If the U.S. government would MURDER and LIE about Tillman for propaganda purposes, what AREN'T they capable of?
"Was the pin-up boy of Bush's War on Terror assassinated?" by CHARLES LAURENCE UK Daily Mail Saturday Aug 4, 2007
He was the pin-up boy of Bush's War on Terror. But the story of Pat Tillman's heroic death soon started to unravel. Today comes the most astonishing claim of all - that he was assassinated by his own side
Pat Tillman died a hero's death. At least, that's what America was told when this former football star and steel-jawed poster boy for the War on Terror, returned home in a box.
Here was a soldier who had paid the ultimate price for defending his fellow Army Rangers from an enemy ambush in the badlands of Afghanistan.
President Bush awarded him a posthumous Silver Star and made speeches in his honour.
Such was the mood of public mourning that his funeral service was broadcast on national television. In death, he was promoted to Corporal.
More than ever, the huge, slab-sided face below the crisply trimmed beret became the face of American patriotism.
But that was never the true story. One month after the fateful day in April 2004, when the 27-year-old died in a ravine on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden hid with Al-Qaeda, it was officially acknowledged that Tillman had not been killed by the Taliban at all.
Instead, he had been cut down by his own side, a victim of "friendly fire".
This was a revelation that triggered outrage. Spearheaded by Tillman's devastated mother Mary and father Pat "senior", a swelling tide of protesters demanded to know whether the Pentagon and the White House had deliberately played Tillman's death for propaganda value to boost support for the war. Plainly there were lies and cover-ups. Who knew what and when?
Now comes a new and even darker possibility. A growing body of evidence suggests that Tillman died neither at the hands of his nation's enemy nor in the tragic, accidental confusion of "friendly fire"; rather he was shot with three bullets in tight formation in the forehead at very close range.
If so, this is evidence of murder. Only now are the original battlefield reports emerging and they clearly suggest that his death was not a mistake, just as his mother - who has inevitably been trying to make sense of the inconsistent reports surrounding the loss of her son - has long suggested.
But could Pat Tillman really have been assassinated? And if so, why?
The dark shadow of "black ops" has fallen over the Tillman story, and it reaches all the way to the White House. Conspiracy theories are multiplying.
Preposterous though it may seem, there is a growing view that Pat Tillman was targeted by American special forces because he was about to become an embarrassment.
New evidence shows that he was turning out to be a very troubled "hero", a poster boy for the Army and the War on Terror who may have been about to speak out against the war he had come to symbolise.Letters home and memories of those who knew him in Iraq suggest that after his initial enthusiasm, he had decided that Iraq was not just a quagmire but an "illegal" war.
Tillman had been heard arguing bitterly against the Iraq war and urging his fellow soldiers to vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.
He had also been using his celebrity to contact the best-selling anti-war intellectual Noam Chomsky, and they were due to meet as soon as Tillman returned from Afghanistan.
Astonishingly, long-hidden details of his death support the murder theory: medical evidence never did match up with the scenario of friendly fire; those three bullets from an M16 combat rifle could not have been fired from farther than ten yards; there were special forces snipers in the group immediately behind Tillman's platoon.
"The nation has been deceived," says Mary Tillman. "It's now about justice for Pat and justice for the other soldiers."
After three years of grief and anger - three years during which the national mood has changed from gung-ho support to rejection of the Bush wars and an atmosphere of dark suspicion over every White House motive - questions over the Tillman story are now convulsing America.Just this week, the Army produced its seventh report into the affair to try to wipe away the stain of Pat Tillman's death.
There is no mention of assassination: the report adheres strictly to the friendly fire line.
But it apportions blame for the initial confusion over how Tillman died - enabling the White House and Pentagon to portray him as an all-American hero - on Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, who was in charge of the special forces in Afghanistan that included Tillman's Rangers.
According to the report, the General had failed to notify both the Tillman family and senior officials of inquiries into the possibility of friendly fire.
He then lied to two sets of investigators about the stage at which he knew that American bullets had killed him. This was a "failure of leadership".
The report insists there was no cover-up and that the death was a battlefield accident, followed by a misunderstanding.
Kensinger faces post-retirement demotion by one star and a cut in his pension from $9,500 a month to $8,500.
In Washington, Army Secretary Pete Geren unveiled the report, saying: "General Kensinger was the captain of that ship and his ship ran aground."
