The Culture of Lies at Rumsfeld's Pentagon

By Scott Horton

Today brings a great deal more information about the death of Patrick Tillman and the cover-up that followed it. In the Washington Post's account of yesterday's congressional hearing, one of Tillman's fellow Army Rangers recounts how he was ordered to lie about what happened to Tillman's family.

“I was ordered not to tell them,” U.S. Army Specialist Bryan O'Neal told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

He said he was given the order by then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey, the battalion commander who oversaw Tillman's platoon.

Pat Tillman's brother Kevin was in a convoy behind his brother when the incident happened, but didn't see it. O'Neal said Bailey told him specifically not to tell Kevin Tillman that the death was friendly fire rather than heroic engagement with the enemy.

“He basically just said, 'Do not let Kevin know, he's probably in a bad place knowing that his brother's dead,'” O'Neal said. He added that Bailey made clear he would “get in trouble” if he told.

Tillman's brother Kevin, who was serving close-by, had an even more stinging assessment:

In earlier testimony, Kevin Tillman accused the military of “intentional falsehoods” and “deliberate and careful misrepresentations” in portraying Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan as the result of heroic engagement with the enemy instead of friendly fire.

“We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family but more importantly the American public,” Kevin Tillman told a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing. “Pat's death was clearly the result of fratricide,” he said, contending that the military's misstatements amounted to "fraud."

“Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters ... so the truth needed to be suppressed,” Tillman said.

Why would the military do this? Pentagon apologists have suggested that the cause was innocent—to spare the Tillman family the sorrow of knowing the truth. This isn't much of an excuse, but it's also impossible to square with what happened. Kevin Tillman has a different assessment that makes more sense:

Tillman charged that other U.S. combat deaths had also been twisted to fit Pentagon public relations needs. In his brother's case, he said, “crucial evidence was destroyed,” the autopsy was “not done according to regulation” and eyewitness testimony “disappeared into thin air.”

The reason for the manipulation, he said, is that “they shifted the focus from the grotesque abuse of Abu Ghraib to a great American who died a hero's death.”