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Lynch and Tillman's Brother: US Military Lied    [

    Ranger Alleges Cover-Up in Tillman Case
    By Scott Lindlaw and Eric Werner
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 24 April 2007

    Washington - An Army Ranger who was with Pat Tillman when he died by friendly fire said Tuesday he was told by a higher-up to conceal that information from Tillman's family.

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

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

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

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

    Kevin Tillman was not in the hearing room when O'Neal spoke.

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

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

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

    The committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., accused the government of inventing "sensational details and stories" about Pat Tillman's death and the 2003 rescue of Jessica Lynch, perhaps the most famous victims of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

    "The government violated its most basic responsibility," said Waxman.

    Lynch, then an Army private, was badly injured when her convoy was ambushed in Iraq. She was subsequently rescued by American troops from an Iraqi hospital but the tale of her ambush was changed into a story of heroism on her part.

    Still hampered by her injuries, Lynch walked slowly to the witness table and took a seat alongside Tillman's family members.

    "The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don't need to be told elaborate tales," Lynch said.

    Kevin Tillman said his family has sought for years to get at the truth, and have now concluded that they were "being actively thwarted by powers that are more interested in protecting a narrative than getting at the truth and seeing justice is served."

    Lawmakers questioned how high up the chain of command the information about Tillman's friendly fire death went, and whether anyone in the White House knew before Tillman's family.

    "How high up did this go?" asked Waxman.

    Pat Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, said she believed former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must have known. "The fact that he would have died by friendly fire and no one told Rumsfeld is ludicrous," she said.

    Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004, after his Army Ranger comrades were ambushed in eastern Afghanistan. Rangers in a convoy trailing Tillman's group had just emerged from a canyon where they had been fired upon. They saw Tillman and mistakenly fired on him.

    Though dozens of soldiers knew quickly that Tillman had been killed by his fellow troops, the Army said initially that he was killed by enemy gunfire when he led his team to help another group of ambushed soldiers. The family was not told what really happened until May 29, 2004, a delay the Army blamed on procedural mistakes.

    In questioning what the White House knew, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., 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 friendly fire 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 Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command.

    "It's a little disingenuous to think the administration didn't know," Kevin Tillman told the committee. "That's kind of what we hoped you guys would get involved with and take a look," he said.

    Mary Tillman told the committee that family members were "absolutely appalled" upon realizing the extent to which they were misled.

    "We've all been betrayed ... We never thought they would use him the way they did," she said.

    The Tillman family has made similar accusations against the administration and the military before, but has generally shied away from news media attention. The family had never previously appeared together and summarized their criticism and questions in such a public, comprehensive way.

    "We shouldn't be allowed to have smoke screens thrown in our face," Mary Tillman said. "You're diminishing their true heroism to write these glorious tales. It's really a disservice to the nation."

    "Our family will never be satisfied. We'll never have Pat back," she said. "Something really awful happened. It's your job to find out what happened to him. That's really important."

    Last month the military concluded in a pair of reports that nine high-ranking Army officers, including four generals, made critical errors in reporting Tillman's death but that there was no criminal wrongdoing in his shooting.

    Tillman's death received worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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    Associated Press writer Scott Lindlaw contributed to this report from San Francisco.

 

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    Lynch, Tillman's Brother: US Military Lied
    CNN News

    Tuesday 24 April 2007

    Washington - The last soldier to see Army Ranger Pat Tillman alive, Spc. Bryan O'Neal, told lawmakers that he was warned by superiors not to divulge - especially to the Tillman family - that a fellow soldier killed Tillman.

    O'Neal particularly wanted to tell fellow soldier Kevin Tillman, who was in the convoy traveling behind his brother at the time of the 2004 incident in Afghanistan.

    "I wanted right off the bat to let the family know what had happened, especially Kevin, because I worked with him in a platoon and I knew that he and the family all needed to know what had happened," O'Neal testified. "I was quite appalled that when I was actually able to speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him."

    Asked who gave him the order, O'Neal replied that it came from his battalion commander, then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey.

    "He basically just said ..., 'Do not let Kevin know, that he's probably in a bad place knowing his brother's dead,'" O'Neal told House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman. "And he made it known I would get in trouble, sir, if I spoke with Kevin on it being fratricide."

