Frag Hags

Just when you figured it couldn't get any worse, the Pat Tillman saga does exactly that, as years of lies wrapped in deceptions and smothered in secret sauce eventually get found out, somehow. It's despicable, through and through, at every level of the game, from the men in the platoon who destroyed the evidence and tried to get their stories straight, all the way up to the thoroughly dishonorable men who chose to use an honorable man as their recruitment prop.

And to what end? Some asshole general who was the last one standing when the music stopped gets reprimanded. Ooooh. A reprimand. That sounds about right.

And I don't want to hear any of this "fog of war" bullshit. Yes, I'm still willing to buy into the essential story that Tillman was a victim of accidental (if meticulously placed, apparently) friendly fire. After that, there was no fog, only cynical decisions made by pathetic, ass-covering freaks who deserve whatever misfortunes life has to offer them.

But this story does not have a retributive or punitive moral, obviously. We can "know" as sure as shit that the true knowledge of Tillman's demise went right up to the top, preceding his funeral, and nothing substantial will ever occur. That is the nature of political crimes -- either people are made an example of and wind up at the end of a rope, or nothing at all happens. Nothing in between, unfortunately, so nothing meaningful will happen to any of the participants in this ugly, manipulative charade.

What it is, however, is very illustrative of the system in general, and the beasts in particular who are currently running it. Because let's face it -- if the evidence had never been made public, they would have been happy to know the truth for themselves, and wrap the lies in a flag and serve it up on a weekly basis. The line between knowing and not knowing is fragile, and realizing how just the knowledge of seemingly simple, isolated events affects our perceptions of the whole process is essential.

Abu Ghraib is another example -- it was something that Iraqis already knew about, obviously, but without the actions of one man, we would never have known about this systematized, deliberate barbarity. We still don't know much; recall that our esteemed legislators, who regard us as children, sat on the second set of photos, deeming them far more problematic than the first. What do you think that means?

You don't even know what you don't know, and most of the people who do know and can affect that, have absolutely zero incentive to change that dynamic for you. It took a corporal who was willing to literally risk his own life to get the Abu Ghraib photo CDs (which were, you recall, trophies of a perverted, sickening sort; they were bragging about this shit) stateside, into responsible, human hands. It's taken three years to find out that Pat Tillman was shot square in the forehead from ten yards away with an M-16, practically point-blank. How many service personnel have been indicted or tried or convicted and sentenced just this year for the most heinous, despicable war crimes?

And that's just the stuff we think we know. Maybe we should keep all these things in mind as well -- as disparate as they may initially seem -- before letting the usual crew of Magic 8-Ball-using Barcalounger Spartans tell us anything about anything, much less about anything important, such as war.