He added that he expected this report to be the last.
There is little chance of that. Mary Tillman, who has long suggested her son was deliberately killed by his comrades, said the report was a farce - "a complete donkey show".
And Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, added: "We don't know the full story about the way the Pentagon and (the White House) managed this tragedy.
"In my view, the Army should reconsider today's announcement and move forward with harsher punishment."
Only a day after the Army report, the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform convened an inquiry titled The Tillman Fratricide: What The Leadership Of The Defence Department Knew.
Chaired by another Californian Democrat with an eye on next year's elections, Henry Waxman, it is calling a slew of top brass and key Pentagon officials to the witness stand.
These include former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was sacked by Bush when the Iraq war turned sour for the voters.
"How high up did this go?" asks Waxman. In other words, did Bush ignore the truth on Tillman to use him for votes?
Or did Pentagon officials, White House staff or election strategists keep the truth from him?
The answer to that might be momentous. But this has all been pushed aside by the revelations prised from records by national news agency the Associated Press (AP).
Using the Freedom of Information Act - American law since the Watergate scandal - they went to court in San Francisco and sued for the right to look at the Pentagon records on the Tillman affair.
They were rewarded with 2,300 pages of documents, and what they contained raised extraordinary inconsistencies when put alongside the official versions of events.
The first mystery surrounds the nature of the wounds he sustained.
"The medical evidence did not match-up with the scenario as described," a doctor who examined Tillman's body told the first group of Army investigators.
Several doctors, their names blacked out in the reports, said that the bullets were so close together that Tillman must have been shot by an M16 combat rifle - a highpowered repeat machine gun - fired from no more than ten yards.
But soldiers have said their experience with an M16 on a three-shot burst suggests the killer was even closer.
To put three rounds into a man's forehead, they would need to be no more than ten feet away.
The Army doctors told the investigators that these wounds suggested murder and urged them to launch a criminal investigation.
The documents record that another doctor who conducted the Tillman autopsy was similarly so suspicious that he told investigators he had taken the unusual step of contacting the Human Resources Command which deals with personnel matters. He was rebuffed.
He then contacted an officer in the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) to suggest he open a criminal case.
"He said he talked to his higher headquarters and they had said 'no'," the doctor testified.
The newly uncovered papers then reveal, however, that as the controversy grew, the Pentagon did go back to check on the possibility of a fratricidal murder.
There is a record of investigators talking to then-Cpt. Richard Scott, who was in charge of the first, local army review.
"Have you, at any time since this incident on April 22, 2004, ever received any information or even rumour that Cpl Tillman was killed by anyone within his own unit intentionally?" they asked.
Scott replied he was sure the killing was accidental, though he must have been aware of the rumours that Tillman had been murdered.
Was Tillman disliked? Was anyone jealous of his celebrity? Was he - considered arrogant? His brothersinarms all insisted that Tillman was admired, respected and liked.
But there are more bombshells from the pages released to AP.
First, there was no evidence of any incoming fire from the enemy, and no sign of damage to any man or equipment from enemy fire.
Yet, the official story has always been that the tragedy started with the breakdown of a personnel carrier as Tillman's unit went into the ravine on an early evening seek-anddestroy patrol.
Tillman and his squad were ordered to continue on foot and were then ambushed; and the squad from a second vehicle following behind mistook them for the enemy ambushers.
If there is no evidence of an enemy ambush, how did the shooting start?
Is it coincidence that after more than three years it has been discovered that there were never-before-mentioned US snipers in the second group?
Could there have been a secret sniper on a mission to Afghanistan to assassinate the Army's poster boy?
Or perhaps three assassins, because as a general rule snipers fire in single shots, from specially tuned rifles, rather than in bursts of three?
Could the suggestion that Tillman was going to become a voice for the anti-war movement be why his mother says that a journal he'd kept since was 16 has gone missing?
It disappeared, along with most of his possessions, two days after he died.
"It's time to really ask who ordered the assassination of Pat Tillman," wrote blogger Josh Swiller on The Huffington Post, a mainstream website, sparking off a series of conspiracy theories.
If that is going too far, it is at least time for the Army, the Pentagon and the White House to come clean on the Tillman tragedy.
In these troubled times, the last thing America and its allies need is such suspicion, rumour and intrigue.
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