops and military families by always giving them the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth.

[frogcycle]

23. After Pat’s Birthday

worth reposting

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
-snip-

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

-snip-

read the article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/

[ProSense]

25. More...

Soltz: Bush Needs To Resolve Whether Pat Tillman Was Killed For His Political Views

Wow!

[ProSense]

33. Kick! n/t

[mloutre]

26. kickin' it for cause ... n/t

[alfredo]

27. It has inspired me to write. This is a first draft so the last paragraph

might be changed, but I do like the part about treating bush with the same contempt he has shown us.

I am puzzled by President Bush claiming Executive Privilege in the Pat Tillman case. What is he covering up with Executive Privilege? Who is he protecting? Is Bush trying to prevent embarrassment, or is he covering up a crime?

Not long ago Bush said "I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

It's time to stop asking for the courtesy of a truthful answer to our questions, it is time to start demanding answers. It is time to stop talking and start shouting. Being polite and respectful does not work with Bush he won't listen. Maybe it's is time to treat him with the same contempt he has shown us.

[Disturbed]

28. Wasn't another soldier that was in that group with Tilman also

shot? Rep. Waxman is conducting an Inquiry into this situation. I hope that he and his committee will be able to access all the relevant documents. This awful event, now over three years past, must be investigated fully!

[alfredo]

29. It just blows me away that bush refuses to cooperation on something

as simple as a friendly fire death.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

34. Bush's secretiveness and apparent cover-up are fueling the conspiracy theories

I don't blame people for jumping to conclusions when their own government adopts a position that suggests guilt. If Bush is entirely innocent and if no murder took place nor was covered-up, then let Bush make all of the files public. If however he did enable the murderers to escape justice, then he belongs in prison.

[BuyingThyme]

35. Conspiracy theory, eh? You don't think it's a conspiracy when

Army officers conspire to cover-up a US soldier shooting and killing another US soldier? And, what's the theory part again?

[wiggs]

36. You're right. Prediction: He will "come clean" to military withholding info

and poor judgement on the part of one of the 3-stars who already resigned...he will admit to these minor offenses in order to hide much deeper misdeeds and patterns. This is something he's done repeatedly...if he admits a mistake or problem it is only to hide from the masses bigger issues.

Coming clean, spun appropriately, will also help him on a whole host of Iraq credibility issues....