Hillary: Vote for Me, I was Duped

May 6, 2007

Late last week, Senator Hillary Clinton offered a bill that would effectively revoke the 2002 congressional authorization that allowed the Bush Administration to wage war in Iraq, and require the president to convince Congress to re-approve the war this October. It’s the latest step taken by Clinton to establish herself as the Democratic Party’s anti-war candidate. If she’d only known in 2002 what she knows now, she has repeatedly said, she would never have supported the earlier resolution.

At its essence, Clinton is saying that the Bush Administration tricked her into voting for the war resolution. “I Was Duped” is hardly an inspiring slogan, and in Hillary’s case it’s a thoroughly disingenuous one as well. She wasn’t duped. She was playing the polls, and at the time she concluded that a vote for war was the smart bet.

Take a look at Clinton’s October 10, 2002, floor speech in which she authorized the use of force against Iraq. She didn’t just side with the Bush Administration, she more or less endorsed its entire case for war:

Intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program . . .

If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.

While acknowledging that there was no evidence to tie Saddam to the September 11 attacks, she said he had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members,” and went on to say:

This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make–any vote that may lead to war should be hard–but I cast it with conviction. Over eleven years have passed since the U.N. called on Saddam Hussein to rid himself of weapons of mass destruction as a condition of returning to the world community. Time and time again he has frustrated and denied these conditions. This matter cannot be left hanging forever with consequences we would all live to regret . . . A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him - use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein–this is your last chance–disarm or be disarmed.

“I Was Duped” is hardly an inspiring slogan and in Hillary’s case it’s a thoroughly disingenuous one as well.

Dick Cheney could hardly have put it better. Now compare Clinton’s remarks with those made by other prominent Democrats during the runup to war. Even if they believed that Saddam had WMDs, many of Clinton’s Democratic colleagues opposed the war and challenged the administration’s case for an invasion. Take Al Gore during a September 23, 2002 speech in San Francisco:

The resulting chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. Here’s why I say that; we know that he has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country. As yet, we have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist groups. If the administration has evidence that he has, please present it, because that would change the way we all look at this thing.

Senator Edward Kennedy’s speech in Washington on September 27 rejected just about every argument tossed out by President Bush.

Information from the intelligence community over the past six months does not point to Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States or a major proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. I have heard no persuasive evidence that Saddam is on the threshold of acquiring the nuclear weapons he has sought for more than 20 years. And the administration has offered no persuasive evidence that Saddam would transfer chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. As General Joseph Hoar, the former Commander of Central Command told the members of the Armed Services Committee, a case has not been made to connect Al Qaeda and Iraq . . . To the contrary, there is no clear and convincing pattern of Iraqi relations with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

When Hillary cast her “yes” vote “with conviction” a few weeks later, Kennedy and 22 other Democratic senators (and a majority of Democrats in the House) rejected the use-of-force resolution. “The question,” Senator Patrick Leahy said during the debate on the vote, “is not whether Saddam Hussein should be disarmed; it is how imminent is this threat and how should we deal with it?” Leahy continued:

The resolution now before the Senate leaves the door open to act alone, even absent an imminent threat. It surrenders to the President authority which the Constitution explicitly reserves for the Congress . . . Many respected and knowledgeable people–former senior military officers and diplomats among them–have expressed strong reservations about this resolution. They agree that if there is credible evidence that Saddam Hussein is planning to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or one of our allies, the American people and the Congress would overwhelmingly support the use of American military power to stop him. But they have not seen that evidence, and neither have I. We have heard a lot of bellicose rhetoric, but what are the facts? I am not asking for 100 percent proof, but the administration is asking Congress to make a decision to go to war based on conflicting statements, angry assertions, and assumption based on speculation. This is not the way a great nation goes to war.

Then there was Robert Byrd, who unsuccessfully tried to mount a filibuster against the resolution, which he described as “the Tonkin Gulf resolution all over again”:

The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the President blanket authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States.

Byrd rejected the administration’s arguments about Saddam posing an imminent WMD threat and noted that no one “has been able to produce any solid evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attack.” He also said that any overthrow of the Iraqi regime “would require a long term occupation,” and that this “kind of nation-building cannot be accomplished with the wave of a wand by some fairy godmother, even one with the full might and power of the world’s last remaining superpower behind her.”

