New Big Screen Documentary Exposes Pat Tillman Cover-Up

http://www.prisonplanet.com/new-big-screen-documentary-exposes-pat-tillman-cover-up.html
New Big Screen Documentary Exposes Pat Tillman Cover-Up
Evidence strongly indicates Tillman was murdered to prevent him from becoming an anti-war icon
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A new documentary set to hit the big screen this summer lifts the lid on the cover-up behind the death of Pat Tillman, the pro-football star who gave up a lucrative career to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq before preparing to return to the U.S. as an anti-war icon, at which point he was killed in a so-called friendly fire incident that more closely resembled a deliberate assassination.

Whether or not the documentary delves into the question of whether Tillman’s death was a targeted act of murder remains to be seen, but the evidence strongly indicates that Tillman was deliberately assassinated in order to prevent him from becoming an anti-war icon and derailing public support in the United States for the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tillman sacrificed the good life and a multi-million dollar football career in the belief that he was defending his country from outside enemies, and soon after 9/11 turned down a contract offer of $3.6 million over three years from the Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army.

It was during Tillman’s second deployment to Afghanistan, after previously serving in Iraq, that he was killed by what the U.S. military initially claimed was a Taliban ambush. It later emerged that the ambush story had been concocted by the Pentagon in an attempt to exploit Tillman’s death for pro-war propaganda. Subsequent investigations claimed that Tillman was killed as a result of a friendly fire accident.

However, in July 2007, the results of an Army medical report found that Tillman had been shot three times in the head with an M16 from a mere 10 yards away, clearly suggesting that the incident was a targeted assassination.

“Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime,” reported the Associated Press.

“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators. “The doctors – whose names were blacked out – said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.”

The report also states that “No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene – no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.”

The article also reveals that “Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.”

The doctor who autopsied Tillman’s body tried to pursue an investigation into the question of whether Tillman was murdered but was prevented from doing so by higher-ups at the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.

The motive for the murder would undoubtedly have been Tillman’s plans to return to the U.S. and a vocal critic of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.

The evidence points directly to it and the motivation is clear – Tillman abandoned a lucrative career in pro-football immediately after 9/11 because he felt a rampaging patriotic urge to defend his country, and became a poster child for the war on terror as a result. But when he discovered that the invasion of Iraq was based on a mountain of lies and deceit and had nothing to do with defending America, he became infuriated and was ready to return home to become an anti-war hero.

In September 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a friend of Tillman had set up a meeting with author and prominent war critic Noam Chomsky, which was scheduled to take place after Tillman’s return from Afghanistan. Chomsky confirmed that the meeting was arranged.

As far back as March 2003, immediately after the invasion of Iraq, Tillman famously told his comrade Spc. Russell Baer, “You know, this war is so fucking illegal,” and urged his entire platoon to vote against Bush in the 2004 election.

During a July 2007 appearance on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, four star General Wesley Clark stated that “the orders came from the very top” to cover-up the nature of Tillman’s death as he was a political symbol and his opposition to the war in Iraq would have rallied the population around supporting immediate withdrawal.

General David Petraeus tipped as Republican 2012 presidential candidate

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7482356/General-David-Petraeus-tipped-as-Republican-2012-presidential-candidate.html

General David Petraeus tipped as Republican 2012 presidential candidate
Speculation is mounting that Gen David Petraeus could run as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.
Alex Spillius in Washington
19 Mar 2010

The shrewd and articulate military commander, credited with turning around the Iraq war, will deliver a speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire next week, a traditional staging post in the state where the first presidential primaries are held every four years. Each of the last eight presidents has spoken at the college on their way to victory.

It will be the latest in a series of speaking engagements where the head of the US Central Command region, which covers the Middle East and Central Asia, has veered well into foreign policy discussion and often faced questions about his political ambition.

His stock response is the same as any potential aspirant at this early stage - a flat no. But for someone who professes to have no interest in running for president he has a way of talking about it even when he hasn't been asked directly.

