What is
established is that Baker directed the fires, and that after firing at
Pat's position once, the vehicle advanced and fired on the same
position again, probably to regain visibility after Pat threw a smoke
grenade in an attempt to alert them that they were firing at
"friendlies."
The distance was between 35-85 meters. My own
examination of the photo imagery suggests to me that the distance is
much closer to the low number. The length of the longest building in
the hamlet was 29 feet (iirc), and an extrapolation from the
seen-from-above images shows the distance between the shooters'
position and Pat's to be around four times that (116 feet, or 35
meters). SSG Weeks (now SFC Weeks) supported this estimation when I
called him on the phone last year.
In later accounts, Army
investigators would attempt to pump up the number of enemy combatants,
upgrade an RPG into a mortar, suggest a far more efficacious ambush,
equivocate about light conditions, and extend the distance between the
shooters and Pat to as much as 200 meters.
Since there is
nothing in the actual statements or physical evidence to support these
claims, I am assuming there was a motive to mislead. My assumption is
that these distortions were designed to introduce "mitigating"
circumstances in a homicide.
My contention from having seen the
Rules of Engagement (ROE) and from familiarity with the Law of Warfare
is that this warrants a re-investigation into the question of whether
there was a criminal homicide.
The reason the killings were both
intentional and illegal has to do with the rules for firing. It is a
violation of the Law of Warfare to fire into a village if one is not
receiving fire from that village. Baker's team did fire into a village
from which there was no fire received, and they had not been under
enemy fire for several minutes. The Rules of Engagement (ROE), which
are theater-specific, and which supercede both doctrine and SOP for
firing, required "positive identification" of the target.
The
investigators and the Army have consistently thrown sand in the eyes of
the public on this account. This is an arcane but crucial point.
Doctrine says an infantryman fires at "known, suspected, and likely
enemy targets." Doctrine is highly decontextualized and general. The
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in the Ranger Regiment is to orient
one's fires on the fires of the leader (Baker, in this case). SOPs are
specific to the unit, but not the theater. Rules of Engagement (ROE)
are specific to the theater, contextualized, and in every case become
the highest of these three guidelines ... superceding all others. ROE
has the force of a General Order in the theater of operations.
When
questioned about why they fired, various Rangers and leaders repeated
that they fired at "known, suspected, and likely enemy positions." This
is a legalistic mantra. Unfortunately, this doctrinal criterion was
circumscribed by the ROE, which required "positive identification" of
targets.
The distance between the shooting vehicle and Pat's
position was easily near enough to make an identification of a standing
Pat Tillman and Bryan O'Neal... two American soldiers, wearing
distinctive uniforms and battle-gear, including Kevlar helmets, and
waving their arms. (In the lull in fire when Baker's vehicle moved
forward to see past the smoke, Pat and Bryan apparently thought they
had been identified as "friendly," so they stood up... only to be cut
down by another volley of machinegun fire.)
QUESTION: Why would
investigators and the chain of command conceal this loss of fire
discipline and fire control -- which led to the death of two men --
inside the manufactured premise of "an intense firefight"?
HYPOTHESIS:
A "hang-together or hang separately" strategy evolved, in which each
member of the chain -- from SPC Alders, who admits firing his Squad
automatic weapon (SAW) at two men whose hands were raised, to SSG
Baker, to MAJ Hodne, who ordered the platoon split for a daylight
movement, in violation of both common sense and a Regimental directive
concerning daylight movement (including CPT Saunders, who had to "go on
record" with these orders to split and move during daylight), to [fill
in the blanks] everyone who was responding to a "show progress"
directive from Public Affairs, that resulted in "bureaucratic
over-interpretation" by Hodne, i.e., the false sense of urgency to get
"boots on the ground before nightfall."
If Baker is prosecuted
for ROE violations (firing into a village and failing to make positive
identification of Pat and the AMF soldier who were killed), he will
then be forced to testify in detail about the split-order, which leads
directly to questions about the "sense of urgency" to have "boots on
the ground before nightfall." If Hodne or Company Commander Captain
William Saunders (who passed Hodne's order to Uthlaut by radio, and
later received immunity in advance of changing a statement that Hodne
gave the order) is relieved, then they are potential disaffected
officers who can point out that command emphasis on "showing progress"
was the basis of the false sense of urgency that led to this
contravention of a Regimental Directive against daylight overland
movement and the tactically unsound order to split the unit in order to
check the box on a time line.
Now, and only now, can we get to
the sequence of events in the subsequent cover-up. First, however, we
have to deal with the recent AP story and the flurry of conspiracy
theories to which it has given rise.
Note: Martha Mendoza's
article that is cited and excerpted here is -- according to reliable
sources -- not what the author originally wrote. It was given its spin
by editors at AP.)