So here are some questions for Hillary:

• Other Democrats knew. Why didn’t you?
• Why did you trust President Bush more than you trusted top figures in your own party?
• Did you, in fact, vote for the war resolution on the basis of polling numbers and political calculations about an expected future run for the presidency?
• And finally, if you won’t vote your conscience on questions of war and peace, when will you?

The answer to that last question is “never.” A recent Washington Post story on Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster, described him as taking “taking increasing control” of her presidential campaign. “Armed with voluminous data that he collects through his private polling firm, Penn has become involved in virtually every move Clinton makes, with the result that the campaign reflects the chief strategist as much as the candidate,” the Post said. “If Clinton seems cautious, it may be because Penn has made caution a science, repeatedly testing issues to determine which ones are safe and widely agreed upon.”

Ken Silverstein

A Bloody Lie of George Tenet

by Larry C Johnson

How many lies is George Tenet allowed to tell on TV before he immolates the last shred of credibility? Judging by his latest sad performance on Meet the Press I would say his time is up. Tenet insisted to Tim Russert today that he was crystal clear in debunking the assumption that Al Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots:

Well, Tim, Tim, I will tell you that I had many conversations, particularly on Iraq and al-Qaeda, particularly on the terrorism question, where we drew the line as sharply as we knew how. We were very, very clear about our judgments. We worked very, very hard to make sure that people comported and stayed within the bounds of what the intelligence showed.

But George Tenet can’t keep his stories straight. For example, as has been widely reported, he starts his book off with an inaccurate account of a conversation with neocon and Iraq war advocate Richard Perle. It is the day after 9-11, Perle is stuck in France, yet Tenet writes that he saw Perle exiting the White House and talking about attacking Iraq. Leave it to George Tenet to make Richard Perle sound sane.

George Tenet wants gullible book buyers to believe that he always disputed the notion that Saddam and the 9-11 attackers were working in concert. But the words and actions of George Tenet tell a radically different story. A damning one at that.

In March of 2002 George Tenet said:

"There is no doubt that there have been contacts and linkages of al-Qaeda organization. As to where we are in September 11, the jury is out. . . . . Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggest that tactical cooperation between them is possible."

Why did George Tenet leave open the window of doubt on this critical issue when he now insists that there was no there there? But wait, there is more.

CIA Deputy Director, John McLaughlin, sent a letter responding to a query from Senator Evan Bayh on October 7, 2002 that said:

"Regarding Senator Bayh's questions of Iraqi links to al-Qaeda, senators could draw from the following points for unclassified discussions. One, We have solid reporting of senior level contact between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Two, "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal" aggression." Three, "Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad." And lastly, "We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs."

Did anyone hear George Tenet at the time remind anybody that there was no “operational tie” between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda? He chose to say nothing. Did he challenge those--like Dick Cheney--who suggested there was a substantive ongoing relationship? Nope. George Tenet said nothing to dispel that false conclusion.

That same day (October 7, 2002) President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio (this is the famous speech in which Tenet excised the reference to Niger, Iraq, and uranium) and said the following:

And that is the source of our urgent concern about Saddam Hussein's links to international terrorist groups. Over the years, Iraq has provided safe haven to terrorists such as Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than 90 terrorist attacks in 20 countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans. . . . We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

George Tenet's CIA approved this language and Tenet was familiar with the speech because he had called the White House to protest another portion of the speech. This provides circumstantial evidence for Richard Dearlove's (George Tenet's British counterpart) now famous memo (the Downing Street Memo) that the facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy of going to war with Iraq. In my day we called it cooking the books and George Tenet was one of the chefs.

Tenet’s participation in the hoodwinking of the American public continued when, on February 4, 2003 , he sat stoically behind Colin Powell at the UN Security Council and, by virtue of his presence, provided the CIA ’s imprimatur for the following claim:

Al Qaeda continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. As with the story of Zarqawi and his network, I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.
I will relate it to you now as he, himself, described it. This senior al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan . His information comes firsthand from his personal involvement at senior levels of al Qaeda. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan , deceased al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, did not believe that al Qaeda labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq .
The support that (al Libi) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

This intelligence came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda commander who was tortured by the Egyptians. Even though George Tenet was briefed in January 2003 that his analysts doubted al-Libi’s account (see Hubris pp. 187-88) he signed off on Powell’s briefing.

