Three Snipers executed Pat Tillman!?!?!?

Was Pat Tillman Murdered by an American Sharpshooter to Shut Him up?

By Richard Clark

Was Pat Tillman assassinated to prevent him from coming home to expose the fact that our troops have been ordered to guard, and even help produce and store the opium of Afghan warlords? Was it also because he had been corresponding with Noam Chomsky and was planning on returning to the US to help reinvigorate the anti-war movement?

Here's what Pat Tillman knew about and wanted to talk about to the US media:

A Marine commander pretends that the Afghan poppy growers will soon be growing vegetables, and Geraldo Rivera participates in the ruse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_gOaPeSCME

Report from the Daily Mail in London:

"Is it coincidence that after more than three years it has been discovered that there were never-before-mentioned US snipers in the Ranger group following Tillman's? Could there have been a secret sniper on a mission to Afghanistan to assassinate the Army's poster boy?

Or perhaps three assassins, because as a general rule snipers fire in single shots, from specially tuned rifles, rather than in bursts of three.

Could the likelihood that Tillman (who had been corresponding with Noam Chomsky) was going to become a voice for the anti-war movement be why his journal, which he'd kept since age 16, went missing? It disappeared, along with most of his possessions, two days after he died.

"It's time to really ask who ordered the assassination of Pat Tillman," wrote blogger Josh Swiller on The Huffington Post, a mainstream website.

First there were tales of Tillman having a personal altercation with another member of his squad, and then there were the stories of Tillman demanding to know why all the poppy fields were so huge, growing so well, and "so well protected.'

What gives it away to me was the constant waffling of "the truth" and the final accounting that Tillman had been killed with three M16 .223 rounds to his forehead fired at close range. Tillman and his murderer must have looked each other in the eyes!

I think Tillman had been asking too many questions and wanted to know why we were doing nothing (except protecting) the many vast fields planted with opium poppies in Afghanistan. And he got murdered for it. The US Army and other organizations continue to cover up the real story behind Ranger Pat Tillman's murder."

But could the CIA really stoop to the level of arranging for U.S. Marines to help protect opium poppy fields? Here's your answer, including photographs:

US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan ...May 21, 2010 ... An Afghani farmer stands in the middle of his poppy field in Delaram, Afghanistan, watching U.S. Marines from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. Nice to know our military is protecting something important.

What if Army poster boy Tillman were to have returned home and spilled this story to the mainstream media? What would that have done to Army recruiting and the war effort in Afghanistan?

Also, consider, this report from the New York Times:

"The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city -- the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. "He's our landlord," a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai's role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article."

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.

By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN Published: October 27, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country.s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A..s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai.s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America.s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America.s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A..s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

"If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves," said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not receive payments from the C.I.A.

The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city -- the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban.s founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. "He.s our landlord," a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai.s role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

"No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations," said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai.s role in the drug trade were not conclusive.

"There.s no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai.s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court," said one American official familiar with the intelligence. "And you can.t ignore what the Afghan government has done for American counterterrorism efforts."

At the start of the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban has become resurgent and the war has intensified, Americans have increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial to turning back the Taliban.s advances.

Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai.s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.

These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it," a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.

"If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it.s probably a duck," the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. "Our assumption is that he.s benefiting from the drug trade."

American officials say that Afghanistan.s opium trade, the largest in the world, directly threatens the stability of the Afghan state, by providing a large percentage of the money the Taliban needs for its operations, and also by corrupting Afghan public officials to help the trade flourish.

The Obama administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the drug lords who are believed to permeate the highest levels of President Karzai.s administration. They have pressed him to move his brother out of southern Afghanistan, but he has so far refused to do so.

Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother.s re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations -- existing only on paper -- that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots.

"The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone," General Flynn said.

In the interview in which he denied a role in the drug trade or taking money from the C.I.A., Ahmed Wali Karzai said he received regular payments from his brother, the president, for "expenses," but said he did not know where the money came from. He has, among other things, introduced Americans to insurgents considering changing sides. And he has given the Americans intelligence, he said. But he said he was not compensated for that assistance.

"I don.t know anyone under the name of the C.I.A.," Mr. Karzai said. "I have never received any money from any organization. I help, definitely. I help other Americans wherever I can. This is my duty as an Afghan."

Mr. Karzai acknowledged that the C.I.A. and Special Operations troops stayed at Mullah Omar.s old compound. And he acknowledged that the Kandahar Strike Force was based there. But he said he had no involvement with them.

A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said.

"Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade," he said. "If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn.t live in Afghanistan."

The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A..s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar.s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Qati.s death remain shrouded in mystery. It is unclear, for instance, if any agency operatives were present -- but officials say the firefight broke out when Mr. Qati tried to block the strike force from freeing the brother of a task force member who was being held in custody.

