By PAULINE JELINEK
The Associated PressThursday, August 16, 2007; 4:02 AM
WASHINGTON -- Army soldiers committed suicide last year at the highest rate in 26 years, and more than a quarter did so while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new military report.
The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its scheduled release Thursday, found there were 99 confirmed suicides among active duty soldiers during 2006, up from 88 the previous year and the highest number since the 102 suicides in 1991 at the time of the Persian Gulf War.
The suicide rate for the Army has fluctuated over the past 26 years, from last year's high of 17.3 per 100,000 to a low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001.
Last year, "Iraq was the most common deployment location for both (suicides) and attempts," the report said.
The 99 suicides included 28 soldiers deployed to the two wars and 71 who weren't. About twice as many women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide as did women not sent to war, the report said.
Preliminary numbers for the first half of this year indicate the number of suicides could decline across the service in 2007 but increase among troops serving in the wars, officials said.
The increases for 2006 came as Army officials worked to set up a number of new and stronger programs for providing mental health care to a force strained by the longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the global counterterrorism war entering its sixth year.
Failed personal relationships, legal and financial problems and the stress of their jobs were factors motivating the soldiers to commit suicide, according to the report.
"In addition, there was a significant relationship between suicide attempts and number of days deployed" in Iraq, Afghanistan or nearby countries where troops are participating in the war effort, it said. The same pattern seemed to hold true for those who not only attempted, but succeeded in killing themselves.
There also "was limited evidence to support the view that multiple ... deployments are a risk factor for suicide behaviors," it said.
About a quarter of those who killed themselves had a history of at least one psychiatric disorder. Of those, about 20 percent had been diagnosed with a mood disorder such as bipolar disorder and/or depression; and 8 percent had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, including post traumatic stress disorder _ one of the signature injuries of the conflict in Iraq.
Firearms were the most common method of suicide. Those who attempted suicide but didn't succeed tended more often to take overdoses and cut themselves.
In a service of more than a half million troop, the 99 suicides amounted to a rate of 17.3 per 100,000 _ the highest in the past 26 years, the report said. The average rate over those years has been 12.3 per 100,000.
The rate for those serving in the wars stayed about the same, 19.4 per 100,000 in 2006, compared with 19.9 in 2005.
The Army said the information was compiled from reports collected as part of its suicide prevention program _ reports required for all "suicide-related behaviors that result in death, hospitalization or evacuation" of the soldier. It can take considerable time to investigate a suicide and, in fact, the Army said that in addition to the 99 confirmed suicides last year, there are two other deaths suspected as suicides in which investigations were pending.
___
Associated Press reporter Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report from Washington.
___
On the Net:
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil
© 2007 The Associated Press
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Why Isn't the Press on a Suicide Watch?
Here is an interesting article which notes suicides among active duty and returning US troops:
Why isn't the Press on a Suicide Watch?
Why isn't the Press on a Suicide Watch?
Monday, August 06, 2007
After Pat's Birthday
By Kevin Tillman
The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
Sat Aug 4, 2007 22:03
Courtesy of the Tillman Family
Originally Posted on Oct 19, 2006
By Kevin Tillman
Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.
It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.
Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=112640;show_parent=1
Check out some of the best Tillman-related materials on the Web
Mary Tillman speaks out in Truthdig
‘They tried to attach themselves to his virtue; then they wiped their feet with him.’
Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family
A veteran of the U.S. Army Special forces writes about a series of shockingly callous statements that Pat Tillman’s commanding officer made about the Tillman family’s search for the truth.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
Sat Aug 4, 2007 22:03
Courtesy of the Tillman Family
Originally Posted on Oct 19, 2006
By Kevin Tillman
Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.
It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.
Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=112640;show_parent=1
Check out some of the best Tillman-related materials on the Web
Mary Tillman speaks out in Truthdig
‘They tried to attach themselves to his virtue; then they wiped their feet with him.’
Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family
A veteran of the U.S. Army Special forces writes about a series of shockingly callous statements that Pat Tillman’s commanding officer made about the Tillman family’s search for the truth.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Tracking and reporting of friendly fire incidents under review by Marines' IG
By Leo Shane III, Stars and StripesPacific edition, Saturday, August 4, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps’ Inspector General will review all service combat casualty reports after senior leaders found numerous errors in units’ tracking and reporting of friendly fire cases.
The investigation, ordered by the commandant, will include a look at whether wounded Marines and their families are receiving proper notification of friendly fire incidents, and how officials could lose track of the strategically important data.
Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Corps, told members of a House Armed Services subcommittee Thursday that since 2001 the service has seen 23 incidents involving 82 casualties that may be a result of friendly-fire attacks, but he admitted he has little confidence that figure is accurate.
In June, Corps officials testified before the same subcommittee that only two friendly-fire incidents had occurred since 2001, with only 19 casualties. Thursday’s figures were the second time they sent corrected data to Congress.
“The families of our fallen and wounded Marines are entitled to accurate, timely information on the causes of their loved ones’ death or injury,” Magnus said. “We don’t want these families to feel like we’re not taking care of them.”
Magnus said that in some of the incidents, families still have not been informed that a friendly-fire investigation is under way, despite Corps policies requiring that information to be related to survivors within a few days.
Members of the subcommittee blasted the Corps for those violations in light of their extra emphasis by lawmakers on the issue and high-profile cases, such as the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., said the multiple errors in the process called into question all of the Corps’ assurances that the service is working toward a solution.
“I’m hesitant to believe there was any intent to deceive or mislead,” he said. “But it’s disturbing that the picture of the friendly-fire process compiled by Marine Corps Headquarters … was so different from how it was actually being implemented.”
Magnus blamed inconsistent paperwork for the mistakes, saying in some cases units used outdated or incorrect terminology that misclassified the cases. The inspector general’s review will include a look at those cases, and offer recommendations for corrections there as well.
Defense officials also are drafting plans for a militarywide friendly-fire reporting policy, modeled after updates in the Army’s regulations earlier this year, the assistant commandant said.
Magnus he expects to offer Congress an accurate number of friendly-fire investigations, casualties and deaths once the inspector general’s review is finished in a few weeks.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps’ Inspector General will review all service combat casualty reports after senior leaders found numerous errors in units’ tracking and reporting of friendly fire cases.
The investigation, ordered by the commandant, will include a look at whether wounded Marines and their families are receiving proper notification of friendly fire incidents, and how officials could lose track of the strategically important data.
Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Corps, told members of a House Armed Services subcommittee Thursday that since 2001 the service has seen 23 incidents involving 82 casualties that may be a result of friendly-fire attacks, but he admitted he has little confidence that figure is accurate.
In June, Corps officials testified before the same subcommittee that only two friendly-fire incidents had occurred since 2001, with only 19 casualties. Thursday’s figures were the second time they sent corrected data to Congress.
“The families of our fallen and wounded Marines are entitled to accurate, timely information on the causes of their loved ones’ death or injury,” Magnus said. “We don’t want these families to feel like we’re not taking care of them.”
Magnus said that in some of the incidents, families still have not been informed that a friendly-fire investigation is under way, despite Corps policies requiring that information to be related to survivors within a few days.
Members of the subcommittee blasted the Corps for those violations in light of their extra emphasis by lawmakers on the issue and high-profile cases, such as the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., said the multiple errors in the process called into question all of the Corps’ assurances that the service is working toward a solution.
“I’m hesitant to believe there was any intent to deceive or mislead,” he said. “But it’s disturbing that the picture of the friendly-fire process compiled by Marine Corps Headquarters … was so different from how it was actually being implemented.”
Magnus blamed inconsistent paperwork for the mistakes, saying in some cases units used outdated or incorrect terminology that misclassified the cases. The inspector general’s review will include a look at those cases, and offer recommendations for corrections there as well.
Defense officials also are drafting plans for a militarywide friendly-fire reporting policy, modeled after updates in the Army’s regulations earlier this year, the assistant commandant said.
Magnus he expects to offer Congress an accurate number of friendly-fire investigations, casualties and deaths once the inspector general’s review is finished in a few weeks.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
The Uncounted Casualties of War
By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate. Posted August 1, 2007.
The parents of an Iraq veteran who committed suicide are suing the Department of Veterans Affairs for wrongful death and medical malpractice.
U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey is not counted among the Iraq War dead. But he did die, when he came home. He committed suicide. His parents are suing the Department of Veterans Affairs and R. James Nicholson, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, for wrongful death, medical malpractice and other damages.
Kevin and Joyce Lucey saw their son's rapid descent after he returned from combat in Iraq in June 2003. Kevin said: "Hallucinations started with the visual, the audio, tactile. He would talk about hearing camel spiders in his room at night, and he actually had a flashlight under his bed, which he could use to search for the camel spiders. His whole life was falling apart."
Jeffrey told his family that he was ordered to execute two Iraqi prisoners of war. After he killed the two men, Jeffrey took their dog tags and wore them until Christmas Eve 2003, when he threw them at his sister, calling himself a murderer. A military investigation concluded the story is without merit, but Kevin Lucey says: "An agency investigating itself, I have a lot of problems with that. We fully believe our son." Joyce Lucey added: "It really, to us, didn't make a difference what caused Jeffrey's PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We know that he came back different, so something happened to him over there."
Jeffrey got worse, secluding himself in his room, watching TV and drinking heavily. Jeffrey was reluctant to seek care, fearing the stigma that he felt accompanied mental-health treatment. Finally, on May 28, 2004, the Luceys had Jeffrey involuntarily committed. The Veterans Affairs hospital released him after three days.
On June 5, 2004, Jeffrey had deteriorated significantly. His sisters and grandfather brought him back to the VA. Joyce said the VA "decided that he wasn't saying what he needed to say to get involuntarily committed. Later we were to find out that they never called a psychiatrist or anybody that could have evaluated him. And they have this all on the record. It said that the grandfather was pleading for his grandson to be admitted."
The Luceys later learned from staff notes that Jeffrey talked about three ways to commit suicide. His father explained: "He told them that he would suffocate himself, he would overdose or he would hang himself. He also shared with the psychiatrist how he had bought a hose. And, of course, on June 5, when we tried to admit him the second time and the VA declined, Joyce and I went through the house, we took everything that he could hurt himself with, but we never thought of a hose."
Turned back by the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Jeffrey spent his last two weeks alive at home. Kevin Lucey describes the night before his son killed himself: "It was about 11:30 at night, and I was exhausted, Jeff was exhausted. He asked me if he would be able to sit in my lap.
And so for 45 minutes we rocked in silence, and the therapist told us after Jeff died that that was no doubt his last place of refuge, his last safe harbor that he felt that he could go to."
The next evening, after returning home from work, Kevin raced inside: "I went to his bedroom, and the one thing I noted was that his dog tags were laying on his bed." He made his way to the cellar, where he found his son Jeffrey dead, with a hose double-looped around his neck.
Three years later, his parents have filed suit. They are not alone. A separate class-action suit was filed by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been denied medical benefits.
Jeffrey Lucey's suicide note begins, "Dear Mom and Dad, I cannot express my apologies in words for the pain I have caused you but I beg for your forgiveness. I want you to know that I loved you both and still do but the pain of life was too much for me to deal with."
Supporting the troops means taking care of them when they return home.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/58609/
--submitted by Patti Woodard
The parents of an Iraq veteran who committed suicide are suing the Department of Veterans Affairs for wrongful death and medical malpractice.
U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey is not counted among the Iraq War dead. But he did die, when he came home. He committed suicide. His parents are suing the Department of Veterans Affairs and R. James Nicholson, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, for wrongful death, medical malpractice and other damages.
Kevin and Joyce Lucey saw their son's rapid descent after he returned from combat in Iraq in June 2003. Kevin said: "Hallucinations started with the visual, the audio, tactile. He would talk about hearing camel spiders in his room at night, and he actually had a flashlight under his bed, which he could use to search for the camel spiders. His whole life was falling apart."
Jeffrey told his family that he was ordered to execute two Iraqi prisoners of war. After he killed the two men, Jeffrey took their dog tags and wore them until Christmas Eve 2003, when he threw them at his sister, calling himself a murderer. A military investigation concluded the story is without merit, but Kevin Lucey says: "An agency investigating itself, I have a lot of problems with that. We fully believe our son." Joyce Lucey added: "It really, to us, didn't make a difference what caused Jeffrey's PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We know that he came back different, so something happened to him over there."
