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The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
By FRANK RICH
11/06/05 "The New York Times" -- -- "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.
Copyright New York Times.
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