MARTHA MENDOZA
AP News
Jul 27, 2007 01:49 EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)
Army
medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the
three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success
to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death
amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated
Press.
“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the
scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he
was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.
The
doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes
were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by
an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
Well, there are doctors and there are doctors.
The
proximity of bullet wounds is not sufficient to determine the distance
from which a round is fired. Two of the best gunshot wound pathologists
in the country, at Dannie Tillman's request, accompanied me to the
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland earlier this
year to examine the autopsy findings and autopsy photographs for Pat
Tillman. Both agreed that the trajectories, exit wounds, and proximity
of rounds are most consistent with a burst fired from the M-249 Squad
Automatic Weapon, like the one fired from around 40 meters away by
Specialist Trevor Alders outside Manah on April 22, 2004.
The AP
story set the conspiracy theorists alight, and when I dismissed the
"assassination theory," a correspondent told me I was "naive" (this
person having never read the documents in the case and never having
spent a day in the military).
"I wonder if all the soldiers in that platoon were actually soldiers," asked the correspondent ominously.
"No,"
I replied with a bit of pique. "The Black Ops folks always hire
20-year-olds (one member of the shooter vehicle was 19!), and put them
in deep cover — which they study between playing video games and
sharing high school lies.
Here’s a slab of conspiracy-mongering with my comments:
The
task organization of the platoon that placed that particular vehicle,
with those particular troops, in this situation… with Pat exactly where
he was… was decided on an ad hoc basis, less than an hour before it
happened, after an all day delay, caused by a busted vehicle. The
decision was made by a 1st Lieutenant [SG: was he in on it?], and
forced on him after an argument by members of the TOC in Khowst [SG:
were they all in on it?], and altered at the last minute by an Afghan
jinga truck driver [SG: was he in on it?] who’d been randomly hired in
Magarah to tow the broken vehicle on that very day, after consultation
between the platoon chain of command [SG: were they all in on it?]
Pat’s position was decided by Pat, after being released from an earlier
position by an acting squad leader [SG: was he in on it, and did he
control Pat’s mind in Pat’s selection of exactly that place in the
boonies of Paktia Province?], who was himself sent forward in response
to gunfire in a canyon. [SG:Did the Black Ops people put the ruts in
the road that trashed the hummer that caused the delay that stalled the
Blacksheep Platooon in Magarah for more than six hours, where they were
sussed out by three part-time guerrillas -- were they in on it too? --
who played their role by staging an ineffectual ambush along a
last-minute route determined by the inability of the jinga truck that
was towing the busted vehicle to climb through the originally planned
(less than one hour before) wadi?]
I love how conspiracists
refer to others as “naive,” when they themselves cannot describe the
difference between correlation and causation, and attach themselves to
stories that are only possible in the minds of scriptwriters.
Real
Black Ops are straightforward affairs, with planning designed to
minimize complexity and reduce the number of independent actors and
“moving parts”… but that makes a lousy script. But if this is what you
want to believe, then we’ll leave you to the Illuminati. In the real
world, power has to mobilize such awesome resources on its own behalf
precisely because it cannot exercise the kind of control you suggest.
No one can.
In response, I received this from another
correspondent: "I’m not at all interested in promoting any 'conspiracy
theories,' I’m just wondering if this new information moves Tillman’s
cause of death due to 'friendly fire' closer to a possibility of a
deliberate fragging."
I replied:
Not unless it occurred
in front of at least eight people, all of whom had great respect for
him, and who conspired to cover this fragging up together.
Two
of the top gunshot specialists in forensic pathology in the nation
examined Pat's autopsy reports and photos and agree with me that this
was likely a squad automatic weapon (same caliber as an M-4). The army
dummied up the distances, then drew them down to 85 meters to support a
“fog of war” thesis (as opposed to the actual serial violations of the
ROE that did occur… more likely at around 40 meters. The three shots
that killed Pat were actually two tight, and one flyer, all head shots
and each instantly fatal on its own account.
Now think in slow motion. Let me begin with the terminal ballistics one never sees in films and on tv.
Destruction
of the connection between the brain stem and the rest of the body
causes a body to fall… straight down. No, people do not fly through the
air like the stunt-people in Hollywood (unless shot from an extremely
close distance). Straight down. This happens instantly. The new theory
proposed by some so-called expert, says that this tight shot-group
(less than 4 inches) could only have been fired by someone shooting on
semi-automatic (one shot at a time, in rapid succession). A
fully-automatic weapon, like the Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) that is
presumed (by two of the top forensics experts in the country) to be the
lethal weapon, according to this theory, cannot fire this shot group
because automatic weapons can not be controlled for this tight a
shot-group.
This premise is the basis of the presumed distance
(10 meters) and mode of fire (semi-auto)/weapon (M-4) in the new
AP-inspired theory. Two problems: (1) the theory about auto fire is
wrong, and (2) Pat was shot in the face three times, while facing
downhill, and standing on a steep incline dropping to his front.
