im being a cheap bastard and trying to save mailing costs so i made the font as small as possible. if either of you cant read it tell me and i will make it a little bigger.
<*==*>
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1205seals05.html
New photos of alleged abuse in Iraq
Military says acts were committed by isolated few
Sarah El Deeb
Associated Press
Dec. 5, 2004 12:00 AM
CAIRO, Egypt - A former military spokesman in Iraq said Saturday new pictures showing apparent abuse of Iraqi prisoners were the acts of an isolated few but will be used by some to try to tarnish the entire U.S. military.
Gen. Mark Kimmitt, now based in Qatar, spoke on the pan-Arab television network a day after the U.S. military launched a criminal investigation into photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees.
Other photos show what appear to be bloodied prisoners, one with a gun to his head. advertisement
The photos, found by an Associated Press reporter, were in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty.
Some of the photos have date stamps suggesting they were taken in May 2003, which could make them the earliest evidence of possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The far more brutal practices photographed in Abu Ghraib prison occurred months later.
The photos were turned over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which instructed the SEAL command to determine whether they show any serious crimes, said Navy Cmdr. Jeff Bender, a spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif.
Kimmitt, the spokesman in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, said he believes the photos show the acts of an isolated few.
Asked by al-Jazeera if such pictures are a problem, Kimmitt said they are certainly a "tool" and some will try to use them to show the U.S. military in a negative light.
After outraged reaction from the Arab world to the first Abu Ghraib pictures, President Bush appeared on Arab television in May and said the torture was the act of a few.
The new photos drew strong reactions in Arab media as did the earlier ones.
"The two scandals confirm the image about the Americans known in the Middle East: that the Americans are not a charity or a humanitarian organization that is leading an experiment of democracy," said Sateh Noureddine of the Lebanese leftist newspaper As-Safir. "Rather, (the U.S. government) is leading a retaliatory operation following the Sept. 11 attacks."
<*==*>
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207iraq-cia07.html
CIA: Iraq situation worsening
New York Times
Dec. 7, 2004 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - A classified cable sent by the CIA's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.
The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior CIA official who recently visited Iraq.
The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient. advertisement
But overall, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation is likely to get worse, bringing more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there are marked improvements soon in the ability of the Iraqi government to assert authority and build the economy.
Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq next month, the officials said. The cable was sent to CIA headquarters after U.S. forces completed what military commanders have described as a significant victory, with the mid-November retaking of Fallujah, a principal base of the Iraqi insurgency.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, was said by the officials to have filed a written dissent, objecting to one finding as too harsh, on the ground that the United States had made more progress than was described in fighting the Iraqi insurgency. But the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey Jr., also reviewed the cable and did not dispute its conclusions, the officials said.
The station chief's cable has been widely disseminated outside the CIA and was initially described by a government official who read the document and who praised it as unusually candid. Other government officials who have read or been briefed on the document later described its contents. The officials refused to be identified by name or affiliation because of the delicacy of the issue. The station chief cannot be publicly identified because he continues to work undercover.
Asked about the cable, a White House spokesman, Sean McCormack, said he could not discuss intelligence matters
<*==*>
the FDA food police state is now here!
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207foodsafety07.html
FDA unveils last piece in food protection plan
USA Today
Dec. 7, 2004 12:00 AM
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday announced the final portion of its post-9/11 rules to protect the nation's food supply.
The rules are the final piece of new authorities given to the FDA by Congress in the wake of the anthrax contamination that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The rules require that companies keep records so that officials can trace the source of food contamination.
Anyone who manufactures, processes, packs, transports, distributes, receives, holds or imports food must keep records showing where they obtained the food and where they shipped it.
Companies must retain records from six months to two years, depending on the shelf life of the food.
<*==*>
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1207gitmo-memo07.html
FBI agents tell of '02 abuse of suspects at Gantanamo
Paisley Dodds
Associated Press
Dec. 7, 2004 12:00 AM
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - FBI agents witnessed "highly aggressive" interrogations and mistreatment of terror suspects at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba starting in 2002, more than a year before the prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq, according to a letter a senior Justice Department official sent to the Army's top criminal investigator.
In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, the FBI official suggested the Pentagon didn't act on FBI complaints about the incidents, including a female interrogator grabbing a detainee's genitals and bending back his thumbs, another where a prisoner was gagged with duct tape and a third where a dog was used to intimidate a detainee who later was thrown into isolation and showed signs of "extreme psychological trauma."
One Marine told an FBI observer that some interrogations led to prisoners "curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain," according to the letter dated July 14, 2004. advertisement
Thomas Harrington, an FBI counterterrorism expert who led a team of investigators at Guantanamo Bay, wrote the letter to Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army's chief law enforcement officer investigating abuses at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.
Harrington said FBI officials complained about the pattern of abusive techniques to top Defense Department attorneys in January 2003, and it appeared that nothing was done.
Although a senior FBI attorney "was assured that the general concerns expressed and the debate between the FBI and DOD regarding the treatment of detainees was known to officials in the Pentagon, I have no record that our specific concerns regarding these three situations were communicated to the Department of Defense for appropriate action," Harrington wrote.
Harrington told Ryder he was writing to follow up a meeting he had with the general the week before about detainee treatment, saying the three cases demonstrate the "highly aggressive interrogation techniques being used against detainees in Guantanamo."
"I refer them to you for appropriate action," Harrington wrote.
Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, current commander of the mission in Guantanamo, said allegations of mistreatment and abuse are taken seriously and investigated.
"The appropriate actions were taken. Some allegations are still under investigation," Hood told the AP. "Once investigations are completed, we report them immediately."
None of the people named in the letter is still at the base, a Guantanamo spokesman said, but it wasn't clear if any disciplinary action had been taken. The letter identified the military interrogators only by last name and rank and mentioned a civilian contractor.
Lt. Col. Gerard Healy, an Army spokesman, confirmed the authenticity of the FBI letter, as did the FBI. Healy said the female interrogator, identified only as Sgt. Lacey in the letter, is being investigated.
<*==*>
Bush's squeeze on Castro puts many Cubans in pain
Nancy San Martin
Miami Herald
Dec. 5, 2004 12:00 AM
MIAMI - In the five months since the Bush administration tightened sanctions on Cuba, life has become "very complicated" for Yuceika, a Cuban woman who once survived on the $100 sent monthly from Miami by the father of her 12-year-old son.
"Before, I would have to really restrict spending so that the $100 would last a complete month," said Yuceika, 35, a resident of the north-central city of Matanzas who can no longer receive the money. "Now, every day is a gamble."
Yuceika is not alone. Numerous Cubans, and the Cuban government, have been harshly affected by the Bush administration's measures, intended to hasten a transition to democracy by keeping U.S. dollars out of the Cuban government's coffers. advertisement
"We are challenging the regime in a way that it has not been challenged at least in the last 25 years," said Dan Fisk, deputy assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs. "They're feeling the pinch."
U.S. officials say the tighter sanctions have already denied the Cuban government $100 million in income since they were implemented June 30, and they expect the total impact for their first year to hit $375 million.
Everyday impact
The measures are widely considered unlikely to dramatically challenge the stability of Cuba's 4-decade-old communist government. But there is little question that Cuba and Cubans are feeling the pinch:
• The once-busy Havana airport terminal reserved for U.S. flights has been shut down. The 20 to 25 jetliners a week that used to fly from Miami, New York and Los Angeles to Cuba are down to a handful of much smaller planes, travel agents in Miami say.
• The number of U.S. travelers to Cuba, most of them Cuban-Americans visiting relatives, is expected to drop from 180,000 in 2003 to no more than 30,000 in the first year of the new measures.
• Prices at Cuban government stores that sell imported products have soared by as much as 50 percent.
• Tourism dollars that trickled down to Cubans such as taxi drivers and private restaurant and room-to-rent owners have dwindled, according to island residents.
• Saying it was reacting to the Bush measures, the Cuban government has imposed a 10 percent fee on most dollar exchanges, in essence taking $1 out of every $10 that Cubans receive from people abroad.
The toughened U.S. rules restrict family reunification visits by Cuban-Americans to Cuba to once every three years, instead of once a year, and limit gift parcels and the $1,200 a year cash remittances to immediate relatives: parents, siblings and children, but not cousins or others.
Remittances from the United States alone total at least $400 million in a typical year, according to U.S. government estimates, while gift parcels and family-reunification travel total an additional $1.1 billion.
That estimate includes items such as the costs of airplane tickets, airport fees for excess baggage, and per diem expenditures authorized for visitors. Under the new rules, the per diem dropped from $164 to $50.
Fisk said the goal was to reduce money going into Cuba by 50 percent.
"That still keeps a flow going to the island, to the Cuban people, but it reduces the regime's ability to exploit those revenue sources," he said. "The idea is to go after the regime."
But average Cubans are feeling the pinch.
One example: Yuceika is not married to the father of her son, making her ineligible to receive the $100 a month that she used to get. And while the son is entitled to the money, he is a minor and cannot withdraw the cash in Cuba.
"I guess we'll have to wait and see how we manage," Yuceika told the Miami Herald in a telephone interview.
And while buyers still jam the government's so-called "dollar stores," which provide the state with huge profit margins on the otherwise unavailable imported items, it remains unclear how long that will continue.
"The stores are still filled with people buying stuff because there's nothing to buy anywhere else," said James Cason, chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana. "What we don't know is: Are people going to buy more or buy less as things get tougher and tougher? Will the measures lead to more money for the regime or less? ... Only time will tell."
Radio, TV Marti
Cason said another part of the new Bush policy on Cuba that seems to be working is the use of U.S. military airplanes, equipped as flying broadcasting stations, to force the signals of Radio and TV Marti past Cuban jamming. The planes have made seven such flights this year.
"On the information side, we are seeing people looking for TV Marti and they're finding it in some areas," Cason said during a recent visit to Miami. "People are eager to see it."
And in Washington, enforcement of the Cuba sanctions also has increased.
Of the roughly 63,000 requests for licenses to travel to Cuba processed by the Treasury Department from Aug. 10 to Nov. 10, about 36,000 were denied and 26,000 approved.
Most of the travel licenses denied were "incomplete, have been filled out by someone seeking to travel too soon after their last visit, they have false information or are seeking a license to visit someone other than immediate families," said Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise.
<*==*>
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4070973.stm
Rethink after Paris airport gaffe
French police have been routinely using the technique
French police say they will ban their technique for training dogs after a bag with plastic explosives was lost at a Paris airport during an exercise.
Police placed the bag in a passenger's luggage at Charles de Gaulle airport to see if sniffer dogs would detect it, but it was then loaded onto a flight.
The order to halt such training methods came after Prime Minister J-P Raffarin voiced concern at the bungled exercise.
Police say the explosives used cannot be activated without detonators.
However, the bag in which they were planted has still not been traced.
Passenger 'at risk'
"The procedures that were used Friday night will no longer be allowed," Pierre Bouquin, spokesman for France's police force known as gendarmes, was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.
"We're going to stop practicing this on the bags of travellers," the spokesman added.
Earlier, Jean-Pierre Raffarin insisted that any future training must guarantee "the respect of the private life of passengers".
"The fight against terrorism and insecurity is a priority for the government, but [Raffarin] made clear his concern in the face of the way the training... was conducted" at the airport, a statement from Mr Raffarin's office said.
The statement said the existing procedures were "susceptible to making the relevant passenger run a risk in the eyes of foreign authorities when arriving in the destination country".
Whisked away
During the exercise, police deliberately placed the bag with up to 150g explosives in a randomly chosen passenger's luggage as it passed along a conveyer belt.
One of the sniffer dogs involved in the exercise successfully detected the item, but the other failed.
Police than tried to repeat the exercise, but the bag had been mistakenly whisked off.
The explosives could have made it onto any of 90 flights leaving Charles de Gaulle airport that evening, police said.
http://www.dehavilland.co.uk/webhost.asp?wci=default&wcp=AviationStoryPage&ItemID=7247823&ServiceID=8&filterid=1&searchid=37655
Bungled security exercise at Paris airport
06/12/2004
French gendarmes have said they will review techniques for training sniffer dogs after a bag containing plastic explosives was lost at a Paris airport during a routine exercise.
The bag in which the explosives were planted has still not been traced.
Police planted the explosives in a passenger's luggage at Charles de Gaulle airport to see if sniffer dogs would detect them. The bag was then mistakenly loaded onto a flight.
Although police have claimed the explosives cannot be activated without detonators, prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has voiced his concerns over the debacle.
He insisted that any future training must guarantee "the respect of the private life of passengers".
A later statement from the French premier's office also declared: "The fight against terrorism and insecurity is a priority for the government, but Raffarin made clear his concern in the face of the way the training was conducted."
Only one of the sniffer dogs involved in the exercise managed to detect the 150g of plastic explosive.
According to gendarmes, the explosive could have been on any of the 90 flights leaving from Charles de Gaulle airport that evening.
© 1998-2004 DeHavilland Information Services plc. All rights reserved.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/news/wabc_120404_explosives.html
Explosives Disappear at Paris Airport
(Paris-WABC, December 4, 2004) — Crews were busy training bomb sniffing dogs at the Charles de Gaule Airport in Paris when the explosives they were supposed to be searching for disappeared.
Now French police say they don't know where they are.
Flights out of Paris arrived in Los Angeles and New York. One flight and its 300 Air France passengers were held at L.A.X. while their luggage was thoroughly searched.
In New York both American Airlines and Air France arriving flights were also searched as officials looked to find the missing explosives. Nothing was found.
French police say the explosives are harmless because no detonators were attached.
<*==*>
News Update
Army distorted Pat Tillman story
Washington Post
Pat Tillman
Just days after Pat Tillman died from friendly fire on a desolate ridge in southeastern Afghanistan, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command released a brief account of his last moments.
The April 30, 2004, statement awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for combat valor and described how a section of his Ranger platoon came under attack.
He ordered his team to dismount and then maneuvered the Rangers up a hill near the enemys location, the release said. As they crested the hill, Tillman directed his team into firing positions and personally provided suppressive fire. . . . Tillmans voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces.
It was a stirring tale and fitting eulogy for the Armys most famous volunteer in the war on terrorism, a charismatic former star with the Arizona Cardinals and Arizona State University whose reticence, courage and handsome beret-draped face captured for many Americans the best aspects of the countrys post-Sept. 11, 2001, character.
It was also a distorted and incomplete narrative, according to dozens of internal Army documents obtained by The Washington Post that describe Tillmans death by fratricide after a chain of botched communications, a misguided order to divide his platoon over the objection of its leader and undisciplined firing by fellow Rangers.
The Armys public release made no mention of friendly fire, even though at the time it was issued, investigators in Afghanistan had taken at least 14 sworn statements from Tillmans platoon members that made clear the true causes of his death. The statements included a searing account from the Ranger nearest Tillman during the firefight, who quoted him shouting Cease fire! Friendlies! with his last breaths.
Army records show Tillman fought bravely during his final battle. He followed orders, never wavered and at one stage proposed discarding his heavy body armor, apparently because he wanted to charge a distant ridge occupied by the enemy, an idea rejected by his immediate superior, witness statements show.
But the Armys published account not only withheld all evidence of fratricide, it exaggerated Tillmans role and stripped his actions of their context. Tillman was not one of the senior commanders on the scene he directed only himself, one other Ranger and an Afghan militiaman, under supervision from others. Witness statements in the Armys files at the time of the press release describe Tillmans voice ringing out on the battlefield mainly in a desperate effort, joined by other Rangers on his ridge, to warn comrades to stop shooting at their own men.
The Armys April 30 news release was just one episode in a broader Army effort to manage the uncomfortable facts of Pat Tillmans death, according to internal records and interviews.
During several weeks of memorials and commemorations that followed Tillmans death, commanders at his 75th Ranger Regiment and their superiors hid the truth about friendly fire from Tillmans brother Kevin, who had fought with Pat in the same platoon, but was not involved in the firing incident and did not know the cause of his brothers death. Commanders also withheld the facts from Tillmans widow, his parents, national politicians and the public, according to records and interviews with sources involved in the case.
On May 3, Ranger and Army officers joined hundreds of mourners at a public ceremony in San Jose, Calif., where Sen. John McCain, RAriz., Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer and Maria Shriver took the podium to remember Tillman. The visiting officers gave no hint of the evidence investigators collected in Afghanistan.
In a telephone interview, McCain said: I think it would have been helpful to have at least their suspicions known before he spoke about Tillmans death in public. Even more, he said, the family deserved some kind of headsup that there would be questions.
McCain said Sunday that questions raised by Mary Tillman, Pats mother, about how the Army handled the case led him to meet twice earlier this fall with Army officers and former acting Army secretary Les Brownlee to seek answers. About a month ago, McCain said, Brownlee told him the Pentagon would reopen its investigation. McCain said he was not certain about the scope of the new investigation but that he believed it is continuing. A Pentagon official confirmed an investigation is under way, but Army spokesmen declined to comment further.
When she learned friendly fire had taken her sons life, I was upset about it, but I thought, Well, accidents happen, Mary Tillman said in a telephone interview Sunday. Then when I found out that it was because of huge negligence at places along the way you have time to process that and you really get annoyed.
INQUIRY QUESTIONED
As memorials and news releases shaped public perceptions in May, Army commanders privately pursued military justice investigations of several low-ranking Rangers who had fired on Tillmans position and officers who issued the ill-fated missions orders, records show.
Army records show that Col. James Nixon, the 75th Ranger Regiments commander, accepted his chief investigators findings on the same day, May 8, that he was officially appointed to run the case. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which is legally responsible for the investigation, declined to respond to a question about the short time frame between the appointment and the findings.
The Army acknowledged only that friendly fire probably killed Tillman when Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger Jr. made a terse announcement on May 29 at Fort Bragg, N.C. Kensinger declined to answer further questions and offered no details about the investigation, its conclusions, or who might be held accountable.
Army spokesmen said last week they followed standard policy in delaying and limiting disclosure of fratricide evidence. All the services do not prematurely disclose any investigation findings until the investigation is complete, said Lt. Col. Hans Bush, chief of public affairs for the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. The Silver Star narrative released April 30 came from information provided by Ranger commanders in the field, Bush said.
Kensingers May 29 announcement that fratricide was probable came from an executive summary supplied by Central Command only the night before, he said. Because Kensinger was unfamiliar with the underlying evidence, he felt he could not answer questions, Bush said.
For its part, Central Command, headquartered at Mac-Dill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., handled the disclosures in accordance with (Department of Defense) policies, Lt. Cmdr. Nick Balice, a command spokesman, said in an e-mail Saturday responding to questions. Asked specifically why Central Command withheld any suggestion of fratricide when Army investigators by April 26 had collected at least 14 witness statements describing the incident, Balice wrote in an e-mail: The specific details of this incident were not known until the completion of the investigation.
GUIDELINES LACKING
The U.S. military has confronted a series of prominent friendly fire cases in recent years, in part because hairtrigger technology and increasingly lethal remote-fire weapons can quickly turn relatively small mistakes into deadly tragedies. Yet the militarys justice system has few consistent guidelines for such cases, according to specialists in Army law. Decision-making about how to mete out justice rests with individual unit commanders who often work in secret, acting as both investigators and judges.
You can have tremendously divergent outcomes at a very low level of visibility, said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School.
In the Tillman case, those factors were compounded by the victims extraordinary public profile. Also, Tillmans April 22 death was announced just days before the shocking disclosure of photographs of abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in Iraqs Abu Ghraib prison. The photos ignited an international furor and generated widespread questions about discipline and accountability in the Army.
Commemorations of Tillmans courage and sacrifice offered contrasting images of honorable service, undisturbed by questions about possible command or battlefield mistakes.
Whatever the cause, McCain said, you may have at least a subconscious desire here to portray the situation in the best light, which may not have been totally justified.
QUICK INVESTIGATION
Working in private last spring, the 75th Ranger Regiment moved quickly to investigate and wrap up the case, Army records show.
Immediately after the incident, platoon members generated after-action statements and investigators working in Afghanistan gathered logs, documents and e-mails. The investigators interviewed platoon members and senior officers to reconstruct the chain of events. By early May, the evidence made clear in precise detail how the disaster unfolded.
On patrol in Talibaninfested sectors of Afghanistans Paktia province, Tillmans Black Sheep platoon, formally 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, became bogged down because of a broken Humvee. Lt. David Uthlaut, the platoon leader, recommended that his unit stay together, deliver the truck to a nearby road, then complete his mission. He was overruled by a superior officer monitoring his operations from distant Bagram, near Kabul, who ordered Uthlaut to split his platoon, with one section taking care of the Humvee and the other proceeding to a village, where the platoon was to search for enemy guerrillas.
Steep terrain and high canyon walls prevented the two platoon sections from communicating with each other at crucial moments. When one section unexpectedly changed its route and ran into an apparent Taliban ambush while trapped in a deep canyon, the other section from a nearby ridge began firing in support at the ambushers. As the ambushed group broke free from the canyon, machine guns blazing, one heavily armed vehicle mistook an allied Afghan militiaman for the enemy and poured hundreds of rounds at positions occupied fellow Rangers, killing Pat Tillman and the Afghan.
Investigators had to decide whether low-ranking Rangers who did the shooting had followed their training or had fired so recklessly that they should face military discipline or criminal charges. The investigators also had to decide whether more senior officers whose decisions contributed to the chain of confusion around the incident were liable.
Reporting formally to Col. Nixon in Bagram on May 8, the cases chief investigator offered nine specific conclusions, which Nixon endorsed, according to the records.
Among them:
The decision by a Ranger commander to divide Tillmans 2nd Platoon into two groups, despite the objections of the platoons leader, created serious command and control issues and contributed to the eventual breakdown in internal Platoon communications. The Post could not confirm the name of the officer who issued this command.
The A Company commanders order to the platoon leader to get boots on the ground at his mission objective created a false sense of urgency in the platoon, which, whether intentional or not, led to a hasty plan. That officers name also could not be confirmed by The Post.
Sgt. Greg Baker, the lead gunner in the Humvee that poured the heaviest fire on Ranger positions, failed to maintain his situational awareness at key moments of the battle and failed to direct the firing of other gunners in his vehicle.
The other gunners failed to positively identify their respective targets and exercise good fire discipline. . . . Their collective failure to exercise fire discipline, by confirming the identity of their targets, resulted in the shootings of Corporal Tillman.
The chief investigator appeared to reserve his harshest judgments for the lowerranking Rangers who did the shooting rather than the higher-ranking officers who oversaw the mission. While his judgments about the senior officers focused on process and communication problems, the chief investigator wrote about the failures in Bakers truck:
While a great deal of discretion should be granted to a leader who is making difficult judgments in the heat of combat, the Command also has a responsibility to hold its leaders accountable when that judgment is so wanton or poor that it places the lives of other men at risk.