In a recent appearance at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia Gen Petraeus turned a question about whether or not he planned to write a book upon retiring into an opportunity to deny he had political ambitions. On other occasions he has laughed off the notion of a White House bid in a slightly disingenuous manner.

Colleagues have begun to semi-seriously joke about the issue. At the annual Washington Alfalfa black tie dinner in late January Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, was heard to remark that Gen Petraeus couldn't make it because "he had an engagement in Iowa", where the first caucuses are held.

"Everybody who knows him or spends time with him has always thought he would have a chance, and he does nothing much to dissuade them," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and publisher of the Washington Note blog.

"His closest advisers don't deny the logic or the suggestion," added Mr Clemons, who recently attended a diplomatic Washington dinner party where Gen Petraeus wore business attire rather than uniform.

John Feehery, a well-connected Republican strategist, said: "If Petraeus were to run, he would be a serious contender. "His positions on certain issues are not well known, but his leadership ability is well known and respected by the American people."

Aged 57, Gen Petraeus was catapulted to fame when then President George W Bush sent him to Baghdad in early 2007 to carry out the "surge" strategy that helped rescue Iraq from all-out civil war.

He drew up the counter-insurgency strategy that helped transform that conflict and is now being deployed with some encouraging early signs in Afghanistan.

In what is so far considered a weak field to run against President Barack Obama he would bring cast-iron national security credibility. Of the Republican front-runners, Sarah Palin is regarded as too divisive and Mitt Romney has trouble connecting with voters outside of country clubs.

Registered as a Republican, the general has told friends that like many senior military figures he hasn't voted for several elections in a bid to preserve his independence.

But he has also described himself as a "Rockefeller Republican" – a pro-business, socially liberal New Englander – who would not fit in well with a party lurching to the Right under the influence of the new Tea Party movement.

Like Gen Colin Powell or Gen Wesley Clark, who flirted with and entered the political fray respectively, he may lack the stomach for non-stop campaigning and fund-raising.

Timing is also against him for 2012. For a serious bid, he would have to leave his command late this year while the Afghan war was still blazing and then try and run against his former boss, the president.

Some associates think 2016 is a safer bet, or the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the pinnacle of any military career. There is also conjecture that Mr Obama, who is an admirer, may line him up for a top job if he wins a second four-year term.

Obama’s patriotism tour

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/jul2008/obam-j02.shtml

Obama’s patriotism tour: the last refuge of a Democratic scoundrel
By Bill Van Auken
2 July 2008

Barely one month after sealing his victory in the primaries and with four months to go before the general election, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has embarked on a campaign swing that has the declared aim of proving his patriotism.

In practice, this exercise in self-abasement before the political right is aimed not at winning votes from the Republican Party, but rather at establishing Obama’s credentials with the constituency that the junior senator from Illinois values most: America’s corporate and financial elite.

Obama kicked off his patriotism tour—set to run through the July 4th holiday—with a speech entitled “The America We Love,” delivered in Independence, Missouri. The site was chosen not merely for the town’s name, but to establish Obama’s connection with its most famous son—Harry Truman, the Democratic president who ordered atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the 24 hours leading up to the speech, the presidential race was dominated by a media-generated furor over a remark made by Obama supporter Gen. Wesley Clark, in an interview on a Sunday television talk show.

Clark, appearing on CBS television’s “Face the Nation” responded to the moderator’s remark that Obama, unlike his Republican rival John McCain, had no military experience, had not “ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.” Clark made the rather obvious point that getting shot down in a fighter plane was not “a qualification for president.”

The howls of outrage from the McCain camp were answered by Obama’s immediate repudiation of Clark. The contrast between the cowardice of the Democrats and the implacable attitude of the Republicans during the 2004 presidential election, when they waged a campaign to defame Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry by claiming that he had lied about his Vietnam War record, could not have been starker.

Behind this bowing before the Republican attacks on Clark’s innocuous statement was the Democratic candidate’s determination to prove himself prepared to wage war and unconditionally embrace American militarism. This theme was incorporated into Obama’s speech, which referred to the Republican candidate by name, praising his military service and implicitly condemning once again Clark’s remark.

