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"The Tillman Story" at Sundance
#1
Emphasis mine.

I like Pat Tillman, his brother Kevin, and his parents more and more as time goes by.


http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movie...index.html

""The Tillman Story" Just before Sundance, director Amir Bar-Lev changed the title of his documentary from "I'm Pat Fucking Tillman," reportedly the last words that the NFL star-turned-Army Ranger said while being gunned down by his own comrades in Afghanistan. But this seemingly nondescript new title has a resonance that becomes clear when you watch Bar-Lev's fascinating account, made with the consent and cooperation of Tillman's family. You see, "The Tillman Story" isn't just about the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire and the military brass lied about it, and essentially have never stopped lying. It's also about the fact that from the moment of his death, and even before, the former Arizona State and Arizona Cardinals star became a mythic, über-patriotic hero, the centerpiece of a right-wing, pro-military propaganda fable. He was never allowed to be who he was, a surprising, curious, and even eccentric individual who didn't fit the mold of either football player or gung-ho soldier.

Tillman returned from a tour of duty in Iraq convinced that the war there was both ill-advised and illegal; he reportedly had read essays about American foreign policy by Noam Chomsky and expressed an interest in meeting him. But as Bar-Lev's film makes clear, it isn't fair for the left to try to steal Tillman back and make him into its own hero figure. He joined the military in the first place, it appears, out of a genuine belief in patriotic self-sacrifice (although he never discussed the decision in public), and reading Chomsky was part of Tillman's wide-ranging self-education, which also included Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Book of Mormon. (He was personally an atheist, but had an almost academic interest in religion.) In this funny, profane and profoundly sad film, Bar-Lev depicts Tillman and his similarly unconventional parents and brothers as belonging to a vanishing species: Americans who hew to no ideological standard, and who actually think for themselves."
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#2
Tillman was targeted.

Silence a popular, potentially influential anti-war agitator AND create a martyr whose death fires up the populus to seek revenge.

The irony alone is enough to satisfy the beast.

It's the Custer story writ small.
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#3
Charles Drago Wrote:Tillman was targeted.

Silence a popular, potentially influential anti-war agitator AND create a martyr whose death fires up the populus to seek revenge.

The irony alone is enough to satisfy the beast.

It's the Custer story writ small.

I waver about whether or not he was targeted. I have a hard time getting past the speed of the cover up, and regardless of the truth about his death there was an instantaneous cover up. His journal/body armor/uniform were burned. Is that typical for a soldier's personal effects to be burned before their body is cold? Even, or especially, in the case of "friendly fire"?
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#4
Here is the link to another Pat Tillman thread: http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...Tillman%22

It has Kevin Tillman's powerful essay.

"Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is."
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