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Pat Tillman's murder:
The terror war in a nutshell
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
August 20, 2007
Due to the diligence of the Tillman family, it
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has been publicly revealed that Pat Tillman died of three closely spaced shots
to the forehead at close range by an M16 rifle. That is all we know
and all we likely ever will know about the true circumstances of his
murder.
He wasn't killed by enemy fire as the military first announced, nor in a
"friendly fire" incident that served as the second cover up lie. It was simply
murder most foul. Someone, almost certainly someone Pat recognized or
knew, stood less than ten feet in front of him, took careful aim and
shot him dead.
My first reaction on hearing the first flimsy "enemy action" story
was to assume that this was an incident of fragging such as I was
accustomed to hearing about during the American War in Viet Nam. In
fragging incidents subordinates kill their leaders,
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usually in an
attempt to protect themselves from an overzealous officer whose lack
of judgement is a danger to the unit.
But now, hearing about the
autopsy results, I no longer believe this was the case. Fragging is
done from behind, by stealth.
From the little that can be discerned, Tillman's killing
was a deliberate murder, or more exactly, considering the most
likely motives for the crime, an assassination. It is reasonable to
assume that Tillman had come to be seen as politically unreliable due
to his mouthing off about how bad this phony war was -- a war that he
had volunteered for in a fit of patriotism. Unreliable people, like
unreliable puppet regimes, need to be gotten rid of. Killed.
Until the first
reports of his death I didn't know who Tillman was, nor, as someone
who totally ignores professional sports and TV, did I care. But
This war, more than any previous war by the U.S., is a secret war with a totally phony public face.
There are no intrepid reporters bringing us the raw images from the front.
Reality has become an entirely manufactured product, the result of massive investment and careful planning.
Or as an official spokesmen of the U.S. government put it, the war was a "product" being introduced to a gullible market.
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apparently a lot of people in the U.S. did know of him -- a well-
paid professional athlete
volunteering to fight in those heady days after the bombing of the
World Trade Center was a propaganda coup of major proportions to the
proponents of the terror war. It was reminiscent of the Elvis
Presley story from the Viet Nam debacle: young hero Achilles off to
fight the noble war against the enemies of freedom.
The Pat Tillman story sums up the terror war in a nutshell.
To start with, his story encapsulates the mood of a nation
that naïvely believed it had been attacked by foreign forces in
a most vile fashion. Another day of infamy, like Pearl Harbor, inspiring heedless patriotism ready to believe any wild story about ruthless
bearded fanatics with their eyes on our
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women and kids. Tillman's heroic
sacrifice of millions of sports dollars
and, more importantly,
his abandonment of the public lime light, implied acceptance of the
propaganda line being sold by the U.S. government. A propagandist's
wet dream.
Secondly, Tillman's choice of service in the Special Forces raised
images of John Wayne in the movie The Green Berets. Tillman
immediately became an iconic figure of military force banishing our
fears of the unknown dangers of the world. A constant barrage of
images of Osama bin Laden assaulted the public with a concrete idea
of who the enemy was, and that Afghanistan was where we were going to
go get him. Tillman's choices reflected the mood of a nation
narcotized by war propaganda. His choices exactly triangulated all
of the major themes in this war of smoke and mirrors and made them
feel substantial and real.
Thirdly, Tillman's reported disillusionment with the war was a tremendous
potential threat to the whole propaganda program. There have been
many victims amongst the unreliable in the course of this war.
Probably many will remain unknown, but the story of ambassador Wilson
and his wife, and the phony suicide of that poor man in England who
let the cat out of the bag about "sexing up" the intelligence in
support of the war, can serve as examples. If Tillman's going to
fight stirred up war fever, then his disillusionment -- were it to become
public -- would do a lot to cool that fever.
One of the encouraging things about our modern life, one of the few,
is that public opinion matters. The propaganda front therefore has
become more important than the battle front.