Gen. John Abizaid, CENTCOMs commander in chief, formally approved the investigations conclusions May 28 under an aides signature and forwarded the report to Special Operations commanders for evaluation and any action you deem appropriate to incorporate relevant lessons learned.
The field investigations findings raised another question for Army commanders: Were the failures that resulted in Tillmans death serious enough to warrant administrative or criminal charges?
In the military justice system, field officers such as Nixon, commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, can generally decide such matters.
At least two low-ranking Rangers, including Baker, accepted administrative punishments that led to demotions but no incarceration, according to sources involved in the case. Baker left the Rangers on an honorable discharge when his enlistment ended last spring, while others who were in his truck remain in the Army, these sources said.
It could not be learned what actions if any were taken against the more senior officers who pressured the platoon leader and ordered him to divide his force, over his objections. Army spokesmen declined to comment, citing privacy rules and Pentagon policy.
Military commanders have occasionally leveled charges of involuntary manslaughter in high-profile friendly fire cases, such as one in 2002 when an Illinois National Guard pilot, Maj. Harry Schmidt, mistakenly bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan. But in that case and others like it military prosecutors have found it difficult to make murder charges stick against soldiers making rapid decisions in combat.
And because there is no uniform, openly published military case law about when friendly fire cases cross the line from accident to crime, commanders are free to interpret that line for themselves.
FOCUS AIMS LOW
The list of cases in recent years where manslaughter charges have been brought is almost arbitrary and capricious, said Charles Gittins, a former Marine who is Schmidts defense lawyer. Gittins said senior military officers tend to focus on lowranking personnel rather than commanders. In Schmidts case, he said, Every single general and colonel with the exception of Harrys immediate commander has been promoted since the accident. Schmidt, on the other hand, was fined and banned from flying Air Force jets.
Short of manslaughter, the most common charge leveled in fratricide is dereliction of duty, or what the military code calls culpable inefficiency in the performance of duty, according to military law specialists. This violation is defined in the Pentagons official Manual for Courts Martial as inefficiency for which there is no reasonable or just excuse.
In judging whether this standard applies to a case such as Tillmans death, prosecutors are supposed to decide whether the accused person exercised that degree of care which a reasonably prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances.
Even if a soldier or officer is found guilty under this code, the punishments are limited to demotions, fines and minor discipline such as extra duty.
Records in the Tillman case do not make clear whether Army commanders considered more serious punishments than this against any Rangers or officers, and if so, why they were apparently rejected.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000732072
Did Pentagon Lie In Reports on Death of Pat Tillman?
By E&P Staff
Published: December 06, 2004 2:00 PM ET
NEW YORK While it has been known for months that the death of former football star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan was due to friendly fire, in contrast to how it was first reported, a two-part Washington Post probe that appeared on Sunday and Monday went much further, laying blame on the Pentagon for what looks like a deliberate misinformation campaign.
David Zucchino in Monday's Los Angeles Times added more to the story, noting the changing Pentagon story, and adding that even the "amended Pentagon conclusion is contradicted by Afghans who were there the night of April 22."
Zucchino wrote that Tillman's parents "say the military has deceived them and stonewalled their attempts to find out how their son died." His mother said, "I'm disgusted by things that have happened with the Pentagon since my son's death."
His father added: "The investigation is a lie. It's insulting to Pat."
The Pentagon is now reviewing its investigation, but has not yet responded to a July 6 FOIA request by the L.A. Times asking for it and other documents.
The Washington Post probe, led by Managing Editor Steve Coll, observed that the Pentagon's spin on Tillman's death was "a distorted and incomplete narrative, according to dozens of internal Army documents obtained by The Washington Post that describe Tillman's death by fratricide after a chain of botched communications, a misguided order to divide his platoon over the objection of its leader and undisciplined firing by fellow Rangers."
According to the Post, "The Army's public release made no mention of friendly fire, even though at the time it was issued, investigators in Afghanistan had already taken at least 14 sworn statements from Tillman's platoon members that made clear the true causes of his death. The statements included a searing account from the Ranger nearest Tillman during the firefight, who quoted him as shouting 'Cease fire! Friendlies!' with his last breaths. ...
"But the Army's published account not only withheld all evidence of fratricide, but also exaggerated Tillman's role and stripped his actions of their context. Tillman was not one of the senior commanders on the scene -- he directed only himself, one other Ranger and an Afghan militiaman, under supervision from others. ...
"The Army's April 30 news release," the Post concluded, "was just one episode in a broader Army effort to manage the uncomfortable facts of Pat Tillman's death, according to internal records and interviews."
Asked in an online chat at the newspaper's Web site on Monday how long it would take for people to accuse the Post of "desecrating" Tillman's memory, media critic Howard Kurtz replied: "Fifteen minutes or less."
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/12/06/tillman.investigation
Army reopens investigation of Tillman death
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Monday, December 6, 2004 Posted: 1735 GMT (0135 HKT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Army has reopened an investigation into the death of Army Ranger Spc. Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, based on its ongoing questions of the case as well as those raised by Tillman's family, an Army official said.
The move came last month.
Tillman, who gave up a contract with the Arizona Cardinals to become a Ranger, was killed in Afghanistan on April 22 in what initially was described as an Taliban ambush.
However, weeks later, the Army announced in a brief statement that Tillman had most likely been killed in friendly fire by soldiers who did not realize in the confusion of the battle that they were firing at other Americans.
The Washington Post on Sunday published a detailed account of the events leading to Tillman's death, based on witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs. (Report of Tillman's death describes friendly fire horror )
According to the report, after his platoon was split up, Tillman and others in his group came under heavy friendly fire from rifles and a machine gun.
In a second article Monday, the Post reported the Army had offered "a distorted and incomplete narrative" in Tillman's death. The paper cited internal Army documents that "describe Tillman's death by fratricide after a chain of botched communications, a misguided order to divide his platoon over the objection of its leader and undisciplined firing by fellow Rangers."
Army officials said Tillman's mother, Mary, went to Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, seeking details of the roles and missions of other soldiers and officers present during the attack.
She also wanted to know why the Army took several weeks to announce it was a friendly-fire incident and had other questions, including why her son's bloodied uniform was burned, the officials said.
McCain approached the Army in October seeking additional information.
An Army official said that several Rangers were disciplined after the incident.
According to the official, one member received administrative charges; four were rotated out of the Ranger unit back into regular Army infantry units, and two were reprimanded.
The official said he did not know why the actions were never announced by the Army at the time of the incident, but noted that due to privacy regulations, names and details of administrative discipline are not released.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002110336_tillman06.html
The errors that killed Pat Tillman
By Steve Coll
The Washington Post
First in a series
It ended on a stony ridge in fading light. Spc. Pat Tillman lay dying behind a boulder. A young fellow U.S. Army Ranger stretched prone beside him, praying quietly as tracer bullets poured in.
"Cease fire! Friendlies!" Tillman cried out.
Smoke drifted from a signal grenade Tillman had detonated minutes before in a desperate bid to show his platoon members they were shooting the wrong men. For a few moments, the firing had stopped. Tillman stood up, chattering in relief. Then the machine gun bursts erupted again.
"I could hear the pain in his voice," recalled the young Ranger who had been near him. Tillman kept calling out that he was a friendly, and he shouted, "I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!" His comrade recalled: "He said this over and over again until he stopped."
Myths shaped Pat Tillman's reputation, and mystery shrouded his death. A long-haired, fierce-hitting defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League, he turned away a $3.6 million contract after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and joined the Army, ultimately giving his life in combat in Taliban-infested southeastern Afghanistan.
Millions of stunned Americans mourned his death April 22 and embraced his sacrifice as a rare example of courage and national service. But the full story of how Tillman ended up on that Afghan ridge and why he died at the hands of his own comrades has never been told.
Dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs obtained by The Washington Post show that Tillman died unnecessarily following botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader, and negligent shooting by pumped-up young Rangers some in their first firefight who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.
The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.
Army commanders hurriedly awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor and released a nine-paragraph account of his heroism that made no mention of fratricide. A month later the head of the Army's Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger Jr., called a news conference to disclose in a brief statement that Tillman "probably" died by "friendly fire." Kensinger refused to answer questions.
Friends and family describe Tillman as an American original, a maverick who burned with intensity. He was wild, exuberant, loyal, compassionate and driven, they say. He bucked convention, devoured books and debated conspiracy theories. He demanded straight talk about uncomfortable truths.
After his death, the Army that Tillman served did not do the same.
From Cardinals to "Black Sheep"
Pat Tillman's decision to trade the celebrity and luxury of pro football for a grunt's life at the bottom of the Ranger chain of command shocked many people, but not those who felt they knew him best.
"There was so much more to him than anyone will ever know," reflected Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer, a teammate at Arizona State University and on the Cardinals, speaking at a memorial service in May. Tillman was "fearless on the field, reckless, tough," yet he was also "thought-provoking. He liked to have deep conversations with a Guinness," and he would walk away from those sessions saying, "I've got to become more of a thinker."
In high school and college, a mane of flaxen hair poured from beneath his football helmet. His muscles rippled in a perfect taper from the neck down. "Dude" was his favorite pronoun; for fun he did handstands on the roof of the family house. He pedaled shirtless on a bicycle to his first pro training camp.
"I play football. It just seems so unimportant compared to everything that has taken place," he told NFL Films after the Sept. 11 attacks. His grandfather had been at Pearl Harbor. "A lot of my family has gone and fought wars, and I really haven't done a damn thing."
He was very close to his younger brother Kevin, then playing minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization. They finished each other's sentences, friends recounted. They enlisted in the U.S. Army Rangers together in spring 2002. Less than a year later, they shipped out to Iraq.
In Pat Tillman's first firefight during the initial months of the Iraq war, he watched his lead gunner die within minutes, stepped into his place and battled steadfastly, said Steve White, a U.S. Navy SEAL on the same mission.
"He was thirsty to be the best," White said.
Yet Tillman accepted his ordinary status in the military and rarely talked about himself. One night he confided to White that he had just turned down an NFL team's attempt to sign him to a huge contract and free him from his Army service early.
"I'm going to finish what I started," Tillman said, as White recalled at the May memorial. The next morning Tillman returned to duty and was ordered to cut "about an acre of grass by some 19-year-old kid."
The Tillman brothers served together in the "Black Sheep," otherwise known as 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. They were elite special operators transferred from Iraq in the spring to conduct sweep and search missions against the Taliban and al-Qaida remnants in eastern Afghanistan. The Rangers worked with CIA paramilitaries, Afghan allies and other special forces on grid-by-grid patrols designed to flush out and entrap enemy guerrillas. They moved in small, mobile, lethal units.
On April 13, the Tillman brothers rolled out with their fellow Black Sheep from a clandestine base near the Pakistan border to begin anti-Taliban patrols with two other Ranger platoons. A week later the other platoons returned to base. So did the two senior commanding officers of A Company, records show.
They left behind the 2nd Platoon to carry on operations near Khost, in Paktia province, a region of broken roads and barren rock canyons frequented by Osama bin Laden and his allies for many years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Left in command of the 2nd Platoon was then-Lt. David Uthlaut, a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he had been named the prestigious first captain of his class. Now serving as a captain in Iraq, Uthlaut declined to be interviewed for these articles, but his statements and field communications are among the documents The Post obtained.
Uthlaut's mission, as Army investigators later put it, was to kill or capture any "anti-coalition members" that he and his men could find.