Obama’s speech, ostensibly a reflection upon patriotism and “American values” in the run-up to July 4th, was a thoroughly reactionary address, in which words were carefully chosen to identify with themes generally associated with the Republican right and, at key points, to deliver a kick in the teeth to sections of left-liberal Democrats who have deluded themselves and sought to generate illusions in others about the real political character of his campaign.

Obama began his speech with a ritualistic reference to the “men of Lexington and Concord ... our first patriots,” without a word to acknowledge that the democratic ideals embodied in the American Revolution and the guarantees of democratic rights written into the US Constitution have been subjected to a wholesale repudiation in practice by the current Republican administration in Washington.

Obama made not a single concrete reference to the policies of the Bush administration. He criticized neither the war of aggression against Iraq, nor the sweeping destruction of Constitutional rights, from the scrapping of habeas corpus, to the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” torture, and the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

Of course, the Democrats and Obama himself are fully complicit in this process. “How do we keep ourselves safe and secure while preserving our liberties?” the Democratic candidate asked rhetorically at one point in the speech. Obama offered no answer, but just the week before he announced his support for a bill legalizing the Bush administration’s domestic spying program, while offering blanket immunity to telecommunications companies that collaborated in the massive illegal warrantless wiretapping operation.

Supporting war and repudiating the 1960s

On the war, he cited the number of dead and wounded American troops and declared that their “sacrifice” called to mind “the commitments that bind us to our nation and to each other.” That this sacrifice was imposed upon the American people on the basis of lies and in pursuit of predatory interests bound up with the conquest of Iraqi oil, not a word.

Obama continued by ascribing the difficulties in today’s debates about patriotism to the “culture wars of the 1960s.” In doing so, he deliberately identified himself with the ideological shibboleths of the political right. He denounced the “so-called counter-culture of the Sixties,” identifying it with “burning flags” and “failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.”

These conceptions are taken directly from the canon of the right wing of the Republican Party. The conception that the “national shame” was the failure to “honor” Vietnam veterans—not the fact that they were sent to fight and die in a criminal colonial war to begin with—is a central theme within the protracted campaign by the US political establishment to expunge the “Vietnam syndrome” and condition the American people to accept new wars of aggression.

In a gratuitous swipe at MoveOn.org, the left-liberal pressure group that has largely supported Obama, the candidate went on to condemn the continued prevalence of “these old, threadbare arguments,” exemplified according to him, when “a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.”

The reference was to a MoveOn.org ad published in September 2007 under the headline “General Petraeus or General Betray US?” It questioned the credibility of congressional testimony by the senior US commander in Iraq in defense of the Bush administration’s military “surge.”

The ad became the subject of a ferocious campaign by the Republican right, which pushed through a Congressional resolution—with substantial Democratic support—denouncing it as an affront the US military.

The reality, to which the ad’s provocative headline referred, is that Petraeus was a political general who went out of his way to provide apologies for the Bush administration’s policies, which were opposed by other senior commanders. This is widely acknowledged within the military and well known to Obama, who now chooses to align himself with the Republicans and cast the general as a victim of intolerance by the antiwar left.

Returning to the theme of the military and patriotism, Obama hailed US troops who have fought in Vietnam and Iraq for having sacrificed “on behalf of a larger cause.” What that cause was, he doesn’t say. However he went on to add: “The call to sacrifice for the country’s greater good remains an imperative of citizenship. Sadly, in recent years, in the midst of war on two fronts, this call for service never came.”

Again, there is not a hint that these wars on “two fronts” were wars of aggression, based on lies. Instead, there is the implicit suggestion that young people should be dragooned into fighting them as part of the “sacrifice” that is “an imperative of citizenship.”

Significantly, the same day Obama delivered the speech in Independence, his senior national security advisor, Richard Danzig, a former navy secretary, told the media that there was little chance that a Democratic administration would cut the gargantuan Pentagon budget after taking control of the White House.