This war, more than any previous war by the U.S., is a secret war with a totally
phony public face. There are no intrepid reporters bringing us the
raw images from the front. Reality has become an entirely
manufactured product, the result of massive investment and careful
planning. Or as an official spokesmen of the U.S. government put it,
the war was a "product" being introduced to a gullible market.
But
an almost perfect propaganda product is not good enough, because there
is an actual reality hiding beneath it and little tears in the fabric
of lies can reveal the falseness of the whole cloth of deceit.
Diligent maintenance of this Potemkin village facade is a must.
Tillman's murder reveals the dedication of the depraved war
criminals who are perpetrating these deceptions to the art of
constructing the perfect crime. The tremendous power in the hands of
those who control the U.S. government seems to create an irresistible
urge on the part of this degenerate leadership to manufacture perfect
crimes. If you look at history since WWII it is possible to discern
a great trail of covert action in support of U.S. political and, most
importantly, transnational commercial goals, each one of which can be
seen as a perfect crime. Pat Tillman's murder is a small scale
version of this more grandiose theme.
The current leadership in the U.S. seems dominated by a part of a
lineage of covert operatives and secret warriors that sprang up
during WWII with the likes of Wild Bill Casey (operative in the
Office of Secret Services in WWII and later head of the CIA under
Reagan).
In the years after WWII the U.S. was seen as a knight in shinning armor by a world rescued
from Axis tyranny. No questions asked,
no pesky inconsistencies needing investigation.
Consequently, covert
operations ran amok and the project of U.S. world domination raced
ahead under the cover of a smiling Uncle Sam who was just there to
help. Alliances were formed with organized crime. Betrayals of
erstwhile allies in the fight with fascism, and nascent democratic
movements, occurred in rapid, dizzying succession. Greece, Viet Nam,
Iran, Indonesia, many countries of South and Central America were
victims of these covert schemes. The list is long and continues to
grow as facts seep out from under the blanket of lies that has
characterized the U.S. government's actions in the world. One false
story after another has been told, to cover up the real goal of military and
economic dominance.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union much of the actual need for
stealth, posturing and deception evaporated. The Project for a New
American Century became the Mein Kampf of a new imperial order. But
habit is hard to beat. False realities still need to be
manufactured, fig leaf like, for the consumption of mass opinion.
So, the Tillman murder has all the elements of the expanding post
WWII tragedy writ small, a schematic that reveals the true nature of
the beast:
• Exploitation of patriotism and fear of the alien other
on the part of a population so thoroughly propagandized as to believe
implicitly whatever official sources say.
• Confidence in elite covert
military means, symbolized most poignantly by John Kennedy's bright-eyed Special Forces units.
• Wars conducted on totally fabricated
pretexts and straw man arguments by demagoguery in the
service of giant corporations whose true aims remain concealed in a
fog of highly engineered propaganda, new pretenses following
punctured pretenses contrived in the wake of punctured pretense in a
drunken walk of surreal proportions.
• Mass murder of civilians,
symbolized in this case by the murder of the single individual,
Pat Tillman, covered up by flimsy lies about insurgents, or communist, or
"narco-terrorist."
It is all there, and more. To the inquiring eye
it reveals, finally, the ultimate parallel between Tillman's murder
and the aggressive U.S. government's imperialist program.
We will
never have any reasonable chance of knowing truthfully the whole
story of what happened to cause Tillman's murder, nor will we ever
have any reasonable chance of knowing the actual true story about the
trail of dead bodies and destroyed landscapes that litter the world
in the wake of U.S. imperial ambition.
© by the author.
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The tremendous power in the hands of those who control the U.S. government seems to create an irresistible urge on the part of this degenerate leadership to manufacture perfect crimes.
If you look at history since WWII it is possible to discern a great trail of covert action in support of U.S. political and, most importantly, transnational commercial goals, each one of which can be seen as a perfect crime.
Pat Tillman's murder is a small scale version of this more grandiose theme.
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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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