But he did more. On February 11, 2003 Tenet he went before Congress and said:

Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of al Qaeda. ... Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful. ... I know that part of this - and part of this Zarqawi network in Baghdad are two dozen Egyptian Islamic jihad which is indistinguishable from al Qaeda - operatives who are aiding the Zarqawi network, and two senior planners who have been in Baghdad since last May.
Now, whether there is a base or whether there is not a base, they are operating freely, supporting the Zarqawi network that is supporting the poisons network in Europe and around the world. So these people have been operating there. And, as you know - I don't want to recount everything that Secretary Powell said, but as you know a foreign service went to the Iraqis twice to talk to them about Zarqawi and were rebuffed. So there is a presence in Baghdad that is beyond Zarqawi.

The public record is quite clear about the role George Tenet played in helping condition the American people to fear Iraq and support a preemptive war against Iraq. He helped build the myth that Al Qaeda enjoyed safehaven in Iraq and was biding its time to strike us again. George Tenet was not an honest broker trying to get the best intelligence to the President and the Congress. He willingly and knowingly agreed to make public statements and authorized statements that were at odds with the actual intelligence.

What do you think would have happened if George Tenet had gone to members of Congress and warned them that there was no relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq? Would overwhelming majorities have voted to give the President authority to start a war with Iraq? I do not think so. Would Americans still raw from the wounds inflicted by Al Qaeda on 9-11 support the President’s campaign to attack a country which had nothing to do with those attacks and, despite claims to the contrary, was not protecting or enabling Al Qaeda operatives who wanted to launch new attacks against the United States? The answer. No, and hell no!

Lie is the only word that comes to mind and seems appropriate to describe what George Tenet has done. This is the chief reason I say he has the blood of American soldiers on his hands. And I, along with several former members of the CIA , the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Army, believe that George Tenet owes the soldiers and the families of soldiers who have died or been wounded in Iraq part of the proceeds from his $4 million dollar advance for his book. It would be the decent thing to do, but George Tenet’s decency quotient appears to be running on empty.

Posted by Larry Johnson on Monday, 07 May 2007 at 00:57 | Permalink

NYT Replays 'Iran Supplied Arms in Iraq' Baloney

Today's Times story
U.S. Long Worried That Iran Supplied Arms in Iraq

The debunking stories
Iraq's Superbombs Likely Homemade, Not Iranian
Iraq's Superbombs: Home Made?

FBI Provided Inaccurate Data for Surveillance Warrants

By John Solomon

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 27, 2007; A05

FBI agents repeatedly provided inaccurate information to win secret court approval of surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, prompting officials to tighten controls on the way the bureau uses that powerful anti-terrorism tool, according to Justice Department and FBI officials.

The errors were pervasive enough that the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, wrote the Justice Department in December 2005 to complain. She raised the possibility of requiring counterterrorism agents to swear in her courtroom that the information they were providing was accurate, a procedure that could have slowed such investigations drastically.

A internal FBI review in early 2006 of some of the more than 2,000 surveillance warrants the bureau obtains each year confirmed that dozens of inaccuracies had been provided to the court. The errors ranged from innocuous lapses, such as the wrong description of family relationships, to more serious problems, such as citing information from informants who were no longer active, officials said.

The FBI contends that none of the mistakes were serious enough to reverse judges' findings that there was probable cause to issue a surveillance warrant. But officials said the errors were significant enough to prompt reforms bureau-wide.

"It is clear to everybody this is a serious matter. This is something that has to happen quickly. We have to have the confidence of the American people that we are using these tools appropriately," said Kenneth Wainstein, the Justice Department's new assistant attorney general for national security.

The department's acknowledgment of the problems with the FISA court applications comes nearly two weeks after a blistering inspector general's report revealed widespread violations of the use of "national security" and "exigent circumstances" letters, which allow FBI agents to collect phone, e-mail and Internet records from telecommunications companies without review by a judge. The problems included failing to document relevant evidence, claiming emergencies that did not exist and failing to show that phone records requests were connected to authorized investigations.

