OLEAN -- At various times during our nearly three-year-old war in Iraq, the Pentagon has been caught:
Most of these ill-advised ideas and downright outrages were quickly stopped, reversed or rectified after adverse publicity in the media.
Now, however, comes an affront to national logic I hadn't heard about during this government's recent adventures in the Middle East.
At a recent local town hall meeting arranged by the congressman for this area -- Rep. John R. "Randy" Kuhl Jr. -- the town supervisor of Allegany, N.Y., got up and offered a complaint.
The supervisor's son Zach -- a fine, patriotic young man I personally have met and conversed with about duty, honor and country -- recently enlisted in the Army Reserves, even when assured he would soon be deployed to Iraq. He received a $5,000 signing bonus.
One of the next things he received was notification he would have to spend about $2,000 of that for his own computer equipment. He was also told -- his father said -- that he should bring his own toilet paper with him when reporting for duty.
Congressman Kuhl -- as he often does during the 60 or so community meetings he has held in his eight-county Southern Tier district -- responded he was unaware of that federal policy and that he would "look into it." We'll be watching.
To the older American mind, at least, there is something basically and intrinsically wrong about the Bush administration's apparent policy of trying to fight this war in Iraq on the cheap.
In the past, in most of the 20th century at least, though there were outrages aplenty, the basic contract between the Armed Forces and the young men and women who were being asked to put their lives on the line in our defense was clearly understood.
It was this: You take the risk. In return, on behalf of a grateful nation, we'll supply the pay, the benefits, the weapons, the leadership, the training, the necessary equipment, post-service educational benefits and lifelong followup health cost.
Granted, an important part of this compact started to erode during the Clinton administration when the Pentagon, White House and Veterans Administration -- for political and economic reasons -- deliberately dithered for years in refusing to officially recognize about a fifth of the troops who returned from the first Gulf War were afflicted by mysterious, chronic and often debilitating symptoms of sickness that came to be known collectively as Gulf War Syndrome.
The epidemiological trail grew cold, by design, and it was almost a decade later when the Pentagon and VA finally came around and recognized -- concerning health benefits -- that the illnesses were real and reimbursable.
The new round of misguided policy attempts and penny-pinching idiocies is particularly galling when constant and critical internal audits indicate Pentagon contractors in Iraq, well-connected companies and individuals in the private sector, are cheating taxpayers out of billions of dollars -- and the Bush administration doesn't even blink.
Never mind whether we belong in Iraq and Afghanistan at all. That's another argument. Once committed, the young Americans who are sent there in harm's way should be supported and supplied to the fullest extent possible -- and not be called upon to support their own possible deaths out of their own shallow pockets.
As I write this, the confirmed U.S. death toll in Iraq has reached 2,300. What receives less publicity is the number of injured -- officially 16,653 as of last Sunday, according to the Department of Defense, which has been accused by critics of the war of grossly downplaying that number. (Another fatality list that receives little notice in the United States is the number of Iraqi police and military members who have succumbed in fighting the insurgents side-by-side with Americans: 4,250 as of Sunday.)
Another disturbing development in a prominent military death occurred last weekend. The Army said Saturday it will begin a criminal probe into the death in Afghanistan, almost two years ago, of former NFL star Pat Tillman, the rugged-looking patriot who walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals after 9/11 to join the Army Rangers.
When Tillman, 27, a member of the crack 75th Ranger Regiment, was killed 23 months ago during a firefight on a canyon road near the Pakistan border, the two initial Army followup investigations attributed his death to enemy fire. Because Tillman was the Army's unofficial poster boy and because questions and rumors kept leaking out of the Ranger units and into the media, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command conducted a third investigation. Three weeks after his death, Tillman was pronounced the victim of "friendly fire," the counter-intuitive term the military uses to describe when U.S. troops are killed by fellow U.S. troops accidentally.
Now, it turns out, Tillman's demise might not have been accidental.
A fourth look at his death after the "friendly fire" conclusion -- this one by the Pentagon's inspector general -- had concluded that officers in the 75th had destroyed critical records and contemporary statements from combat colleagues in a manner that could be described as "gross negligence."
Tillman's brother, also an Army Ranger, who was nearby in theater at the time of his sibling's shooting, was deliberately kept in the dark despite his questions, the IG held. The family smelled a rat and kept the pressure on.
Now, in yet a fifth probe of the patriot-athlete's killing, the Army Criminal Investigation Command will investigate possible charges of negligent homicide.
The Special Operations Command had concluded in a bit of bureaucratese that there was "no official reluctance to report the truth" -- a typical Pentagon obfuscation designed to indicate lies have been told, but by mistake or inadvertently. Riiiight. And the critical records and eyewitness accounts were destroyed by accident, too.
Tillman's mother, Mary, told the Washington Post, "The military has had every opportunity to do the right thing and they haven't. They knew all along that something was seriously wrong and they just wanted to cover it up."
From personal reporting experience, I know that her conclusion is not far-fetched. While still reporting in Washington in the late 1990s, during a time of relative peace, I discovered most military branches displayed a propensity to cover up suspicious deaths.
Many obvious or apparent murders were officially described as suicides, including members of the military who:
And on, and on, and on ... final acts that were so unbelievably dexterous they would have required the talents of a master contortionist or Houdini-like magician. The only persons who really tried to find out why the deaths occurred were the parents. They'd hire lawyers and private detectives to investigate the case. The military brass remained aloof and willing to accept the most preposterous explanations. None of the deceased were as prominent as Pat Tillman. Few of the surviving relatives received justice.
Some described me as cynical. Perhaps I was, but I'd describe my demeanor as curious and observing. The suspected coverup motive? To preserve chances of commanding officers for being promoted. If a homicide occurs on your base or your ship or to one of your charges -- especially during peacetime when the officer ranks tend to get top-heavy -- a murder in your midst is reason enough for a promotion board to croak your military career.
I don't have any idea why Pat Tillman might have been killed. But I'm certainly not ready to dismiss the possibility of homicide -- particularly in the middle of a bullets-are-flying scenario when such an occurrence would be relatively easy to mask.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 7 2006 |