There is still an investigation into the death of Pat Tillman, the NFL star who gave up a multi-million dollar contract to enlist in the Army Special Forces and head to Afghanistan. This time last year, the Army finally admitted that it had deliberately lied about and concealed the nature of his death—that, rather than bravely fighting off a Taliban advance, he was on the radio begging his own unit to stop firing on his position until three bullets to the head silenced him.
Of course, the Army held no one accountable for the cover up, despite the forensic doctors thinking there were grounds for a murder investigation. I blame this in part on the “special rules” people like Mackubin Thomas Owens, who believe that in war you should never hold officers responsible for their egregious actions because it’s war and we need officers—when the prevailing wisdom is that numbers matter more than anything else, why should the Army have any accountability?
Now the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has released another report on Tillman’s death. The unsurprising result?
The committee says that in their quest to find out when officials first knew about the possibility that Tillman’s death was not due to enemy fire, they were “frustrated by a near universal lack of recall,” according to the report.
The committee interviewed several senior White House officials including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, communications director Dan Bartlett, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan, and chief speech writer Michael Gerson.
“Not a single one could recall when he learned about the fratricide or what he did in response,” says the report.
This is, unfortunately, par for the course in the Bush White House. I’m surprised it can even function when so many of its officials have no idea who was making what decisions at what time, ever.
Meanwhile, Tillman’s parents gets to learn, again, the depths of the contempt with which our national leaders hold them and their son.
This is absolutely disgraceful. Tillman was a hero for his choice, and for his sacrifice. The least the White House could do is to honor that.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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