Ted Rall on Pat Tillman's 'friendly fire' death

http://www.rall.com/rants.html

...........snip.............

So much for the argument that Tillman died fighting for his country. Or for the bullshit cover story concocted by the military to justify awarding him a posthumous Silver Star. I wonder if the Pentagon will have the integrity to revoke it?

So, to recap: Tillman gave up $3.6 million to get killed by his fellow soldiers. I guess I do owe an apology after all, but not for calling him a sap: In my cartoon, I said Tillman got offed by the Afghan resistance. That part, as it turns out, wasn't true.

Bushie war apologists may email their apologies to MSNBC, which canceled my cartoons as the result of my cartoon. And prospective soldiers may want to take this opportunity to reconsider the wisdom of enlisting. It's bad enough to get killed by friendly fire; it's still worse to get killed by friendly fire while fighting an unjust, illegal and unjustifiable war.

This is good to know:

"30,000 Dead Iraqis

The psycho right bloggers, unwilling to acknowledge that information exists offline, keep asking where people like me come up with the figure that we killed at least 30,000 Iraqis during the war. The answer is: Bob Woodward. In his book "Plan of Attack," he quotes Bush Administration sources as saying that we killed that many Iraqis during the first few weeks of war. Obviously that figure has since risen. Since I like to keep my statistics on the conservative side, however, I use the official Pentagon figure of 30,000."

and i suspect it's at least 20 or 30,000, making it even steven in terms of revenge. for everone who died in 9-11, 3,000, we have killed 1,000. those are concrete numbers everyone can relate to. the revenge equation.

And that was before the "Mission Accomplished" stunt.

So now the GOP is saying DoD was lying? Or did 5000 come back from the dead?
The Professor

TV's talking heads shows is enough). But if this is true, it is amazing the WH repugs admit killing 30,000 PEOPLE (they are PEOPLE) like it is nothing, it is worth it so they can get the oil. CHRISTIANS ALL OF THEM. What does that say about real Christians? Why aren't real Christians up in arms against these criminals?

I keep hearing this. Could it be that it doesn't mean what you think it means?

--IMM

There is no telling how many Iraqi troops were entombed in underground bunkers and killed during the opening round of combat, but a safe estimate is probably in the 5,000 - 10,000 range. Additionally, the number of innocent civilians killed by our bomb and missile attacks throughout the country during that same period have to number in the 20,000 - 30,000 range. So, taking those estimates from the opening round of combat from the invasion until the FratBoy Fuhrer's bleated declaration of "mission accomplished", a total of 25,000 - 40,000 Iraqis died during the early days.

Since nobody is bothering to keep count of the Iraqi dead since Chimpy's bleat, common sense dictates that somewhere in the neighborhood of another 10,000 - 20,000 Iraqis have died.

Total to date? Approximately 35,000 - 60,000 Iraqis have died to satisfy the oil- and blood-lust of the NeoCons, all based on lies told to both the American people and the international community at large. How many Iraqis have been wounded and/or maimed for life is open to sad speculation. And by the way, close to 1,000 American troops have died in Iraq, with several thousand more that will never again be physically and/or mentally whole.

Ted's cartoon was right on the money. Tillman's death was a horrible waste and due to Bush's policies has made no one safer.

I wondered why the * administration didn't make a super big deal out of his death, playing up the "hero" bit and all that. Well, no wonder. How can you make a hero to promote your war, when your own side killed the hero.

I misread the post. Please delete.

they were going to use his death to really ratchet up the lynch mob mentality, but they were strangely silent.

Now we know why.

rather than just being cannon fodder in an eternal struggle to rid the world of terrorists through our own full-range of terrorist acts using the most sophisticated, costly, and lethal weapons imaginable. Hopefully Ted's apology will be accepted by any/all who deserve an apology. And the Bush war apologists can continue to shill for their little pre-emptive wars.

a genuinely patriotic effort.

A LOT of people still do not realize the truth about Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. A lot of people (Howard Dean for one) were for the war in Afghanistan, but against Iraq.

if he was killed by friendly fire or not. He was still partaking in an illegal war, and he is still dead.

was a war against AlQaida. I feel very sorry for him, his family, and this country.

in any case I can't read his mind, and he must have believed in something pretty strongly to give up a life of luxury for a very possible death. But Afganistan was not about terrorism, no more than Iraq - after all if it had been, why is the US now seriously considering allowing previous Taleban elements back into the government?

