Football Star Murdered in Afghanistan: how the US government exploited the life and death of Pat Tillman

Carlton Meyer, “Football Star Murdered in Afghanistan” (Tales of the American Empire, 9 April 2020)

With the passage of time, former NRL football player turned soldier Pat Tillman (1976 – 2004) may well turn out to be an all-American hero – just not in the way assumed by most Americans brought up on US news media and Hollywood propaganda. After completing college on a football scholarship, Tillman began an illustrious sports career as linebacker for the Arizona Cardinals in the late 1990s. Eight months after the plane attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York in September 2001, Tillman turned down a US$3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals and enlisted in the US Army with his brother Kevin. After completing training, Tillman participated in the US invasion in Iraq in 2003 and then returned to the US to complete other military training. In October, he was sent to Afghanistan. On 22 April 2004, Tillman was killed, supposedly by Afghan enemy combatants.

Meyer’s short 9-minute video shows that, rather than being killed by enemy Afghans in the heat of battle, Tillman was killed in cold blood by someone on his own side in a scenario that suspiciously looks like a trap aimed at getting rid of him. During his deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tillman became disillusioned with the US conduct of the war in those two nations. He voiced his disapproval to other soldiers. The video mentions that he exchanged correspondence with leading US dissident of the time, Noam Chomsky, and planned to meet with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor after returning to the US. It seems very likely that the Pentagon realised how embarrassing Tillman’s meeting with Chomsky and opinions might be to it, and how his actions and opinions might affect the US public’s attitude to the military. That might affect the all-important military recruitment drive among high school students and other young people to get more cannon fodder to throw at harmless people of colour in dirt-poor countries holding resources dear to wealthy elites in the US and other parts of the Western world. Therefore Tillman had to go.

The video does a good job of delineating Tillman’s career in the last few years of his life. Viewers wanting more information will need to make their investigations but the video provides enough detail to be a foundation for those enquiries. Special mention must be made of Tillman’s family members, particularly his mother, who became suspicious when Tillman’s personal belongings including his private diary were burned by the Army rather than returned to his immediate relatives. The family later discovered that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire. The video also mentions that Army doctors disagreed with the official narrative on the cause of Tillman’s death and pointed out that Tillman was shot three times in forehead at near point-blank range.

A major source of information relied on by the video is a “60 Minutes” (US version) interview with Pat Tillman’s mother Mary about her son and the despicable and cowardly way in which the US Army and the US government handled the news and information about the circumstances of Tillman’s death. As with other videos in the Tales of the American Empire series, this major source comes near the end of the video.

It seems that justice for Pat Tillman, bringing his killers and those who plotted his death into a court of law to be charged with premeditated murder, is still some way off. His brave family continues to meet with obfuscations from the authorities. The video ends quite awkwardly and abruptly. Tillman’s horrific death serves to show that even in the case of one very high-profile and popular individual, the US government and the powers behind it are prepared to exploit that person’s popularity and reputation for their own ends and to throw the individual under the proverbial bus when it suits them – let alone other lesser-known people and even entire nations. This is the way of the political culture of the US and its allies.