Parrot Cage

That Annoying Absence of Faith: The Pat Tillman Investigation Gets Even Stranger

Mike Fish at ESPN is doing some great follow-up on the investigation into Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan.  We've openly speculated about the possibility that Tillman was deliberately fragged due to his non-traditional political views and opposition to the war in Iraq.  The circumstances as presented by the Amy seem plausible enough, but the stench of coverup just grows fouler.

And then you get a taste for what kind of men were in command of Tillman's life and it just reinforces any suspicion that Tillman's death is far more murky than what we've been led to believe.  Tillman was an atheist, and so is his family.  This fact is being used as a convenient tool of obfuscation.  Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, the regiment Ranger executive officer in Afghanistan can barely contain his disgust for the Tillman family's lack of Christianity and it's difficult to imagine that his prejudice hasn't either tainted the investigation, or possibly contributed to Tillman's murder.

"But there [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, 'OK, it was an unfortunate accident.' And they let it go. So this is — I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."  

In a transcript of his interview with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones during a November 2004 investigation, Kauzlarich said he'd learned Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother and fellow Army Ranger who was a part of the battle the night Pat Tillman died, objected to the presence of a chaplain and the saying of prayers during a repatriation ceremony in Germany before his brother's body was returned to the United States.  

Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.  

In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."  

Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so.   There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know."  

Asked what might finally placate the family, Kauzlarich said, "You know what? I don't think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don't know. Maybe they want to see somebody's head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can't bring their son back."

These are the types of idiots running this investigation and, for that matter, running our military.  Never forget that faith is the shield of tyrants.

To even further complicate this investigation, all individuals associated with Tillman's death have been sworn to secrecy under a confidentiality agreement allegedly required of Rangers.  The Army has ensured that there can be no independent investigation into Pat Tillman's death.

So again, we raise the question: was Pat Tillman deliberately murdered?  If not, why did the Army lie about the circumstances surrounding his death?  Why did they destroy all physical evidence, including Tillman's extensive war diary?  Why did Lt. Col. Kauzlarich, among others, recommend that Tillman receive a Silver Star for getting killed by his own troops?  And why is Kauzlarich so annoyed that this atheist family won't just let it go, like any good Christian family would?  What does this motherfucker have to hide?

Rummy Unplugged

Yesterday, a former CIA agent put Donald Rumsfeld on the spot.  The arrogant sum'bitch stammered and lied his way around the issue, but Ray McGovern held tight, not letting the Secretary of Defense weasel his way out--you know, the way the press does.  Nobody in the press corp has come close to demanding these kinds of answers out of Rummy, or for that matter out of anyone in the administration.  With tens of thousands dead, a country in chaos, terrorism on the rise, and thousands of Americans dead or maimed, the architects behind this catastrophic clusterfuck need to be held accountable. 

We like how the first impulse of the crowd was to try to drag McGovern out of the room.  What's the difference between a Bushie and a brownshirt?

From Crooks & Liars: watch the video, read the transcript.

Rummy's behavior as an arrogant prick who doggedly drags America into never-ending wars reminds us of Kennedy's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who managed the invasion and destruction of Vietnam with similarly dismissive condescension.  Watch The Fog of War, by Errol Morris.  Some douchebags never learn, they just make excuses.

Another Hitchens Smackdown

Notoriously ill-reasoned Bush apologist Christopher Hitchens continues to defend discredited facts long after they've been dismissed by everyone else.  In the last two weeks he has concentrated his venom on Ambassador Joe Wilson who exposed the Iraq-Niger connection as nonsense.

Hitchens is insisting that, forged documents notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was desperately trying to purchase Uranium from Niger.  And he is attacking Wilson primarily for making a laughingstock of such suggestions.

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson rather impolitely puts a boot up Hitchens' ass.

Saddam's ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, made a trip to Niger to, as a literate person can understand from Wilson's account, encourage African statesmen to break the diplomatic sanctions against Iraq which, along with their connection to all other UN sanctions, were devastating the country.

Hitchens' alternate theory is that Zahawie had no other business in Africa but to purchase uranium for bomb-making since poor Niger is merely:

a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore.