In the use of both national security letters and the FISA warrant applications, officials acknowledged that the problems resulted from agents' haste or sloppiness -- or both -- and that there was inadequate supervision.

"We've oftentimes been better at setting the rules than we have been at establishing the internal controls and audits necessary to enforce them," FBI Assistant Director John Miller said.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee today to answer questions about the use of national security letters. Congress will receive its annual report on FISA warrants next month.

Experts said Congress, the courts and the Justice Department share the blame for not conducting more aggressive oversight of FBI agents.

"It is a little too easy to blame the FBI, because the FBI gets away with this stuff when the other institutions of government fail to do their jobs," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which monitors civil liberties issues.

Records show that the FISA court approves almost every application for the warrants, which give agents broad powers to electronically monitor and surveil people who they allege are connected to terrorism or espionage cases. The number of requests rose from 886 in 1999 to 2,074 in 2005. The court did not reject a single application in 2005 but "modified" 61, according to a Justice Department report to Congress.

Senior Justice officials said they have begun a comprehensive review of all terrorism-fighting tools and their compliance with the law. That will be followed by regular audits and training to ensure that agents do not lapse into shortcuts that can cause unintended legal consequences.

Wainstein noted that before his division was created last year, the Justice Department could not systematically check FBI compliance with rules in all types of national security investigations. He acknowledged, for instance, that the department was told of 26 potential violations that the FBI had disclosed in its use of national security letters but did not focus on them.

Earlier this year, President Bush agreed to allow the FISA court to review surveillance requests from the National Security Agency after a battle with civil liberties groups and some lawmakers over the legality of that agency's spying effort, in which some suspects were overseas.

Last year's problems involving the FISA court, however, involved the issuance of secret warrants that authorized FBI agents to conduct surveillance inside the United States.

Shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FISA court complained that there were inaccuracies in 75 warrants that the court had approved going back several years. The FBI responded by instituting new policies to better ensure that the information agents provided in warrant applications was accurate and could be verified if questioned.

But audits conducted beginning in 2003 showed an increasing number of errors and corrections in applications. On Dec. 12, 2005, the court sent a letter of complaint that raised the idea of agents being compelled to swear to the accuracy of information.

Justice and the FBI are reviewing about 10 percent of the 60,000 ongoing terrorism investigation files in search of problems. "We are learning to live in a different environment, and now we are aware and working on problems, and I think we are creating a lot of fixes," said Jane Horvath, the Justice Department's first chief privacy and civil liberties officer.

FBI officials said they expect the audit of national security letters for 2006 to show the same problems as those identified in the current audit, which covered 2003 through 2005.

"You are never going to be at a zero error rate because this is a human endeavor," Wainstein said. "Therefore it is subject to error on occasion. But we're going to do everything we can to minimize them."

Broken Promises and Barefaced Lies: The Democrats Strike Again

We have observed the same song and dance so many times before it's hard to believe more didn't see it coming. The Democrats once again let down their constituents and all the other voters who ushered them in to power last November – believing, in utter stupidity, that they would somehow halt the madness of the Iraq war by challenging the Bush administration and their Republican allies in Congress.

By now we should all know about the ugly stunt they pulled last week. The Democratic majority in the House passed an appropriations bill that would give Bush more money to continue his war. The legislation, which will likely be knocked out by the White House, calls for the troops to come home later this year. Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, believed this would somehow appease their antiwar base. Regrettably their smarmy attempt has absolutely no teeth whatsoever. Having been one of the unfortunate geeks who actually read the bill, I can tell you only one thing – it's a complete farce.

In order for troops to come home the Bushies would have to confirm whether or not "progress" had been made in Iraq, not Congress. So with more money in hand and sole authority on deciding whether or not the war is going as planned, the White House, even if Bush signed the bill, would never have to end the thing. The proposal wasn't a compromise as many have claimed, but a dagger in the heart of all of us who want to bring this war to a screeching halt.

