The Inspector General of the Pentagon has asked the army to open a criminal investigation into Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan.
The request, which came out of the inspector general's review of four previous investigations of the April 22, 2004, shooting, will likely lead investigators from the Army Criminal Investigation Command to return to Afghanistan and conduct a monthslong investigation into whether Tillman's death may have been a homicide, the result of criminal negligence or an accident, said an Army official who asked to remain anonymous.
Tillman's mother says:
"The Army used him. They knew right away he was killed by fratricide and used him for their own purposes to promote the war, to get sympathy for the war, for five weeks."
Why would the military do that? All one has to do is go back in time to April, 2004 when Tillman was killed and look at the headlines coming out of Iraq. Here are a few:
American death toll tops 600. There were 99 American troops killed in April alone. Kidnappings were rampant. Reports on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were breaking. A week after Tillman's death, CBS' "60 Minutes II" aired photos of the Iraqi prisoner abuse. There were reports the U.S. was sending unfit soldiers back to Iraq. Spain announced it would withdraw troops from Iraq as soon as possible. Honduras and the Dominican Republic made similar announcement. 18 schoolchildren were among those killed in Basra. The Dover Photos of coffins of American war dead were released.
It doesn't take a giant leap of faith to believe that the military decided to misrepresent the circumstances of Tillman's death in a desire to avoid even more bad press about the war in Iraq. It certainly wasn't going well.
Which makes me wonder: It's still not going well. Iraq is on the brink of, or in the midst of, civil war. So many of us believe that these words, written by Princeton Theologian George Hunsinger at that time, still ring true:
Adequate words are lacking to describe the mendacity of the current administration and the folly of its "preemptive" war. Judged by just-war standards, it has waged war on Iraq without just cause, without legitimate authority, without right intention, without due regard for civilians, and without reasonable chance of success. It is hubris that will come to grief, one that threatens to engulf the entire world.
Have we just decided to accept the war? Where did the dissent go? We invaded another country under false pretenses, there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq did not play a role in 9/11 and almost two years after the bad press at the time of Pat Tillman's death, we're still there. Something is very wrong with this picture.
(Jeralyn Merritt blogs daily at TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.)