For a while Hitchens was saying that the ultimate evidence of Saddam's WMDs lay in the garden bed of Iraqi engineer Mahdi Obeidi.  In his book The Bomb in My Garden (and soon to be a Johnny Depp-produced film) Obeidi tells of how he built a centrifuge prototype for Saddam in the 1980's, but buried it in his garden when UN inspections took force following the first Gulf War.  Components and blue prints for the centrifuge prototype were abandoned and forgotten since 1991; any sane person would see this story as ultimate evidence of Saddam's impotency, not his danger.  However, Hitchens has championed this book as the smoking gun in Saddam's quest for WMD.  Compare the centrifuge prototype to Iran's functioning centrifuges. Then ask yourself what Saddam could have possibly done with any uranium, had he actually been seeking it.  With only a prototype of an uranium enriching device buried in parts of a small garden, Saddam would have been better off mass-producing glow-in-the-dark Spiderman watches.

Of the many ridiculous claims Hitchens has made about Saddam's nuclear ambitions the fantastical Niger connection isn't even the most absurd.  Hitchens' claim that Saddam was attempting to buy nuclear ICBMs from North Korea "off the shelf" stands in a class all by itself.  Mind you, the "off the shelf" wording is what is most laughable.  That North Korea is even capable of producing nuclear weapons is a source of some debate.  The only people convinced of North Korea's bomb-making abilities are the same folk that assured us Saddam was days away from nuclear proliferation.  Even sillier still, North Korea would have to create some kind of delivery system for a nuclear device for it to be even practical.  North Korea's rocketry skills are commensurate to their skills at producing NBA stars. 

If Christopher Hitchens imagines that Kim Jung Il is stocking his shelves with nuclear ICBMs for sale, there's almost nothing he can't imagine.  Few are served when imagination is the crucial rationale in debates of war and conquest.

Anti-War Dust-Up at UC Santa Cruz

Military recruiters were unceremoniously driven from a job fair at UC Santa Cruz.  We've either participated in or been witness to many of these kind of incidents and know better than to trust msm accounts to get it right, so compare with indymedia accounts.

We actually happen to have a few insider takes on this event. 

• These Santa Cruz anti-war folk are serious motherfuckers.  They aren't cowed by accusations of being anti-patriotic and they will get in your face.  And where most would-be peaceniks balk at saying or doing anything remotely anti-military, or anything upsetting to the myth of the soldier saint, these Santa Cruz cats will tear it up.  In many ways, they embody the anti-American hippie stereotype which white-ringers love to hate and build much of their identity around.

• Also, one of our friends had a chance to chat with Captain William Griffin who was on the receiving end of the anti-recruitment furor.  Seems the guy has a rather, uh, progressive attitude about the whole incident.  He was slated to appear on many of the cable news shows.  We haven't heard what he said on the air, but privately he was delighted that there is some passion and conviction left in America's youth.

Naturally, this whole incident has been an answer to the prayers of unhinged mooniebots.  At last they have the America-hating hippie scum they've so wanted to attack--and just when they need them most.  They've been champing at the treason bit for too long, and Michael Moore was never quite incriminating enough on his own.  Truly, manna from heaven for fascists.

You Go to War with the Competence You Lack

It seems nearly every thread of this administration's incompetence unravels without consequence to the guilty.  Witness the new revelations that--surprise!--the inadequate armor which was given to soldiers serving in Iraq has cost many lives.

Oh, wouldn't it be nice if certain public officials were actually held responsible for the irresponsible execution of their jobs.  Yeah, elections were designed for that.  But that requires an informed and relatively morally-conscious voting public.  But what if Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the whole lot of evil scumbags could be sued by the soldiers for their willful stupidity?  If Bush is the Commander in Chief, why is he not subject to the same code of military conduct as his underlings?  Why couldn't the bastard be court-martialed for unnecessarily jeopardizing the lives of those he commands?

Old GB Shaw had it right:  Democracy ensures a government no better than you deserve.  That's why we say "Draft Republicans!"

We're Not Liars, Just Incompetent

The President's snippy speech on Veteran's Day dishonestly addressed questions about his honesty.

That the American people were misled into war is indisputable.  Distinguishing outright lies and fabrications from basic incompetency and sloppy management becomes a bit trickier.

Did the President know that his case for war was flimsy?  Probably not.  George Bush has staffed his administration with yes men and ideological zombies.  This President isn't a reader, he has no experience, education, training, aptitude, or even basic curiosity to know or learn about anything that he is tasked to make decisions about.  Instead, he has taken the Lazy Reagan approach to governance: hope that the people you've surrounded yourself with know how to do your job.