Number (2) first.
For
this to have been an M-4 fiing on semi, the shooter would have had to
fire, re-acquire [aim], fire, re-acquire, and fire again, before Pat
fell to the ground (straight down, on a steep forward-inclining piece
of terrain, with a large stone in front of him to prevent him tumbling
down the hill). Even a very good rapid-fire shooter could not have
placed all three shots together (from a standing or other
non-prone-supported position at 35-40 meters) quickly enough to fire
the second and third shots before Pat fell away from the sight
alignment.
The only 5.56 mm weapon on the scene that could have
placed those shots that quickly in the same place was the SAW… cyclic
rate of auto-fire: 850 rounds per minute (14 rounds per second, ergo,
three rounds in 2/10 of a second).
To the constraints of physics
and physiology now add on the statistical improbability that a bunch of
enlisted people would willingly participate as accessories after the
fact in a cold-blooded murder (that just happened to coincide with an
unplanned --[but ineffectual -- ambush)… and we begin to appreciate how
unlikely this scenario is.
Now for number (1). I’ll happily go
to the range with anyone who cares to set it up today (or chose anyone
who has been trained to fire the SAW), and demonstrate that these tight
groups very well can be fired from a SAW, when they are part of a
continuous firing cycle that allows the gunner to first walk the fire
onto a target, then tighten down on the weapon as he orients on the
impact signature (The rock in front of Pat was covered with bullet
strikes.).
There are family members who will not easily dismiss
this, and who can blame them after the government has lied and covered
up again and again and again on this case. I don’t fault them; and in
fact I have great affection for them. The depth of their sense of
betrayal would make anyone think the worst, and want someone to prove
otherwise. More than this... if this case becomes one about a
conspiracy to murder, the focus is taken off the likely suspects for
the real cover-up and crime, and the ones who all these sacrifices of
Generals have been designed to protect… Donald Rumsfeld, Lawrence
DeRita, and probably George W. Bush. They are all loving this right now.
Let me say for the record, again, that I do not believe that Pat Tillman was targeted for assassination.
A
second lieutenant and an infantry sergeant are not tasked with anything
as politically sensitive as assassination. I am speaking as an alumnus
of Delta Force, one of the few organizations that actually might be
entrusted with this kind of operation (and then only very rarely). It
doesn’t matter what you see in the movies.
The decisions that
placed Pat Tillman at exactly the place and exactly the time of his
death were made ad hoc, on the spot, at a series of junctures that
could not have been controlled, including a vehicle that unexpectedly
broke down, one key decision made by an Afghan jinga truck driver and
Pat’s own decision (following two on-the-spot decisions by members of
his platoon in direct response to a completely unexpected situation) to
move forward into the position where he was shot.
The mystique
of Special Operations (including the Rangers, who are the Special
Operations’ shock infantry component) is useful as a deterrent, but it
is not reflective of a reality. The Pentagon and others want you and
the rest of the world to believe this mystique, because your fear and
the fear of the rest of the world is what maintains the efficacy of a
huge bluff. This government wants us to spin out as many scary
fantasies as possible, because it serves the dual purpose of either
portraying opponents of the military as “conspiracy nuts” or promoting
precisely the myth of spooky invincibility that keeps us in line.
I
came straight from the bowels of this system, and I have written three
books exposing the worst aspects of the military. If they haven’t yet
cut my brake lines or shot me when I’m out fishing, then they didn’t
kill Pat Tillman because he criticized the war in Iraq and read a book
by Noam Chomsky...
...Key facts, as presented in this series ...
have already “escaped,” e.g., the Scott investigation and the
fraudulence of awarding a Silver Star as part of a cover story. These
facts are now, for the Administration and the Pentagon, inescapable.
All
that is missing right now is someone with a little integrity and
courage, and subpoena authority, to use these facts to tear the rest of
the mask away.
All that is required, however, to discredit those
asking the questions is our own insistence on the least plausible
scenario, no doubt inspired by a righteous mistrust and loathing of
people like Donald Rumsfeld and Lawrence Di Rita, when the existing
facts do not support that scenario.
There is nothing the
Pentagon would rather do with this case, aside from making it
evaporate, than turn it into a debate about whether Pat was
assassinated or not. He wasn’t, and so they can not only poke fun at
any of us who propose that hypothesis, they can relax as we all bark up
the wrong tree.
What they do not want is a rigorous examination
of the motives, decisions, and events that might lead a larger public
to see how they have been spinning prevarications to call an imperial
Oil War democracy-building.
Pat Tillman, and many who knew and
cared for him, at some point believed, based on the evidence before
them, that he was bound for a place in history of some kind… in
football. What neither he nor they could know was that football fame
would emerge as just a stepping stone to a far more significant role in
history: contributing to the end of an illegal war, and bringing down
(hopefully) a dangerous clique of international scofflaws.
