Pat Tillman, the Pentagon, and Propaganda

After the 9/11 attacks, Pat Tillman quit the Arizona Cardinals football team and joined the Army. He eventually served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, reaching the rank of Specialist. When he was killed in April 2004, the Army told his family he was advancing in the teeth of enemy fire and died protecting his fellow Army Rangers. A splashy public memorial service hailed him as a hero who gave his life to save his comrades.

And it was all a lie.

Over the last four years, details have been slowly and painfully dragged out of the Pentagon about the real circumstances in which Tillman died. He was not killed by enemy fire at all, but by friendly fire in a chaotic encounter with his own troops. Indeed, the upper echelons of the military knew almost immediately what really happened. But rather than tell the truth about a sad fact of war, they instituted a cover-up, keeping the true facts of Tillman's death secret for as long as they could. They might have justified it at first as sparing a grieving family, but what they did next was unforgivable.

The Pentagon turned Tillman into an iconic propaganda figure - the square-jawed football hero who voluntarily gave up his career to save America from terrorists, and valiantly gave up his life to save his fellow soldiers from the same enemy. They even awarded him a posthumous Silver Star for "gallantry in action against an armed enemy," fully aware that there was no actual "armed enemy" anywhere nearby. Not content to make him into a recruiting poster, the Pentagon also used him to distract attention from the then-breaking Abu Ghraib scandal.

As the cover-up unraveled, the Pentagon looked worse and worse. Tillman's parents have never stopped fighting to learn the real truth, most recently on CBS' 60 Minutes. How was he killed? Why did the military cover up the details of his death? How far up the chain of command did the lies go? And why was the memory of their son sacrificed on the altar of the White House's relentless PR machine, corrupted into something he was not, all to make the military look good?

Four years of lies and evasions is far more than enough. Tillman's family, and all America, deserve to know the whole truth.