[inquiry]

Testimony from a former U.S. Army Ranger



[web]http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5587990522549547050&hl=en[/web]

Excerpts:

“When we were doing the night raids in the houses, we would pull people out and have them all on their knees and zip-tied. We would ask the man of the house questions. If he didn’t answer the way we liked, we would shoot his youngest kid in the head. We would keep going, this was our interrogation. He could be innocent. He could be just an average Joe trying to support his family. If he didn’t give us a satisfactory answer, we’d start killing off his family until he told us something. If he didn’t know anything, I guess he was SOL.”

and

“For not speaking out, I feel like I’m betraying my battle-buddies that died.”

[Loki]

Jesse Macbeth is a liar. This is patently obvious in the first 20 seconds when they show a photo of him in BDUs with a fucked up beret and sleeves rolled up like a Marine. He would have lasted about 3 seconds looking like this before his squad leader tore him a new one.

[inquiry]

THE TILLMAN FILES

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/w ... iles.shtml

May 4, 2006 1530 PST – (FTW) - Captain Scott felt the mixture of anxiety and resentment rising in his throat like the onions from a bad sandwich.

He’d known somewhere backstage in his brain all along that he would cross that portal and run smack-dab into the reality behind the rah-rah about Army Values: Integrity, my ass. This one was always too big for integrity. It had spin written all over it; and it went high, very high. But he’d had to test it, had to do it by the book, make it real, ask all the questions…state his true conclusions.

No way he wanted to go into that room, face that flat-eyed phalanx of careers and agendas. He had known, somewhere before the little voice could even say it aloud in his head, this is one where you are supposed to read between the lines. This is one that is so big, heads are going to roll, and pawns are going to be sacrificed in a bureaucratic gambit of “protect the king.”

Integrity was no longer about Army Values. It was about making a choice he’d have to live with for life; and he had known that his quiet conscience was going to be purchased at great risk.

Colonel Kazlorich had told him, when he assigned him this fucking investigation…it was fratricide. One day after it happened. Hell, minutes after it happened, they knew. Pat Tillman—Pat fucking Tillman!—was killed by his own men.

Those had been among his last words before he stood up during the lull in fire, thinking they’d figured it out, only to be gunned down in a resurgent hail of automatic weapons fire.

“Stop shooting! I’m Pat fucking Tillman, goddamnit!”

But when the public statements had come out, Captain Scott reflected anxiously—waiting to be called into the room—even before he’d assembled his materials to conduct the investigation, whoa Nelly! He remembered thinking then, this can’t possibly end well…do they really think they can get away with this? They can’t hide this.

Now he was walking into a room full of them, officers with their career-obsessed asses on the line, a very dangerous crew. This is so fucked up, he found himself thinking, so big…and I’m just a squirrel here, trying to cross an eight-lane highway. Two little fucking words, and now I have to face the whole fucking chain of command after they cut some kind of deal and changed those statements. Two words: ROE and negligence.

This series on Pat Tillman’s death and the government cover-up in its wake is dedicated to Pat Tillman, both what he was and what he would have been. In the current struggle to break the power of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld clique that Pat Tillman had unmasked for himself and learned to despise, I feel confident that he would have approved how his own story—the story of a human being—might become one among many successive waves of attack against an immense edifice of malignant power. He would have understood that whether we succeed or not—while important—is not the measure of what we are. The measure of what we are is that we try, and that we don’t supplicate ourselves before that malignant power and make an offering of our fear.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/w ... les3.shtml

[chris-h]

He is a fake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Macbeth

[gg3]

Re. Pat Tillman, who isn't a fake: This is why the military is fundamentally reluctant to go to war unless it is truly necessary: In any modern conflict, i.e. WW1 to the present, "friendly-fire casualties" make up fully one-third of battlefield casualties.

Every battlefield commander knows full well that he and his soldiers will bear the full responsibility for those tragic deaths. Anyone who has worked his way up the ranks knows this from terrible personal experience.

This is also to the everlasting disgrace of Bush, Cheney, et. al.: Willfully ignorant of the realities of combat, they ginned up an excuse to go into war needlessly, and every single one of those combat casualties is their responsibility.