“It’s hard to see how we could spend less on the military in the near term,” Danzig told the Reuters news agency. The advisor stressed that Obama would heed the advice of US commanders in Iraq on the question of troop withdrawals, adding that he will seek a “more muscular US presence” in Afghanistan. Danzig also said that Obama would continue the US efforts to build a missile defense system.

”Faith-based” renewal

Obama followed up his speech in Missouri with a presentation in Zaneville, Ohio in which he vowed to substantially expand the program initiated by the Bush administration to provide federal funding for so-called “faith-based” social service groups. He thereby embraced an initiative that involves a frontal assault on the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, while endorsing the fraud that these church groups can deal with the massive social crisis gripping America.

“We know that faith and values can be a source of strength in our lives,” said Obama. “That’s what it’s been for me. And that’s what it is to many Americans. But it can also be something more. It can be the foundation of a new project of American renewal.”

Under conditions in which the American economy stands on the brink of a full-scale depression, with millions faced with the loss of jobs and homes as well as the steady erosion of real incomes by soaring gas and food prices, the conception of a religion-based “project of American renewal” is as ludicrous as it is reactionary.

Obama’s lurch to the right, after winning a primary campaign by posturing as an advocate of change and an opponent of the Iraq war, has drawn widespread comment.

“I’ve been struck by the speed and decisiveness of his move to the center,” Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council, said approvingly.

In a June 28 article, the Los Angeles Times noted Obama’s “emphasizing centrist - even conservative - positions on hot button issues,” pointing to his support for the domestic spying legislation, his assertion that states should be allowed to execute child rapists and his backing for the US Supreme Court’s striking down of the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. “The changes carry some risk that Obama will diminish the image he has sought to build as a new type of leader who will change how Washington conducts business,” the paper warned.

The positions being taken by Obama are not some clever vote-winning ploy. What you see is what you get. He is a thoroughly corrupt and reactionary politician, who has clawed his way up through the political cesspool known as the Chicago Democratic Party machine. He is prepared to do anything to succeed and whatever is required to uphold the interests of the ruling elite that both political parties serve.

For a layer of so-called lefts oriented to the Democratic Party, none of this will make a difference. They will only work harder at trying to convince people that Obama is merely being pressured from the right and can be pushed back by pressure from the left.

This standpoint is most clearly expressed by the Nation magazine, which recently commented on the controversy provoked by Obama’s selection of a right-wing economic advisor.

“Now Obama has stumbled into embarrassing questions about his commitment to that message of change,” it said in a June 19 editorial. “It wouldn’t be the first time a Democratic presidential candidate talked about sweeping change, won over the party faithful and ordinary voters, and then abandoned them to powerful interests. But we believe Obama is better than that...”

The Nation peddles the crassest illusions in Obama and through him, in the Democratic Party and the profit system it defends. But this task becomes more and more difficult as Obama moves sharply to the right, even while the deepening economic and social crisis are creating the conditions for a broad shift to the left among American youth, students and working people.

The political evolution of the Obama campaign is the clearest confirmation that the struggle against war and social reaction can be advanced only through a definitive break with the Democrats and the building of a new independent party of the working class, based on a socialist program.

CAMPAIGN SLOG 371 Days to Go!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/30/AR2007103002049_pf.html

CAMPAIGN SLOG 371 Days to Go!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007; C01

For you state officials still wrangling over the dates of your primaries, lay down your swords. The presidential tickets already have been decided, and not by the mainstream media:

Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party presidential nominee, with retired Gen. Wesley Clark as her running mate. They will oppose Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee in the general election.

Says? A poll of 355 "statistically representative" witches conducted by the New York Center for the Strange, which was established in the early '70s, associate director Lewis Scott said yesterday as a way to "upgrade the perception of witches."

"Witchcraft is a legitimate religion," Scott says. "Why should it be maligned any more than any other religion?"

Or denigrated below your garden-variety polling operation? After all, the witches accurately called the 2000 presidential election, "narrowly," for President Bush.

-- Sridhar Pappu