For those management types who obsess about 'management style', the Bush Administration should be a case study in 'hands off' failure--not failure of morale or productivity within the administrative structure, but failure of the actual enterprise he has been charged to manage.

As for the Bush administration's honesty, well, when you have to fib about your truthfulness, it doesn't really bolster your credibility any.  By telling us that the Congress had the same intelligence as he did, Bush is really saying more about himself than anyone else cares to hear.  The cronies that permeate the West Wing are the ones responsible for shaping the case for war and are the ones who chose which intelligence to give Congress.  Bush had access to the unedited story.  The problem is, he probably doesn't realize it.  He doesn't understand that the role of chief executive demands that you be made aware of everything, even that which you'd rather not hear.

Instead, our President ducks out of his homework and then mocks those that cheated off his test.  That isn't leadership, that's junior high.

Pat Tillman, More Than A Hero

Pat Tillman was more than a football player, more than the vaunted war hero.  We should all know his story by now, the pro football player who walked away from a multi-million dollar contract to join the military and fight terrorism abroad.  And then there's the story of how he bravely died in battle, and then the story of how he was actually killed by "friendly" fire.

Pat was a hometown guy, and his high school was one of our rivals.  Despite our displeasure with the Commander in Chief, we had enormous respect for someone who would put their country ahead of personal ambitions.  We certainly weren't alone, his sacrifice was quickly canonized by a country who could at least unite in celebrating the best of us.

Turns out Pat was even more complex than we knew, and because of that his sainthood may now be called into question.  The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that, amongst his many passions, Pat Tillman was a fan of Noam Chomsky and not a fan of the Iraq War. 

This may seem heretical to many, but it seems rather consistent for someone from our neck of the woods.  Silicon Valley is hardly a raging cauldron of leftism, but there are reasons why Pat's alma matter Leland High School is a shining jewel in the California school system.  Complexity and depth are, above all, Silicon Valley values.

Undoubtedly this new revelation will alter the course of the Pat Tillman legacy.  Will  Ann Coulter now revise her passionate ode to Pat's death when she learns that she actually would have hated him in life?  How will the massive spin machine react to this bombshell:

Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said  that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11  attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

Not only did we lose a powerful friend in the war on terrorism, we lost a possible ally in the mending of our country.

At Pat's funeral his brother gave a good indication that Tillman was not the simple warrior cliche so many wanted him to be:

"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's fucking dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead.''

Undoubtedly there will be those who suggest that Tillman's death was neither accidental nor friendly, that the Bush administration snuffed a potential Cindy Sheehan; but that would be an absurd charge.  If anything, Republicans are historically inept in their illegalities and clumsy in their execution.  They are neither that bright, nor that capable.  Republicans are only competent to assassinate character, and Pat Tillman's legacy could well be their next target.

To counter-phrase Ann Coulter, and to praise our Silicon brother:  There is not another region of the country--certainly nowhere in red state America--that could have produced a Pat Tillman.

Anti-War Rallying

This weekend saw the most significant anti-war demonstrations since the invasion of Iraq.  Perhaps 100,000 showed up in Washington while other co-demonstrations rallied 'round the country.  Us West Coasters represent, with pictures.

Much of this has to do with the galvanizing figure of Cindy Sheehan.  Although she has been the object of jihad from the white-ringer establishment and their propaganda arm Fox News, Cindy is the perfect face of American sacrifice for Republican wars.  She's much harder to dismiss than oily foreigners or bubble-headed celebrities.

Of course, in the wake of horrifying domestic needs, much of America is finally waking to the fact that the occupation of Iraq is an unmitigated disaster: 

from the lawlessness,
to the tyranny in Kafkaesque fashion,
to the incompetence,
to the resistance from clerics, ethnic rivals, and even hand-picked local officials,
to the endless lies,
and perhaps most importantly (to anyone who leaned Bush on security issues), the increasing realization that this war has made us less safe, not more.

The ever-saccharine MSM has to parade its ultimate non-bias in covering the minuscule pro-war rallies on equal footing.  Do military recruiters know to show up at those rallies?  Or do they know not to show up at those rallies?  Pro-war doesn't mean that you're willing to fight it.