Jeffrey got worse, secluding himself in his room, watching TV and drinking heavily. Jeffrey was reluctant to seek care, fearing the stigma that he felt accompanied mental-health treatment. Finally, on May 28, 2004, the Luceys had Jeffrey involuntarily committed. The Veterans Affairs hospital released him after three days.
On June 5, 2004, Jeffrey had deteriorated significantly. His sisters and grandfather brought him back to the VA. Joyce said the VA "decided that he wasn't saying what he needed to say to get involuntarily committed. Later we were to find out that they never called a psychiatrist or anybody that could have evaluated him. And they have this all on the record. It said that the grandfather was pleading for his grandson to be admitted."
The Luceys later learned from staff notes that Jeffrey talked about three ways to commit suicide. His father explained: "He told them that he would suffocate himself, he would overdose or he would hang himself. He also shared with the psychiatrist how he had bought a hose. And, of course, on June 5, when we tried to admit him the second time and the VA declined, Joyce and I went through the house, we took everything that he could hurt himself with, but we never thought of a hose."
Turned back by the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Jeffrey spent his last two weeks alive at home. Kevin Lucey describes the night before his son killed himself: "It was about 11:30 at night, and I was exhausted, Jeff was exhausted. He asked me if he would be able to sit in my lap.
And so for 45 minutes we rocked in silence, and the therapist told us after Jeff died that that was no doubt his last place of refuge, his last safe harbor that he felt that he could go to."
The next evening, after returning home from work, Kevin raced inside: "I went to his bedroom, and the one thing I noted was that his dog tags were laying on his bed." He made his way to the cellar, where he found his son Jeffrey dead, with a hose double-looped around his neck.
Three years later, his parents have filed suit. They are not alone. A separate class-action suit was filed by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been denied medical benefits.
Jeffrey Lucey's suicide note begins, "Dear Mom and Dad, I cannot express my apologies in words for the pain I have caused you but I beg for your forgiveness. I want you to know that I loved you both and still do but the pain of life was too much for me to deal with."
Supporting the troops means taking care of them when they return home.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/58609/
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Thursday, August 02, 2007
From the New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
Published: August 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — With Donald H. Rumsfeld seated at the witness table, the chairman of a House committee investigating the bungled aftermath of the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman told a packed Capitol Hill hearing room Wednesday that the time had come for some answers. What did Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Defense Department officials know about Corporal Tillman’s accidental killing by American forces, he asked, and when did they know it?
Three and a half hours, a few four-color charts and a couple of lost tempers later, the chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, solemnly admitted that he had gotten almost nowhere.
“You’ve all admitted that the system failed; none of you feel personally responsible,” Mr. Waxman said, addressing Mr. Rumsfeld, who resigned as defense secretary last fall, as well as one currently serving general and two retired ones who also testified under oath Wednesday.
“Somebody should be responsible.”
The hearing, held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s first return to Capitol Hill since President Bush asked him to resign after the Democratic victories in midterm elections. And although the bitter exchanges between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Democrats who now control Congress focused on the case involving Corporal Tillman, they exposed veins of anger over what the Democrats regard as a lack of accountability for broad missteps in Iraq.
Still, for most of the hearing, Mr. Rumsfeld, who sometimes sounded frailer and more gravel-voiced than he did while leading the Pentagon for nearly six years, offered few specific facts and recollections. He interjected only one exasperated “Oh, goodness!” despite numerous verbal provocations from committee members and stuck to his prepared answers and upbraided Democratic committee members when he felt they had their facts wrong.
“I don’t recall precisely how I learned that he was killed,” Mr. Rumsfeld said of Corporal Tillman early in the hearing. “It could have been internally; it could have been through the press.” He said he was also unsure when he learned the death was most likely from American fire, he added, although it was probably around May 20, 2004, about three weeks after the three generals seated beside him at Wednesday’s hearing had learned of it.
Testifying not in their familiar uniforms rich with medals but in ordinary business suits, two retired generals, Richard B. Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the American forces in the Middle East, each acknowledged that the Tillman matter was a “screw-up,” but not their fault.
General Abizaid said he received a classified message on April 29, 2004, saying Corporal Tillman, a professional football player who quit after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to become an Army Ranger, may have been killed by American fire in April 2004, and not in combat, as the Army had publicly stated.
General Myers said he could not recall how or when he learned of it, and even if he could, he said, “I don’t think there’s any regulation that would require me to do anything, actually.”
General Myers also said that if he knew that Army officials had suspected friendly fire — or what the military calls a “blue on blue” attack — in Corporal Tillman’s death, he would have informed Mr. Rumsfeld, his boss at the time, but added, “I cannot recall whether or not I did that.”
Several Democrats used the hearing to engage Mr. Rumsfeld in unrelated but longstanding grievances, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Pentagon’s policy of banning news media coverage of flag-draped military coffins returning from overseas.
At one point, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat who is running for president, averred that Mr. Rumsfeld had “covered up” the Tillman matter as well as prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
“That’s just false,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected. “You have nothing to base that on. You have not a scrap of evidence or a piece of paper or a witness that would attest to that. I have not been involved in any cover-up whatsoever.”
Stewing quietly throughout the hearing, and eventually lashing out at a lawmaker who approached to offer condolences, were several members of Corporal Tillman’s family, including his brother Kevin and his father, Pat Tillman Sr. The family has been assertive in calling attention to the Army’s mishandling of Corporal Tillman’s death, and has been critical of Republican members of Congress who have sought to minimize the significance of the case.
Near the end of the hearing, Pat Tillman Sr. told Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, in a low but furious voice, “Get away from me.”
The only active duty witness at the hearing was Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the former commander of the United States Special Operations Command. Each of the four witnesses said he was either not the proper person, did not know enough or was not in the proper position to correct the public record on the Tillman killing or alert the Tillman family to the suspicions of friendly fire.
The Army told Corporal Tillman’s parents that he had been killed by fellow troops almost five weeks after his death, long after his nationally televised memorial service and posthumous Silver Star award.
“It’s very difficult to come to grips with how we screwed this thing up,” General Abizaid said, “but we screwed this thing up.”
Published: August 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — With Donald H. Rumsfeld seated at the witness table, the chairman of a House committee investigating the bungled aftermath of the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman told a packed Capitol Hill hearing room Wednesday that the time had come for some answers. What did Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Defense Department officials know about Corporal Tillman’s accidental killing by American forces, he asked, and when did they know it?
Three and a half hours, a few four-color charts and a couple of lost tempers later, the chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, solemnly admitted that he had gotten almost nowhere.
“You’ve all admitted that the system failed; none of you feel personally responsible,” Mr. Waxman said, addressing Mr. Rumsfeld, who resigned as defense secretary last fall, as well as one currently serving general and two retired ones who also testified under oath Wednesday.
“Somebody should be responsible.”
The hearing, held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s first return to Capitol Hill since President Bush asked him to resign after the Democratic victories in midterm elections. And although the bitter exchanges between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Democrats who now control Congress focused on the case involving Corporal Tillman, they exposed veins of anger over what the Democrats regard as a lack of accountability for broad missteps in Iraq.
Still, for most of the hearing, Mr. Rumsfeld, who sometimes sounded frailer and more gravel-voiced than he did while leading the Pentagon for nearly six years, offered few specific facts and recollections. He interjected only one exasperated “Oh, goodness!” despite numerous verbal provocations from committee members and stuck to his prepared answers and upbraided Democratic committee members when he felt they had their facts wrong.
“I don’t recall precisely how I learned that he was killed,” Mr. Rumsfeld said of Corporal Tillman early in the hearing. “It could have been internally; it could have been through the press.” He said he was also unsure when he learned the death was most likely from American fire, he added, although it was probably around May 20, 2004, about three weeks after the three generals seated beside him at Wednesday’s hearing had learned of it.
Testifying not in their familiar uniforms rich with medals but in ordinary business suits, two retired generals, Richard B. Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the American forces in the Middle East, each acknowledged that the Tillman matter was a “screw-up,” but not their fault.
General Abizaid said he received a classified message on April 29, 2004, saying Corporal Tillman, a professional football player who quit after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to become an Army Ranger, may have been killed by American fire in April 2004, and not in combat, as the Army had publicly stated.
General Myers said he could not recall how or when he learned of it, and even if he could, he said, “I don’t think there’s any regulation that would require me to do anything, actually.”
General Myers also said that if he knew that Army officials had suspected friendly fire — or what the military calls a “blue on blue” attack — in Corporal Tillman’s death, he would have informed Mr. Rumsfeld, his boss at the time, but added, “I cannot recall whether or not I did that.”
Several Democrats used the hearing to engage Mr. Rumsfeld in unrelated but longstanding grievances, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Pentagon’s policy of banning news media coverage of flag-draped military coffins returning from overseas.
At one point, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat who is running for president, averred that Mr. Rumsfeld had “covered up” the Tillman matter as well as prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
“That’s just false,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected. “You have nothing to base that on. You have not a scrap of evidence or a piece of paper or a witness that would attest to that. I have not been involved in any cover-up whatsoever.”
Stewing quietly throughout the hearing, and eventually lashing out at a lawmaker who approached to offer condolences, were several members of Corporal Tillman’s family, including his brother Kevin and his father, Pat Tillman Sr. The family has been assertive in calling attention to the Army’s mishandling of Corporal Tillman’s death, and has been critical of Republican members of Congress who have sought to minimize the significance of the case.
Near the end of the hearing, Pat Tillman Sr. told Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, in a low but furious voice, “Get away from me.”
The only active duty witness at the hearing was Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the former commander of the United States Special Operations Command. Each of the four witnesses said he was either not the proper person, did not know enough or was not in the proper position to correct the public record on the Tillman killing or alert the Tillman family to the suspicions of friendly fire.
The Army told Corporal Tillman’s parents that he had been killed by fellow troops almost five weeks after his death, long after his nationally televised memorial service and posthumous Silver Star award.
“It’s very difficult to come to grips with how we screwed this thing up,” General Abizaid said, “but we screwed this thing up.”
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Rumsfeld defends himself on Tillman
01 August, 2007
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended himself and took no personal responsibility Wednesday for the military‘s bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.
He told a House committee hearing that he‘d always impressed upon Pentagon underlings the importance of telling the truth.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Unanswered questions about the bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan reach into the highest ranks of the Pentagon and beyond, a key Democrat charged Wednesday.
"The concealment of Corp. Tillman‘s fratricide caused millions of Americans to question the integrity of our government, yet no one will tell us when and how the White House learned the truth," said Waxman, D-Calif.
Both joined him at the witness table.
"Are you not ashamed?" one said. Rumsfeld didn‘t react.
Tillman‘s mother Mary and other family members watched from the last row in the committee room.
The Army censured Kensinger for "a failure of leadership" and accused him of lying to investigators probing the aftermath of Tillman‘s death. For five weeks the Army knew Tillman was cut down by his fellow Army Rangers, but told the public and Tillman‘s own family that he died in a fire fight with enemy militia.
"I have no knowledge of any evidence to that end," Geren told a Pentagon briefing Tuesday after announcing Kensinger‘s censure.
That wasn‘t good enough for Democrats, who along with Tillman‘s family suspect a cover-up that goes all the way to the White House.
The punishments "do nothing to lift the appearance of cover-up that continues to envelop the Pat Tillman story," said Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., who represents Tillman‘s hometown of San Jose.
"It is inconceivable that numerous top-ranking generals ... were aware of the true circumstances of Pat‘s death, but did not inform their civilian superiors — President Bush and then-Secretary Rumsfeld," said Honda, promising to "hold these commanders‘ feet to the fire" at Wednesday‘s hearing.
Waxman wanted to hear from Kensinger, and the committee issued a subpoena Monday for his testimony. As the hearing began U.S. marshals still hadn‘t been able to deliver it.
Kensinger‘s attorney, Charles W. Gittins, said Tuesday night that Kensinger was away on business travel.
