DailyKos: Did Bush order Pat Tillman whacked?

Pat Tillman

WASHINGTON – The highly trafficked "progressive" website DailyKos, which boasts contributors including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is suggesting football star Pat Tillman was murdered in Afghanistan on orders from the White House.

The theory behind the conspiracy? "It was well-known he (Tillman) was against the war in Iraq," explains the DailyKos diarist Dburn.

The blog references an appearance by General Wesley Clark on MSNBC's "Keith Olbermann's Countdown" discussing the latest developments in the story of the athlete killed in Afghanistan, presumably by friendly fire from within his Army Ranger unit.

"Wesley Clark was on and believes the orders came from the very top as Tillman was a political symbol," explains the blog. "No indication if orders were to murder him, but at least to cover it up. I'm not speculating at this point. But I saw in another diary where they claimed executive privilege in the Tillman case. It's starting to look beyond bad."

Clark, however, never even remotely suggested the possibility of any high-level conspiracy to kill Tillman. In fact, he was questioning where, in the chain of command, was the decision made to cover up the truth about what happened to Tillman.

"The evidence of some problems (in the Tillman case) is very, very clear," he told Olbermann. "Mary Tillman and the Tillman family have been incredibly courageous in pursuing the truth in this. And the truth is not yet out. If there is even a hint that there was something like a homicide or a murder in this case, it should have been fully investigated and proved or disproved. And we don't really know how far up -- was it the secretary of defense's office? Was it the White House? Where did the idea that you shouldn't give any indication of what happened to Tillman -- just go ahead and go through with the burial ceremony, give him the Silver Star, where did that -- where was that idea blessed? You can be sure that that idea did not originate or stop at the two- or three-star level. That was -- someone approved that all the way to the top because Pat Tillman was a political symbol used by the administration when it suited their purposes."

On such fragile "evidence" is a larger foundation of conspiracy developing on other antiwar websites. Following up the DailyKos report, PrisonPlanet.com, a website of radio talk host Alex Jones, concludes: "New Evidence Clearly Indicates Pat Tillman Was Executed."

"Astounding new details surrounding the death of Pat Tillman clearly indicate that top brass decided to execute the former pro football star in cold blood to prevent him from returning home and becoming an anti-war icon," claims the report.

The article cites the DailyKos report as the basis for this conclusion: "According to DailyKos, Wesley Clark appeared on 'Keith Olbermann's Countdown' last night and stated that 'the orders came from the very top' to murder Tillman as he was a political symbol and his opposition to the war in Iraq would have rallied the population around supporting immediate withdrawal."

Of course, that was a misrepresentation of what DailyKos published, which, in turn, was a distortion of what Clark said on MSNBC.

"The notion that the U.S. government gave orders for Army top brass to execute Pat Tillman in cold blood is the most damaging indictment of the Iraq war since it began, trumping the lies about weapons of mass destruction tenfold, but if the establishment media continue to soft-pedal and steam-valve one of the biggest stories of the century its impact will be completely diluted," continued the PrisonPlanet report. "It is up to us to make this story go viral because the implications are so dire that they could act as the final death knell for the blood-soaked and illegal occupation of Iraq and become the clarion call to bring our troops home."

DailyKos is the 2002 creation of Markos Moulitsas, nicknamed Kos, who explains the site was a response to "those dark days when an oppressive and war-crazed administration suppressed all dissent as unpatriotic and treasonous."

"DailyKos has grown in those five years to the premier political community in the United States, with traffic of about 600,000 daily visits," boasts the site. "Among luminaries posting diaries on the site are President Jimmy Carter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and dozens of other senators, congressmen, and governors."

The troubling speculation over the Tillman cover-up came after the Associated Press reported U.S. Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Tillman's head and had tried to get authorities to investigate whether the late pro footballer's death amounted to a crime.

The Pentagon has been under heat for lying about the circumstances of Tillman's death from the beginning. The military initially told the public and the Tillman family he had been killed by enemy fire. Only weeks later did the Pentagon admit he was gunned down by fellow Rangers in what has been characterized as a battlefield accident.