Fortunately these are the sorts of betrayals that fuel activists like Cindy Sheehan and CODEPINK in to putting their energy in opposing the Democratic leadership. Nancy Kricorian, who manages CODEPINK's ListenHillary.org, a site dedicated to challenging Sen. Clinton's stance on the Iraq war, recently told me why she believes it is imperative that we take on the Democratic stalwarts like Hillary Clinton.

"Hillary is the current Democratic front-runner for the presidential nomination and because she is one of the most powerful people in the party, so we feel it is important to hold her accountable for her voting record on and her public statements about Iraq," Kricorian said. "We hope that by pressuring her to change her stance … we will have an impact on the [Democrats]. We are tired of convoluted rhetoric and empty words – we want Hillary and the Democrats to stop buying Bush's war."

Cindy Sheehan reiterated a similar line when I recently spoke with her. "We need to take Hillary and [Nancy] Pelosi on to reflect true progressive antiwar values, not AIPAC or neocon values," she said. "It is important to keep the pressure on her and the others, because number one, she needs to be exposed, and two, she needs to know that we are not fooled by her."

As Election Spectacle 2008 takes center stage over the next year, let's not buy the Democratic bull that they are going to do anything substantial to end the war in Iraq, even if Barack, Hillary, and rest of the gang promise as much. We gave them an antiwar mandate, and they still want to give Bush billions more to continue the war and the sole authority to decide when the time is right to bring the troops home.

The Democrats aren't a party of opposition, but a party of capitulation.

--Joshua Frank

March 26, 2007 in War | Permalink | Comments (0)

Who's Shooting Who?

How the U.S. Military strung along the family of a Fort Lewis soldier killed by "friendly fire."

THIRTEEN DAYS after Fort Lewis Ranger and ex–pro football player Pat Tillman, 27, was killed in Afghanistan, a Fort Lewis military policeman named Jesse Buryj, 21, was killed in Iraq. In life, the famous chiseled athlete and the small-town baritone horn player never met. But their deaths have followed a parallel course. Both were victims of "friendly fire," the military's oxymoronic euphemism for death at the hands of a fellow soldier. And who exactly killed them, and under what circumstances, remains a mystery.

The Army is trying to answer that question in the high-profile Tillman case. It has undertaken four investigations in three years and is now performing a fifth review to answer questions about a possible Army cover-up and whether the killing was intentional, which could lead to criminal charges.

In contrast, the Buryj case has fallen silent. The service is satisfied with blaming an unknown soldier from Poland, even though the Polish government denies the claim and Buryj's mother in Ohio says she was told an American soldier has confessed to shooting her son.

"My son is another Kennedy—nobody seems to know who shot him," says Peggy Buryj with a hard laugh. She's grateful for the Army's attempts to provide her with information, although each new answer raised more infuriating questions. And she doesn't begrudge the Tillmans for the attention they've gotten, having conferred and commiserated with the family. Peggy Buryj feels the Tillman case has helped open the eyes of other parents to questions about the Pentagon's casualty reporting methods. And like the Tillmans, she suspects a military cover-up. "Where's my criminal investigation?" she asks.

Understandably, the Tillman case has gotten more notice. Pat Tillman was the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who gave up a $3.6 million NFL contract to join the Army in 2002. He signed up with his brother Kevin, who gave up a promising baseball career, eight months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. They ascended to Ranger School, were assigned to Fort Lewis' elite 75th Ranger Regiment, and served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. A hero to many, Pat Tillman was killed April 22, 2004. He was the 106th U.S. fatality in Afghanistan, where, as of this week, more than 370 have died.

His death made international headlines. The funeral was nationally televised. Moments of silence were held, flags were lowered, and memorials were established in his name. He's been given a special display at the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, his picture and story included in the NFL's "Wartime Heroes" exhibit and elsewhere.

Jesse Buryj's life was comparably modest. He grew up in Ohio, played in the high-school band, and joined the Army after graduating in 2002. Hoping to someday become a police officer, Buryj wound up in Fort Lewis' 66th Military Police Company, which, in addition to MP duties, can also be involved in combat situations. He shipped off to Iraq in February 2004 and was killed three months later. He was the 761st U.S. fatality in Iraq, where, as of this week—the war's fourth anniversary—more than 3,200 have died.