"He declined the committee invitation to testify two weeks ago, so it was no surprise to the committee that he had no intent to participate in a hearing that is all about show and no substance," Gittins said in an e-mail message to The Associated Press.
Gittins said his client "had no reason to lie" and had told investigators "everything he knows" about the case. In May, in a rebuttal letter to the general who reviewed the matter, Kensinger firmly rejected all accusations that he had lied.
Gittins also dismissed accusations that Kensinger should have told the Tillman family about the possibility of friendly fire, saying the retired general "was not the release authority for the information." That "release authority," Gittins said, was Gen. John Abizaid, then the head of the U.S. Central Command.
Tillman‘s death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League‘s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after 9/11.
Among possible evidence of White House knowledge, lawmakers have cited a memo written by a top general seven days after Tillman‘s death warning it was "highly possible" the Army Ranger was killed by his own comrades and making clear his warning should be conveyed to the president.
President Bush made no reference to the way Tillman died in a speech delivered two days after the memo was written.
A White House spokesman has said there‘s no indication Bush received the warning in the memo written April 29, 2004, by then-Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to Abizaid.
Abizaid was on the witness list for Wednesday‘s hearing.
McChrystal was spared punishment in the investigation report released Tuesday. The investigation concluded McChrystal behaved reasonably in assuming the supporting material for Tillman‘s Silver Star recommendation was accurate, and in conveying the message about the likelihood of friendly fire in Tillman‘s death.
___
Associated Press writers Richard Lardner in Washington and Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to this report.
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended himself and took no personal responsibility Wednesday for the military‘s bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.
He told a House committee hearing that he‘d always impressed upon Pentagon underlings the importance of telling the truth.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Unanswered questions about the bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman‘s friendly-fire death in Afghanistan reach into the highest ranks of the Pentagon and beyond, a key Democrat charged Wednesday.
"The concealment of Corp. Tillman‘s fratricide caused millions of Americans to question the integrity of our government, yet no one will tell us when and how the White House learned the truth," said Waxman, D-Calif.
Both joined him at the witness table.
"Are you not ashamed?" one said. Rumsfeld didn‘t react.
Tillman‘s mother Mary and other family members watched from the last row in the committee room.
The Army censured Kensinger for "a failure of leadership" and accused him of lying to investigators probing the aftermath of Tillman‘s death. For five weeks the Army knew Tillman was cut down by his fellow Army Rangers, but told the public and Tillman‘s own family that he died in a fire fight with enemy militia.
"I have no knowledge of any evidence to that end," Geren told a Pentagon briefing Tuesday after announcing Kensinger‘s censure.
That wasn‘t good enough for Democrats, who along with Tillman‘s family suspect a cover-up that goes all the way to the White House.
The punishments "do nothing to lift the appearance of cover-up that continues to envelop the Pat Tillman story," said Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., who represents Tillman‘s hometown of San Jose.
"It is inconceivable that numerous top-ranking generals ... were aware of the true circumstances of Pat‘s death, but did not inform their civilian superiors — President Bush and then-Secretary Rumsfeld," said Honda, promising to "hold these commanders‘ feet to the fire" at Wednesday‘s hearing.
Waxman wanted to hear from Kensinger, and the committee issued a subpoena Monday for his testimony. As the hearing began U.S. marshals still hadn‘t been able to deliver it.
Kensinger‘s attorney, Charles W. Gittins, said Tuesday night that Kensinger was away on business travel.
"He declined the committee invitation to testify two weeks ago, so it was no surprise to the committee that he had no intent to participate in a hearing that is all about show and no substance," Gittins said in an e-mail message to The Associated Press.
Gittins said his client "had no reason to lie" and had told investigators "everything he knows" about the case. In May, in a rebuttal letter to the general who reviewed the matter, Kensinger firmly rejected all accusations that he had lied.
Gittins also dismissed accusations that Kensinger should have told the Tillman family about the possibility of friendly fire, saying the retired general "was not the release authority for the information." That "release authority," Gittins said, was Gen. John Abizaid, then the head of the U.S. Central Command.
Tillman‘s death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League‘s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after 9/11.
Among possible evidence of White House knowledge, lawmakers have cited a memo written by a top general seven days after Tillman‘s death warning it was "highly possible" the Army Ranger was killed by his own comrades and making clear his warning should be conveyed to the president.
President Bush made no reference to the way Tillman died in a speech delivered two days after the memo was written.
A White House spokesman has said there‘s no indication Bush received the warning in the memo written April 29, 2004, by then-Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to Abizaid.
Abizaid was on the witness list for Wednesday‘s hearing.
McChrystal was spared punishment in the investigation report released Tuesday. The investigation concluded McChrystal behaved reasonably in assuming the supporting material for Tillman‘s Silver Star recommendation was accurate, and in conveying the message about the likelihood of friendly fire in Tillman‘s death.
___
Associated Press writers Richard Lardner in Washington and Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Accustomed to Their Own Atrocities in Iraq, U.S. Soldiers Have Become Murderers
By Chris Hedges
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations."
In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.
The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war -- one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. "This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun," remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three."
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.
It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war's death mask.
"And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq," said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. "It's the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here, I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.
"The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffle bag in each hand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've got a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired. You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then, you're scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you're not in the States anymore … so fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can't trust any of these fucking Hadjis, because all these fucking Hadjis are going to kill you. And Hadji is always used as a term of disrespect and usually, with the 'f' word in front of it."
War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power to the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction -- and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word -- sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects -- objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in air strikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they became sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another's dignity or life.
"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, when 20 year old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day to find a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol and to stay alive."
"It's like you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit."
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth, to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative the essence of war which is death.
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "shitting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word "Hadji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese or "rag head" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed "Hadji food," "Hadji homes," and "Hadji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejia remembers, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to intervene, yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also notes.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, "this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment." Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot shit up," a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."
"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road, and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Mejia writes, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia's squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they!?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins. Senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely saw combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia notes, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks." This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges, bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath, were finally awarded, the commanders immediately brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejia noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."
The war breeds gratuitous and constant acts of violence.
"I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white collar family," said Phillip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. "So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people, but I don't really remember.
"And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then, they have like a storage shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't -- mother fucker -- he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog -- and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals -- and this dog has like these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, the family is sitting right there with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm like what the fuck are you doing.
"And so, the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so, I told them I was like fucking shoot it, you know. At least, kill it, because that can't be fixed. It's suffering. And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but -- and I had tears then, too, -- and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common. I don't know if it's rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one's manliness traits. I don't know. I had a big problem with that.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not. He was a sycophant down to the T."
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58101/
Also at:
http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/war_on_terror/accustomed_to_their_own_atrocities_in_iraq,_u.s._soldiers_have
--submitted by Patti Woodard
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations."
In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress pushes troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. This hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find.
The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal clash when soldiers and Marines return home, alienating these combat veterans from the world around them, a world that still dines out on the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. But slowly returning veterans are giving us a new narrative of the war -- one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq for a lie and sustained because of wounded national pride and willful ignorance. "This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun," remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three."
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Those who come back from war, like Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans, suffer not only delayed reactions to stress, but a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the lies and myths used to mask the reality of war. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of American troops.
It has unleashed a new wave of embittered veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war's death mask.
"And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of what the fuck are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq," said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of convoys in Iraq. "It's the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people, the only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi, I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here, I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff.
"The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffle bag in each hand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've got a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired. You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then, you're scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you're not in the States anymore … so fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can't trust any of these fucking Hadjis, because all these fucking Hadjis are going to kill you. And Hadji is always used as a term of disrespect and usually, with the 'f' word in front of it."
War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power to the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on this earth. The frenzy of this destruction -- and when unit discipline breaks down, or there was no unit discipline to begin with, frenzy is the right word -- sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects -- objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in air strikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they became sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another's dignity or life.
"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, when 20 year old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day to find a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol and to stay alive."
"It's like you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit."
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth, to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative the essence of war which is death.
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "shitting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word "Hadji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese or "rag head" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed "Hadji food," "Hadji homes," and "Hadji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejia remembers, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. Mejia watched, not daring to intervene, yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gun point, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also notes.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, "this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment." Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot shit up," a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."
"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," Mejia said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road, and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Mejia writes, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia's squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they!?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, Mejia noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins. Senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely saw combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, Mejia notes, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks." This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges, bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath, were finally awarded, the commanders immediately brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," Mejia noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."
The war breeds gratuitous and constant acts of violence.
"I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white collar family," said Phillip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. "So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people, but I don't really remember.
"And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then, they have like a storage shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't -- mother fucker -- he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog -- and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals -- and this dog has like these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, the family is sitting right there with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm like what the fuck are you doing.
"And so, the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so, I told them I was like fucking shoot it, you know. At least, kill it, because that can't be fixed. It's suffering. And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but -- and I had tears then, too, -- and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them 20 bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common. I don't know if it's rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one's manliness traits. I don't know. I had a big problem with that.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not. He was a sycophant down to the T."
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58101/
Also at:
http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/war_on_terror/accustomed_to_their_own_atrocities_in_iraq,_u.s._soldiers_have
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Friday, July 27, 2007
Was Tillman Murdered?
Was Tillman Murdered? AP Gets New Documents
Published: July 26, 2007 11:30 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO 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.
Ultimately, the Pentagon did conduct a criminal investigation, and asked Tillman's comrades whether he was disliked by his men and whether they had any reason to believe he was deliberately killed.
The Pentagon eventually ruled that Tillman's death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident.
The medical examiners' suspicions were outlined in 2,300 pages of testimony released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Among other information contained in the documents:-- In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop "sniveling."
-- Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.--
The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman's death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn't recall details of his actions.
-- No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene - no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.
The Pentagon and the Bush administration have been criticized in recent months for lying about the circumstances of Tillman's death.
The military initially told the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by enemy fire. Only weeks later did the Pentagon acknowledge he was gunned down by fellow Rangers.
With questions lingering about how high in the Bush administration the deception reached, Congress is preparing for yet another hearing next week.
The Pentagon is separately preparing a new round of punishments, including a stinging demotion of retired Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., 60, according to military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the punishments under consideration have not been made public.
In more than four hours of questioning by the Pentagon inspector general's office in December 2006, Kensinger repeatedly contradicted other officers' testimony, and sometimes his own.
He said on some 70 occasions that he did not recall something.At one point, he said: "You've got me really scared about my brain right now. I'm really having a problem."
Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, who has long suggested that her son was deliberately killed by his comrades, said she is still looking for answers and looks forward to the congressional hearings next week.
"Nothing is going to bring Pat back. It's about justice for Pat and justice for other soldiers. The nation has been deceived," she said.
The documents show that a doctor who autopsied Tillman's body was suspicious of the three gunshot wounds to the forehead.
The doctor said he took the unusual step of calling the Army's Human Resources Command and was rebuffed.
He then asked an official at the Army's Criminal Investigation Division if the CID would consider opening a criminal case.
"He said he talked to his higher headquarters and they had said no," the doctor testified.
Also according to the documents, investigators pressed officers and soldiers on a question Mrs. Tillman has been asking all along.
"Have you, at any time since this incident occurred back on April 22, 2004, have you ever received any information even rumor that Cpl. Tillman was killed by anybody within his own unit intentionally?" an investigator asked then-Capt. Richard Scott.
Scott, and others who were asked, said they were certain the shooting was accidental.
Investigators also asked soldiers and commanders whether Tillman was disliked, whether anyone was jealous of his celebrity, or if he was considered arrogant. They said Tillman was respected, admired and well-liked.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
More on the Tillman Case
Published: July 26, 2007 11:30 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO 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.
Ultimately, the Pentagon did conduct a criminal investigation, and asked Tillman's comrades whether he was disliked by his men and whether they had any reason to believe he was deliberately killed.
The Pentagon eventually ruled that Tillman's death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident.
The medical examiners' suspicions were outlined in 2,300 pages of testimony released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Among other information contained in the documents:-- In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop "sniveling."
-- Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.--
The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman's death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn't recall details of his actions.
-- No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene - no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.
