One could look at the military honoring Tillmans’s death as a decent thing to do while still informing the family of the exact nature of what happened. What’s the harm? For Waxman it seems any excuse will do when your after the President.

In each of these incident I see things that are not perfect but far from what is being of them. I also see partisan politics behind each of them.

If in fact Tillman was glorified above what was necessary it wasn’t for partisan gain but for the good of the country’s and military’s morale. Not a big sin in my book.

No, it is a scandal to use a dead soldier for propaganda–plain and simple.

Further, when they initially announced it was friendly fire they said “probably” and made it sound like an accident during combat, which it was not.

(And sorry, I still think that that USA situation is scandalous–how could you listen to Gonzales’ testimony and still say that the DoJ is being run well?)

Tillman was killed on April 22. Within minutes of the battle an officer on site told some of the rangers to not tell Tillman’s brother that it was possibly a friendly incident. Taking into account the anguish of just having your sibling killed and the facts of the incident not certain the officer could see no good coming from a such a disclosure.

The army then did an investigation which determined it was a friendly fire accident. The results were released to the family and the public on May 29. So in 37 days the facts were determined and information released. No scandal so far.

The administration did use Tillman’s sacrifice as an example of what our brave men and women were risking every day. They did not go back and proclaim all of those statements null and void upon learning it was a friendly fire incident. Is that scandal? I don’t think so.

The scandal in my opinion is Henry Waxman trying to make something out of nothing and forcing Tillman’s family to relive this horrible nightmare again. Waxman is also doing his best to present the worst possible picture of what happened and how it was handled. He is doing exactly as many of the Dems promised before the election, to drag this administration through hearings meant to defame the President and his policies.

The administration and army did not take the Tillman family and “drag them through such a skein of deception for the sake of preserving a good story/avoiding embarrassment”. Kevin Tillman’s statements about “being actively thwarted” in seeking the truth make no sense since the truth was told in just over thirty days from his brother’s death.

There is no scandal here.