Like many who have always opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we are uncomfortable with many of the organizing elements of the anti-war movement.  Because no establishment Democrat has the courage to confront Bush's war, the anti-war movement has grown out of much more radical fervor, and not all of it related to the war in Iraq.

The anti-war movement will continue to be a dilemma for many who wish to publicly express their displeasure over their country's proto-imperialist militarism, but who also believe in the Pottery Barn rule:  we broke it, we'll have to suck on it.  And equally bedevilling will be the involvement of those of us who don't despise Israel or think of terrorists as freedom fighters.

Where do we go from here?

Hitchens v. Galloway: The Quickening

We know, this obsession with Hitchens and Galloway needs to be curbed, but...

Last night the two sat at the table with Bill Maher and we dreaded that this might turn into a painful replay of their debate.  The Real Time producers were wise enough to place a mannered British woman between them:  Katty Kay of the BBC.

So it was an all-Brit cast, which sounds like a great idea, but when they started talking about our domestic woes (Katrina, Bush) the fact that none of them held a stake in these matters seemed to feed their tepid insights.

Undoubtedly, the booking of Hitchens and Galloway on the same stage was intended to provoke a brawl, but it never came.  Galloway was unusually polite and deferential, even as Hitchens tried, unsuccessfully, to invoke his formula of covering weak and unsupportable arguments with attacks on Galloway's character.  We know that Galloway is flawed, and certainly not the anti-war poster boy that we would choose, but last night his relaxed non-confrontational manner of shrugging off Hitchens did more to disarm Hitchens' guile than all the nasty shouting of their debate.  At one point Galloway begged to "talk about Iraq" rather than indulging Hitchens' obsession.

However, Hitchens was persistent enough in his goading of Galloway to allow Maher his comparison to a chick fight.

Hitchens repeated his dismissal of the John Hopkins study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which suggested that nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians were probably killed as a result of the US invasion.  This time Hitchens ratcheted up his denial by calling the study "junk science by a junk scientist."

Hitchens may still be clinging to Fred Kaplan's dubious critique of the Lancet article, or he might  be listening to other equally questionable denunciations.  Either way, Hitchens is deliberately lying about the study's credibility.  Tim Lambert, a professor unaffiliated with the Lancet article, has successfully rebutted attacks on the study--almost all of which come from non-scientists.  Of course, Hitchens can get away with suggesting that the study has been discredited because the MSM has largely ignored or avoided it.  Most Americans have never heard of it.

We'll have to do more study on this, but Hitchens has been excerpting his new book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, in stating that Jefferson engaged in a kind of war on terrorism against Muslim extremists.  His reference is to the famed "shores of Tripoli" which were stormed by freshly American Marines.  As Hitchens must know, these Barbary Coast wars were commenced to end tribute-paying, not to conduct a war on fanatical Islam.  The religious affiliation of pirates has never interfered with, let alone inspired, their piracy.  Will we have to read his book to properly debunk his revisionist motive, or can we simply blow off his premise as obvious and demonstrable bullshit?  We call bullshit.

Hitchens v. Galloway: addendum

Not to belabor this painful episode of the wrong-but-can't-admit-it versus the accidentally-occasionally-right, but we just caught the celebrity list of those who attended this gruesome event and noticed that Viggo Mortensen had a ringside seat.

Now, political celebrities are frequently nauseating--nobody wants to share a philosophy with Woody Harrelson--but Viggo has always been a thinking-man's hunk... errr, thinking-woman's hunk, and, in contrast to "gorgeous" George Galloway, offers a pleasing face to the anti-war movement.

Unless he was there to support Hitchens... then fuck him!

He has been hobnobbing with Cindy Sheehan recently, so it might be safe to welcome him as one of our own.  Let's just hope he doesn't let fly with a poorly-considered casual comment on the publicity junket.

And speaking of unhelpful celebrity... are we alone in thinking that bubble-headed Jane Fonda could be the worst possible thing to happen to the anti-war movement since... well, since George Galloway?  It seems as if Jane doesn't understand that the anti-war movement was successful in ending the war against Vietnam in spite of her idiocy, not because of it.  Anti-war means you don't take sides, Jane.  People of conscience don't "accidentally" find themselves strapping on a helmet and gushing atop heavy artillery.  Peace-makers don't genuflect to militarists, whatever their nationality.  Why are lefties still enamored with this twit?