The name Buryj is Ukranian, by the way. It's pronounced BOO-dee. But, as Buryj's mother says with a chuckle, "In the Army, you'd never survive with a name that sounds like 'booty.' So he didn't complain when they started calling him Spc. 'Burage.'"

Buryj's death rated mostly small headlines back home. Family and friends turned out for the service, and citizens paused in the street as his procession passed. He was remembered as the typical good guy who strikes out for a career in the military. He had slung a few burgers at Wendy's and married his high-school sweetheart, Amber, a piccolo player in his school band, in a wedding ceremony officiated by the band's director.

He was honored in Canton, too, a gritty former steel town 45 minutes south of Cleveland. That's his hometown. He's buried in a small church cemetery there. Though he never became the local cop he'd hoped to be, his name is included on a list of fallen officers remembered at an annual Canton police memorial event.

The uneven contrast of their lives and their Canton memorials is reflected in the differing levels of investigation into the two soldiers' deaths, Buryj's family thinks.

The Army initially told both families their sons were killed during firefights with the enemy—Tillman ambushed in the mountains near the Pakistani border, Buryj fatally injured when his armored vehicle turned over during an attack in Karbala, south of Baghdad. Each family buried its loved one thinking the soldier was slain by forces aligned with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That's hard enough to take. But it wasn't true.

Five weeks after Tillman's death, the Army revealed he was killed by his own troops—one, or several, of four U.S. soldiers—something the Army knew from the start. "Cease fire, friendlies," he is said by a witness to have futilely shouted, "I am Pat fucking Tillman, damn it!" He was hit in the head by three bullets and torn apart.

Fellow soldiers wrapped Tillman's body in a poncho and later burned his bloody clothing and body armor—because they were a biohazard, the soldiers claimed. Commanders meanwhile debated how and when they'd admit the fratricide. They were silent, Tillman's father, Patrick, would say later, because "they killed their poster boy" in an unpopular war during an election year.

Family pressure and heavy media coverage eventually prompted the four different investigations, with results of the fifth soon to be released. The latest probe is, in part, a review of the earlier ones, the Army says. It's supposed to clear up disputed details of Tillman's death—whether it was a "fog of war" accident caused by the confused inability to determine friend from foe, or possibly death by "fragging" (an intentional shooting). A secondary probe could also establish whether officials tried to criminally cover up details of the case.

Truth has been just as elusive and delayed in the Buryj case, as his family sees it. But theirs is a lonelier fight for a son no less loved. Mother Peggy remembers looking out her window and seeing the uniformed officer on her doorstep that sad day in May. She put off going to the door. The longer she waited, the longer Jesse would still be alive.

"He said Jesse was killed when a truck rammed his Humvee," Peggy Buryj says, referring to what a casualty officer told her. Her son was among a small contingent manning a checkpoint when a heavy dump truck sped out of the night toward them. Buryj, a Humvee turret gunner, fired hundreds of rounds, killing the driver and saving fellow soldiers' lives, the record shows. But the truck kept coming, knocking over the Humvee and throwing Buryj to the ground.

At first, Peggy Buryj believed the incident to have been an accident. That's what she was told by the military, according to an Associated Press report the day after his death: "'Everyone was fine, but Jesse's stomach was hurting him,' she said she was told. 'They took him to a hospital where they found he had massive internal injuries, and he died on the operating table.'" She didn't know it at the time, but he also had a bullet inside him. The fatal wound had not been obvious at the scene, but the mangled slug was discovered in a postmortem CAT scan.

No one in the truck had fired at them, the soldiers reported that day. That meant Buryj was killed by his own troops.

But it was more than two months before the Army told the Buryj family their son had been shot. When the death certificate arrived in July, it listed a "penetrating gunshot wound of the back."

The family was surprised and confused. There was no indication who fired the shot.

Peggy Buryj began making calls, writing letters, and sending e-mails. Fortuitously, President Bush came to Canton that summer during the 2004 election campaign and met some of Ohio's grieving war families. Peggy got a brief audience and asked him to help her learn more. He promised to do what he could.

But for the most part, the family was on its own. Peggy, 53, who works part time, learned how to file Freedom of Information Act requests with the Army. In February 2005, she and husband Steve, 54, a worker at an Akron plastics company, received a copy of Jesse's Army autopsy report. Nine months after Buryj's death, his family for the first time saw the official words "friendly fire," or death resulting from mistaken aim or misidentification of the target.