The Pentagon and the Bush administration have been criticized in recent months for lying about the circumstances of Tillman's death.
The military initially told the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by enemy fire. Only weeks later did the Pentagon acknowledge he was gunned down by fellow Rangers.
With questions lingering about how high in the Bush administration the deception reached, Congress is preparing for yet another hearing next week.
The Pentagon is separately preparing a new round of punishments, including a stinging demotion of retired Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., 60, according to military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the punishments under consideration have not been made public.
In more than four hours of questioning by the Pentagon inspector general's office in December 2006, Kensinger repeatedly contradicted other officers' testimony, and sometimes his own.
He said on some 70 occasions that he did not recall something.At one point, he said: "You've got me really scared about my brain right now. I'm really having a problem."
Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, who has long suggested that her son was deliberately killed by his comrades, said she is still looking for answers and looks forward to the congressional hearings next week.
"Nothing is going to bring Pat back. It's about justice for Pat and justice for other soldiers. The nation has been deceived," she said.
The documents show that a doctor who autopsied Tillman's body was suspicious of the three gunshot wounds to the forehead.
The doctor said he took the unusual step of calling the Army's Human Resources Command and was rebuffed.
He then asked an official at the Army's Criminal Investigation Division if the CID would consider opening a criminal case.
"He said he talked to his higher headquarters and they had said no," the doctor testified.
Also according to the documents, investigators pressed officers and soldiers on a question Mrs. Tillman has been asking all along.
"Have you, at any time since this incident occurred back on April 22, 2004, have you ever received any information even rumor that Cpl. Tillman was killed by anybody within his own unit intentionally?" an investigator asked then-Capt. Richard Scott.
Scott, and others who were asked, said they were certain the shooting was accidental.
Investigators also asked soldiers and commanders whether Tillman was disliked, whether anyone was jealous of his celebrity, or if he was considered arrogant. They said Tillman was respected, admired and well-liked.
--submitted by Patti Woodard
More on the Tillman Case
General Faces Demotion in Tillman Case
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press Writer
6:38 PM EDT, July 26, 2007
WASHINGTON
Army Secretary Pete Geren is expected to recommend demoting a retired three-star general for his role in providing misleading information to investigators about the friendly-fire shooting of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, military officials say.
In what would be a stinging and rare rebuke, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, who headed Army special operations, is one of seven high-ranking Army officers expected to receive official reprimands for critical errors in reporting the circumstances of the Army Ranger's death in April 2004.
The officials requested anonymity because the punishments under consideration by Geren have not been made public. The Army said it has not made any final decisions. The Army plans an announcement next week, after notifying Tillman's family and Congress of its actions.
Geren also is considering a letter of censure to Kensinger. He is in line for the harshest punishment of those involved in what has become a three-year controversy that led to more than half a dozen investigations. Five other officers, including three generals, are expected to receive less severe letters criticizing their actions.
Army officials decided against tougher penalties, which could have included additional demotions, dishonorable discharges or prison time. One senior officer, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, escaped punishment.
Tillman's death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League's Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Tillman's mother, Mary, said the impending punishments were inadequate.
"I'm not satisfied with any of it," she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
She rejected the Pentagon's characterization of the officers' offenses as "errors" in reporting her son's death, when several officers have said they decided against telling the Tillman family that friendly fire was suspected.
Geren's pending decisions come four months after two investigative reports found that Army officers provided misleading and inaccurate information about Tillman's death. A central issue has been why the Army waited about five weeks after it suspected friendly fire was involved before telling his family.
The investigations found that nine officers, including four generals, were at fault in providing the bad information and should be held accountable. But the reports determined there was no criminal wrongdoing in the actual shooting and that there was no deliberate cover-up.
Geren then named Gen. William Wallace to review the investigations and recommend disciplinary actions. Wallace disagreed with initial findings against McChrystal, according to the military officials.
But Wallace also surprised Army officials by singling out a 10th officer -- one who had not been blamed in the earlier reports -- for rebuke.
Brig. Gen. Gina Farrisee, director of military personnel management at the Pentagon, is expected to receive a letter of punishment for her involvement in the oversight of the awarding of Tillman's Silver Star.
Two others who were blamed in earlier reports are also expected to receive letters of admonishment: Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, who led one of the early Army investigations, and Brig. Gen. James C. Nixon, who was Tillman's regimental commander.
Jones, now retired from the Army, was faulted for failing to address several issues, leading to speculation that Army officials were concealing information about Tillman's death.
Nixon was criticized for failing to ensure that Tillman's family was told.
The names of the three lower level officers expected to be punished have not been released by the military. But they are likely among the five who were blamed -- but also not named -- in the earlier investigations.
According to an AP analysis of the reports and other documents, those five officers include then-Capt. Richard Scott, who conducted the first investigation into the shooting, and then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey, the battalion commander who oversaw Tillman's platoon and played a role in the recommendation for his Silver Star. Officials would not say if either of those are among the ones recommended for rebuke.
It is no surprise that Kensinger, 60, is in line for the most severe punishment. An investigation by the Defense Department's inspector general found "compelling evidence that Kensinger learned of suspected fratricide well before the memorial service and provided misleading testimony" on that issue. That misrepresentation, the report said, could constitute a "false official statement," a violation of the Military Code of Justice.
Farrisee's rebuke is tied to the Army recommendations that Tillman receive the Silver Star. The investigations found that Army officials were aware that Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire, but that they moved ahead with the medal, for heroism in the face of the enemy.
If Geren does recommend to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Kensinger lose a star and be demoted to major general, that would lower Kensinger's retirement benefits. As an example, a lieutenant general retiring in 2006 would earn about $9,400 per month, while a major general would get about $8,500 per month.
The letters of rebuke for the others could be crippling blows, too. They can include letters of concern, reprimand or censure, with escalating degrees of gravity.
"For officers generally, a reprimand is a devastating career injury," said Eugene Fidell, a lawyer who specializes in military cases and teaches at American University's Washington College of Law. "It can trigger an effort to throw the person out of the military. It can trigger a reduction in pay grade when the time comes to retire. It can prevent a future promotion and it can gum up a promotion that has already been decided."
For a one-star general, Fidell said, it could mean they are likely to never get a second star. He said a lower level officer, such as a captain, "would have to dig out of a deep hole to continue his or her career. Letters of reprimand are truly bad news."
Associated Press reporter Scott Lindlaw in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Associated Press Writer
6:38 PM EDT, July 26, 2007
WASHINGTON
Army Secretary Pete Geren is expected to recommend demoting a retired three-star general for his role in providing misleading information to investigators about the friendly-fire shooting of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, military officials say.
In what would be a stinging and rare rebuke, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, who headed Army special operations, is one of seven high-ranking Army officers expected to receive official reprimands for critical errors in reporting the circumstances of the Army Ranger's death in April 2004.
The officials requested anonymity because the punishments under consideration by Geren have not been made public. The Army said it has not made any final decisions. The Army plans an announcement next week, after notifying Tillman's family and Congress of its actions.
Geren also is considering a letter of censure to Kensinger. He is in line for the harshest punishment of those involved in what has become a three-year controversy that led to more than half a dozen investigations. Five other officers, including three generals, are expected to receive less severe letters criticizing their actions.
Army officials decided against tougher penalties, which could have included additional demotions, dishonorable discharges or prison time. One senior officer, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, escaped punishment.
Tillman's death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League's Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Tillman's mother, Mary, said the impending punishments were inadequate.
"I'm not satisfied with any of it," she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
She rejected the Pentagon's characterization of the officers' offenses as "errors" in reporting her son's death, when several officers have said they decided against telling the Tillman family that friendly fire was suspected.
Geren's pending decisions come four months after two investigative reports found that Army officers provided misleading and inaccurate information about Tillman's death. A central issue has been why the Army waited about five weeks after it suspected friendly fire was involved before telling his family.
The investigations found that nine officers, including four generals, were at fault in providing the bad information and should be held accountable. But the reports determined there was no criminal wrongdoing in the actual shooting and that there was no deliberate cover-up.
Geren then named Gen. William Wallace to review the investigations and recommend disciplinary actions. Wallace disagreed with initial findings against McChrystal, according to the military officials.
But Wallace also surprised Army officials by singling out a 10th officer -- one who had not been blamed in the earlier reports -- for rebuke.
Brig. Gen. Gina Farrisee, director of military personnel management at the Pentagon, is expected to receive a letter of punishment for her involvement in the oversight of the awarding of Tillman's Silver Star.
Two others who were blamed in earlier reports are also expected to receive letters of admonishment: Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, who led one of the early Army investigations, and Brig. Gen. James C. Nixon, who was Tillman's regimental commander.
Jones, now retired from the Army, was faulted for failing to address several issues, leading to speculation that Army officials were concealing information about Tillman's death.
Nixon was criticized for failing to ensure that Tillman's family was told.
The names of the three lower level officers expected to be punished have not been released by the military. But they are likely among the five who were blamed -- but also not named -- in the earlier investigations.
According to an AP analysis of the reports and other documents, those five officers include then-Capt. Richard Scott, who conducted the first investigation into the shooting, and then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey, the battalion commander who oversaw Tillman's platoon and played a role in the recommendation for his Silver Star. Officials would not say if either of those are among the ones recommended for rebuke.
It is no surprise that Kensinger, 60, is in line for the most severe punishment. An investigation by the Defense Department's inspector general found "compelling evidence that Kensinger learned of suspected fratricide well before the memorial service and provided misleading testimony" on that issue. That misrepresentation, the report said, could constitute a "false official statement," a violation of the Military Code of Justice.
Farrisee's rebuke is tied to the Army recommendations that Tillman receive the Silver Star. The investigations found that Army officials were aware that Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire, but that they moved ahead with the medal, for heroism in the face of the enemy.
If Geren does recommend to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Kensinger lose a star and be demoted to major general, that would lower Kensinger's retirement benefits. As an example, a lieutenant general retiring in 2006 would earn about $9,400 per month, while a major general would get about $8,500 per month.
The letters of rebuke for the others could be crippling blows, too. They can include letters of concern, reprimand or censure, with escalating degrees of gravity.
"For officers generally, a reprimand is a devastating career injury," said Eugene Fidell, a lawyer who specializes in military cases and teaches at American University's Washington College of Law. "It can trigger an effort to throw the person out of the military. It can trigger a reduction in pay grade when the time comes to retire. It can prevent a future promotion and it can gum up a promotion that has already been decided."
For a one-star general, Fidell said, it could mean they are likely to never get a second star. He said a lower level officer, such as a captain, "would have to dig out of a deep hole to continue his or her career. Letters of reprimand are truly bad news."
Associated Press reporter Scott Lindlaw in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Editorial: Seeking the Truth About Pat Tillman
Published: July 27, 2007
The Pentagon indicated yesterday that several high-ranking officers will soon be punished for misleading investigators probing the 2004 death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger who became an icon in the administration’s war on terror but who was later found to have been killed by friendly fire. While this could provide a measure of accountability, it should not stop Representative Henry A. Waxman from pursuing his dogged efforts to get to the bottom of this convoluted and troubling case.
Corporal Tillman, who walked away from a lucrative football contract to enlist in the Army after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, in a hail of fire from fellow Rangers who mistakenly believed that his small group was an enemy force.
That Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire appears to have be known to his fellow soldiers within a day of the incident, if not sooner. But at some point in the first few days another story was concocted asserting that he had died from enemy fire as he heroically tried to help the unit that shot him. The truth did not emerge — and was not conveyed to his family — until more than a month had gone by and a well-publicized and widely televised memorial service had taken place.
Mr. Waxman, who runs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is asking three basic questions: Who initiated the phony story? How far up the chain of command did the deception go? And what did the White House know?
Mr. Waxman has reviewed more than a thousand pages that the White House, with some reluctance, has provided his staff for private review. He now wants some of these documents made available to the full committee, but since the written record seems to shed little light on what the White House was or was not being told, he has also asked four former members of the White House staff to testify. Among them is them Scott McClellan, a former press secretary.