He was in Iraq first. The Army offered to let him out, but he said he signed a contract for three years,so they sent him to Afghanistan. He thought the other platoon was being attacked and went back to help them. He was apparently wrong and he got killed by friendly fire. Don't think this matters in the end, he still putting his life in harms way for his fellow soldiers. However, his sacrfice was no greater than the other 800ish(?) soldiers who have been killed.

my .02 after being up for 26 hours :crazy:

Iraq is an unjust war, but Afghanstan? I thought that's where the true terrorist are/were.

I like Ted, but he may be over zealous and a bit wrong.

Al Quaida had training camps in Afganistan, yes. It now has them across the Middle East. If Afganistan was about fighting terrorism, why was Osama allowed to get away so easily? Afganistan was a convinient precedent for Iraq as much as anything else.

there were and still are training madrassas in Pakistan - are we at war with them yet?

perhaps that $700 million dollars secretly diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq might have helped stabilize the situation for our soldiers in Afghanistan. Who knows....

And speaking of Woodward, he claimed the bu$h* cabal kept Congress "totally in the dark of this." Just thought I'd throw that little tidbit in.

odd that

Just like Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the Taliban were heavily supported by the US gov't to 'stabilize' the region for a big oil pipeline.

Only when the Taliban wouldn't go for the deal did they become bomb targets.

The US has a harsh way of firing employees. It kills them and their families and culture.

I call this 'Pink Slip Genocide.' Our troops are just delivering pink slips in the US corporate take-over of the planet.

where do you think the money comes from? Remember the Ag credits for Saddam? get serious, if they handed out food we wouldnt have famine as a weapon.

Ole' Ben Fritz seems to be defending Bush* in this "op-ed"....

The truth that Scheer is avoiding here, however, is that the current downturn began while Bill Clinton was still President. Furthermore, in the three months prior to July, Bush's economic policy had barely begun to take effect. There is no logical reason to hold the economic policy of Bush and Republicans in Congress responsible for a downturn that began before Bush's inauguration.

The broadsides don't stop there, though. Another one of Scheer's insights into Bush's foreign policy is that it "can more charitably be viewed as the confused performance of a struggling C student." In the same column, Scheer's conclusion about the Bush's administration's rejection of many foreign treaties is, again, that the President is dumb: "t is therefore unfair for critics to hold his proposals to too high a standard of logic and sophistication," he writes. "After all, this is George W. Bush we're talking about."

Scheer also plays on a common and again unsupported liberal trope: that Bush is merely a front man and Vice-President Cheney is running the country. "It's a sad measure of the president's need for adult supervision," Scheer wrote in July, "that Cheney has become the first vice president in modern U.S. history to seize control of the White House and render the president himself a public relations front man sent around the country to do photo ops." Once again, Scheer presents no evidence to support his attack, simply asserting that "veryone knows that Cheney, not Bush, runs the show."


I'm guessing you did an on-the-fly google and didn't bother reading the whole damn thing. Right?

Spinsanity is about as strictly non-partisan as it gets.

Nice try at discrediting the source, though.

Do you understand how the "smart sanctions" that Bush* imposed on Afghanistan and Iraq worked? Maybe you can ask your "non-partisan" buddies over at spininsanity. They seem to be experts on everything.

Maybe you could also provide me with a list of the NGO's that funded "afghan assistance". I'll show you mine if you show me yours....

http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2004_03_28_archive.html#108052985404469028
Spinsanity announces All the President's Spin (3/29)

We are proud to announce the upcoming release of our first book, All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth, which will be published in August by Touchstone/Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

All the President's Spin will provide the definitive non-partisan account of the Bush administration's unrelenting dishonesty about public policy. The book will demonstrate how the White House has broken new ground in using misleading sales tactics to promote its policies and manipulate the media.

Of course, the President is not the only dishonest national politician, but he is surely the most influential. Bush's tactics threaten to change the nature of the presidency and further corrupt American political debate. That is why, rather than attacking his policies or ideology, our book will examine the public relations strategy the Bush administration has used to advance that agenda - its origins, how it works, and why it has been so effective at spinning the media.

