I had hoped not to feel compelled to write about this, but it’s gotten under my skin.
Yesterday, Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz wrote on ThinkProgress about Pat Tillman: “Was the man the White House used to promote the war ordered to be killed because he was becoming increasingly critical of the war in Iraq?â€Â
Morons:
Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, host Keith Olbermann noted that “Corporal Tillman held a number of personal views that were unpopular within the context of the Bush administration, perhaps also within the Army.†Tillman reportedly favored John Kerry in the presidential election, opposed the invasion of Iraq, and had plans to meet with Noam Chomsky.
The Associated Press reported that in the last moments before Tillman died, another soldier was hugging the ground at Tillman’s side, and Tillman said, “Would you shut your [expletive] mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling –â€Â
The question of whether Tillman was killed for his political views lingers greater than ever.
Except that that’s not at all what Tillman said, according to the guy whom he was supposed to have berated:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman’s side started praying.
“I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,” Sgt. Bryan O’Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. “He said something like, ‘Hey, O’Neal, why are you praying? God can’t help us now.'”
Tillman’s intent, O’Neal said, was to “more or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment.”
“He said, ‘I’ve got an idea to help get us out of this,'” said O’Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman’s unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.
O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said.
A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman’s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O’Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain’s testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The chaplain told investigators that O’Neal said Tillman was harsh in his last moments, snapping, ‘Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling …”
“He never would have called me ‘sniveling,'” O’Neal said. “I don’t remember ever speaking to this chaplain, and I find this characterization of Pat really upsetting. He never once degraded me. He’s the only person I ever worked for who didn’t degrade anyone. He wasn’t that sort of person.”
So, you know, who are you going to believe? Not that it matters, though; the chaplain was merely speaking to the larger truths of the dehumanization wrought by the war.
Serr8d contributes this:
Because there’s nothing quite so respectful of a man’s life and sacrifice as to dig up his bones and turn them into a ventriloquist’s dummy.
So, you know, who are you going to believe? Not that it matters, though; the chaplain was merely speaking to the larger truths of the dehumanization wrought by the war.
Plus, there are people who have edited memoirs and know people who would probably confirm the truthiness of it. If asked. Probably.
As will be immediately noted, I ain’t cool yet with doin’ the italic tags properly.
S’alright.
If Pat Tillman was worth murdering, why do so many NPR reporters rotate in and out of Iraq unscathed?
Because that would be too obvious, happyfeet. Everybody knows that our sub-moronic Chimperor likes his murderous conspiracies to be subtle.
Two points: 1. If all you have is a hammer (your hate) then the whole world looks like a nail.
and 2. I read somewhere someone wonder, “Wouldn’t it have been easier just to have killed Chomsky?”
What the hell kind of chaplain leaks information confessed to him in the course of ‘debriefing’ a unit!?
What you tell a chaplain is sacrosanct and cannot be told by him to others.
Un-fucking-real…. There is a special place in hell for any chaplain who would breach this kind of confidence.
I’ll never talk to one of those bastards again–I’ve never trusted them.
TW: Kuru Palatinate Yeah, Kreuzefeld-Yakov….
Thanks for the link, Dan. I posted a bit more on the KOS Konnection, the idiotic ill wind that got this mess started.
You have to wonder what kind of crazy idea they’ll hatch next?
tw objects foreheads yeah, KOSbats act lobotomized, sometimes…
I’m all but certain Pat entertained himself with bulldogs, call it existential intuitiveness gone intentionalistcally toward the career connectedness; like Vick, the fucker never made the playoffs, now did he?
I bet Pat Tillman banged lots of chicks. For that, he must…
No offense too large, no desecration too vile, no conspiracy theory too implausible!
Yes, Kosters, DUmmies, assorted LLLs, this is your legacy.
Tell me, are these people all really crazy, is that their problem?
TW: medical history (that’s what I was thinkin’)
Great, Pat Tillman truthers. I’m sure he’d be proud.
Let me see if I have this right:
Tillman walks away from an 8 million dollar contract, fast cars, loose women, etc, to go to basic training then to the special forces training. All the while learning how to kill with everything from a TOW missle to a sharpened turd.
But he was a Chomsky fan?
Weird.
“Comment by Pablo on 7/29 @ 5:47 am #
Great, Pat Tillman truthers. I’m sure he’d be proud.”
It’s spelled ‘twoofers’.
I’ve often found ,when dealing with progs, that I have to constantly remind them that they don’t own the dead.
Rusty, it doesn’t surprise me if they think they own the dead. I have come to doubt that many of them have souls.
(TW: These reaus — is this thing pulling word fragments out of Witheld’s comments?)
Did I mention how repulsive this trooferism? I mean, regular trooferism is sick like eating from the self-serve Midnight Cemetary Buffet, but this is genuinely sick.
Who knew that progressives were really Mormons?!
Progressives have apparently concluded that they can “convert” or “adjust” the dead, just as (some) Mormons claim that they can retroactively “convert” people who have already passed on.
Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past, control the future.
Regardless of the issue of quote attribution, there ARE some serious questions surrounding Tillman’s death.
Lurking: At least the Mormons, to my understanding, only call it a “baptism”; as they say, it’s offering the dead a chance to convert and gain salvation via Mormon Power.
They’re not claiming to have made the dead Mormons unilaterally; the deceased, as I understand their theology, can still reject it.
(Though, of course, from their point of view, if you were dead and stuck in purgatory or Heck, and got a get-out-free card from a post-death baptism, you’d be extra-crazy to reject it at that point, right?)
It’s a war. Shooting is involved. Sometimes bad stuff happens even when you don’t want it to. A conspiracy? I don’t think so.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a conspiracy either. I just find it telling that the right would essentially abandon its granite-jawed poster boy when his death is questionable. Tillman’s family deserves answers. He served honorably, and deserves your respect; instead, you are the ones who abuse his memory by stuffing it into your little cannon for your latest fusillade against the left.
Who the hell cares who said what? Tillman’s sentiments were well known. Stop trivializing him for a hollow and irrelevant gottcha.
Wow. Two foregone conclusions in one!
Cynn, did you miss the part where people are using Tillman’s death to accuse the Bush Administration of politically motivated murder?
apples Balls case buck oranges