He thinks that the shooter ought to have been in real trouble for violating RoE, but that it wasn't assassination. Lots of insights on how military culture leads naturally to coverups in cases like this.
http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2007/08/05/the-fog-of-fame-pat-tillman-as-everyones-political-football/A vehicle under the control of Sergeant Greg Baker, with a driver, an M240B machinegun, an M2 50-caliber machinegun, an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), and two M4s (the standard assult rifle now used by the infantry) came out of the canyon and fired on both the village and Pat’s position. Pat and Thani were killed; and Uthlaut, along with his radio operator, Jade Lane, were wounded.
What is established is that Baker directed the fires, and that after firing at Pat’s position once, the vehicle advanced and fired on the same position again, probably to regain visibility after Pat threw a smoke grenade in an attempt to alert them that they were firing at “friendlies.” The distance was between 35-85 meters. My own examination of the photo imagery suggests to me that the distance is much closer to the low number. The length of the longest building in the hamlet was 29-feet (iirc), and an extrapolation from the seen-from-above images shows the distance between the shooters’ position and Pat’s to be around four times that (116 feet, or 35 meters). SSG Weeks (now SFC Weeks) supported this estimation when I called him on the phone last year.
In later accounts, Army investigators would attempt to pump up the number of enemy combatants, upgrade an RPG into a mortar, suggest a far more efficacious ambush, equivocate about light conditions, and extend the distance between the shooters and Pat to as much as 200 meters.
Since there is nothing in the actual statements or physical evidence to support these claims, I am assuming there was a motive to mislead. My assumption is that these distortions were designed to introduce “mitigating” circumstances in a homicide.
My contention from having seen the Rules of Engagement (ROE) and from familiarity with the Law of Warfare is that this was a criminal homicide, at least on the part of Greg Baker, and that he intentionally and illegally led him men to kill two other human beings.
It is not my contention that he intended to kill Pat Tillman. His intention was to kill unidentified human beings; which is precisely what he and his subordinates did.
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The doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.Well, there are doctors and there are doctors.
The proximity of bullet wounds is not sufficient to determine the distance from which a round is fired. Two of the best gunshot wound pathologists in the country (Bux and DiMaio), at Dannie Tillman’s request accompanied me to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland earlier this year to examine the autopsy findings and autopsy photographs for Pat Tillman. Both agreed that the trajectories, exit wounds, and proximity of rounds are most consistent with a burst fired from the M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, like the one fired from around 40 meters away by Specialist Trevor Alders outside Manah on April 22, 2004.
The AP story set the conspiracy theorists alight, and when I dismissed the “assassination theory,” a correspondent told me I was “naive” (this person having never read the documents in the case and never having spent a day in the military).
“I wonder if all the soldiers in that platoon were actually soldiers,” asked the correspondent ominously.
“No,” I replied with a bit of pique. “The Black Ops folks always hire 20-year-olds (one member of the shooter vehicle was 19!), and put them in deep cover — which they study between playing video games and sharing high school lies.
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