"It appears that for a time Pat Tillman bought into the propaganda like so many green fresh-faced kids do. When he found that it was a lie and wrote to others including his family about the atrocities he was seeing on a daily basis and being forced to participate in by his commanding officers, he was seen as a threat to the whole Iraq War Lie told by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Powell, and Rice. Pat was a famous enlistee who would find an audience and he was finding his own voice and it scared the daylights out of the Administration liars. "
"So when the letters home detailing the day to day horrors he was being asked to inflict on innocent civilians showed some consistency and gravity and when his conversations to others in the squad started to raise eyebrows, he was ordered killed to keep his mouth shut. That is what this country has become and it is to our collective shame that his death speaks. The US Congress needs to speak for all the dead through Pat Tillman with a thorough investigation, seeking conviction of all who sought to silence him through death. "
I am sure those on the left of the Blogosphere take this very seriously. They're judgment is clouded by their hate of George Bush and his administration.
3ccd, the writer of this post, fails to link to any of the articles he quotes and when I tried googleing them, I was unable to find them.
Here is a link to a story about how Pat Tillman died as told by his comrades.
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My blogging buddies, who are way far to the left of Daily Kos, say that Pat Tillman was killed by a Delta Force hit team using some kind of advanced technology that made witnesses disappear. This team was transported to Afghanistan in Vice President Cheney’s Air Force jet. They were disguised as female journalists and were secretly left behind after Cheney’s visit to the troops in the area. How they actually carried out the murder of Pat Tillman is still shrouded in mystery, but this report by one of my blogging buddies will give you some idea of what happened and why Pat was killed.
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The official US position was that Osama Bin Laden was hiding in the mountains of Waziristan, a so-called lawless tribal region that straddles the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But during a one-day pass, Pat Tillman, dressed in civilian clothes, actually saw Bin Laden selling VHS videos at a bazaar shop in a little village near where Pat was based. Pat reported this Bin Laden sighting to his superiors, but they laughed it off.
About a week or ten days later, Pat convinced two of his fellow soldiers that the story was true. They all dressed in tribal garb and went back to the bazaar with the idea of jumping Bin Laden and taking him back to their base. But when they got to the little video shop, all they found was a note taped to the steel grate that covered the entrance: “Gone on holiday. Will return soon, God willing. –Osama Bin Laden, Proprietor.”
The three soldiers were convinced now that they were on to something big, and that it was just a matter of time before they got their man. But then several strange events occurred. Both of Pat’s fellow soldiers disappeared while on guard duty late at night!
In the first case, they found all the soldier’s clothes and equipment in a neat pile near where he had been posted, but he had completely vanished. The story went around that he had gone crazy from listening to the “voices” men often think they hear in the desert wind at night, and that in his madness he had shed all his clothes and run off into the wilderness, where he probably died within a day or two.
In the second case, the soldier disappeared with all his clothes and equipment. But in the place where he was supposed to have been standing guard, the authorities found a 5-lb. package of neatly wrapped hamburger meat. DNA test were conducted on the meat, out of fear that the meat was actually a portion of the soldier’s remains, but the results indicated the package contained only USDA Choice Beef, which was commonly served by the American caterers in Afghanistan.
This is when Pat started to become extremely paranoid and started writing home about the awful things that were going on. He told his family and friends that he was sure he was going to “disappear” next because he had seen Bin Laden selling videos in the nearby village. “I’ll tell you what,” he wrote in one letter, “this war will be over in a NY minute if I can snatch Bin Laden. It might even end the war in Iraq. And you know some people won’t be happy with that.”
After his two fellow soldiers disappeared, Pat spent most of his time sitting in the middle of his tent, cross legged, holding his M16 rifle in his lap. He refused to stand guard duty at night, for which he was written up twice, and subsequently lost his liberty privileges. He claimed in letters that he was being watched continually, and that it was impossible for him to sneak off to the little village to check on Bin Laden. And then the day of the fateful patrol arrived.
The events of that horrible day are well known. What is not well known, except by the few soldiers who found Pat with three bullet holes in his forehead, is that Pat’s body was surrounded by at least eight neat piles of discarded Army uniforms and equipment and perhaps as many as 12 individually wrapped, 5-lb. packages of USDA Choice ground beef.
Kos is not one of my normal hangouts, but when I did visit, I found it to consist of rational centrists like Billmon mixed in with granola. You know, the usual fruits, nuts and flakes. But LGF was consistently sickening. I'll admit that it's been a couple of years since I even bothered reading them, so hopefully they've improved.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to Steve Coll's story on Pat Tillman. I missed it when it first came out. Steve Coll is a helluva writer, and Pat Tillman was a helluva man. I admire them both. If you haven't read Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars", give it a look. It's a much better way to spend your time than reading either Kos or LGF.
As for Tillman's death, it looks to have been a horrible accident. It was a mistake to split the platoon. Shit like that happens. Always has. Always will. And vultures will always circle, trying to take advantage of the misfortunes of others. Vultures like those at LGF and Kos.
Cheney had no time to envolve himself with Tillman's death. He was too bush heating up red hot pokers in Gitmo's torture chambers.
ReplyDeleteBig Swede