WASHINGTON, 3 August 2007 — Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and three retired top generals all delivered the same message on Capitol Hill Wednesday: The military never tried to cover up the fact that Army Ranger Cpl. Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire instead of by an enemy in Afghanistan in 2004.
Testifying before a House panel, they blamed army officials for the delay in notifying Tillman’s family about the cause of death. They also apologized over the “screw-ups” in how the military badly mishandled the case.
Rumsfeld, in his first appearance in Congress since President Bush replaced him with Robert Gates in December last year, said he could not recall exactly when he first learned that Tillman’s death in Afghanistan in April 2004 resulted from gunfire by his own troops.
This prompted a sarcastic Dana Milbank in yesterday’s Washington Post to write: “...Rumsfeld displayed an alarming decline in his mental faculties and couldn’t remember a thing about the incident.”
During four hours of questioning by a House committee, Rumsfeld and former generals expressed regret at the Pentagon’s five-week delay in telling the truth about how Tillman died.
The witnesses, among the very highest-ranking military officers at the time, said they could not have done anything differently to prevent the mistakes that kept the truth from Tillman’s family and the public.
Retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, who headed Central Command, was blunt: “It’s very difficult to come to grips with how we screwed this thing up, but we screwed this up.”
Tilman’s death attracted worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the army after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I feel terrible that it was handled in a way that was unsatisfactory, and that caused a great deal of heartbreak for the Tillman family” Rumsfeld said, as members of the family looked on from the back row of the hearing room. He was jeered by protesters denouncing him as a “war criminal,” but he ignored them.
Rumsfeld insisted that despite his intense interest in Tillman when the football star joined the army in 2002, he did not know how Tillman was killed until about May 20, after it was common knowledge among many generals.
After Tillman enlisted, Rumsfeld wrote him a personal note, praising him for “the proud and patriotic thing you are doing,” and he sent a memo to an army official describing Tillman as “world-class — we might want to keep our eye on him.”
Yet despite this intense interest, Rumself could not remember. “I don’t recall when I was told and I don’t recall who told me,” said Rumsfeld.
“No fewer than 82 times during the hearing, Rumsfeld and his former military colleagues were heard to utter ‘I can’t recall,’ ‘I don’t remember,’ ‘I don’t know’ or a variation of these,” wrote Milbank.
But when Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, a presidential candidate, suggested Rumsfeld was part of a cover-up, the former secretary shot back: “I know that I would not engage in a cover-up. No one in the White House suggested such a thing to me. I know that the gentlemen sitting next to me are men of enormous integrity and would not participate in something like that,” he said, gesturing toward Abizaid, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers and Gen. Bryan Brown.
After the hearing, Tillman’s mother, Mary Tillman, said she still believes top officials tried to cover up the truth about the death of her son.
“They said nothing, nothing to improve their credibility,” she said. “Rumsfeld’s very savvy and he sounds good, but I’m very unhappy with what I heard. It’s obvious they knew more than they will say.”
Tillman’s family, and some members of Congress, have accused top officials of using his heroism and celebrity status to distract the public from a worsening war in Iraq.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is examining how and when officials learned about the nature of Tillman’s death, in part because members of Congress have been unsatisfied with the military’s account.
The Pentagon already has conducted two separate investigations, and disciplined several officers. But both investigations concluded Tillman’s death was an accident, not intentional, and that there was no evidence either the military or the Bush administration intentionally covered up the nature of the death.
Waxman said the committee would continue to pursue its investigation because few individuals were taking responsibility for the case.