"Matiullah was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr. Karzai said in the interview.

Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action against Mr. Karzai -- or even begin a serious investigation of the allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune from similar scrutiny.

For years, first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have said that the Taliban benefits from the drug trade, and the United States military has recently expanded its target list to include drug traffickers with ties to the insurgency. The military has generated a list of 50 top drug traffickers tied to the Taliban who can now be killed or captured.

Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai.s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai.s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.

The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.

But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. "This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice," the former official said.

Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.

In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.

Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai.s arrest.

================

Fallen hero? Pat Tillman died on the border of Afghanistan in April 2004

He was the pin-up boy of Bush's War on Terror. But the story of Pat Tillman's heroic death soon started to unravel. Today comes the most astonishing claim of all - that he was assassinated by his own side

Pat Tillman died a hero's death. At least, that's what America was told when this former football star and steel-jawed poster boy for the War on Terror, returned home in a box.

Here was a soldier who had paid the ultimate price for defending his fellow Army Rangers from an enemy ambush in the badlands of Afghanistan.

President Bush awarded him a posthumous Silver Star and made speeches in his honour.

Such was the mood of public mourning that his funeral service was broadcast on national television. In death, he was promoted to Corporal.

More than ever, the huge, slab-sided face below the crisply trimmed beret became the face of American patriotism.

But that was never the true story. One month after the fateful day in April 2004, when the 27-year-old died in a ravine on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden hid with Al-Qaeda, it was officially acknowledged that Tillman had not been killed by the Taliban at all.

Instead, he had been cut down by his own side, a victim of "friendly fire".

This was a revelation that triggered outrage. Spearheaded by Tillman's devastated mother Mary and father Pat "senior", a swelling tide of protesters demanded to know whether the Pentagon and the White House had deliberately played Tillman's death for propaganda value to boost support for the war. Plainly there were lies and cover-ups. Who knew what and when?

Now comes a new and even darker possibility. A growing body of evidence suggests that Tillman died neither at the hands of his nation's enemy nor in the tragic, accidental confusion of "friendly fire"; rather he was shot with three bullets in tight formation in the forehead at very close range.

If so, this is evidence of murder. Only now are the original battlefield reports emerging and they clearly suggest that his death was not a mistake, just as his mother - who has inevitably been trying to make sense of the inconsistent reports surrounding the loss of her son - has long suggested.

But could Pat Tillman really have been assassinated? And if so, why?

The dark shadow of "black ops" has fallen over the Tillman story, and it reaches all the way to the White House. Conspiracy theories are multiplying.

Preposterous though it may seem, there is a growing view that Pat Tillman was targeted by American special forces because he was about to become an embarrassment.

New evidence shows that he was turning out to be a very troubled "hero", a poster boy for the Army and the War on Terror who may have been about to speak out against the war he had come to symbolise.

Letters home and memories of those who knew him in Iraq suggest that after his initial enthusiasm, he had decided that Iraq was not just a quagmire but an "illegal" war.

Tillman had been heard arguing bitterly against the Iraq war and urging his fellow soldiers to vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

He had also been using his celebrity to contact the best-selling anti-war intellectual Noam Chomsky, and they were due to meet as soon as Tillman returned from Afghanistan.

Astonishingly, long-hidden details of his death support the murder theory: medical evidence never did match up with the scenario of friendly fire; those three bullets from an M16 combat rifle could not have been fired from farther than ten yards; there were special forces snipers in the group immediately behind Tillman's platoon.

"The nation has been deceived," says Mary Tillman. "It's now about justice for Pat and justice for the other soldiers."

President Bush awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star and made speeches in his honour

After three years of grief and anger - three years during which the national mood has changed from gung-ho support to rejection of the Bush wars and an atmosphere of dark suspicion over every White House motive - questions over the Tillman story are now convulsing America.

Just this week, the Army produced its seventh report into the affair to try to wipe away the stain of Pat Tillman's death.

There is no mention of assassination: the report adheres strictly to the friendly fire line.

But it apportions blame for the initial confusion over how Tillman died - enabling the White House and Pentagon to portray him as an all-American hero - on Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, who was in charge of the special forces in Afghanistan that included Tillman's Rangers.

According to the report, the General had failed to notify both the Tillman family and senior officials of inquiries into the possibility of friendly fire.

He then lied to two sets of investigators about the stage at which he knew that American bullets had killed him. This was a "failure of leadership".

The report insists there was no cover-up and that the death was a battlefield accident, followed by a misunderstanding.

Kensinger faces post-retirement demotion by one star and a cut in his pension from $9,500 a month to $8,500.