A busted Humvee, a divided platoon
The trouble began with a Humvee's broken fuel pump.
A helicopter flew into Paktia with a spare on the night of April 21. But the next morning, the Black Sheep's mechanic had no luck with his repair.
Uthlaut ordered his platoon to pull out. He commanded 34 men in nine vehicles, including the busted Humvee. They towed the broken vehicle with straps because they lacked a proper tow bar. After several hours on rough, dirt-rock roads, the Humvee's front end buckled. It could move no farther. Uthlaut pulled his men into a tiny village called Margarah to assess options.
It was just after noon. They were in the heart of Taliban country, and they were stuck.
Uthlaut messaged his regiment's Tactical Operations Center far away at Bagram, near Kabul. He asked for a helicopter to hoist the Humvee back to base. No dice, came the reply: There would be no transport chopper available for at least two or three days.
While Uthlaut tried to develop other ideas, his commanders at the base squabbled about the delay. According to investigative records, a senior officer in the Rangers' operations center, whose name is edited out of documents obtained by The Post, complained pointedly to A Company's commander, Uthlaut's immediate superior.
"This vehicle problem better not delay us any more," the senior officer said, as he later recalled in a sworn statement. The 2nd Platoon was already 24 hours behind schedule, he said. It was supposed to be conducting clearing operations in Manah, a southeastern Afghan village.
By 4 p.m. Uthlaut thought he had a solution. He could hire a local "jinga truck" driver to tow the Humvee out to a nearby road where the Army could move down and pick it up. In this scenario, Uthlaut told his commanders, he had a choice. He could keep his platoon together until the Humvee had been disposed of, then move to Manah. Or he could divide his platoon in half, with one "serial" handling the vehicle while the other serial moved immediately to the objective.
The A Company commander, under pressure from his superior to get moving, ordered Uthlaut to split his platoon.
Uthlaut objected. "I would recommend sending our whole platoon up to the highway and then having us go together to the villages," he wrote in an e-mail to the operations center at 5:03 p.m. With sunset approaching, he wrote, even if he split the platoon, the serial that went to Manah would be unable to carry out search operations before dark. And under procedures at the time, he was not supposed to conduct such operations at night.
Uthlaut's commander overruled him. Get half your platoon to Manah right away, he ordered.
But why? Uthlaut asked, as he recalled in a sworn statement. Do you want us to change procedures and conduct sweep operations at night?
No, said the A Company commander.
"So the only reason you want me to split up is so I can get boots on the ground in sector before it gets dark?" an incredulous Uthlaut asked, as he recalled.
Yes, his commander said.
Uthlaut tried "one last-ditch effort," pointing out that he had only one heavy .50-caliber machine gun for the entire platoon. Did that change anything? The commander said it did not.
"At that point I figured I had pushed the envelope far enough and accepted the mission," Uthlaut recalled in the statement.
He pulled his men together hastily and briefed them. Twenty hours after its detection, the broken Humvee part had brought them to a difficult spot: They had to divide into two groups quickly and get moving across a darkening, hostile landscape.
Serial 1, led by Uthlaut and including Pat Tillman, would move immediately to Manah.
Serial 2, with the local tow truck hauling the Humvee, would follow but would soon branch off toward a highway to drop off the vehicle.
Sgt. Greg Baker, a young and slightly built Ranger nearing the end of his enlistment, commanded the heaviest-armed vehicle in Serial 2, just behind the jinga tow truck. Baker's men wielded the .50-caliber machine gun, plus an M-240B machine gun, an M-249 squad automatic weapon and three M-4 carbines.
Baker's truck would do the heaviest shooting if there was an attack. Baker, who left the Rangers last spring, declined to comment for these articles as did a second gunner, Trevor Alders.
Kevin Tillman was also assigned to Serial 2. He manned an MK19, a weapon capable of firing 350 small grenades a minute at a range of more than 2,200 yards.
They left Margarah village a little after 6 p.m. They had been in the same place for more than five hours, presenting an inviting target for Taliban guerrillas.
Pat Tillman's serial, with Uthlaut in command, soon turned into a steep and narrow canyon, passed through safely and approached Manah as planned.
Serial 2 briefly started down a different road, then stopped. The Afghan tow-truck driver said he couldn't navigate the pitted road. He suggested they turn around and follow the same route Serial 1 had taken. After Serial 2 passed Manah, the group could circle around to the designated highway. Serial 2's leader, the platoon sergeant, agreed. There was no radio communication between the two serials about this change in plans.
At 6:34 p.m. Serial 2, with about 17 Rangers in six vehicles, entered the narrow canyon that Serial 1 had just left.
Tomorrow: The ambush begins.
http://www.azcentral.com/sports/cardinals/articles/1205tillmannarrative05-ON.html
Barrage of bullets drowned out cries of Tillman's comrades
Steve Coll
The Washington Post
Dec. 5, 2004 11:00 AM
It ended on a stony ridge in fading light. Spec. Pat Tillman lay dying behind a boulder. A young fellow U.S. Army Ranger stretched prone beside him, praying quietly as tracer bullets poured in.
"Cease fire! Friendlies!" Tillman cried out.
Smoke drifted from a signal grenade Tillman had detonated minutes before in a desperate bid to show his platoon members they were shooting the wrong men. For a few moments, the firing had stopped. Tillman stood up, chattering in relief. Then the machine gun bursts erupted again. advertisement
"I could hear the pain in his voice," recalled the young Ranger near him. Tillman kept calling out that he was a friendly, and he shouted, "I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!" His comrade recalled: "He said this over and over again until he stopped."
Myths shaped Pat Tillman's reputation, and mystery shrouded his death. A long-haired, fierce-hitting defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League, he turned away a $3.6 million contract after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to volunteer for the war on terrorism, ultimately giving his life in combat in Taliban-infested southeastern Afghanistan.
Millions of stunned Americans mourned his death last April 22 and embraced his sacrifice as a rare example of courage and national service. But the full story of how Tillman ended up on that Afghan ridge and why he died at the hands of his own comrades has never been told.
Dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs obtained by The Washington Post show that Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader, and negligent shooting by pumped-up young Rangers - some in their first firefight - who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.
The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.
Army commanders hurriedly awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor and released a nine-paragraph account of his heroism that made no mention of fratricide. A month later the head of the Army's Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger Jr., called a news conference to disclose in a brief statement that Tillman "probably" died by "friendly fire." Kensinger refused to answer questions.
Friends and family describe Tillman as an American original, a maverick who burned with intensity. He was wild, exuberant, loyal, compassionate and driven, they say. He bucked convention, devoured books and debated conspiracy theories. He demanded straight talk about uncomfortable truths.
After his death, the Army that Tillman served did not do the same.
Pat Tillman's decision to trade the celebrity and luxury of pro football for a grunt's life at the bottom of the Ranger chain of command shocked many people, but not those who felt they knew him best.
"There was so much more to him than anyone will ever know," reflected Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer, a teammate at Arizona State University and on the Cardinals, speaking at a memorial service last May. Tillman was "fearless on the field, reckless, tough," yet he was also "thought-provoking. He liked to have deep conversations with a Guinness," and he would walk away from those sessions saying, "I've got to become more of a thinker."
In high school and college, a mane of flaxen hair poured from beneath his football helmet. His muscles rippled in a perfect taper from the neck down. "Dude" was his favorite pronoun; for fun he did handstands on the roof of the family house. He pedaled shirtless on a bicycle to his first pro training camp.
"I play football. It just seems so unimportant compared to everything that has taken place," he told NFL Films after the Sept. 11 attacks. His grandfather had been at Pearl Harbor. "A lot of my family has gone and fought wars, and I really haven't done a damn thing."
He was very close to his younger brother Kevin, then playing minor league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization. They finished each other's sentences, friends recounted. They enlisted in the U.S. Army Rangers together in spring 2002. Less than a year later, they shipped out to Iraq.
In Pat Tillman's first firefight during the initial months of the Iraq war, he watched his lead gunner die within minutes, stepped into his place and battled steadfastly, said Steve White, a U.S. Navy SEAL on the same mission. "He was thirsty to be the best," White said.
Yet Tillman accepted his ordinary status in the military and rarely talked about himself. One night he confided to White that he had just turned down an NFL team's attempt to sign him to a huge contract and free him from his Army service early.
"I'm going to finish what I started," Tillman said, as White recalled at the May memorial. The next morning Tillman returned to duty and was ordered to cut "about an acre of grass by some 19-year-old kid."
The Tillman brothers served together in the "Black Sheep," otherwise known as 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. They were elite - special operators transferred from Iraq in the spring to conduct sweep and search missions against the Taliban and al-Qaida remnants in eastern Afghanistan. The Rangers worked with CIA paramilitaries, Afghan allies and other special forces on grid-by-grid patrols designed to flush out and entrap enemy guerrillas. They moved in small, mobile, lethal units.
On April 13, 2004, the Tillman brothers rolled out with their fellow Black Sheep from a clandestine base near the Pakistan border to begin anti-Taliban patrols with two other Ranger platoons. A week later the other platoons returned to base. So did the two senior commanding officers of A Company, records show. They left behind the 2nd Platoon to carry on operations near Khost, in Paktia province, a region of broken roads and barren rock canyons frequented by Osama bin Laden and his allies for many years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Left in command of the 2nd Platoon was then-Lt. David Uthlaut, a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he had been named the prestigious first captain of his class. Now serving as a captain in Iraq, Uthlaut declined to be interviewed for these articles, but his statements and field communications are among the documents obtained by The Post.
Uthlaut's mission, as Army investigators later put it, was to kill or capture any "anti-coalition members" that he and his men could find.
The trouble began with a Humvee's broken fuel pump.
A helicopter flew into Paktia with a spare on the night of April 21. But the next morning, the Black Sheep's mechanic had no luck with his repair.
Uthlaut ordered his platoon to pull out. He commanded 34 men in nine vehicles, including the busted Humvee. They towed the broken vehicle with straps because they lacked a proper tow bar. After several hours on rough, dirt-rock roads, the Humvee's front end buckled. It could move no farther. Uthlaut pulled his men into a tiny village called Margarah to assess options.
It was just after noon. They were in the heart of Taliban country, and they were stuck.
Uthlaut messaged his regiment's Tactical Operations Center far away at Bagram, near Kabul. He asked for a helicopter to hoist the Humvee back to base. No dice, came the reply: There would be no transport chopper available for at least two or three days.
While Uthlaut tried to develop other ideas, his commanders at the base squabbled about the delay. According to investigative records, a senior officer in the Rangers' operations center, whose name is redacted from documents obtained by The Post, complained pointedly to A Company's commander, Uthlaut's immediate superior.
"This vehicle problem better not delay us any more," the senior officer said, as he later recalled in a sworn statement. The 2nd Platoon was already 24 hours behind schedule, he said. It was supposed to be conducting clearing operations in a southeastern Afghan village called Manah.
By 4 p.m. Uthlaut had a solution, he believed. He could hire a local "jinga truck" driver to tow the Humvee out to a nearby road where the Army could move down and pick it up. In this scenario, Uthlaut told his commanders, he had a choice. He could keep his platoon together until the Humvee had been disposed of, then move to Manah. Or he could divide his platoon in half, with one "serial" handling the vehicle while the other serial moved immediately to the objective.
The A Company commander, under pressure from his superior to get moving, ordered Uthlaut to split his platoon.
