Speaking of Heroes

Kim Ponders — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:11:51 -0500

After lamenting in my last post about the lack of women heroes in the military, Ms. Jessica Lynch has gone on record along with the family of deceased Army soldier Pat Tillman, to denounce the military's propaganda machine and debunk what were perhaps the last myths hanging by a golden thread from the war in Iraq.

Today on Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald offers a scathing critique, based on the House panel investigating the spin machine behind the Tillman and Lynch incidents, of a thoroughly rotted government mirrored by an obsequious press:

"First, it has been well-known for several years that the U.S. military outright invented lies regarding literally every aspect of the Jessica Lynch story. And the Tillman family for years has been vocally complaining about the lies they were told by the Pentagon regarding the circumstances surrounding Pat Tillman's death...None of this is new. So why is Congress holding hearings to investigate these matters only now?

The answer, of course, is because the Republicans who controlled Congress for the last four years absolutely suppressed any attempt whatsoever to exert oversight on the administration...Our government literally ceased to function the way it is designed to, because Congressional Republicans deliberately abdicated their duty of checks on the executive and actively helped to conceal every improper and deceitful act."

What's worse, the media were eager dupes for the hero stories from their first moments:

"Over and over and over, our most influential American media outlets publish false stories based on government "sources" who purposely lie to them, and they never report on the real story -- who are the government sources lying to the American public while hiding behind shields of anonymity granted to them, and maintained by, our nation's "journalists"?"

And then there is the military itself, which is supposed to be a bastion of strength for the nation but which is in fact afraid of its own shadow, spooked by its sudden image in the glass.

Pat Tillman (and so many like him) died for what he hoped, or believed, or prayed was a noble cause, despite what the neo-Con military activists like Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich suggest about Tillman's aethiesm. (Kauzlarich is, I believe, the definition of someone afraid of his own shadow.) What Tillman depended on was the honesty and integrity of a military that had asked those things of him, and promised them in return. Tillman gave the Army his life, and in exchange, the Army gave him a lie, because, evidently, the service he gave was just not good enough. Mothers: warn your sons.

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Speaking of Heroes