"We had no idea until then," the mother recalls.

Buryj is one of possibly two dozen U.S. service members killed by their own troops or allies in Afghanistan and Iraq—on the ground and in mistaken aerial attacks—out of more than 3,570 deaths. (The ratio was much worse in the 1991 Gulf War, with 35 out of 148 U.S. combat deaths from friendly fire.) The Army confirms 17 fratricides since 2001, and documents obtained by the Army Times last year turned up six other suspected friendly-fire incidents involving the deaths of nine U.S. soldiers. Several British and Canadian soldiers have also been killed by Americans. It can be devastating to all involved. Last month, the London Sun said a cockpit recording of two U.S. pilots—who'd just learned they'd accidentally killed a British soldier on the ground—captured them saying "I'm going to be sick" and "We're in jail, dude." Last week, a London coroner's inquest found the soldier's death avoidable and "criminal."

Fog of war is "the generic answer" to many of the deaths, says John Pike, a military expert and director of the D.C. think-tank Global Security, "though there are always more specific elements in each case." He didn't want to comment directly on Buryj's or other individual cases, but said, "Combat is an enormously confusing, chaotic environment, which is one reason ground troops spend so much time training, so that when faced with actual combat, they are able to respond instinctively." The services have been developing new techniques and technology to prevent such deaths, including sewing electronic chips into military clothing that can be seen on computer screens in vehicles and aircraft.

Some of the very first deaths in the "war on terror" were from friendly fire. A 2,000-pound U.S. bomb missed its target and killed three Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan in December 2001. One of the dead was Army Staff Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser, 28, whose mother and stepfather live in Seattle; they were informed within 24 hours of the well-publicized bombing that left 20 other U.S. soldiers injured, and six allied Afghan fighters dead. The first American soldier to die from "unfriendly," or enemy, fire was Army Sgt. Nathan Chapman, 31, of Puyallup, who was killed the next month in Afghanistan.

The military uses the term "nonhostile fire" to describe what are usually noncombat deaths caused by fellow soldiers, oftentimes merely by stumbling or failing to secure a weapon. That's what happened to Capt. James Shull of Kirkland, for example. He was accidentally killed in 2003, on routine patrol in Baghdad, when one of his men tossed a rifle into the back of a Humvee and the M-16 discharged. Shull, 32, married with three children, was killed instantly.

The Army's casualty reporting methods have been questioned in other friendly-fire cases, such as the death of Army 1st Lt. Ken Ballard, 26, from California. He died in May 2004 in Iraq—killed in action, his family was initially told. They later learned, by requesting military records, that the tank commander died from the accidental discharge of an unmanned machine gun (incredibly, it had been triggered by a tree limb as the tank passed under it). The reporting system also failed for the families of two California National Guardsmen, Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, and Lt. Andre Tyson, 33, killed in 2004 supposedly in an enemy ambush in Iraq. It wasn't until last summer that the Army finally admitted the two were murdered by members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps they were training.

Last year, the Army reviewed nearly 800 fatalities in an attempt to improve its reporting. The service says it found seven cases—Tillman's and Buryj's among them—where families were misinformed. Lt. Col. Kevin Arata of the Army's Human Resources Command in Virginia says that led to "major steps" to improve the casualty-report process. Another layer of review, by field-grade officers, has been added to verify the accuracy of initial casualty information, Arata tells Seattle Weekly, and any war death now will get a more thorough look "to ensure families ultimately received the most accurate information."

New procedures to cross-reference and double-check investigations are in place, Arata adds, and families now are entitled to receive a follow-up report, redacted and declassified, "to verify or clarify the initial circumstances in a much shorter period of time."

That's well and good, says Peggy Buryj, if it prevents other families from going through the misery she has endured. But she thinks an independent entity should be established to help families hack a path through the Army's tangled bureaucracy. "The only people shooting that day were the good guys," she says. "I buried my son not knowing that."

It wasn't until Army officials arrived at her home in April 2005, handing over a "final" report, that she learned Buryj's unit had been on a joint mission with Polish troops, who then had about 300 soldiers in Iraq.