Uthlaut objected. "I would recommend sending our whole platoon up to the highway and then having us go together to the villages," he wrote in an e-mail to the operations center at 5:03 p.m. With sunset approaching, he wrote, even if he split the platoon, the serial that went to Manah would be unable to carry out search operations before dark. And under procedures at the time, he was not supposed to conduct such operations at night.
Uthlaut's commander overruled him. Get half your platoon to Manah right away, he ordered.
But why? Uthlaut asked, as he recalled in a sworn statement. Do you want us to change procedures and conduct sweep operations at night?
No, said the A Company commander.
"So the only reason you want me to split up is so I can get boots on the ground in sector before it gets dark?" an incredulous Uthlaut asked, as he recalled.
Yes, said his commander.
Uthlaut tried "one last-ditch effort," pointing out that he had only one heavy .50-caliber machine gun for the entire platoon. Did that change anything? The commander said it did not.
"At that point I figured I had pushed the envelope far enough and accepted the mission," Uthlaut recalled in the statement.
He pulled his men together hastily and briefed them. Twenty hours after its detection, the broken Humvee part had brought them to a difficult spot: They had to divide into two groups quickly and get moving across a darkening, hostile landscape.
Serial One, led by Uthlaut and including Pat Tillman, would move immediately to Manah.
Serial Two, with the local tow truck hauling the Humvee, would follow, but would soon branch off toward a highway to drop off the vehicle.
Sgt. Greg Baker, a young and slightly built Ranger nearing the end of his enlistment, commanded the heaviest-armed vehicle in Serial Two, just behind the jinga tow truck. Baker's men wielded the .50-caliber machine gun, plus an M-240B machine gun, an M-249 squad automatic weapon and three M-4 carbines. Baker's truck would do the heaviest shooting if there were any attack. Two of his gunners had never seen combat before.
Baker left the Rangers last spring; he declined to comment for these articles. A second gunner in his vehicle, Trevor Alders, also declined to discuss the incident.
Kevin Tillman was also assigned to Serial Two. He manned an MK19 gun in the trailing vehicle, well behind Baker.
They left Margarah village a little after 6 p.m. They had been in the same place for more than five hours, presenting an inviting target for Taliban guerrillas.
Pat Tillman's serial, with Uthlaut in command, soon turned into a steep and narrow canyon, passed through safely and approached Manah as planned.
Behind them, Serial Two briefly started down a different road, then stopped. The Afghan tow truck driver said he couldn't navigate the pitted road. He suggested they turn around and follow the same route that Serial One had taken. After Serial Two passed Manah, the group could circle around to the designated highway. Serial Two's leader, the platoon sergeant, agreed.
There was no radio communication between the two serials about this change in plans.
At 6:34 p.m. Serial Two, with about 17 Rangers in six vehicles, entered the narrow canyon that Serial One had just left.
When he heard the first explosion, the platoon sergeant thought one of his vehicles had struck a land mine or a roadside bomb.
They had been in the canyon only a minute. In his machine gun-laden truck, Greg Baker also thought somebody had hit a mine. He and his men jumped out of their vehicle. Baker looked up at the sheer canyon walls. The canyon was five to 10 yards across at its narrowest. "I noticed rocks falling," he recalled in a statement, and "then I saw the second and third mortar rounds hit." He could hear, too, the rattle of enemy small-arms fire.
It was not a bomb - it was an ambush. Baker and his comrades thought they could see their attackers moving high above them. They began to return fire.
They were trapped in the worst possible place: the kill zone of an ambush. The best way to beat a canyon ambush is to flee the kill zone as fast as possible. But Baker and his men had dismounted their vehicles. Worse, when they scrambled back and tried to move, they discovered that the lumbering Afghan tow truck in their serial was stalled, blocking their exit.
Baker "ran up and grabbed" the truck driver and his Afghan interpreter and "threw them in the truck and started to move," as he recalled. He fired up the canyon walls until he ran out of ammunition. Then he jumped from the tow truck, ran back to his vehicle and reloaded. When the tow truck stopped again, Baker shouted at his own driver to move around it.
Finally freed, Baker's heavily armed Humvee raced out of the ambush canyon, its machine guns pounding fire, its inexperienced shooters coursing with adrenaline.
Ahead of them, parked outside a small village near Manah, David Uthlaut heard an explosion. From his position he "could not see the enemy or make an adequate assessment of the situation," so he ordered his men to move toward the firing.
Uthlaut designated Pat Tillman as one of three fire team leaders and ordered him to join other Rangers "to press the fight," as Uthlaut put it, against an uncertain adversary.
Uthlaut tried to raise Serial Two on his radio. He wanted to find out where the Rangers were and to tell them where his serial had set up. But he couldn't get through - the high canyon walls blocked radio signals.
Tillman and other Rangers moved up a rocky north-south ridge that faced the ambush canyon on a roughly perpendicular angle.
The light was dimming. "It was like twilight," one Ranger in the fight recalled. "You couldn't see colors, but you could see silhouettes." Another soldier felt the light was "still pretty good."
A sergeant with Tillman on the ridge recalled he "could actually see the enemy from the high northern ridge line. I could see their muzzle flashes." The presumed Taliban guerrillas were about half a mile away, he estimated.
Tillman approached the sergeant and said "that he saw the enemy on the southern ridge line," as the sergeant recalled. Tillman asked whether he could drop his heavy body armor. "No," the sergeant ordered.
"I didn't think about it at the time, but I think he wanted to assault the southern ridge line," the sergeant recalled.
Instead, on the sergeant's instructions, Tillman moved down the slope with other Rangers and "into a position where he could engage the enemy," the sergeant recalled. With Tillman were a young Ranger and a bearded Afghan militia fighter who was part of the 2nd Platoon's traveling party.
A Ranger nearby watched Tillman take cover. "I remember not liking his position," he recalled. "I had just seen a red tracer come up over us ... which immediately struck me as being a M240 tracer. ... At that time the issue of friendly fire began turning over in my mind."
Tillman and his team fired toward the canyon to suppress the ambush. His brother Kevin was in the canyon.
Several of Serial Two's Rangers said later that as they shot their way out of the canyon, they had no idea where their comrades in Serial One might be.
"Contact right!" one gunner in Greg Baker's truck remembered hearing as they rolled from the ambush canyon.
As he fired, Baker "noticed muzzle flashes" coming from a ridge to the right of the village they were now approaching. Everyone in his vehicle poured fire at the flashes in a deafening roar.
"I saw a figure holding an AK-47, his muzzle was flashing, he wasn't wearing a helmet, and he was prone," Baker recalled in a statement. "I focused only on him. I got tunnel vision."
Baker was aiming at the bearded Afghan militia soldier in Pat Tillman's fire team. He died in a fusillade from Baker's Humvee.
A gunner in Baker's light truck later guessed they were "only about 100 meters" from their new targets on the ridge, but they were "driving pretty fast towards them."
Rangers are trained to shoot only after they have clearly identified specific targets as enemy forces. Gunners working together are supposed to follow orders from their vehicle's commander - in this case, Baker. If there is no chance for orderly talk, gunners are supposed to watch their commander's aim and shoot in the same direction.
As they pulled alongside the ridge, the gunners poured an undisciplined barrage of hundreds of rounds into the area Tillman and other members of Serial One had taken up positions, Army investigators later concluded. The gunner of the M-2 .50-caliber machine gun in Baker's truck fired every round he had.
The shooters saw only "shapes," a Ranger-appointed investigator wrote, and all of them directed bursts of machine gun fire "without positively identifying the shapes."
Yet not everyone in Baker's convoy was confused. The driver of Baker's vehicle or the one behind him - the records are not clear - pulled free of the ambush canyon and quickly recognized the parked U.S. Army vehicles of Serial One ahead of him.
He looked to his right and saw a bearded Afghan firing an AK-47, "which confused me for a split second," but he then quickly saw the rest of Serial One on top of the ridge.
The driver shouted twice: "We have friendlies on top!" Then he screamed "No!" Then he yelled several more times to cease fire, he recalled. "No one heard me."
Up on the ridge, Tillman and Rangers around him began to wave their arms and shout. But they only attracted more fire from Baker's vehicle.
"I saw three to four arms pop up," one of the gunners with Baker recalled. "They did not look like the cease-fire hand-and-arm signal because they were waving side to side." When he and the other gunners spotted the waving arms, their "rate of fire increased."
The young Ranger nearest Tillman on the ridge, whose full name could not be confirmed, saw a Humvee coming down the road. "They made eye contact with us," then began firing, he remembered. Baker's heavily armed vehicle "rolled into our sight and started to unload on top of us. They would work in bursts."
Tillman and nearly a dozen other Rangers on the ridge tried everything they could: They shouted, they waved their arms, and they screamed some more.
"Ranger! Ranger! Cease fire!" one soldier on the ridge remembered shouting.
"But they couldn't hear us," recalled the soldier nearest Tillman. Then Tillman "came up with the idea to let a smoke grenade go." As its thick smoke unfurled, "this stopped the friendly contact for a few moments," the Ranger recalled.
"We thought the battle was over, so we were relieved, getting up and stretching out, and talking with one another."
Suddenly he saw the attacking Humvee move into "a better position to fire on us." He heard a new machine gun burst and hit the ground, praying, as Pat Tillman fell.
A sergeant farther up the ridge from Tillman fired a flare - an even clearer signal than Tillman's smoke grenade that these were friendly forces.
By now Baker's truck had pulled past the ridge and had come into plain sight of Serial One's U.S. vehicles. Baker said later that he looked down the road, then back up to the ridge. He saw the flare and identified Rangers even as he continued to shoot at the Afghan he believed to be a Taliban fighter. Finally he began to call for a cease-fire.
In the village behind Tillman's ridge, Uthlaut and his radio operator had been pinned down by the streams of fire pouring from Baker's vehicle. Both were eventually hit by what they assumed was machine gun fire.
The last of Serial Two's vehicles pulled up in the village. All the firing had stopped.
The platoon sergeant jumped out and began searching for Uthlaut, angry that nobody seemed to know what was happening. He found the lieutenant sitting near a wall of the village, dropped down beside him and demanded to know what he was doing. "At that point I spotted the blood around his mouth" and realized there were casualties - and that Uthlaut was one of them, wounded but still conscious.
On the ridge the young Ranger nearest Pat Tillman screamed, "Oh my (expletive) God!" again and again, as one of his comrades recalled. The Ranger beside Tillman had been lying flat as Tillman initially called out for a cease-fire, yelling out his name. Then Tillman went silent as the firing continued. Now the young Ranger saw a "river of blood" coming from Tillman's position. He got up, looked at Tillman, and saw that "his head was gone."
"I started screaming. ... I was scared to death and didn't know what to do."
A sergeant on the ridge took charge. He called for a medic, ordered Rangers to stake out a perimeter picket in case Taliban guerrillas attacked again, and opened a radio channel to the 75th Ranger Regiment's operations center at Bagram.
Seventeen minutes after Serial Two had entered the canyon, 2nd Platoon reported that its forces "were no longer in contact," as a Ranger-appointed investigator later put it. It was not clear then or later who the Afghan attackers spotted by half a dozen Rangers in both serials had been, how many guerrillas there were, or whether any were killed.
Nine minutes later, a regiment log shows, the platoon requested a medevac helicopter and reported two soldiers killed in action. One was the Afghan militia soldier. The other was Pat Tillman, 27.
His brother Kevin arrived on the scene in Serial Two's trailing vehicle.
Kevin Tillman declined to be interviewed for these stories and was not asked by Ranger investigators to provide sworn statements. But according to other statements and sources familiar with the investigation, Kevin was initially asked to take up guard duty on the outskirts of the shooting scene.