There are at least two possible outcomes here. One is that the White House was part of the deception, which would be bad for the White House. Another is that the White House did not learn the truth any sooner than the public or the Tillman family, which would be very bad for the Pentagon. Mr. Waxman should continue his quest, and the White house must be responsive.
The Pentagon indicated yesterday that several high-ranking officers will soon be punished for misleading investigators probing the 2004 death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger who became an icon in the administration’s war on terror but who was later found to have been killed by friendly fire. While this could provide a measure of accountability, it should not stop Representative Henry A. Waxman from pursuing his dogged efforts to get to the bottom of this convoluted and troubling case.
Corporal Tillman, who walked away from a lucrative football contract to enlist in the Army after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, in a hail of fire from fellow Rangers who mistakenly believed that his small group was an enemy force.
That Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire appears to have be known to his fellow soldiers within a day of the incident, if not sooner. But at some point in the first few days another story was concocted asserting that he had died from enemy fire as he heroically tried to help the unit that shot him. The truth did not emerge — and was not conveyed to his family — until more than a month had gone by and a well-publicized and widely televised memorial service had taken place.
Mr. Waxman, who runs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is asking three basic questions: Who initiated the phony story? How far up the chain of command did the deception go? And what did the White House know?
Mr. Waxman has reviewed more than a thousand pages that the White House, with some reluctance, has provided his staff for private review. He now wants some of these documents made available to the full committee, but since the written record seems to shed little light on what the White House was or was not being told, he has also asked four former members of the White House staff to testify. Among them is them Scott McClellan, a former press secretary.
There are at least two possible outcomes here. One is that the White House was part of the deception, which would be bad for the White House. Another is that the White House did not learn the truth any sooner than the public or the Tillman family, which would be very bad for the Pentagon. Mr. Waxman should continue his quest, and the White house must be responsive.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Non-combat Deaths in Iraq Drop
By Thomas Frank, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — Non-combat U.S. troop deaths in Iraq have fallen for three years — largely because of fewer vehicle accidents — and account for the smallest percentage of fatalities for any war except the Korean conflict.
A USA TODAY analysis of Pentagon data shows 105 U.S. troops died in non-combat incidents, including suicide and illness, in the year ending June 30 — 11% of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq for that period. During the first year of the war, there were 193 non-combat deaths, about half of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
The falloff in non-combat deaths comes amid a spike in battle fatalities. There were 939 U.S. combat deaths in the year ending June 30, the most for any 12-month period of the war. In the first year, 387 troops died in combat.
Until World War II, non-combat deaths — from disease, cold and other causes — outnumbered those on the battlefield, said Malcolm Muir, a Virginia Military Institute historian.
Non-combat deaths in Iraq are dropping because troops do little driving unless they are on missions, said F. Andy Messing, executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation in Alexandria, Va.
Unlike past campaigns, U.S. forces in Iraq are largely confined to fortified bases and combat outposts. "People just aren't going out unless it's for a specific mission," said Messing, a retired Army Special Forces major. "It's a very different environment than in the Vietnam War or even the first Gulf War."
Leading causes of non-combat deaths in Iraq are vehicle accidents, gunshot wounds — accidents and suicides — and air crashes. The number of troops killed in vehicle accidents fell from 67 in the first year of the Iraq war to 23 in the most recent year, Pentagon data show.
Another factor: medical advances that allow them to be quickly airlifted to Germany and improve survival rates. It's "an extraordinary change in medical doctrine," Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said.
The smaller percentage of non-combat fatalities in Iraq — 645 of 3,631 total deaths — contrasts with the 1991 Gulf War. Then, more troops died outside of combat than in fighting, 235 vs. 147.
"That war was very short and relatively chaotic," said Dennis McBride, president of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies outside Washington.
In the current war, troops have had time to learn. "On flying missions, lessons get passed down to crews," improving safety, McBride said.
It wasn't until World War II, when medicine had vastly improved, that battlefield deaths outnumbered non-combat deaths, Pentagon figures show.
BAGHDAD — Non-combat U.S. troop deaths in Iraq have fallen for three years — largely because of fewer vehicle accidents — and account for the smallest percentage of fatalities for any war except the Korean conflict.
A USA TODAY analysis of Pentagon data shows 105 U.S. troops died in non-combat incidents, including suicide and illness, in the year ending June 30 — 11% of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq for that period. During the first year of the war, there were 193 non-combat deaths, about half of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
The falloff in non-combat deaths comes amid a spike in battle fatalities. There were 939 U.S. combat deaths in the year ending June 30, the most for any 12-month period of the war. In the first year, 387 troops died in combat.
Until World War II, non-combat deaths — from disease, cold and other causes — outnumbered those on the battlefield, said Malcolm Muir, a Virginia Military Institute historian.
Non-combat deaths in Iraq are dropping because troops do little driving unless they are on missions, said F. Andy Messing, executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation in Alexandria, Va.
Unlike past campaigns, U.S. forces in Iraq are largely confined to fortified bases and combat outposts. "People just aren't going out unless it's for a specific mission," said Messing, a retired Army Special Forces major. "It's a very different environment than in the Vietnam War or even the first Gulf War."
Leading causes of non-combat deaths in Iraq are vehicle accidents, gunshot wounds — accidents and suicides — and air crashes. The number of troops killed in vehicle accidents fell from 67 in the first year of the Iraq war to 23 in the most recent year, Pentagon data show.
Another factor: medical advances that allow them to be quickly airlifted to Germany and improve survival rates. It's "an extraordinary change in medical doctrine," Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said.
The smaller percentage of non-combat fatalities in Iraq — 645 of 3,631 total deaths — contrasts with the 1991 Gulf War. Then, more troops died outside of combat than in fighting, 235 vs. 147.
"That war was very short and relatively chaotic," said Dennis McBride, president of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies outside Washington.
In the current war, troops have had time to learn. "On flying missions, lessons get passed down to crews," improving safety, McBride said.
It wasn't until World War II, when medicine had vastly improved, that battlefield deaths outnumbered non-combat deaths, Pentagon figures show.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Pat Tillman Investigators Want Rumsfeld: House panel hopes to ask him about Ranger’s death
Published on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle
by Zachary Coile
WASHINGTON — House lawmakers, suspecting that top Pentagon officials covered up the 2004 friendly-fire death of football star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, want former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five generals to testify about the fatal shooting of the San Jose native by soldiers from his unit in Afghanistan.
The Democrats’ most tenacious investigator, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, joined by the panel’s ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, announced Monday they will ask Rumsfeld, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and retired Gen. John Abizaid, who oversaw operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to testify at a hearing scheduled for Aug. 1.
Waxman’s goal is clear from the title of the hearing — “The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew.”
Rumsfeld and the others could resist testifying before the committee, a media event sure to attract almost every TV camera on Capitol Hill. But Waxman holds a powerful card: He is the only committee chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote.
Still, with Davis’ support, it appears Waxman will have the committee’s backing to compel the witnesses to appear.
Many lawmakers already believe the Pentagon knew the facts of Tillman’s death for weeks, but misled the public by awarding him the Silver Star and spinning a false tale of his dying while fighting enemy forces.
“Who knew what and when?” Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, said Monday. “After years of obfuscation, and likely coverup, an American hero’s family and the nation remain inexcusably in the dark. The White House and Department of Defense’s refusal to answer this basic question about the death of Patrick Tillman is an affront to the sacrifices of America’s warriors.”
The committee also wants testimony from Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who sent a high-priority cable five days after Tillman’s death to Abizaid and other top Army commanders, warning that the former NFL safety probably had been killed by friendly fire — not by the Taliban, as the Army claimed publicly.
The memo, viewed as a smoking gun by congressional investigators, urged Abizaid to immediately contact “POTUS” — the president of the United States — “to preclude any unknowing statements by our country’s leaders which might cause public embarrassment.”
The memo also was sent to Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, who oversaw the Rangers, and Gen. Bryan “Doug” Brown, former chief of the Special Operations Command. Both generals, now retired, have been called to testify.
Army spokesman Paul Boyce said he could not comment on whether the current or former officials would agree to appear before Congress. The Army is waiting for more information from the committee, he said.
Waxman’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee launched the investigation earlier this year, sifting through evidence gathered by Tillman’s family and Army investigators that found that senior Army officers destroyed key evidence, including burning Tillman’s uniform and armor-plated vest; warned Tillman’s fellow soldiers not to discuss the incident; and later devised a public relations strategy for how to handle the football star’s death.
Several Army officers are expected to be disciplined for their handling of the shooting as part of a new Army inquiry. But Tillman’s family and House lawmakers believe that top Pentagon officials — including Abizaid and possibly Rumsfeld — also were aware of or approved the cover-up.
“How high up did this go?” Waxman asked at the committee’s first hearing in April.
Waxman and Davis have accused the Pentagon of blocking their inquiry by refusing to hand over documents, including e-mails and internal memos, about what top generals knew about Tillman’s death.
The Pentagon has turned over more than 10,000 pages of documents, but has refused to produce others, with White House lawyers citing executive branch confidentiality. Waxman and Davis, in a letter last week, said the information released thus far “sheds virtually no light on these matters.”
“From the very start, the administration has mishandled information about this tragedy and misinformed the American public,” said Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, a senior Democrat on the committee. “It is high time they came clean and respected the oversight role of Congress in this issue.”
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
by Zachary Coile
WASHINGTON — House lawmakers, suspecting that top Pentagon officials covered up the 2004 friendly-fire death of football star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, want former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five generals to testify about the fatal shooting of the San Jose native by soldiers from his unit in Afghanistan.
The Democrats’ most tenacious investigator, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, joined by the panel’s ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, announced Monday they will ask Rumsfeld, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and retired Gen. John Abizaid, who oversaw operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to testify at a hearing scheduled for Aug. 1.
Waxman’s goal is clear from the title of the hearing — “The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew.”
Rumsfeld and the others could resist testifying before the committee, a media event sure to attract almost every TV camera on Capitol Hill. But Waxman holds a powerful card: He is the only committee chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote.
Still, with Davis’ support, it appears Waxman will have the committee’s backing to compel the witnesses to appear.
Many lawmakers already believe the Pentagon knew the facts of Tillman’s death for weeks, but misled the public by awarding him the Silver Star and spinning a false tale of his dying while fighting enemy forces.
“Who knew what and when?” Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, said Monday. “After years of obfuscation, and likely coverup, an American hero’s family and the nation remain inexcusably in the dark. The White House and Department of Defense’s refusal to answer this basic question about the death of Patrick Tillman is an affront to the sacrifices of America’s warriors.”
The committee also wants testimony from Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who sent a high-priority cable five days after Tillman’s death to Abizaid and other top Army commanders, warning that the former NFL safety probably had been killed by friendly fire — not by the Taliban, as the Army claimed publicly.
The memo, viewed as a smoking gun by congressional investigators, urged Abizaid to immediately contact “POTUS” — the president of the United States — “to preclude any unknowing statements by our country’s leaders which might cause public embarrassment.”
The memo also was sent to Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, who oversaw the Rangers, and Gen. Bryan “Doug” Brown, former chief of the Special Operations Command. Both generals, now retired, have been called to testify.
Army spokesman Paul Boyce said he could not comment on whether the current or former officials would agree to appear before Congress. The Army is waiting for more information from the committee, he said.
Waxman’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee launched the investigation earlier this year, sifting through evidence gathered by Tillman’s family and Army investigators that found that senior Army officers destroyed key evidence, including burning Tillman’s uniform and armor-plated vest; warned Tillman’s fellow soldiers not to discuss the incident; and later devised a public relations strategy for how to handle the football star’s death.
Several Army officers are expected to be disciplined for their handling of the shooting as part of a new Army inquiry. But Tillman’s family and House lawmakers believe that top Pentagon officials — including Abizaid and possibly Rumsfeld — also were aware of or approved the cover-up.
“How high up did this go?” Waxman asked at the committee’s first hearing in April.
Waxman and Davis have accused the Pentagon of blocking their inquiry by refusing to hand over documents, including e-mails and internal memos, about what top generals knew about Tillman’s death.
The Pentagon has turned over more than 10,000 pages of documents, but has refused to produce others, with White House lawyers citing executive branch confidentiality. Waxman and Davis, in a letter last week, said the information released thus far “sheds virtually no light on these matters.”