And "most likely," the report said, one of the Poles had killed her son. But when Buryj put in a call to the Polish Embassy in D.C., "they denied it," she recalls.

The embassy confirmed that denial to Seattle Weekly. Defense attaché Maj. Rafal Nowak says the Polish government conducted its own inquiry into the death, and "the conclusion was that the Polish troops were not responsible for Buryj's death." The inquiry determined that the bullet fragment found in Buryj's body was standard 5.56 ammunition used by both U.S. and Polish troops, but that it couldn't have been fired by a Polish soldier because the Polish unit was positioned to shoot at the truck and not toward the checkpoint where Buryj was posted.

After two field investigations, the U.S. Army couldn't fully resolve this and other questions. With the Buryjs pushing for more details, in part through their congressional representatives, the service's watchdog agency, the Army inspector general's office, last year decided to undertake a new probe, reviewing both the case and the investigations into it.

Last November, the report arrived, leaving Peggy Buryj lost in her own kind of fog of war.

She learned for the first time that, like in Tillman's case, as many as four American soldiers, in addition to the Polish troops, had apparently been suspected of firing the fatal bullet.

But the bullet fragment taken from Jesse Buryj's body had been lost—accidentally destroyed in late 2005, the inspector general said, when it was mixed in with evidence from hostile-fire cases and criminal investigators tossed them all out.

"They threw away the bullet!" exclaims a frustrated Peggy Buryj. That news hit her in much the same way the news of Tillman's clothing destruction affected his stunned parents. "I lost the last bit of confidence I had in the Army," Buryj says.

The fragment could have been instrumental in determining which gun had fired the fatal shot. But it may have been a moot point: The IG also discovered that no ballistics samples were taken from the suspect weapons after the shooting in 2004.

"Had the four U.S. weapons been tested [and the bullet retained], this might have eliminated doubts over whether U.S. weapons fired the fatal round," said the report.

The IG outlined a series of Army errors compounded by more mistakes, paperwork screwups, and unexplained reporting delays, although the probe found no evidence of an intentional cover-up.

The Army's methods in the case were "often inaccurate and untimely," the IG concluded. The Army officially declared the shooting "a tragic accident" likely caused by an unknown ally.

With her son's story lacking the final, whodunit chapter, Peggy Buryj would like to see a full-scale probe like the one being done in the Tillman case by the Army Criminal Investigative Division, under orders from the IG. There's reasonable cause, she says.

"I think it may have been someone from the 66."

At least, that's what she was told, she says, by one of the officers in Jesse's 66th MP Company.

A lieutenant, he "came to our house last February [2006]," Buryj says."He had heard me on a radio show talking about Jesse. He called and asked if he could come by and talk to me. He was very afraid and at first wouldn't tell me his name.After a while, I figured out who he was." She won't publicly identify the officer.

"He told me who had confessed to killing Jesse. [The officer] was not there when Jess was killed, but he was there when the confession was made and the reports were falsified."

Buryj says she relayed the information to the IG's office, but was told the officer who had spoken with her had since left the service and the Army lacked jurisdiction. The IG's office won't comment today.

"They totally discredited him by saying he was demoted while in Iraq and had an ax to grind with commanders of the 66th," Buryj says. "That may be true, but people I've talked to in the 66th say it isn't."

Time is working against her now, as it is for the Tillmans. Three of the four likely shooters in Tillman's case are out of the service, free from military punishment.

"I think they're waiting for the same thing in Jess' case," says Buryj, suggesting the Army can just drop the case altogether if the alleged shooter of her son leaves the service.

A civil lawsuit would be expensive and perhaps futile—the military services are shielded from most tort claims for injury and death under a 60-year-old law known as the Feres doctrine, which, for the "good of the service," immunizes the military from what could be a barrage of claims.

Besides, says Buryj, if key evidence is missing, other than asking for a criminal probe, "There's just no place I know to go from here. Is it good enough? No. But what can I do about it? I guess you just live with your frustration."

She pauses.

"He was funny; that's the one thing I miss most. He was the funniest person I ever met. We were always on the same wavelength." She visits him weekly, sometimes driving past the football fans downtown.

By Rick Anderson

randerson@seattleweekly.com