In Washington, Army Secretary Pete Geren unveiled the report, saying: "General Kensinger was the captain of that ship and his ship ran aground."

He added that he expected this report to be the last.

There is little chance of that. Mary Tillman, who has long suggested her son was deliberately killed by his comrades, said the report was a farce - "a complete donkey show".

And Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, added: "We don't know the full story about the way the Pentagon and (the White House) managed this tragedy.

"In my view, the Army should reconsider today's announcement and move forward with harsher punishment."

Only a day after the Army report, the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform convened an inquiry titled The Tillman Fratricide: What The Leadership Of The Defence Department Knew.

Chaired by another Californian Democrat with an eye on next year's elections, Henry Waxman, it is calling a slew of top brass and key Pentagon officials to the witness stand.

These include former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was sacked by Bush when the Iraq war turned sour for the voters.

"How high up did this go?" asks Waxman. In other words, did Bush ignore the truth on Tillman to use him for votes?

Or did Pentagon officials, White House staff or election strategists keep the truth from him?

The answer to that might be momentous. But this has all been pushed aside by the revelations prised from records by national news agency the Associated Press (AP).

Using the Freedom of Information Act - American law since the Watergate scandal - they went to court in San Francisco and sued for the right to look at the Pentagon records on the Tillman affair.

They were rewarded with 2,300 pages of documents, and what they contained raised extraordinary inconsistencies when put alongside the official versions of events.

The first mystery surrounds the nature of the wounds he sustained.

"The medical evidence did not match-up with the scenario as described," a doctor who examined Tillman's body told the first group of Army investigators.

Several doctors, their names blacked out in the reports, said that the bullets were so close together that Tillman must have been shot by an M16 combat rifle - a highpowered repeat machine gun - fired from no more than ten yards.

But soldiers have said their experience with an M16 on a three-shot burst suggests the killer was even closer.

To put three rounds into a man's forehead, they would need to be no more than ten feet away.

The Army doctors told the investigators that these wounds suggested murder and urged them to launch a criminal investigation.

The documents record that another doctor who conducted the Tillman autopsy was similarly so suspicious that he told investigators he had taken the unusual step of contacting the Human Resources Command which deals with personnel matters. He was rebuffed.

He then contacted an officer in the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) to suggest he open a criminal case.

"He said he talked to his higher headquarters and they had said 'no'," the doctor testified.

The newly uncovered papers then reveal, however, that as the controversy grew, the Pentagon did go back to check on the possibility of a fratricidal murder.

There is a record of investigators talking to then-Cpt. Richard Scott, who was in charge of the first, local army review.

"Have you, at any time since this incident on April 22, 2004, ever received any information or even rumour that Cpl Tillman was killed by anyone within his own unit intentionally?" they asked.

Scott replied he was sure the killing was accidental, though he must have been aware of the rumours that Tillman had been murdered.

Was Tillman disliked? Was anyone jealous of his celebrity? Was he - considered arrogant? His brothersinarms all insisted that Tillman was admired, respected and liked.

But there are more bombshells from the pages released to AP.

First, there was no evidence of any incoming fire from the enemy, and no sign of damage to any man or equipment from enemy fire.

Yet, the official story has always been that the tragedy started with the breakdown of a personnel carrier as Tillman's unit went into the ravine on an early evening seek-anddestroy patrol.

Tillman and his squad were ordered to continue on foot and were then ambushed; and the squad from a second vehicle following behind mistook them for the enemy ambushers.

If there is no evidence of an enemy ambush, how did the shooting start?

Is it coincidence that after more than three years it has been discovered that there were never-before-mentioned US snipers in the second group?

Could there have been a secret sniper on a mission to Afghanistan to assassinate the Army's poster boy?

Or perhaps three assassins, because as a general rule snipers fire in single shots, from specially tuned rifles, rather than in bursts of three?

Could the suggestion that Tillman was going to become a voice for the anti-war movement be why his mother says that a journal he'd kept since was 16 has gone missing?

It disappeared, along with most of his possessions, two days after he died.

"It's time to really ask who ordered the assassination of Pat Tillman," wrote blogger Josh Swiller on The Huffington Post, a mainstream website, sparking off a series of conspiracy theories.

If that is going too far, it is at least time for the Army, the Pentagon and the White House to come clean on the Tillman tragedy.

In these troubled times, the last thing America and its allies need is such suspicion, rumour and intrigue.

tilman tilmann patrick .. why did they kill you? Because you endangered
the hegemony. David Kelly, Israeli Mossad cia executioners, Robin Cook,
Alfred Herrhausen, Detlev Rohwedder, Gerd Bastian... 911 inside job,
and the people of this world are hostages to undercover secret clubs,
deep state, ergenekon gladio (wikipedia GLADIO, if you don't think this is ernest)