He learned that his brother was dead only when a platoon mate mentioned it to him casually, according to these sources.
It would take almost five more weeks - after a flag-draped coffin ceremony, a Silver Star award and a news release, and a public memorial attended by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Jake Plummer and newswoman Maria Shriver - for the Rangers or the Army to acknowledge to Kevin Tillman, his family or the public that Pat Tillman had been killed by his own men.
Washington Post staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.
http://www.azcentral.com/sports/cardinals/articles/1206TillmanII06-ON.html
Friendly fire facts hidden early on after Tillman's death
Steve Coll
The Washington Post
Dec. 6, 2004 06:00 AM
Just days after Pat Tillman died from friendly fire on a desolate ridge in southeastern Afghanistan, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command released a brief account of his last moments.
The April 30, 2004, statement awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for combat valor and described how a section of his Ranger platoon came under attack.
"He ordered his team to dismount and then maneuvered the Rangers up a hill near the enemy's location," the release said. "As they crested the hill, Tillman directed his team into firing positions and personally provided suppressive fire. ... Tillman's voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces." advertisement
It was a stirring tale and fitting eulogy for the Army's most famous volunteer in the war on terrorism, a charismatic former pro football star whose reticence, courage and handsome beret-draped face captured for many Americans the best aspects of the country's post-Sept. 11 character.
It was also a distorted and incomplete narrative, according to dozens of internal Army documents obtained by The Washington Post that describe Tillman's death by fratricide after a chain of botched communications, a misguided order to divide his platoon over the objection of its leader and undisciplined firing by fellow Rangers.
The Army's public release made no mention of friendly fire, even though at the time it was issued, investigators in Afghanistan had taken at least 14 sworn statements from Tillman's platoon members that made clear the true causes of his death. The statements included a searing account from the Ranger nearest Tillman during the firefight, who quoted him shouting "Cease fire! Friendlies!" with his last breaths.
Army records show Tillman fought bravely during his final battle. He followed orders, never wavered and at one stage proposed discarding his heavy body armor, apparently because he wanted to charge a distant ridge occupied by the enemy, an idea rejected by his immediate superior, witness statements show.
But the Army's published account not only withheld all evidence of fratricide, it exaggerated Tillman's role and stripped his actions of their context. Tillman was not one of the senior commanders on the scene - he directed only himself, one other Ranger and an Afghan militiaman, under supervision from others. Witness statements in the Army's files at the time of the press release describe Tillman's voice ringing out on the battlefield mainly in a desperate effort, joined by other Rangers on his ridge, to warn comrades to stop shooting at their own men.
The Army's April 30 press release was just one episode in a broader Army effort to manage the uncomfortable facts of Pat Tillman's death, according to internal records and interviews.
During several weeks of memorials and commemorations that followed Tillman's death, commanders at his 75th Ranger Regiment and their superiors hid the truth about friendly fire from Tillman's brother Kevin, who had fought with Pat in the same platoon, but was not involved in the firing incident and did not know the cause of his brother's death. Commanders also withheld the facts from Tillman's widow, his parents, national politicians and the public, according to records and interviews with sources involved in the case.
On May 3, Ranger and Army officers joined hundreds of mourners at a public ceremony in San Jose, Calif., where Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer and Maria Shriver took the podium to remember Tillman. The visiting officers gave no hint of the evidence investigators collected in Afghanistan.
In a telephone interview, McCain said: "I think it would have been helpful to have at least their suspicions known" before he spoke about Tillman's death in public. Even more, he said, "the family deserved some kind of heads-up that there would be questions."
McCain said Sunday that questions raised by Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, about how the Army handled the case led him to meet twice earlier this fall with Army officers and former acting Army secretary Les Brownlee to seek answers. About a month ago, McCain said, Brownlee told him the Pentagon would reopen its investigation. McCain said he was not certain about the scope of the new investigation but that he believed it is continuing. A Pentagon official confirmed an investigation is underway, but Army spokesmen declined to comment further.
When she learned friendly fire had taken her son's life, "I was upset about it, but I thought, 'Well, accidents happen,' " Mary Tillman said in a telephone interview Sunday. "Then when I found out that it was because of huge negligence at places along the way - you have time to process that and you really get annoyed."
As memorials and news releases shaped public perceptions in May, Army commanders privately pursued military justice investigations of several low-ranking Rangers who had fired on Tillman's position and officers who issued the ill-fated mission's orders, records show.
Army records show that Col. James C. Nixon, the 75th Ranger Regiment's commander, accepted his chief investigator's findings on the same day, May 8, that he was officially appointed to run the case. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which is legally responsible for the investigation, declined to respond to a question about the short time frame between the appointment and the findings.
The Army acknowledged only that friendly fire "probably" killed Tillman when Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr. made a terse announcement on May 29 at Fort Bragg, N.C. Kensinger declined to answer further questions and offered no details about the investigation, its conclusions, or who might be held accountable.
Army spokesmen said last week they followed standard policy in delaying and limiting disclosure of fratricide evidence. "All the services do not prematurely disclose any investigation findings until the investigation is complete," said Lt. Col. Hans Bush, chief of public affairs for the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. The Silver Star narrative released April 30 came from information provided by Ranger commanders in the field, Bush said.
Kensinger's May 29 announcement that fratricide was "probable" came from an executive summary supplied by Central Command only the night before, he said. Because Kensinger was unfamiliar with the underlying evidence, he felt he could not answer questions, Bush said.
For its part, Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., handled the disclosures "in accordance with (Department of Defense) policies," Lt. Cmdr. Nick Balice, a command spokesman, said in an e-mail Saturday responding to questions. Asked specifically why Central Command withheld any suggestion of fratricide when Army investigators by April 26 had collected at least 14 witness statements describing the incident, Balice wrote in an e-mail: "The specific details of this incident were not known until the completion of the investigation."
The U.S. military has confronted a series of prominent friendly fire cases in recent years, in part because hair-trigger technology and increasingly lethal remote-fire weapons can quickly turn relatively small mistakes into deadly tragedies. Yet the military's justice system has few consistent guidelines for such cases, according to specialists in Army law. Decision-making about how to mete out justice rests with individual unit commanders who often work in secret, acting as both investigators and judges.
"You can have tremendously divergent outcomes at a very low level of visibility," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. "That does not necessarily contribute to public confidence in the administration of justice in the military. Other countries have been moving away" from systems that put field commanders in charge of their own fratricide investigations, he said.
In the Tillman case those factors were compounded by the victim's extraordinary public profile. Also, Tillman's April 22 death was announced just days before the shocking disclosure of photographs of abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. The photos ignited an international furor and generated widespread questions about discipline and accountability in the Army.
Commemorations of Tillman's courage and sacrifice offered contrasting images of honorable service, undisturbed by questions about possible command or battlefield mistakes.
Whatever the cause, McCain said, "you may have at least a subconscious desire here to portray the situation in the best light, which may not have been totally justified."
Working in private last spring, the 75th Ranger Regiment moved quickly to investigate and wrap up the case, Army records show.
Immediately after the incident, platoon members generated after-action statements and investigators working in Afghanistan gathered logs, documents and e-mails. The investigators interviewed platoon members and senior officers to reconstruct the chain of events. By early May, the evidence made clear in precise detail how the disaster unfolded.
On patrol in Taliban-infested sectors of Afghanistan's Paktia province, Tillman's "Black Sheep" platoon, formally 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, became bogged down because of a broken Humvee. Lt. David Uthlaut, the platoon leader, recommended that his unit stay together, deliver the truck to a nearby road, then complete his mission. He was overruled by a superior officer monitoring his operations from distant Bagram, near Kabul, who ordered Uthlaut to split his platoon, with one section taking care of the Humvee and the other proceeding to a village, where the platoon was to search for enemy guerrillas.
Steep terrain and high canyon walls prevented the two platoon sections from communicating with each other at crucial moments. When one section unexpectedly changed its route and ran into an apparent Taliban ambush while trapped in a deep canyon, the other section from a nearby ridge began firing in support at the ambushers. As the ambushed group broke free from the canyon, machine guns blazing, one heavily armed vehicle mistook an allied Afghan militiaman for the enemy and poured hundreds of rounds at positions occupied fellow Rangers, killing Pat Tillman and the Afghan.
Investigators had to decide whether low-ranking Rangers who did the shooting had followed their training or had fired so recklessly that they should face military discipline or criminal charges. The investigators also had to decide whether more senior officers whose decisions contributed to the chain of confusion around the incident were liable.
Reporting formally to Col. Nixon in Bagram on May 8, the case's chief investigator offered nine specific conclusions, which Nixon endorsed, according to the records.
Among them:
The decision by a Ranger commander to divide Tillman's 2nd Platoon into two groups, despite the objections of the platoon's leader, "created serious command and control issues" and "contributed to the eventual breakdown in internal Platoon communications." The Post could not confirm the name of the officer who issued this command.
The A Company commander's order to the platoon leader to get "boots on the ground" at his mission objective created a "false sense of urgency" in the platoon, which, "whether intentional or not," led to "a hasty plan." That officer's name also could not be confirmed by The Post.
Sgt. Greg Baker, the lead gunner in the Humvee that poured the heaviest fire on Ranger positions "failed to maintain his situational awareness" at key moments of the battle and "failed" to direct the firing of other gunners in his vehicle.
The other gunners "failed to positively identify their respective targets and exercise good fire discipline. ... Their collective failure to exercise fire discipline, by confirming the identity of their targets, resulted in the shootings of Corporal Tillman."
The chief investigator appeared to reserve his harshest judgments for the lower-ranking Rangers who did the shooting rather than the higher-ranking officers who oversaw the mission. While his judgments about the senior officers focused on process and communication problems, the chief investigator wrote about the failures in Baker's truck:
"While a great deal of discretion should be granted to a leader who is making difficult judgments in the heat of combat, the Command also has a responsibility to hold its leaders accountable when that judgment is so wanton or poor that it places the lives of other men at risk."
Gen. John P. Abizaid, CENTCOM's commander in chief, formally approved the investigation's conclusions May 28 under an aide's signature and forwarded the report to Special Operations commanders "for evaluation and any action you deem appropriate to incorporate relevant lessons learned."
The field investigation's findings raised another question for Army commanders: Were the failures that resulted in Tillman's death serious enough to warrant administrative or criminal charges?
In the military justice system, field officers such as Nixon, commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, can generally decide such matters.
At least two low-ranking Rangers, including Baker, accepted administrative punishments that led to demotions but no incarceration, according to sources involved in the case. Baker left the Rangers on an honorable discharge when his enlistment ended last spring, while others who were in his truck remain in the Army, these sources said.
It could not be learned what actions - if any - were taken against the more senior officers who pressured the platoon leader and ordered him to divide his force, over his objections. Army spokesmen declined to comment, citing privacy rules and Pentagon policy.
Military commanders have occasionally leveled charges of involuntary manslaughter in high-profile friendly fire cases, such as one in 2002 when an Illinois National Guard pilot, Maj. Harry Schmidt, mistakenly bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan. But in that case and others like it military prosecutors have found it difficult to make murder charges stick against soldiers making rapid decisions in combat.
And because there is no uniform, openly published military case law about when friendly fire cases cross the line from accident to crime, commanders are free to interpret that line for themselves.
