Quote:McCord told Van Auken: "He [Kauzlarich] goes, 'If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherf*cker on the street.'" McCord said that he had also witnessed the order carried out, saying: "I've seen it many times, where people are just walking down the street and an IED goes off and the troops open fire and kill them."
High-level orders to kill civilians in the context of retaliation for attacks on forces have already been successfully prosecuted as a war crime. In 1944, German SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler ordered the execution of civilians in the ratio of ten to one for every German soldier killed in a March 1944 attack by Italian partisans. Kappler was sentenced to life in prison. The executions took place in the Caves of Ardeatine in Italy, and were made into the subject of a movie starring Richard Burton. None of the lower-ranking soldiers who actually carried the order out were prosecuted.

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Both McCord and Stieber say they saw their mission as a plan to "out-terrorize the terrorists," in order to make the general populace more afraid of the Americans than they were of insurgent groups.

In the interview with Horton, Horton pressed Stieber:
"... a fellow veteran of yours from the same battalion has said that you guys had a standard operating procedure, SOP, that said - and I guess this is a reaction to some EFP attacks on y'all's Humvees and stuff that killed some guys - that from now on if a roadside bomb goes off, IED goes off, everyone who survives the attack get out and fire in all directions at anybody who happens to be nearby ... that this was actually an order from above. Is that correct? Can you, you know, verify that?

Stieber answered:
"Yeah, it was an order that came from Kauzlarich himself, and it had the philosophy that, you know, as Finkel does describe in the book, that we were under pretty constant threat, and what he leaves out is the response to that threat. But the philosophy was that if each time one of these roadside bombs went off where you don't know who set it ... the way we were told to respond was to open fire on anyone in the area, with the philosophy that that would intimidate them, to be proactive in stopping people from making these bombs ..."

The attack which spurred the World War II German commander's retaliatory executions, intended as collective punishment for not informing on partisans, was an IED planted in a garbage container. Kappler's rank was the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel.
Lt. Col. Kauzlarich was Tillman's executive officer at the time Tillman was killed in Afghanistan.

Quote:Tillman's friend and fellow soldier in Iraq, Spc. Russell Baer, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005:
"I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town.... We were talking. And Pat said, 'You know, this war is so f*cking illegal.' And we all said, 'Yeah.' That's who he was. He totally was against Bush."

Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, confirms that he had an appointment with Dr. Chomsky, which Chomsky also confirms, upon his return to the states. Some speculate that Tillman may have been considering going public against the Iraq war, at a time when it was going badly and calls were growing for the impeachment of George Bush.

Quote:Lt. Col. Kauzlarich, a born-again Christian, came under fire after he likened Tillman's alleged atheist beliefs as akin to being "worm dirt" when you are dead. In an interview with ESPN, as an explanation for why the Tillman family continued to pursue the case, Kauzlarich, dubbed "Col. K" by his men, offered that it was because they did not believe in an afterlife. He said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt."