Once again it has taken grieving relatives to point out that the Bush administration will exploit even a heroic death for its own partisan purposes.
As with the widows of Sept. 11 who demanded that our obfuscating leaders investigate what went wrong on that terrible day, or the wounded Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who resisted efforts to make her into some kind of Rambo figure, so relatives of late NFL star Pat Tillman are demanding to know why their celebrated war hero son's death in 2004 was exploited for public relations purposes by the U.S. military and the administration.
"They blew up their poster boy," Tillman's father, Patrick, a San Jose lawyer, told the Washington Post last week. He joined his former wife to demand accountability for the latest military cover-up to happen on Commander in Chief Bush's watch. High-ranking Army officials, he said, told "outright lies."
"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this," Tillman said. "They purposely interfered with the investigation .... I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out."
A devastating series of investigations and Post stories has shown that the Army's command structure was eager to cover up the embarrassing truth: that Pat Tillman, who turned down a $3.6-million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers after 9/11, was accidentally killed by his fellow Rangers while on patrol in Afghanistan a year ago.
Last spring, after months of increasingly damaging reports exposing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and cover-up, the administration found some public relations relief in the sad, patriotic tale of a man who spurned fame and fortune to make "the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror," in the words of a White House spokesman at the time. A nationally televised memorial service and a Silver Star commendation cemented Tillman's place as the nation's first war hero since the story of Lynch's capture and phony details of her rescue were foisted on the public in 2003.
Now, thanks to the reporting of the Post and the fury of Tillman's parents, we know that the military's top commanders were covering up the truth to protect their image, and that of the Bush administration's costly and deadly "nation-building" exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq.