    The military instead released a "manufactured narrative" detailing how Pat Tillman died leading a courageous counterattack in an Afghan mountain pass, Kevin Tillman told the committee.

    Kevin Tillman said the military tried to spin his brother's death to deflect attention from emerging failings in the Afghanistan war.

    Also Tuesday, former Pfc. Jessica Lynch told the House panel that the military lied about her capture.

    Lynch testified that after her vehicle was attacked in Iraq in March 2003, she suffered a mangled spinal column, broken arm, crushed foot, shattered femur and even a sexual assault.

    But it only added insult to injury, literally, when she returned to her parents' home in West Virginia, which "was under siege by media all repeating the story of the little girl 'Rambo' from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," Lynch said.

    "It was not true," she said before gently chiding the military. "The truth is always more heroic than the hype."

    The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform invited the two to testify on how the Pentagon spread false stories about Tillman and Lynch. Waxman, D-California, went as far as to say that the military "invented" tales.

    "The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth," Waxman said. "That didn't happen for two of the most famous soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."

    Brother Calls Tale "Calculated Lies"

    As the tide was turning in the U.S. battle against Afghan insurgents - and as media outlets prepared to release reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq - the military saw Pat Tillman's death as an "opportunity," Kevin Tillman told the panel.

    Even after it became clear the report was bogus, the military clung to the "utter fiction" that Pat Tillman was killed by a member of his platoon who was following the rules of engagement, the brother said.

    "They never felt threatened and they still shot up the village unprovoked," Kevin Tillman said. "This was not some fog of war; they simply lost control."

    Tillman bristled at the military claim that the initial report was merely misleading.

    Clearly resentful, he told the panel that writing a field report stating his brother had been "transferred to an intensive care unit for continued CPR after most of his head had been taken off by multiple .556 rounds is not misleading."

    "These are deliberate and calculated lies," he said.

    Pat Tillman, who became a national hero after he gave up a lucrative contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals to join the Army's elite Rangers force, was awarded the Silver Star, the military's third-highest combat decoration, after the Army said he was killed leading a counterattack.

    The Army later acknowledged not only that Tillman was killed by his fellow soldiers, but that officers in Tillman's chain of command knew the counterattack story was bogus.

    Though the military blamed the erroneous report on an inadequate initial investigation, Mary Tillman told ESPN Radio last month that everyone involved in the shooting knew immediately that her son had been shot three times in the head by a member of his platoon.

    "The Tillman family was kept in the dark for more than a month," Waxman said. "Evidence was destroyed. Witness statements were doctored. The Tillman family wants to know how all of this could've happened."

    Lynch: Truth "Not Always Easy"

    Lynch's testimony began with a recollection of the March 23, 2003, attack and her purported rescue nine days later.

    As she and her fellow 11 soldiers drove through Nassiriya, Iraq, they noticed armed men standing in the streets and on rooftops. Three soldiers were quickly killed when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into their vehicle, Lynch said.

    The other eight died in the ensuing fighting or from injuries incurred during the fighting, she said. Lynch later woke up at Saddam Hussein General Hospital.

    "When I awoke, I did not know where I was. I could not move. I could not call for help. I could not fight," she said, explaining she had a six-inch gash in her head and numerous broken bones. "The nurses at the hospital tried to soothe me, and they even tried unsuccessfully at one point to return me to Americans."

    On April 1, U.S. troops came for her.

    "A soldier came into the room. He tore the American flag from his uniform, and he handed it to me in my hand and he told me, 'We're American soldiers, and we're here to take you home.' And I looked at him and I said, 'Yes, I'm an American soldier, too,'" she recalled.

    She was distraught to come home and find herself billed as a hero when two of her fellow soldiers had fought bravely until the firefight's end and another had died after picking up soldiers and removing them from harm's way.

    "The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate lies," she said. "I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity."

    "The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype," she said.

    Lynch became a celebrity after U.S. troops filmed what they said was a daring raid on the hospital. Lynch, the Army claimed, was shot and stabbed during a fierce gun battle with Iraqi troops that left 11 of her comrades dead.

    Hospital staffers, however, said there were no Iraqi troops at the hospital when the purported rescue took place.

    It was later learned that Lynch never fired a shot during the firefight because her gun was jammed with sand.