“From the very start, the administration has mishandled information about this tragedy and misinformed the American public,” said Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, a senior Democrat on the committee. “It is high time they came clean and respected the oversight role of Congress in this issue.”
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Panel reviews casualty notification processes
By Karen Jowers - Staff writerPosted : Friday Jun 29, 2007 14:31:22 EDT
The Marine Corps may not be complying with a law that requires families to be notified when an investigation is being conducted in connection with the death or injury of their service member, such as in cases of friendly fire, a Marine Corps official acknowledged during a congressional hearing today.
The Marine Corps is aware of the law, said retired Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Downs, director of the personnel and family readiness division, which includes the casualty division, under Headquarters Marine Corps. He said the family is notified after the investigation is finished if a determination is made that the incident did involve friendly fire.
“Clearly, we need to look at the issue of ‘under investigation,’” Downs said, to ensure that combatant commanders put amendments into personnel casualty reports earlier, rather than waiting until the final investigation report is in.
“The existence of this regulation is well known. It’s an issue of 100 percent adherence,” Downs said.
Army, Navy and Air Force officials told the House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee that families are notified when an investigation begins.
“As soon as we get information, the case is under investigation or unknown, we will notify the family,” said Brig. Gen. Reuben Jones, the Army’s adjutant general.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Anthony Przybyslawski, commander of the Air Force Personnel Center, said families are assigned an officer from the Office of Special Investigations within 72 hours of an investigation being opened in a death. Since 2004, OSI investigates every hostile incident death, he said.
The Army also investigates every hostile incident death.
The Navy also notifies families that investigations are being conducted, said Patrick McLaughlin, acting assistant deputy chief of naval operations and chief operating officer for manpower, personnel, training and education enterprise.
Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., the subcommittee chairman, described the hearing as “an unsatisfactory experience.”
“I thought this would be crisper, more clear and uniform. But I’ve got uneasiness about this process,” Snyder said. “I thought it would be laid out that all families are treated in the same way. Maybe they’re treated fairly, but they’re not getting the same information because it varies from service to service.”
--Source: The Army Times
The Marine Corps may not be complying with a law that requires families to be notified when an investigation is being conducted in connection with the death or injury of their service member, such as in cases of friendly fire, a Marine Corps official acknowledged during a congressional hearing today.
The Marine Corps is aware of the law, said retired Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Downs, director of the personnel and family readiness division, which includes the casualty division, under Headquarters Marine Corps. He said the family is notified after the investigation is finished if a determination is made that the incident did involve friendly fire.
“Clearly, we need to look at the issue of ‘under investigation,’” Downs said, to ensure that combatant commanders put amendments into personnel casualty reports earlier, rather than waiting until the final investigation report is in.
“The existence of this regulation is well known. It’s an issue of 100 percent adherence,” Downs said.
Army, Navy and Air Force officials told the House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee that families are notified when an investigation begins.
“As soon as we get information, the case is under investigation or unknown, we will notify the family,” said Brig. Gen. Reuben Jones, the Army’s adjutant general.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Anthony Przybyslawski, commander of the Air Force Personnel Center, said families are assigned an officer from the Office of Special Investigations within 72 hours of an investigation being opened in a death. Since 2004, OSI investigates every hostile incident death, he said.
The Army also investigates every hostile incident death.
The Navy also notifies families that investigations are being conducted, said Patrick McLaughlin, acting assistant deputy chief of naval operations and chief operating officer for manpower, personnel, training and education enterprise.
Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., the subcommittee chairman, described the hearing as “an unsatisfactory experience.”
“I thought this would be crisper, more clear and uniform. But I’ve got uneasiness about this process,” Snyder said. “I thought it would be laid out that all families are treated in the same way. Maybe they’re treated fairly, but they’re not getting the same information because it varies from service to service.”
--Source: The Army Times
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Families Frustrated in Quest for the Truth
Published on Thursday, May 5, 2005 by the Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California)
by Gregor McGavin
They paid the ultimate price on the battlefields of Iraq -- some killed by the enemy, others by their own side.
For that sacrifice, some families of slain troops say the U.S. military has paid them back in lies and a lack of information.
I don't believe anything the government says.
Johnny Burkett, a Vietnam veteran whose nephew, Lance Cpl. Tamario Burkett, was one of 18 Marines killed at An Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003
Lila Lipscomb, 50, of Flint, Mich., holds the flag she received after the death of her son Michael Pedersen in the Iraq war in 2003. After appearing in the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11,"
Lila has been an even stronger advocate against the war in Iraq. Two years after the official end of a war in Iraq hailed for its few incidents of fratricide, a Press-Enterprise investigation has revealed that twice as many troops as reported might have fallen to "friendly fire."
But the U.S. military -- which vowed after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to both curb and be more open about its deadly mistakes -- is still keeping secret a report designed to lessen the risk of repeating them.
"It's not right to keep it a secret," said Dorothy Halvorsen, whose son Chief Warrant Officer Erik Halvorsen was one of six soldiers killed in a helicopter crash in central Iraq on April 2, 2003.
Since then, Halvorsen has gotten varying accounts from the military of what happened that night, and she and other relatives of the slain troops have had to fight for information.
"They're putting more restrictions on what we can know," she said. "And we have a right to know."
Across the country, many mothers and fathers, wives, siblings and grandparents -- including some who remain staunchly pro-war -- say they feel they've been kept in the dark. These families question the military's commitment to decreasing friendly fire, and to telling them the truth of how their loved ones died.
Recent news reports that the military deliberately concealed that Pat Tillman -- a professional football player turned Army Ranger, and one of the highest-profile casualties -- was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan have amplified those questions.
The "lessons learned" report from U.S. Joint Forces Command is said to provide the final word on all suspected fratricide incidents and steps to avoid repeating them. The report, completed more than a year ago, has yet to be declassified, or made available to the public.
It is "the Department of Defense look at friendly fire," said Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a department spokesman. "I don't know that there is any intention to release the lessons-learned report."
The Press-Enterprise investigation, meant to parallel the work of military investigators, uncovered that as many as 24 Marines, soldiers and sailors -- 18 percent of the 139 combat deaths during major fighting from March 19 to May 2, 2003 -- might have been killed by their own side.
The numbers rival those from the Gulf War in 1991, when 35 U.S. troops, or 24 percent, were killed by fratricide. Relatives of Gulf War friendly fire victims had to wait nearly six months to learn the circumstances of their loved ones' deaths.
In light of those casualties -- the highest percentage of friendly fire deaths ever recorded by U.S. forces -- and the delay in informing relatives, the military promised to do better on both fronts.
But two years after the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom -- the official war in Iraq -- the military still has publicly acknowledged only 12 possible fratricide deaths. Military leaders have claimed those low numbers showed their anti-fratricide efforts have paid off.
The yearlong Press-Enterprise investigation, based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, official military releases and interviews with scores of families, was limited to the same period covered by the military's lessons-learned report. About 1,600 U.S. troops have died to date in Iraq; it is not known how many might have been killed by friendly fire since the war ended and the occupation began.
'Information Warfare'
It has been two years since his helicopter crashed in the Iraqi desert, but Lila Lipscomb says she still doesn't know what killed her son, U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Pedersen.
The casualty officers came to her Flint, Mich., home to tell her Pedersen was dead, along with Halvorsen and the four other soldiers aboard. In the months that followed, she would get more calls and letters from the military.
Each time, the story seemed to change.
First, it was a hostile incident that brought the Black Hawk down, less than two weeks into Operation Iraqi Freedom. Then it was nonhostile, a catchall term that includes accidents. The pilot's spatial disorientation, they said next. And from the start, the families wondered if it was friendly fire.
Worse for Lipscomb than her fear that Pedersen and his comrades might have been killed by their own side was the growing belief that the U.S. military was not telling her and other families the truth.
"It is an attempt to keep us uninformed," said Lipscomb, part of whose story was featured in the Michael Moore documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Some experts say the military has long been plagued by an institutional unwillingness to own up to its mistakes. Others say defense officials have taken misinformation to new levels, "spinning" casualties to downplay the negative.
"They've gone into a turtle shell, and they only want to talk about the good things that happen in the war," said Steve Robinson, a veteran Army Ranger who now heads the National Gulf War Resource Council, a military watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
Robinson, who has done extensive research on this war and past conflicts, said the Pentagon has engaged in a public-relations campaign.
"It's part of the strategy in war, and it's something we employ in Iraq to gain the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people," Robinson said.
"And in some cases it looks as if the Department of Defense is employing information warfare at home by not releasing accurate information or making it difficult to obtain information," he said.
Robinson said he thinks now the military is covering up the number of troops killed by friendly fire.
Defense officials bristle at such claims.
"We don't have an issue of people covering things up," said Venable, the defense spokesman. "I know the accusations. That may have been true back in the Vietnam War and other eras."
It is not true today, he said.
"Is there a policy of keeping quiet about friendly fire incidents? No, they're investigated fully," Venable said. "The results are released once the investigation" is completed.
The military's final report on the incident that killed Lipscomb's son came to her more than a year later and only after she had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. The parts that weren't blacked out said the soldier flying the Black Hawk might have become disoriented and lost control.
The report said the six soldiers were killed, not by friendly fire, but by an accident. Lipscomb still doesn't know whether to believe it.
Lipscomb, 50, originally from Big Bear Lake, comes from a military family -- her father, grandfather and brothers all served in the military. She was proud of that. She encouraged her son to sign up as a way to serve his country and earn money for college.
Military Language
Friendly fire is an unavoidable part of modern warfare, military officials and experts agree.
No matter what training and high-tech systems are used to combat fratricide, experts say some troops will be lost in the so-called "fog of battle" -- the cloud of dust and smoke and fatigue and urgency that hangs over the battlefield.
"It will never go to zero. It's never going to go away," said Ivan Oelrich, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C. "You've got lots and lots of guys out there with guns, and they're shooting them. Mistakes are always going to happen."
But critics say even the language the military uses in discussing casualties is purposely confusing.
One hundred and thirty-nine U.S. troops were killed during the period of major combat operations -- March 19 to May 2, 2003. Of those, 115 were classified as hostile, the others nonhostile.
The military lists as nonhostile those deaths not directly attributable to enemy or friendly fire, or terrorist activity. They include accidents such as vehicle crashes, as well as suicides and homicides.
Casualty reports include categories such as combat and noncombat deaths, the first being those related to direct or indirect fire from the enemy, even if the victim is killed by something other than that fire. Thus, a soldier killed in a jeep that crashes after swerving to avoid a hand grenade is a combat death.
It all makes for a confusing picture, critics say.
'It Takes Time'
Venable said defense officials do their best, often with limited information from the battlefield, to let families know the fate of their loved ones.
Each soldier's death sparks a "line of duty" investigation by that unit's chain of command.
Once relatives are notified, the names of the dead are announced publicly, Venable said. More detailed investigations can follow, often ordered by U.S. Central Command, which oversees all combat forces.
"I can understand a sense of frustration. You want answers, and you want them quick," Venable said. "But you've got to understand, these things are complicated and they're detailed. It takes time."
Though families speak highly of the casualty officers who deliver the bad news, many -- even those who supported the war -- say they don't think the military has been straight with them.
A Patriot missile brought down Navy Lt. Nathan White's fighter jet on April 2, 2003, killing the 30-year-old from Mesa, Ariz.
"In spite of everything, his father still supports the president and our troops," said Dennis White, Nathan's father.
The military acknowledged that it was friendly fire that killed White, but his father said he has not gotten any straight answers from the military or the government as to why the Air Force is still using the Patriot, which has caused several friendly fire deaths of U.S. and allied troops.
Others say they believe the government has lied to them.
"I don't believe anything the government says," said Johnny Burkett, a Vietnam veteran whose nephew, Lance Cpl. Tamario Burkett, was one of 18 Marines killed at An Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.
Burkett and nine other Marines were hit by so much enemy and friendly fire that it was impossible to tell which killed them, a military investigation concluded.
Robinson said the Defense Department has a history of not coming clean.
