War On Error

The friendly-fire killing of Pat Tillman was bad enough, but it was not the biggest crime here. The Pentagon's investigation of itself changes nothing. The real crime all along was the Pentagon's and the administration's ease in continuing to use Tillman's genuine sacrifice as a sordid prop, knowing full well what had really happened, cocnealing the truth even from Tillman's own family.

And if not for his family's diligence and insistence on getting to the bottom of all this, the Pentagon and the Army would never have fessed up. Tillman's death could perhaps be charitably attributed to "error", in that his platoon-mates certainly didn't mean to shoot him, but there was no mistake about what the Army and Pentagon did and tried to do in the immediate aftermath and ensuing weeks. They knew what they were doing when they tried to destroy the evidence, and they knew what they were doing when they were handling the media during Tillman's funeral service.

There was no mistake about any of that. They meant to do that shit. Let's at least be clear about that, before the Pentagon gets too caught up in absolving itself.