In short, this is not a partisan book, nor are we changing the nature of our analysis. Our commitment to non-partisanship is steadfast; we will continue to hold Democrats and liberals accountable on the website, in our Philadelphia Inquirer column and elsewhere. But being non-partisan does not require that everything we write be mechanically balanced between criticism of both sides. In the future, we may well write books or articles focusing exclusively on liberals or Democrats, who have become increasingly aggressive in their rhetoric in recent months. But after almost three years of critiquing spin, we believe that Bush's presidency is the most important subject for an in-depth analysis.

More information on the book will be forthcoming in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, you can pre-order All the President's Spin from Amazon.com. Thanks again for reading!

Yeah, they love Bush over there. So much that they publish a book about how he's a lying sack of shit.

Let's look around the website, see what we find:
http://www.spinsanity.org/topics/
Sure, there are some attacks on liberals - generally for particularly outrageous statements like Ted Rall's bullshit about the invasion of Afghanistan being all about oil.

But there are also all sorts of fun articles, like:
http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2003_11_23_archive.html#106965028380818766
A recent article by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard detailing the contents of a classified Defense Department memo has become the focal point in a debate about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A number of pundits have seized on the memo to suggest that, as Hayes puts it, "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans." Yet these sweeping conclusions vastly overstate the implications of the memo as reported in Hayes's article.
...
These sorts of claims both ignore questions about the reliability of the evidence contained in the memo, and unfairly generalize what the evidence suggests. In such a heated debate, commentators must note caveats about such information and fairly represent it to the public rather than making sweeping claims that distort the facts.

Attacking the claim that Saddam and bin Laden were buddies... those right-wing lunatics!

Here's another, entitled "Pro-war media critics deceive and distort"
http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2003_04_13_archive.html
Now that the U.S. has won the war in Iraq, some pro-war pundits and journalists are taking the opportunity to crow, pointing out examples of those who doubted the war effort would go smoothly and, in the process, often implying that the U.S. media has been broadly anti-war. But while some commentators did indeed make predictions that were proven wrong, one publication in particular, the Washington Times, has grossly overplayed its hand, making broad accusations of anti-war bias that, on close examination, prove to be deceptive.

An article from the Times last Thursday, for instance, led with the claim that "Baghdad's jubilation got the cold shoulder from some journalists yesterday," but proved little of the kind. Amongst the evidence is a comparison of two networks' coverage of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad: "While Fox News described the Baghdad scene as 'filled with hundreds of joyful people,' ABC's Peter Jennings' characterized the throng as 'a small crowd.'" The fact that Jennings didn't use an overtly positive adjective to describe the size of the crowd, which numbered a few hundred, is hardly evidence of a "cold shoulder," especially when one considers other statements from the same report that writer Jennifer Harper ignores. Jennings called the toppling "an extraordinary scene" and reporter Richard Engel said "it is just amazing now" and noted that "there was some very excited whistling coming from these crowds."
...

There they go again... attacking the conservative notion that the media was anti-war. Those clever Bush lovers!

Here's yet another example:
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030630.html
Screed: With Treason, Ann Coulter once again defines a new low in America's political debate

With her new book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, syndicated pundit Ann Coulter has driven the national discourse to a new low. No longer content to merely smear liberals and the media with sweeping generalizations and fraudulent evidence, she has now upped the ante, accusing the entire Democratic Party as well as liberals and leftists nationwide of treason, a crime of disloyalty against the United States. But, as in her syndicated columns (many of which are adapted in the book) and her previous book Slander: Liberal Lies Against the American Right, Coulter's case relies in large part on irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual errors and deceptions. Regardless of your opinions about Democrats, liberals or the left, her work should not be taken at face value.

Yeah, that sounds like a committed bunch of right-wingers to me. Thank you so much for saving me from my foolish ways.

What's your point? Ben thinks that it's all BS that Bush* caused the Recession and that it's all BS that Cheney runs the White House, and that it's all BS that Bush* is too stupid to handle foreign policy.

At issue is an op-ed that questions the information surrounding the money given to the "afghans" during may of 2001. (Colin Powell commends the Taliban for eliminating many of the poppy crops....)

You can search the UN archives regarding afghan aid. Bush* cut it by 60% from the previous year. The Bush* "smart sanctions" used the plight of the Afghan people as a tool to fuck over the Taliban. You can also look into the number of afghans that fled into Pakistan and Iran because of the Bush* "smart sanctions". If you have an itch you can also search for certain Oil Companies that were contributing to the "afghans" for security and infrastructure.