Defense officials "lied, misled and withheld critical information" about Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, he said, and he believes they did so again regarding Gulf War veterans' exposure to chemical and biological warfare agents.
Friendly fire became a military priority after the first Gulf War, when the number of victims prompted the Pentagon to pour billions of dollars into satellite and computer technology aimed at giving troops a better view of the battlefield.
Critics say the military recommitted itself to eliminating friendly fire only after several high-profile incidents -- including one at An Nasiriyah and another in Afghanistan in 2001 that killed four Canadian soldiers.
"They had been very concerned after Desert Storm, and then it kind of wore off," said John Pike, who heads the military think-tank GlobalSecurity.org. "I think it is back on their screen."
Related Suspicion Confirmed
Army Spc. Donald Oaks Jr., Sgt. 1st Class Randall Rehn and Sgt. Todd Robbins died on April 3, 2003, when an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle dropped a bomb on the multi-launch rocket weapon they manned for the Army's C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Artillery regiment.
U.S. Central Command announced within days that the incident was under investigation, but the findings were not officially released.
"I don't think they've learned anything at all since the first Gulf War," grandfather Sam Oaks, 63, said of military officials.
The younger Oaks, a 20-year-old from Erie, Pa., had joined the Army for college money, his grandfather said. He and the other relatives of the three men were told it might have been friendly fire, but it took more than a year for the final report confirming that suspicion to be delivered.
"His grandma told him when he went over to Iraq, 'Be careful for friendly fire,' " the elder Oaks said. "We talked about it all the time, because we know what happened in the first Gulf War."
Rehn, 36, was married with a 3-month old daughter when he shipped out to Iraq.
Back home in Longmont, Colo., his brother Joe said he remains in favor of the war, which he says is necessary to combat terrorism. But he thinks the military had other reasons for delaying its report.
"I'm sure it wasn't at the top of their priority list to figure out what went on, if you know what I mean," Rehn said. "The No. 1 priority is to make sure more people don't know, not to figure out what went on."
Report Delayed
Joint Forces Command focuses on research, experimentation and training.
In June, more than 28,000 U.S. service members and troops from Britain, Canada and other allied nations took part in Joint Forces Command exercises at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune. In simulated combat, they tested anti-fratricide technology that could one day be used on the real battlefield.
Joint Forces Command spent nearly a year developing its report on lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
"They identified friendly fire as one of those things which need substantial improvement," Venable said.
Lipscomb and other loved ones of the six soldiers killed in the Black Hawk crash say they feel they may never know what really happened.
"Some days I think, 'Oh, maybe I can buy this,' " she said of the military's finding of pilot disorientation. "Other times it just doesn't add up to me. There's a lot of covering up, I'm sure. Sometimes you have to say, 'I'll never know.' "
© 2005, The Press-Enterprise Company
--submitted by Patti Woodard
by Gregor McGavin
They paid the ultimate price on the battlefields of Iraq -- some killed by the enemy, others by their own side.
For that sacrifice, some families of slain troops say the U.S. military has paid them back in lies and a lack of information.
I don't believe anything the government says.
Johnny Burkett, a Vietnam veteran whose nephew, Lance Cpl. Tamario Burkett, was one of 18 Marines killed at An Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003
Lila Lipscomb, 50, of Flint, Mich., holds the flag she received after the death of her son Michael Pedersen in the Iraq war in 2003. After appearing in the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11,"
Lila has been an even stronger advocate against the war in Iraq. Two years after the official end of a war in Iraq hailed for its few incidents of fratricide, a Press-Enterprise investigation has revealed that twice as many troops as reported might have fallen to "friendly fire."
But the U.S. military -- which vowed after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to both curb and be more open about its deadly mistakes -- is still keeping secret a report designed to lessen the risk of repeating them.
"It's not right to keep it a secret," said Dorothy Halvorsen, whose son Chief Warrant Officer Erik Halvorsen was one of six soldiers killed in a helicopter crash in central Iraq on April 2, 2003.
Since then, Halvorsen has gotten varying accounts from the military of what happened that night, and she and other relatives of the slain troops have had to fight for information.
"They're putting more restrictions on what we can know," she said. "And we have a right to know."
Across the country, many mothers and fathers, wives, siblings and grandparents -- including some who remain staunchly pro-war -- say they feel they've been kept in the dark. These families question the military's commitment to decreasing friendly fire, and to telling them the truth of how their loved ones died.
Recent news reports that the military deliberately concealed that Pat Tillman -- a professional football player turned Army Ranger, and one of the highest-profile casualties -- was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan have amplified those questions.
The "lessons learned" report from U.S. Joint Forces Command is said to provide the final word on all suspected fratricide incidents and steps to avoid repeating them. The report, completed more than a year ago, has yet to be declassified, or made available to the public.
It is "the Department of Defense look at friendly fire," said Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a department spokesman. "I don't know that there is any intention to release the lessons-learned report."
The Press-Enterprise investigation, meant to parallel the work of military investigators, uncovered that as many as 24 Marines, soldiers and sailors -- 18 percent of the 139 combat deaths during major fighting from March 19 to May 2, 2003 -- might have been killed by their own side.
The numbers rival those from the Gulf War in 1991, when 35 U.S. troops, or 24 percent, were killed by fratricide. Relatives of Gulf War friendly fire victims had to wait nearly six months to learn the circumstances of their loved ones' deaths.
In light of those casualties -- the highest percentage of friendly fire deaths ever recorded by U.S. forces -- and the delay in informing relatives, the military promised to do better on both fronts.
But two years after the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom -- the official war in Iraq -- the military still has publicly acknowledged only 12 possible fratricide deaths. Military leaders have claimed those low numbers showed their anti-fratricide efforts have paid off.
The yearlong Press-Enterprise investigation, based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, official military releases and interviews with scores of families, was limited to the same period covered by the military's lessons-learned report. About 1,600 U.S. troops have died to date in Iraq; it is not known how many might have been killed by friendly fire since the war ended and the occupation began.
'Information Warfare'
It has been two years since his helicopter crashed in the Iraqi desert, but Lila Lipscomb says she still doesn't know what killed her son, U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Pedersen.
The casualty officers came to her Flint, Mich., home to tell her Pedersen was dead, along with Halvorsen and the four other soldiers aboard. In the months that followed, she would get more calls and letters from the military.
Each time, the story seemed to change.
First, it was a hostile incident that brought the Black Hawk down, less than two weeks into Operation Iraqi Freedom. Then it was nonhostile, a catchall term that includes accidents. The pilot's spatial disorientation, they said next. And from the start, the families wondered if it was friendly fire.
Worse for Lipscomb than her fear that Pedersen and his comrades might have been killed by their own side was the growing belief that the U.S. military was not telling her and other families the truth.
"It is an attempt to keep us uninformed," said Lipscomb, part of whose story was featured in the Michael Moore documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Some experts say the military has long been plagued by an institutional unwillingness to own up to its mistakes. Others say defense officials have taken misinformation to new levels, "spinning" casualties to downplay the negative.
"They've gone into a turtle shell, and they only want to talk about the good things that happen in the war," said Steve Robinson, a veteran Army Ranger who now heads the National Gulf War Resource Council, a military watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
Robinson, who has done extensive research on this war and past conflicts, said the Pentagon has engaged in a public-relations campaign.
"It's part of the strategy in war, and it's something we employ in Iraq to gain the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people," Robinson said.
"And in some cases it looks as if the Department of Defense is employing information warfare at home by not releasing accurate information or making it difficult to obtain information," he said.
Robinson said he thinks now the military is covering up the number of troops killed by friendly fire.
Defense officials bristle at such claims.
"We don't have an issue of people covering things up," said Venable, the defense spokesman. "I know the accusations. That may have been true back in the Vietnam War and other eras."
It is not true today, he said.
"Is there a policy of keeping quiet about friendly fire incidents? No, they're investigated fully," Venable said. "The results are released once the investigation" is completed.
The military's final report on the incident that killed Lipscomb's son came to her more than a year later and only after she had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. The parts that weren't blacked out said the soldier flying the Black Hawk might have become disoriented and lost control.
The report said the six soldiers were killed, not by friendly fire, but by an accident. Lipscomb still doesn't know whether to believe it.
Lipscomb, 50, originally from Big Bear Lake, comes from a military family -- her father, grandfather and brothers all served in the military. She was proud of that. She encouraged her son to sign up as a way to serve his country and earn money for college.
Military Language
Friendly fire is an unavoidable part of modern warfare, military officials and experts agree.
No matter what training and high-tech systems are used to combat fratricide, experts say some troops will be lost in the so-called "fog of battle" -- the cloud of dust and smoke and fatigue and urgency that hangs over the battlefield.
"It will never go to zero. It's never going to go away," said Ivan Oelrich, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C. "You've got lots and lots of guys out there with guns, and they're shooting them. Mistakes are always going to happen."
But critics say even the language the military uses in discussing casualties is purposely confusing.
One hundred and thirty-nine U.S. troops were killed during the period of major combat operations -- March 19 to May 2, 2003. Of those, 115 were classified as hostile, the others nonhostile.
The military lists as nonhostile those deaths not directly attributable to enemy or friendly fire, or terrorist activity. They include accidents such as vehicle crashes, as well as suicides and homicides.
Casualty reports include categories such as combat and noncombat deaths, the first being those related to direct or indirect fire from the enemy, even if the victim is killed by something other than that fire. Thus, a soldier killed in a jeep that crashes after swerving to avoid a hand grenade is a combat death.
It all makes for a confusing picture, critics say.
'It Takes Time'
Venable said defense officials do their best, often with limited information from the battlefield, to let families know the fate of their loved ones.
Each soldier's death sparks a "line of duty" investigation by that unit's chain of command.
Once relatives are notified, the names of the dead are announced publicly, Venable said. More detailed investigations can follow, often ordered by U.S. Central Command, which oversees all combat forces.
"I can understand a sense of frustration. You want answers, and you want them quick," Venable said. "But you've got to understand, these things are complicated and they're detailed. It takes time."
Though families speak highly of the casualty officers who deliver the bad news, many -- even those who supported the war -- say they don't think the military has been straight with them.
A Patriot missile brought down Navy Lt. Nathan White's fighter jet on April 2, 2003, killing the 30-year-old from Mesa, Ariz.
"In spite of everything, his father still supports the president and our troops," said Dennis White, Nathan's father.
The military acknowledged that it was friendly fire that killed White, but his father said he has not gotten any straight answers from the military or the government as to why the Air Force is still using the Patriot, which has caused several friendly fire deaths of U.S. and allied troops.
Others say they believe the government has lied to them.
"I don't believe anything the government says," said Johnny Burkett, a Vietnam veteran whose nephew, Lance Cpl. Tamario Burkett, was one of 18 Marines killed at An Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.
Burkett and nine other Marines were hit by so much enemy and friendly fire that it was impossible to tell which killed them, a military investigation concluded.
Robinson said the Defense Department has a history of not coming clean.
Defense officials "lied, misled and withheld critical information" about Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, he said, and he believes they did so again regarding Gulf War veterans' exposure to chemical and biological warfare agents.
Friendly fire became a military priority after the first Gulf War, when the number of victims prompted the Pentagon to pour billions of dollars into satellite and computer technology aimed at giving troops a better view of the battlefield.
Critics say the military recommitted itself to eliminating friendly fire only after several high-profile incidents -- including one at An Nasiriyah and another in Afghanistan in 2001 that killed four Canadian soldiers.
"They had been very concerned after Desert Storm, and then it kind of wore off," said John Pike, who heads the military think-tank GlobalSecurity.org. "I think it is back on their screen."
Related Suspicion Confirmed
Army Spc. Donald Oaks Jr., Sgt. 1st Class Randall Rehn and Sgt. Todd Robbins died on April 3, 2003, when an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle dropped a bomb on the multi-launch rocket weapon they manned for the Army's C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Artillery regiment.
U.S. Central Command announced within days that the incident was under investigation, but the findings were not officially released.
"I don't think they've learned anything at all since the first Gulf War," grandfather Sam Oaks, 63, said of military officials.