The
crimes of this Administration are more serious and vile by orders of
magnitude than the mere imagined assassination of one young man.
And now, at last, I will briefly describe the cover-up.
Pat
Tillman was the most well-known enlisted man in the entire military.
When he enlisted, Pat received a personal letter from Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld thanking Pat for his enlistment. So Pat was on
Rumsfeld's radar immediately. The fog of fame began then as the spin on
Pat's enlistment was that he took a break from a lucrative football
career because of 9-11. That's not how it was. Pat saw young men being
marched off to war; and he didn't want to use his talent as an
exemption. It's different.
The day Pat was killed outside Manah,
officialdom developed a multiple personality disorder. On the one hand,
there was bureaucrat's panic, because it was known almost at once that
this was a case of "fratricide." On the other hand, the scriptwriters
smelled a story with Pat's corpse propped up like a Greek statue that
would draw all eyes away from the debacle of Fallujah-Najaf and the
wanton racist cruelty of Abu Ghraib. So there was the bureaucrat's
instinct to hide the facts in a period of waning legitimation; and
there was the flack's instinct to tell a lie. Hiding a thing and lying
about it are two different things, and they can be contradictory.
That's how both the hiding and the lying began to unravel.
At
the highest levels, there was a decision to be made about how far one
could get away with the lie in the short term, and hide their own
complicity in case the lie was exposed in the long term.
On
April 29, Major General Stanley McChrystal -- commander of the task
force that the Rangers served in Afghanistan, and head of the most
secretive joint-service force in the US military -- sent a memo to John
Abizaid, telling him to warn everyone all the way to Commander-in-Chief
George W. Bush, an investigation "will find that it is highly possible
Cpl. Tillman was killed by friendly fire... I felt that it was
essential that you received this information as soon as we detected it
in order to preclude any unknowing statements by our country's leaders
which might cause public embarrassment if the circumstances of Cpl.
Tillman's death become public."
No reference to telling the
truth... "which might cause public embarrassment if the circumstances
of Cpl. Tillman's death become public."
According to an unnamed
source, Abizaid misled Congress on August 1, 2007, when he stated that
this memo -- from the General in theater who directed the most
politically-sensitive and secret operations in the military, which
include units like Delta Force (now operating under a new name) -- did
not "reach him" for "10 to 20 days."
This memo, it must be assumed, was a living organism that had to exercise its own initiative to "reach" its intended recipient.
Pat
Tillman's death by friendly fire --instead of the enemy fire described
in a fraudulent Silver Star citation drafted by officers who knew how
Pat was killed -- was explosive news. Yet on August 1, 2007, Rumsfeld,
his former-Joint Chiefs Chair Meyers, and the ex-CENTCOM Commander John
Abizaid -- not one of them -- could remember when, where, or how they
learned of this explosive news.
We’re talking about a man at the top whose middle name was “Micromanager”.
•
Since the day he took command of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has been using
his famous "8,000-mile screwdriver" to tilt the civil-military balance
his way. According to his critics, he is Robert McNamara reborn—an
arrogant micromanager, contemptuous of soldierly expertise and certain
of his own infallibility.
(Andrew Bacevich, Los Angeles Times)
•
It says Mr Rumsfeld has held 139 meetings with the Joint Chiefs of
Staff since the beginning of 2005, and 208 meetings with the senior
field commanders. The retired generals complained that Mr Rumsfeld was
a "micromanager" who often ignored the advice of senior commanders.
(Mark Mazzetti and Jim Rutenberg, Sydney Morning Herald)
• Was
Donald Rumsfeld a micromanager? Yes. Did he want to be involved in all
of the decisions? Yes. (Michael DeLong, Retired Marine Lt. Gen, former
deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command during the Afghanistan and
Iraq wars, New York Times)
[On Rumsfeld’s micromanagement of torture see Andrew Cockburn’s series here.]
But
little Donnie Rumsfeld can't remember when, where, or how he learned of
Pat Tillman's death, and he doesn't interfere in the business of his
officers, and I am the rightful King of Connecticut.
Since I'm
not bearing that ridiculous pretense of objectivity that "journalists"
so audaciously lay claim to, and since I am not a lawyer schooled in
absolute empiricism, I can only say what seems to be apparent to me
from this testimony... which Congress left unchallenged.
They
pissed on our legs and told us it was raining. Liars, every goddamn one
of them. Liars, con-men, and criminals. Based on the evidence, this is
what I believe. Someone has to say this out loud. Dannie Tillman has
been trying to tell us this for three years.
Writings 
This is where there are conflicting stories, partly because of the "fog of war," but more importantly to evade possible prosecutions... and the Pandora's box of counter-accusation a recrimination that might be opened by prosecutions.
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