[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110605Z.shtml

The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 06 November 2005

    It would be a compelling story," Patrick
Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby
used to allegedly mislead investigators in the
Valerie Wilson leak case, "if only it were true."

    "Compelling" is higher praise than any Mr.
Libby received for his one work of published
fiction, a 1996 novel of "murder, passion and
heart-stopping chases through the snow" called
"The Apprentice." If you read the indictment,
you'll see why he merits the critical upgrade.
The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the
grand jury - with its endlessly clever
contradictions of his White House colleagues'
testimony - is compelling even without the sex
and the snow.

    The medium is the message. This
administration just loves to beguile us with a
rollicking good story, truth be damned. The
propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case -
the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam's mushroom
clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given
that potboiler's huge success at selling the war,
its authors couldn't resist providing sequels
once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty
toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day
approaches, we need to remember and unmask those
scenarios as well. Our troops and their families
have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for
the official fictions that have corrupted every
stage of this war.

    If there's a tragic example that can serve as
representative of the rest, it is surely that of
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back
who famously volunteered for the Army in the
spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million
N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay
something back to his country by pursuing the
enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war
in Iraq that he didn't see coming when he
enlisted because the administration was still
hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of
duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds
in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was
killed. On April 30, an official Army press
release announcing his Silver Star citation
filled in vivid details of his last battle.
Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out
the enemy, even as he "personally provided
suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic
Weapon machine gun."

    It would be a compelling story, if only it
were true. Five weeks after Tillman's death, the
Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing
details, that he had "probably" died from
friendly fire. Many months after that,
investigative journalists at The Washington Post
and The Los Angeles Times reported that the
Army's initial portrayal of his death had been
not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of
something darker. "The records show that Tillman
fought bravely and honorably until his last
breath," Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December
2004. "They also show that his superiors
exaggerated his actions and invented details as
they burnished his legend in public, at the same
time suppressing details that might tarnish
Tillman's commanders."

    This fall The San Francisco Chronicle
uncovered still more details with the help of
Tillman's divorced parents, who have each
reluctantly gone public after receiving
conflicting and heavily censored official reports
on three Army investigations that only added to
the mysteries surrounding their son's death. (Yet
another inquiry is under way.) "The
administration clearly was using this case for
its own political reasons," said Patrick Tillman,
Pat Tillman's father, who discovered that crucial
evidence in the case, including his son's uniform
and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately.
"This cover-up started within minutes of Pat's
death, and it started at high levels."

    His accusations are far from wild. The
Chronicle found that Gen. John Abizaid, the top
American officer in Iraq, and others in his
command had learned by April 29, 2004, that
friendly fire had killed their star recruit. That
was the day before the Army released its
fictitious press release of Tillman's hillside
firefight and four days before a nationally
televised memorial service back home enshrined
the fake account of his death. Yet Tillman's
parents, his widow, his brother (who served in
the same platoon) and politicians like John
McCain (who spoke at Tillman's memorial) were not
told the truth for another month.

    Why? It's here where we find a repeat of the
same pattern that drove the Valerie Wilson leak a
year earlier. Faced with unwelcome news - from
the front, from whistle-blowers, from scandal -
this administration will always push back with
change-the-subject stunts (like specious terror
alerts), fake news or, as with Joseph Wilson,
smear campaigns. Much as the White House was out
to bring down Mr. Wilson because he threatened to
expose its prewar hype of Saddam's supposed
nuclear prowess, so the Pentagon might have been
out to delay or rewrite a story that could be
trouble when public opinion on the war itself was
just starting to plummet.

    It was an election year besides. Tillman's
death came after a month of solid bad news for
America and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign
alike: the publication of Richard Clarke's book
about pre-9/11 administration counterterrorism
fecklessness, the savage stringing up of the
remains of American contractors in Falluja, the
eruption of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in six
Iraqi cities, the first publication of illicit
photos of flag-draped coffins. In the days just
after Tillman's death, "60 Minutes II" first
broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos, Ted Koppel read
the names of the war's fallen on "Nightline," and
the Pentagon's No. 2, the Iraqi war architect
Paul Wolfowitz, understated by more than 200 the
number of American casualties to date (722) in an
embarrassing televised appearance before
Congress.

    Against this backdrop, it would not do to
have it known that the most famous volunteer of
the war might have been a victim of gross
negligence or fratricide. Though Tillman himself
was so idealistic that he refused publicity of
any kind when in the Army, he was exploited by
the war's cheerleaders as a recruitment lure and
was needed to continue in that role after his
death. (Even though he was adamantly against the
Iraq war, according to friends and relatives
interviewed by The Chronicle.)

    "They blew up their poster boy," Patrick
Tillman told The Post; he is convinced that "all
the people in positions of authority went out of
their way to script" the fake narrative (or, as
he puts it, "outright lies") that followed. Pat
Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, was offended to
discover that even President Bush wanted a cameo
role in this screenplay: she told The Post that
he had offered to tape a memorial to her son for
a Cardinals game that would be televised shortly
before Election Day. (She said no.)

    In an interview with The Arizona Republic,
Mary Tillman added: "They could have told us
upfront that they were suspicious that it was a
fratricide but they didn't. They wanted to use
him for their purposes. It was good for the
administration. It was before the elections. It
was during the prison scandal. They needed
something that looked good, and it was appalling
that they would use him like that."

    Appalling but consistent. The Pentagon has
often failed to give the troops what they need to
fight the war in Iraq, from proper support in
manpower and planning at the invasion's outset to
effective armor for battle to adequately financed
health care for those who make it home. But when
it comes to using troops in the duplicitous
manner that Mary Tillman describes, the sky's the
limit.

    Pat Tillman's case is itself a replay of the
fake "Rambo" escapades ascribed to Pfc. Jessica
Lynch a year earlier, just when Operation Iraqi
Freedom showed the first tentative signs of
trouble and the Pentagon needed a feel-good
distraction. As if to echo Mary Tillman, Ms.
Lynch told Time magazine this year, "I was used
as a symbol." But the troops aren't just used as
symbols for the commander in chief's political
purposes. They are also drafted to serve as
photo-op props and extras, whether in an
extravaganza like "Mission Accomplished" or a
throwaway dog-and-pony show like the recent
teleconference in which the president held a
"conversation" with soldiers who sounded as
spontaneous as the brainwashed G.I.'s in "The
Manchurian Candidate."

    As Mr. Bush's approval rating crashes into
the 30's, he and the vice president are so
desperate to wrap themselves in khaki that on the
day of the Libby indictment, they took separate
day trips to mouth the usual stay-the-course
platitudes before military audiences. If this was
a ploy to split the focus of cable news networks
and the public, it failed. Perhaps Scooter Libby
is hoping that a so-called faulty-memory defense
will save him from jail, but too many other
Americans are now refreshing their memories of
what went down in the plotting and execution of
the war in Iraq. What they find are harsh truths
and buried secrets that even the most compelling
administration scenarios can no longer disguise.