The younger Oaks, a 20-year-old from Erie, Pa., had joined the Army for college money, his grandfather said. He and the other relatives of the three men were told it might have been friendly fire, but it took more than a year for the final report confirming that suspicion to be delivered.
"His grandma told him when he went over to Iraq, 'Be careful for friendly fire,' " the elder Oaks said. "We talked about it all the time, because we know what happened in the first Gulf War."
Rehn, 36, was married with a 3-month old daughter when he shipped out to Iraq.
Back home in Longmont, Colo., his brother Joe said he remains in favor of the war, which he says is necessary to combat terrorism. But he thinks the military had other reasons for delaying its report.
"I'm sure it wasn't at the top of their priority list to figure out what went on, if you know what I mean," Rehn said. "The No. 1 priority is to make sure more people don't know, not to figure out what went on."
Report Delayed
Joint Forces Command focuses on research, experimentation and training.
In June, more than 28,000 U.S. service members and troops from Britain, Canada and other allied nations took part in Joint Forces Command exercises at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune. In simulated combat, they tested anti-fratricide technology that could one day be used on the real battlefield.
Joint Forces Command spent nearly a year developing its report on lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
"They identified friendly fire as one of those things which need substantial improvement," Venable said.
Lipscomb and other loved ones of the six soldiers killed in the Black Hawk crash say they feel they may never know what really happened.
"Some days I think, 'Oh, maybe I can buy this,' " she said of the military's finding of pilot disorientation. "Other times it just doesn't add up to me. There's a lot of covering up, I'm sure. Sometimes you have to say, 'I'll never know.' "
© 2005, The Press-Enterprise Company
--submitted by Patti Woodard
Saturday, June 16, 2007
DoD Receives Mental Health Task Force Results
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates received the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health results and forwarded them to the Congress on June 14. The department will have six months to develop and implement a corrective action plan.
"This report points to significant shortfalls in achieving goals and taking care of our service members and their families," said Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. "We will continue to address the need for mental health care in order to reinforce our commitment to providing the best care in the world to our service members and their families who deserve no less."
Significant findings include:
Mental health care stigma remains pervasive and is a significant barrier to care.
Mental health professionals are not sufficiently accessible to service members and their families.
There are significant gaps in the continuum of care for psychological health.
The military system does not have enough resources, funding or personnel to adequately support the psychological health of service members and their families in peace and during conflict.
Implementation of recommendations and remedies to support our service members has already begun, to include:
Military services have established dozens of deployment health clinics around the country.
Mental health providers have been embedded in line units in Iraq and Afghanistan to perform initial treatment for combat stress and post -traumatic stress disorder.
Service members are receiving additional mental health training to de-stigmatize when they need to reach out for help.
The services are currently proactively exploring options to adequately resource their mental health care providers.
"I want to thank the members of the task force, the Congress, and especially our medical personnel who have been working so hard to provide compassionate care to our service members with the resources they have been given," Casscells said.
The Task Force on Mental Health was congressionally directed and organized in June 2006 to assess and recommend actions for improving the efficacy of mental health services provided to service members and their families. It includes seven DoD members and seven non-DoD members.
The report can be viewed on the health affairs Web site at http://www.ha.osd.mil/dhb/mhtf/MHTF-Report-Final.pdf .
"This report points to significant shortfalls in achieving goals and taking care of our service members and their families," said Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. "We will continue to address the need for mental health care in order to reinforce our commitment to providing the best care in the world to our service members and their families who deserve no less."
Significant findings include:
Mental health care stigma remains pervasive and is a significant barrier to care.
Mental health professionals are not sufficiently accessible to service members and their families.
There are significant gaps in the continuum of care for psychological health.
The military system does not have enough resources, funding or personnel to adequately support the psychological health of service members and their families in peace and during conflict.
Implementation of recommendations and remedies to support our service members has already begun, to include:
Military services have established dozens of deployment health clinics around the country.
Mental health providers have been embedded in line units in Iraq and Afghanistan to perform initial treatment for combat stress and post -traumatic stress disorder.
Service members are receiving additional mental health training to de-stigmatize when they need to reach out for help.
The services are currently proactively exploring options to adequately resource their mental health care providers.
"I want to thank the members of the task force, the Congress, and especially our medical personnel who have been working so hard to provide compassionate care to our service members with the resources they have been given," Casscells said.
The Task Force on Mental Health was congressionally directed and organized in June 2006 to assess and recommend actions for improving the efficacy of mental health services provided to service members and their families. It includes seven DoD members and seven non-DoD members.
The report can be viewed on the health affairs Web site at http://www.ha.osd.mil/dhb/mhtf/MHTF-Report-Final.pdf .
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Iraq War Veterans' Suicide
Iraq War Veteran's Suicide
By asears@wbai.org (Andrea Sears) A new study says male US veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide as non-veterans.
Some know this first hand.
Audioport.Org - http://www.audioport.org
-- submitted by Patti Woodard
By asears@wbai.org (Andrea Sears) A new study says male US veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide as non-veterans.
Some know this first hand.
Audioport.Org - http://www.audioport.org
-- submitted by Patti Woodard
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Top General defends seeming underestimation of US troop deaths in Iraq
05/31/2007 Filed by Michael Roston
VoteVets chairman criticizes Pentagon's explanation
After the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared to significantly underestimate the number of US armed service members killed in the Iraq War on Memorial Day, a spokesman for his office defended his remarks in an interview with RAW STORY. General Peter Pace meant in his Memorial Day media appearance to distinguish between US troops killed in action and the hundreds who who have died from 'non-hostile' causes in the Iraqi theater of combat.
"You only have a few minutes when you're doing short interviews on morning shows, and General Pace was trying to be very precise," Lieutenant Colonel Gary Tallman from the Public Affairs Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday.
"He was referring to American service members killed in action as of May 25, which at that date was 2815, and there additionally have been 619 non-hostile deaths, and that puts you over 3,400."
Pace had appeared to say that fewer than 3,000 US soldiers died since the US invaded Iraq in 2003.
"When you take a look at the life of a nation and all that's required to keep us free, we had more than 3,000 Americans murdered on 11 September, 2001. The number who have died, sacrificed themselves since that time is approaching that number," he said in the CBS News performance on Monday morning, which RAW STORY reported later in the day.
The remark was criticized by one Iraqi veterans group.
"Memorial Day is a time to remember anyone who lost their lives in military service to this nation. The ultimate sacrifice doesn’t discriminate as to whether a hero is a combat death or non-combat," said Jon Soltz, the Chairman of VoteVets.org, a political action committee that supports veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who are running for public office.
"All those who gave their lives deserve to be treated with equal honor and respect. It’s simply wrong to leave out those who were non-combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan when speaking of those who gave their lives in service to the nation."
Spokesman admits General's remark 'made us say hmmm...'
Lt. Col. Tallman admitted in the interview with RAW STORY that even General Pace's staff was surprised by the remark that he made in the appearance with Harry Smith.
"Col. Haddock [another Joint Chiefs spokesperson] spoke to him about that specifically afterwards, and he said, 'That made us say ''hmmmm...,'' that made us stop and think, because the media reports well over 3,000, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense reports everything,'" Tallman explained.
But, apparently Pace defended himself to his staff.
"He said 'no, no, I'm right. I'm speaking to those who were killed in action,'" Tallman added.
As of Wednesday, the Iraq Casualty Count database RAW STORY had earlier used showed 618 US armed services members had died of 'non-hostile causes.' A count showed that 52 had died of a number of health-related causes. Additionally, 48 had died of 'non-hostile' causes without any particular explanation in the Iraq Casualty Count database, 2 had died of 'non-hostile - not reported,' and 29 had died from 'non-hostile - unspecified cause.'
A sizable number of the remainder had died from vehicle accidents, or helicopter crashes.
Additional so-called 'non-hostile deaths' included a variety of subcategories: accidental overdose; airplane crash; building fire; drowning; electrocution; homicide; heatstroke; lost at sea; maintenance accident; ordnance accident; suicide; weapons discharge; and, weapon malfunction.
The spokesperson insisted to RAW STORY that General Pace was not discounting the 'sacrifice,' as he said in the interview, of those who died from these so-called 'non-hostile' causes.
"Not at all, he's not trying to underestimate or downplay the circumstances of any fatalities.
There have been heart attacks, and some folks have gotten sick, and they did so in the line of duty for their country, and it's catastrophic for their families," Lt. Col. Tallman insisted.
"General Pace felt that and he's conveyed that, but the way question the was asked, as he read it, he was trying to be precise."
However, Tallman had no explanation as to why it was so important for the Joint Chiefs Chairman to emphasize those who were killed as opposed to those who died under other circumstances.
"I can't speak for him specifically," the spokesman said.
VoteVets chairman criticizes Pentagon's explanation
After the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared to significantly underestimate the number of US armed service members killed in the Iraq War on Memorial Day, a spokesman for his office defended his remarks in an interview with RAW STORY. General Peter Pace meant in his Memorial Day media appearance to distinguish between US troops killed in action and the hundreds who who have died from 'non-hostile' causes in the Iraqi theater of combat.
"You only have a few minutes when you're doing short interviews on morning shows, and General Pace was trying to be very precise," Lieutenant Colonel Gary Tallman from the Public Affairs Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday.
"He was referring to American service members killed in action as of May 25, which at that date was 2815, and there additionally have been 619 non-hostile deaths, and that puts you over 3,400."
Pace had appeared to say that fewer than 3,000 US soldiers died since the US invaded Iraq in 2003.
"When you take a look at the life of a nation and all that's required to keep us free, we had more than 3,000 Americans murdered on 11 September, 2001. The number who have died, sacrificed themselves since that time is approaching that number," he said in the CBS News performance on Monday morning, which RAW STORY reported later in the day.
The remark was criticized by one Iraqi veterans group.
"Memorial Day is a time to remember anyone who lost their lives in military service to this nation. The ultimate sacrifice doesn’t discriminate as to whether a hero is a combat death or non-combat," said Jon Soltz, the Chairman of VoteVets.org, a political action committee that supports veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who are running for public office.
"All those who gave their lives deserve to be treated with equal honor and respect. It’s simply wrong to leave out those who were non-combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan when speaking of those who gave their lives in service to the nation."
Spokesman admits General's remark 'made us say hmmm...'
Lt. Col. Tallman admitted in the interview with RAW STORY that even General Pace's staff was surprised by the remark that he made in the appearance with Harry Smith.
"Col. Haddock [another Joint Chiefs spokesperson] spoke to him about that specifically afterwards, and he said, 'That made us say ''hmmmm...,'' that made us stop and think, because the media reports well over 3,000, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense reports everything,'" Tallman explained.
But, apparently Pace defended himself to his staff.
"He said 'no, no, I'm right. I'm speaking to those who were killed in action,'" Tallman added.
As of Wednesday, the Iraq Casualty Count database RAW STORY had earlier used showed 618 US armed services members had died of 'non-hostile causes.' A count showed that 52 had died of a number of health-related causes. Additionally, 48 had died of 'non-hostile' causes without any particular explanation in the Iraq Casualty Count database, 2 had died of 'non-hostile - not reported,' and 29 had died from 'non-hostile - unspecified cause.'
A sizable number of the remainder had died from vehicle accidents, or helicopter crashes.
Additional so-called 'non-hostile deaths' included a variety of subcategories: accidental overdose; airplane crash; building fire; drowning; electrocution; homicide; heatstroke; lost at sea; maintenance accident; ordnance accident; suicide; weapons discharge; and, weapon malfunction.
The spokesperson insisted to RAW STORY that General Pace was not discounting the 'sacrifice,' as he said in the interview, of those who died from these so-called 'non-hostile' causes.
"Not at all, he's not trying to underestimate or downplay the circumstances of any fatalities.
There have been heart attacks, and some folks have gotten sick, and they did so in the line of duty for their country, and it's catastrophic for their families," Lt. Col. Tallman insisted.
"General Pace felt that and he's conveyed that, but the way question the was asked, as he read it, he was trying to be precise."
However, Tallman had no explanation as to why it was so important for the Joint Chiefs Chairman to emphasize those who were killed as opposed to those who died under other circumstances.
"I can't speak for him specifically," the spokesman said.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
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