The list of cases in recent years where manslaughter charges have been brought is "almost arbitrary and capricious," said Charles Gittins, a former Marine who is Schmidt's defense lawyer. Gittins said senior military officers tend to focus on low-ranking personnel rather than commanders. In Schmidt's case, he said, "Every single general and colonel with the exception of Harry's immediate commander has been promoted since the accident." Schmidt, on the other hand, was ultimately fined and banned from flying Air Force jets.
Short of manslaughter, the most common charge leveled in fratricide is dereliction of duty, or what the military code calls "culpable inefficiency" in the performance of duty, according to military law specialists. This violation is defined in the Pentagon's official Manual for Courts Martial as "inefficiency for which there is no reasonable or just excuse."
In judging whether this standard applies to a case such as Tillman's death, prosecutors are supposed to decide whether the accused person exercised "that degree of care which a reasonably prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances."
Even if a soldier or officer is found guilty under this code, the punishments are limited to demotions, fines and minor discipline such as extra duty.
Records in the Tillman case do not make clear if Army commanders considered more serious punishments than this against any Rangers or officers, and if so, why they were apparently rejected.
Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1206tilman06.html
Tillman's end filled with horror
Wire services
Dec. 6, 2004 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The last minutes of Pat Tillman's life were a horror of misdirected machine-gun fire and signals to firing colleagues that were misunderstood as hostile acts, according to an account published Sunday of the death of the NFL player turned soldier.
It took the Army a month to change the record to show that Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who gave up a $3.6 million contract to become an Army Ranger, was killed in April not by Afghan guerrillas but by Ranger colleagues.
Even then, the statement by Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger Jr., head of the Army's Special Operations Command, gave few specifics of his death and implied that he was trying to suppress enemy fire when he "probably died as a result of friendly fire." advertisement
The Washington Post on Sunday, in the first article of a two-part series, published what it described as the first full telling of how and why Tillman died. The newspaper said it had access to "dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs."
A series of mishaps and missteps began the chain of events that resulted in Tillman's death in eastern Afghanistan, the newspaper said. A Humvee broke down, which led to the splitting up of his platoon.
Tillman's brother, Kevin, who had enlisted with him in the Army Rangers in 2002, was in the part of the platoon called Serial 2.
The segment of the platoon with Pat Tillman, Serial 1, passed through a canyon and was near its north rim. The other segment, Serial 2, changed its plans because of poor roads and followed the same route into the canyon. It came under fire from Afghan Taliban fighters.
Men in Serial 1 heard an explosion that preceded the attack. Tillman and two other team leaders were ordered to head toward the attackers, the Post said. The canyon walls prevented them from radioing their positions to their colleagues, just as Serial 2 had not radioed its change in plans.
Tillman's group moved toward the north-south ridge to face the canyon, and Tillman took another Ranger and an Afghan ally down the slope.
"As they pulled alongside the ridge, the gunners poured an undisciplined barrage of hundreds of rounds into the area (where) Tillman and other members of Serial 1 had taken up positions," the Post said the Army concluded.
The first to die was the Afghan, whom the Americans mistook for a Taliban fighter.
Under fire, Tillman and almost a dozen others on the ridge "shouted, they waved their arms, and they screamed some more," the Post said.
"Then Tillman 'came up with the idea to let a smoke grenade go.' As its thick smoke unfurled, 'This stopped the friendly contact for a few moments,' " a Ranger was quoted as saying.
Assuming the friendly fire had stopped, the Ranger said, he and his comrades emerged and talked with each other, the Post reported.
"Suddenly, he saw the attacking Humvee move into 'a better position to fire on us.' He heard a new burst from a machine gun and hit the ground, praying, as Pat Tillman fell," the Post reported.
The Ranger said Tillman screamed out his name repeatedly and shouted for the shooting to stop, the Post said. He and others waved their arms, only attracting more fire.
On the ridge, the Ranger nearest Pat Tillman screamed, "Oh my (expletive) God!" again and again, as one of his comrades recalled. Tillman initially called out for a cease-fire, yelling out his name. Then Tillman went silent as the firing continued.
Now the Ranger saw a "river of blood" coming from Tillman's position. He got up, looked at Tillman, and saw that "his head was gone."
"I started screaming. . . . I was scared to death and didn't know what to do."
A sergeant on the ridge took charge. He called for a medic, ordered Rangers to stake out a perimeter picket in case Taliban guerrillas attacked again and opened a radio channel to the 75th Ranger Regiment's operations center at Bagram.
Seventeen minutes after Serial 2 had entered the canyon, 2nd Platoon reported that its forces "were no longer in contact," an investigator said.
Nine minutes later, a regiment log shows, the platoon requested a medevac helicopter and reported two soldiers killed in action: the Afghan and Tillman, 27.
His brother Kevin arrived in Serial 2's trailing vehicle.
Kevin declined to be interviewed for these stories and was not asked by Ranger investigators to provide sworn statements.
He learned that his brother was dead when a platoon mate mentioned it to him casually, according to sources.
The second part of the Post series, published on the newspaper's Web site Sunday night, tells of "a broader Army effort to manage the uncomfortable facts of Pat Tillman's death."
"Commemorations of Tillman's courage and sacrifice offered contrasting images of honorable service, undisturbed by questions about possible command or battlefield mistakes," the Post reported.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Post, "You may have at least a subconscious desire here to portray the situation in the best light, which may not have been totally justified."
Mary Tillman told the Post that when she learned friendly fire had killed her son: "I was upset about it, but I thought, 'Well, accidents happen.' Then when I found out that it was because of huge negligence at places along the way, you have time to process that and you really get annoyed."
The Associated Press and Washington Post contributed to this article.
<*==*>
http://www.azcentral.com/sports/cardinals/articles/1207tillman07.html
Army revisits Tillman death
McCain helps family seek answers in new probe
Billy House
Republic Washington Bureau
Dec. 7, 2004 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The Army has opened a new investigation into football star Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death in April while serving as a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, amid questions raised by Tillman's family and others about why the Pentagon deliberately held back or distorted some details.
Tillman, 27, who to many people had become a symbol of U.S. patriotism, had walked away from a lucrative contract extension offered by the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army in 2002.
The new probe was ordered last month by former acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee before his planned departure from that job last week, an Army spokesman said Monday. advertisement
Brownlee's order came after Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., carrying a list of questions sent to him from Tillman's mother, Mary, met with Army officers and Brownlee on Oct. 5. Brownlee and Army officers met again with McCain on Nov. 14, the day McCain's office obtained a letter formally stating the Army had opened another investigation.
The new probe was officially opened at Brownlee's order on Nov. 3, an Army spokeswoman said.
Among the questions Mary wanted answered: Why did it take the Pentagon five weeks to acknowledge that Pat was not killed by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters on April 22 but by a section of his own Army Rangers platoon?
In fact, it was The Arizona Republic, not the Army, that first informed Pat Tillman's parents on May 28 that the Army's investigation had concluded their son likely was killed by friendly fire, a finding withheld from them and the public until after memorials and commemorations for Tillman.
Carol Darby, a spokeswoman with the Army's Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., confirmed Monday that official findings of the investigation had been completed and turned over to Central Command as early as May 17.
But it was not until May 29 and after The Republic already had contacted Mary and Patrick Tillman and published a news story that their son likely was killed by friendly fire, that officials of the Special Operations Command publicly confirmed that was true.
Even then, the Army provided few specifics of Pat Tillman's death and implied he was trying to suppress enemy fire when he died, a claim that also is in dispute now with a new newspaper account that there may be no evidence insurgents ever opened fire on the Rangers.
"I hope the outcome of this new investigation will finally provide a full and accurate account of the events surrounding this terrible tragedy and address the concerns of his family," McCain said Monday.
"It's an entirely new investigation," said Army Sgt. Kyle Cosner, another spokesman with Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. "It's important to distinguish between the old investigation and what is a new group of individuals conducting a new investigation."
Neither of Tillman's parents could be reached Monday for comment.
Tillman's brother-in-law, Alex Garwood, executive director of the Pat Tillman Foundation, said, "We understand the interest, but we consider this a personal matter with the family, and the foundation does not have a comment."
A spokeswoman in McCain's office said that the senator was given a time frame of "a couple of weeks" for the new investigation to be complete but that the holiday schedule makes the exact date of completion unclear.
Darby also could not give a specific time frame for completion.
Army officials insisted that no one involved in the previous investigation conducted by U.S. Central Command out of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa is involved.
Although this new probe initially was prompted by questions raised by the Tillman family, reports on Sunday and Monday in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have raised more questions about what happened the night of April 22 when Tillman was killed and about the Pentagon's handling of its investigations afterward.
In a two-part report Sunday and Monday, the Post recalled how the Army's April 30 public news release purportedly giving details of Tillman's death in southeastern Afghanistan made no mention of friendly fire, even though at the time investigators already had taken at least 14 sworn statements from Tillman's platoon members that made clear the true causes of his death.
That news release, in which the Army announced Tillman was posthumously receiving the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his actions, focused on how he led a team of Rangers up a hill to knock out enemy fire that had pinned down another section of his platoon.
But the Post story described internal Army documents as also detailing a series of botched communications, a misguided order to divide the platoon over the objection of its leader, an explosion believed to be the beginning of an enemy attack, and undisciplined firing by Rangers that led to the fratricide of not just Tillman but also an Afghan militiaman.
On Monday, the Times added more fuel to the notion the Pentagon was involved in a deliberate misinformation campaign.
The newspaper reported that even with the amended version of what happened to Tillman, which was released May 29, few other specifics of Tillman's death were given and the Army continued to imply he was trying to suppress enemy fire when he died.
But even that version, the Times reported, is contradicted by Afghan police and militia commanders, along with local residents there. They say the Army Rangers simply overreacted to an explosion, either a land mine or roadside bomb, and fired wildly at Tillman and other Rangers.
The Times reported that those officials say there is no evidence insurgents opened fire in the remote canyon where Tillman was raked by gunfire from a section of his own Ranger platoon.
Army officials on Monday declined to publicly release the documents and interviews that provided the basis of its initial investigative findings.
No soldiers faced judicial action as a result of Tillman's death, but several were disciplined, Darby said.
Reach the reporter at billy.house@arizonarepublic.com or 1-(202)-906-8136
<*==*>
its not a job its slavery
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1210stop-loss10.html
Debate rages on policy extending military duty
Dennis Wagner
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 10, 2004 12:00 AM
The U.S. Army says its stop-loss program is vital to ensuring that the United States always has trained, experienced soldiers on duty in war zones.
But critics say the practice of forcing soldiers to remain deployed after they are supposed to be out of the service is not only unlawful but atrocious policy for the Pentagon.
Thanks to a federal lawsuit filed by eight soldiers Monday, those arguments likely are to be addressed by a District Court judge in Washington, D.C., if not the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the meantime, however, the involuntary service of soldiers has become grist for Starbucks discussion among troops, their families and the rest of America.
Should soldiers who have completed their military obligations be forced to remain in combat zones as a patriotic duty? Or is the government abusing those who have given most for America?
"Our country is at war right now," answers Steve Soha, a Phoenix police lieutenant and gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserves. "Inconvenience and changes in plans are a fact of life. They need to suck it up and go to work."
Soha speaks from experience. His Special Operations Training Group was deployed to Afghanistan for a year when his wife was seven months pregnant. And it was sent to Iraq not long after his son was born.
Soha said enlistment contracts are absolutely clear in telling personnel that service may be extended during war. Troops who need to come home for hardship reasons have an appeal process, he added. "But I think bringing a lawsuit is embarrassing," he said. "Your country has called."