I've never "attacked" anyone on DU. I just have a problem with people that pull some bullshit quote off an op-ed piece written by someone who is pissed off at some "liberal" for his wild - crazy rants.

I realize that "facts" require a little more time and effort. I'd just suggest that in the future you do a little better homework before making a blanket statement like the one you originally made.

You haven't addressed the point in question: Did the Bush Administration "give $43 million to the Taliban."

Bush causing the recession: Bush was in office for three months - not long enough for his policies to make a significant difference. Now, there's a case to be made that he talked down the economy - the worst thing you can do as President is start saying the 'r' word in every speech.

Cheney runs the White House / Bush is too stupid to handle foreign policy: These are just ad hominem attacks - they are all well and good here at DU, where we're making fun of political opponents. But they aren't valid public policy debate points.

You can search the UN archives regarding afghan aid. Bush* cut it by 60% from the previous year. The Bush* "smart sanctions" used the plight of the Afghan people as a tool to fuck over the Taliban. You can also look into the number of afghans that fled into Pakistan and Iran because of the Bush* "smart sanctions". If you have an itch you can also search for certain Oil Companies that were contributing to the "afghans" for security and infrastructure.

What the hell are you talking about? Here's a hint - if you have something in the UN archives that I should read about afghan aid, post a link. I'm not about to defend your argument for you.

As it stands, your argument seems to lack consistency. I point out that the "Taliban giveaway" was not money to the government, but aid to starving Afghans (according to CNN in May 2001, http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/05/17/us.afghanistan.aid/index.html, $28 million was not money at all, but the equivalent amount of wheat). You respond by claiming that "smart sanctions" ended up hurting the Afghani people.

Perhaps you should learn how to write a persuasive argument. When you are trying to convince others that you are speaking correctly, you should cite the sources you use to come to your conclusion, rather than a derisive "Search the archives."

I've put my cards on the table. If you want to continue this conversation, how about you do the same?

if you think the Bushcorp admin sent money for food and called it a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs. if you think those programs arent abused to launder taxpayer treasury funds into the pockets of weapons manufacturers and dealers like the Bush family, friends and employers own and operate. As they have been caught doing in the past (with no wrist slapping). Dont be a sap.

I have sources which say that at least $28 million of the "money" was in fact in the form of surplus wheat. It wasn't any form of currency that could be embezzled, it was food.

How was giving away food a way of laundering money?

what sources? why dont you delineate your facts? Id love to hear about it.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/05/17/us.afghanistan.aid/index.html
The package includes $28 million worth of wheat from the U.S. Department of Agriculture

It would appear that it was our collective wheat.

Rall is a first class journalistic hemroid

I presume you can back that claim up. Rall may have made a mistake, or he may have been correct. I've yet to see any proof he was wrong, other than unsupported claims made by hate-filled neanderthals. So, pony up the goods, dude. I'm sure I'm not the only one who want to see it.

Click here for fair and balanced yet stunning, insulting, shocking, funny buttons, magnets and stickers

how about a link to prove Fucking anyone is not a racist. You don't fucking SLANDER SOMEONE unless the SLANDERER is the one with the evidence.

It's apparently Rall's contention that anybody who supports the racist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a racist, including Tillman. It's his opinion, not slander, and he's welcome to it.

you pretty much slander yourself.

He went to blow up a bunch of dirt farmers because they happened to be the same religion as the guys who blew up the WTC. At least that's our opinion.

He died for what he believed in. A lot of people (including this message board) talk a lot but can't back it up.

Is it a good thing that one so strongly believes a thing that they become a gullible killing machine for dishonest politicians? This is the crux of what Rall was getting at. We call to honor his bravery which he certainly seemed to have in abundance. But do we call him to task for not investigating further whether the war was justified.

Patriotism requires more than just rushing off and killing whoever your pResident tells you to. It requires doing what is best for your country. If that means spending some time investigating what it is doing wrong then that is what is required.

Bravery is good. Blind adherence is bad. In the end we really do not know what Tillman's reasons for going to war were. But heroes must be made during such times and he certainly fits the picture of one.

If he was fighting in Iraq, then maybe your argument would stant. But let's not forget that Tillman fought and died in Afghanistan fighting Al Qaeda. It was a good cause no matter who the President is. Al Qaeda was responsible for 911 (at least they carried it out), so the war against them was justified.

They lie, cheat, steal, and murder...or hadn't you noticed?