More lying

The need to create some sort of "sacrificial saint" for their policies led the Department of Defense (undoubtedly through Rummy, Wolfowitz and Feith) to simply lie out their ass and hide information from the nation and the family of a person that did not need such efforts.

The first Army investigator who looked into the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan last year found within days that he was killed by his fellow Rangers in an act of "gross negligence," but Army officials decided not to inform Tillman's family or the public until weeks after a nationally televised memorial service.

A new Army report on the death shows that top Army officials, including the theater commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, were told that Tillman's death was fratricide days before the service.

Soldiers on the scene said they were immediately sure Tillman was killed by a barrage of American bullets as he took shelter behind a large boulder during a twilight firefight along a narrow canyon road near the Pakistani border, according to nearly 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and investigative reports obtained by The Washington Post.

The documents also show that officers made erroneous initial reports that Tillman was killed by enemy fire, destroyed critical evidence and initially concealed the truth from Tillman's brother, also an Army Ranger, who was near the attack on April 22, 2004, but did not witness it.

Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones prepared the report in response to questions from Tillman's family and from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). Jones concluded that there was no official reluctance to report the truth but that "nothing has contributed more to an atmosphere of suspicion by the family than the failure to tell the family that Cpl. Pat Tillman's death was the result of suspected friendly fire, as soon as that information became known within military channels."

"Notifying families in a timely way that they have had a loved one killed or severely injured is complex and imperfect work. We can do better," said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman. "At the heart of every notification effort is a commitment to compassion and completeness in providing information as it is known to those who sustained the loss. That is what happened in the case of Corporal Tillman, and that effort continues to this day."

This just glosses it over all the more. Remember that Tillman, apparently not at a religious person, if not unromantic, was being beatified through the efforts of the Bush Administration and anyone else with an interest in doing so (from John McCain to the National Football League). His death had to be some sort of metaphysical sacrifice for a higher purpose, not some accidental and tragic error.

Given their track record, there is little doubt this was an orchestrated effort to turn Pat Tillman from another tragic death, into the kind of sacrificial saint that we all must be forced to worship, losing the actual man in the erection of statuary.