Staughton Lynd, an attorney in the federal lawsuit, is among those who say the stop-loss policy violates recruitment contracts and constitutes fraud because soldiers don't realize they are subject to involuntary extensions.
His clients include an Arizona National Guard soldier from Chandler whose wife claims recruiters were deceptive in their sign-up spiel.
When her husband, identified as John Doe 1 in the court complaint, inquired about the Army's "Try One" program, she said, "They told him there's no obligation. 'If you don't like it, you're done.'
"He was happy to be in the military. But then he said, 'OK, my time is done now.' "
Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman in Virginia, said stop-loss is currently used only in the Afghanistan-Iraq conflict area, and only to ensure that Army units aren't shuttling new, inexperienced personnel in to key positions. "In Iraq, do we really want a platoon leader to leave four months in, and another guy to take his place?"
Hilferty pointed out that soldiers sign papers acknowledging in several places that they may be held over or recalled to duty without consent. One example: "In the event of war, my enlistment in the armed forces continues six months after the war ends unless it is discontinued by the president."
Because of such caveats, many military law experts say the federal suit has little chance of success.
But, legalities aside, Lynd said the Pentagon is shooting itself in the foot when it reneges on deals with patriotic Americans. Although stop-loss may have short-term operational advantages, Lynd said, it erodes the Pentagon's ability to recruit and enlist other soldiers who may fear similar treatment.
A recent Associated Press review found that, nationwide, National Guard sign-ups were 12 percent short of the military's goal. But Hilferty disputed those findings. He said recruiting and retention numbers for fiscal 2003-04, which ended in September, were at 107 percent of goals.
"The conventional wisdom is that stop-loss will (negatively) affect recruiting," he added. "But it doesn't."
The Army's policy derives from a federal statute that says: "(T)he President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States."
Plaintiffs in the civil suit say that language does not address soldiers who enlist via the "Try One" program, which signs up Army National Guard members for a 12-month trial program. Three of the eight plaintiffs, including the Arizona soldier, are in that category.
Lynd acknowledged that courts may lean toward presidential power during times of military action: "Obviously, there's an elephant in the kitchen, which is the tendency of judges to say, 'Well, there's a war going on.' "
However, he said, courts and the public may also see stop-loss as unfair and counterproductive because it sabotages the esprit de corps of troops.
"If you're going to have a volunteer service," Lynd said, "you have to play straight with the people. . . . We're getting e-mails from all over the world saying, 'Morale in my unit is at rock bottom.' "
Hilferty, the Army spokesman, said that's hardly news: "If a soldier's not (complaining), he's not happy."
John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States, said both sides of the stop-loss debate have merit.
"When it happens to you it's like, 'Uggh! This wasn't part of my plan.' But we all raised our hands and took an oath," Goheen said.
"We don't like it. But we certainly understand it."
<*==*>
did you ever hear of the cops sweeping north scottsdale for felons?
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1210Phx-raid10.html
Authorities sweeping S. Phoenix for felons
200 captures may be made
Carol Sowers
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 10, 2004 12:00 AM
Faced with a two-year backlog of unserved warrants, police are conducting a two-week sweep in south Phoenix neighborhoods, looking for elusive suspects charged with a range of felonies.
Officers said the raid, expected to end Dec. 17, could uproot as many as 200 suspects who have eluded arrest or failed to appear in court.
As of Thursday about 20 police and Maricopa County Adult Probation officers had reeled in 90 suspects. advertisement
<*==*>
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1211iraq-plea11.html
GI admits killing hurt Iraqi teen; latest moral loss
Paul Garwood
Associated Press
Dec. 11, 2004 12:00 AM
BAGHDAD - A U.S. soldier pleaded guilty Friday to killing a severely wounded Iraqi teenager in what investigators say may have been a mercy killing, the latest of several similar incidents that have undercut efforts by the United States to win support among Iraqis and defeat a rampant insurgency.
The conviction of Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr., 30, of Winston-Salem, N.C., comes almost a month after the Nov. 13 killing of another wounded Iraqi found lying in a Fallujah mosque among the bodies of several people killed during a weeklong operation to retake that city from insurgents.
Horne is the first of four soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, based in Fort Riley, Kan., to face court-martial on charges of murdering Iraqis during fighting in Baghdad's impoverished Sadr City in August. advertisement
This week in Germany, a U.S. tank company commander was ordered court-martialed after being accused of shooting and killing a critically injured Iraqi driver for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on May 21 near Kufa, 100 miles south of Baghdad.
As in Horne's case, witnesses have said Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, 29, of Chicago, shot the wounded man out of compassion. Maynulet will be tried on charges of assault with intent to commit murder and dereliction of duty, which carry a maximum combined sentence of 20 1/2 years.
Human rights groups have condemned the illegal killings of Iraqis - either civilians or wounded fighters - by the U.S. military, saying such acts amount to violations of international humanitarian rights and should be dealt with as war crimes.
Critics also say poor understanding by young U.S. troops of the rules of military engagement leads to the killing of civilians.
"It doesn't help you win the hearts and minds of the public if you put a bullet in their hearts and another in the minds," said Mark Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch.
Garlasco, speaking from New York, said there were 1,000 "questionable deaths" of Iraqi civilians at the hands of military forces between the start of the war in March 2003 until the fall of Baghdad three weeks later. The deteriorating security situation has made it impossible to count such deaths since then, he said.
"There are a lot of 19-year-old troops out there with weapons who are very scared and are facing a concealed enemy who is attacking them while not following any international standards of warfare," Garlasco said. "This doesn't excuse them, but it shows there is a level of understanding."
The U.S. military has defended its record, saying that with more than 400,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq since the war began, only a few illegal killings have come to light.
Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a spokesman with the military command in Baghdad, said soldiers understand the rules of engagement and go through extensive training.
"The U.S. military is a cross-section of the U.S. society, where we have the complete spectrum of best possible people that you could imagine, but unfortunately we have those at the other end who commit crimes and they are held accountable," he said.
<*==*>
laws??? the government doesnt need to obey no stinking international laws!!!!
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1211scotus-death11.html
Supreme Court takes global case on death penalty
Charles Lane
Washington Post
Dec. 11, 2004 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether the federal courts must give a hearing to a Mexican death-row inmate in Texas who says the state violated international law by trying him for murder without first notifying Mexican diplomats who might have helped him.
The case, which has attracted worldwide attention, is seen as a test of the willingness of the judicial branch of the U.S. government to accept an international institution's authority at a time when the executive branch under President Bush is taking criticism from many quarters abroad for operating unilaterally in world affairs.
The fact that it arises in the context of the death penalty, for which the United States in general and Texas in particular are under fire in Europe and Latin America, adds to its potential international impact. advertisement
The case marks the Supreme Court's first opportunity to respond to a March 31 decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, which ruled that the United States had violated the Vienna Convention on consular relations in the case of the Texas inmate, Jose Ernesto Medellin, and 48 other Mexican nationals on death row.
The application of the Vienna Convention to criminal cases is no small issue in the United States, where the population includes millions of non-citizens.
Including the Mexicans directly involved in the ICJ ruling, there are 118 foreign nationals on death row in the United States, from 32 countries.
The court received friend-of-the court briefs from the European Union, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and Mexico, all urging it to hear the case.
Also supporting Medellin's appeal was a group of former U.S. diplomats, including former Iran hostage L. Bruce Laingen, who argued that U.S. citizens abroad will "suffer in kind" if their own courts do not enforce consular access.
In its March ruling, the ICJ did not attempt to overturn the men's death sentences.
It said only that the treaty - which the United States has ratified and pledged to enforce in cases involving citizens of other ratifying countries, including Mexico - gives Medellin and the other Mexicans an individual right to claim in a federal court that their cases might have turned out differently if they had had consular access.
U.S. rules that require them to raise such claims in state court first do not apply, the ICJ ruled.
The Bush administration had argued against this interpretation, but the vote in the ICJ was 14-1, with a U.S. judge joining the majority.
The ICJ ruling brought to a head a long-simmering conflict between that court and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which generally favors limiting the avenues by which death-row inmates may challenge their sentences on constitutional and other legal grounds
<*==*>
why didnt the Lady of Guadalupe go directly to the bishop and tell him to build the church?
even better why didnt the Lady of Guadalupe use her magic to build the church?
you know sometimes it seems like god does things backwards.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/home/articles/1211altars11.html
Celebrating the Virgin
Altars mark day of feast
Sadie Jo Smokey
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 11, 2004 12:00 AM
Sometimes called Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Spanish for "Our Lady of Guadalupe"), the Virgin of Guadalupe is a deeply rooted religious and cultural tradition to many Hispanic Catholics. Her feast day, Sunday, is celebrated with food and prayer, with many observers building altars in their homes and yards.
The dark-skinned Madonna is not just a Mexican saint, said Robert Bitto, owner of Sueños, a Latin American import store in Phoenix.
In 1999, Pope John Paul II proclaimed the Lady of Guadalupe to be the patroness or protector of the Americas.
Bitto's store sells religious artwork of the Virgin made by artists in the Valley, Mexico, Peru and Poland. "She has universal appeal," Bitto said. "I've heard she's a very powerful symbol."
In 1531, the Lady of Guadalupe reportedly appeared to a poor indigenous man, Juan Diego, on a hillside outside of what is now Mexico City. She asked Diego to instruct the bishop to build a temple so that she could demonstrate her love, compassion and promise to protect all people. To help Diego prove that she had appeared, she made roses bloom on the hill. Diego gathered the roses in his cape and took them to the bishop. When Diego opened his cape, it was emblazoned with an image of the Virgin surrounded by a ring of light.
Typically, she is shown floating in an oval-shaped aura wearing a blue shroud with white stars, standing atop a crescent moon that is being held up by an angel. She is always leaning, face down to the right, with her hands folded in prayer. Other images show the Virgin appearing before a kneeling San Juan Diego.
The faithful can buy the image of the Lady of Guadalupe on plastic holy cards, statues, wood retablos, repujados (metal), key chains, crosses, blankets, stickers, Christmas-tree ornaments and rose- scented candles at import stores and swap meets.
"Peruvian renditions tend to look more indigenous because that's who makes it," Bitto explained. "But she comes with fair and dark skin, sometimes framed in roses."
Reach the reporter at (602) 444-8148.
"We are happy with the results, but are always pushing to do better," said Mario Ancich, a South Mountain Precinct community action officer.
Officers also recovered marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, two handguns, a shotgun and a rifle as of Wednesday. Officers also took a drug pipe from the jeans pocket of 38-year-old Louise Gano, who was staying with friends near Third Avenue and Dobbins Road.
She is wanted for failing to appear in court on marijuana possession charges.
In another nearby neighborhood, a woman who would identify herself only as Becky, was frightened when police cars, and officers in bulletproof vests, pulled up at the house next door.
"My niece lives there," she said. "It's scary."
Police were looking for Alejandro de la Paz, wanted on year-old drunk driving and forgery charges.
Christina Bernal, 38, related to de La Paz by marriage, said he had been living with her family but returned to Mexico six months ago.
Bernal said she is glad he is gone.
"I'm tired of the police showing up," she said.
She said she knew of the drunken driving charges but wasn't aware of the forgery charge.
Police knocked on other suspects' doors but either got no answers or were told the person had moved.
The sweep is the second in two months in the south Phoenix area.
In early October, police and probation officers spent two days looking for bail jumpers and other felons in the Cash Neighborhood, between 35th and 39th avenues and Southern Avenue to Broadway Road.
They arrested about 30 suspects and recovered six guns, two stolen vehicles and drugs.