The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew

As of last night, four thousand and sixty three of our bravest soldiers have died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Each death has its own compelling story. Each brought incalculable grief for the soldier’s family and friends. And each is a tragic and irreplaceable loss for our country.

In today’s hearing we will continue our investigation of the misinformation surrounding the death of one of those soldiers … Corporal Pat Tillman.

We’re focused on Corporal Tillman’s case because the misinformation was so profound and because it persisted so long. And if that can happen to the most famous soldier serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, it leaves many families — and many of us — questioning the accuracy of information for many other casualties.

To date there have been seven investigations into Corporal Tillman’s case. Yesterday the Army announced sanctions against six officers. But important questions still remain unanswered.

Normally in investigations, the more we learn, the easier it is to understand what actually happened. The opposite is true with the Tillman case. As we learn more, everything that happened in 2004 from April 22, the day Pat Tillman died, to May 29, the day the Defense Department finally announced this was a friendly fire incident, makes less sense.

One possible explanation is that a series of counter-intuitive, illogical blunders unfolded accidentally and haphazardly. As the Army noted yesterday, “in seven investigations into this tragedy, not one has found evidence of a conspiracy by the Army to fabricate a hero, deceive the public, or mislead the Tillman Family about the circumstances of Cpl. Tillman’s death.”

The other possible explanation is that someone — or some group of officials — acted deliberately and repeatedly to conceal the truth. Kevin Tillman, who served with his brother in Afghanistan, expressed that view in our last hearing. He said:

April 2004 was turning into the deadliest month to date in the war in Iraq. … American commanders essentially surrendered Fallujah to members of Iraq resistance. … In the midst of this, the White House learned that Christian Parenti, Seymour Hersh, and other journalists were about to reveal a shocking scandal involving massive and systemic detainee abuse in a facility known as Abu Ghraib. … Revealing that Pat’s death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster during a month already swollen with political disasters and a brutal truth that the American public would undoubtedly find unacceptable. So the facts needed to be suppressed and alternative narrative had to be constructed. … This freshly manufactured narrative was then distributed to the American public and we believe the strategy had the intended effect. It shifted the focus from the grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib … to a great American who died a hero’s death.

Our Committee’s challenge is to determine which explanation is true.

At our last hearing, Specialist Bryan O’Neal testified. Specialist O’Neal was standing next to Corporal Tillman during the firefight. He knew immediately that this was a case of friendly fire and described what happened in an eyewitness statement he submitted up his chain of command immediately after Corporal Tillman’s death.

But Specialist O’Neal told us something else. After he submitted his statement, someone else rewrote it. This unnamed person made significant changes that transformed O’Neal’s account into an enemy attack.

We still don’t know who did that and why he did it. We just know that although everyone on the ground knew this was a case of friendly fire, the American people and the Tillman family were told that Corporal Tillman was killed by the enemy. And that doesn’t make any sense.

Our focus has been to look up the chain of command, but that has proved to be as confounding as figuring out what happened to Specialist O’Neal’s witness statement.

We have tried to find out what the White House knew about Corporal Tillman’s death. We know that in the days following the initial report, at least 97 White House officials sent and received hundreds of e-mails about Corporal Tillman’s death and how the White House and the President should respond.

There’s nothing sinister about this, and there’s nothing sinister in the e-mails we have reviewed. Corporal Tillman is a national hero. It makes sense that White House officials would be paying attention.

But what doesn’t make sense is that weeks later — in the days before and after the Defense Department announced that Corporal Tillman was actually killed by our own forces — there are no e-mails from any of these 97 White House officials about how Corporal Tillman really died.

The concealment of Corporal Tillman’s fratricide caused millions of Americans to question the integrity of our government, yet no one will tell us when and how the White House learned the truth.

Today we will be examining the actions of the senior leadership at the Department of Defense. Much of our focus will be on a “Personal For” message, also known as a “P4,” that Major General Stanley McChrystal sent on April 29, 2004. This P4 alerted his superiors that despite press reports that Corporal Tillman died fighting the enemy, it was “highly possible that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire.”

Three officers received this P4 report: Lt. General Kensinger, General Abizaid, and General Brown.

General Kensinger refused to appear here today. His attorney informed the Committee that General Kensinger would not testify voluntarily and, if issued a subpoena, would seek to evade service.

The Committee did issue a subpoena to General Kensinger earlier this week, but U.S. Marshals have been unable to locate or serve him. So we will not be able to ask General Kensinger what he did with the P4. We won’t be able to ask him why he didn’t notify the Tillman family about the friendly fire investigation. And we won’t be able to ask him why he did nothing to correct the record after he attended Corporal Tillman’s memorial service in early May and heard statements he knew were false.

Fortunately, we do have the other two recipients of the P4, General Abizaid and General Brown, here this morning. We will ask them what they did after they received General McChrystal’s message.

We are also grateful that General Myers and Secretary Rumsfeld, who rearranged his schedule so that he could be here, are testifying today.

Members of the Committee — like Americans across the nation — are looking for answers to simple questions: Who knew about the friendly fire attack? Why wasn’t the family told? Why did it take over a month for the leadership of the Defense Department to tell the public the truth?

Today, I hope, we will at last get answers to these questions and bring clarity to this investigation.

I commend the Army for its continued investigations into the Tillman case and Army Secretary Geren for the forthright approach he is taking. Progress has been made. But we still don’t know who was responsible for the false information and what roles, if any, the Defense Department and White House had in the deceptions.

We owe it to the Tillman family — and to the American people — to get the answers to these fundamental questions.