I Cogitate

Hundreds pay respects to slain GI; Say goodbye to Ciara Durkin amid questions about death
Karen Goulart
The Patriot Ledger
October 6, 2007

QUINCY - In an increasingly heavy stream they came.

Fellow Army National Guard members she called friends, and some she never met; former co-workers from Fenway Community Health who recalled her with laughter her even as they wiped away tears; newly minted soldiers in fatigues, ranking officers in crisp uniforms and graying veterans of wars fought decades ago.

From late Friday afternoon and into the evening they came to Dennis Sweeney Funeral Home to comfort the Durkin family and say good-bye to their beloved daughter and sister, Spc. Ciara Durkin.

Durkin, 30, died Sept. 28 from a single gunshot to the head at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. She had been assigned to a finance unit at the base since February; her tour would have ended next February...

...Family members said she loved her job and serving her country, but something she said while on leave at home in Quincy last month turned from what seemed like a joke to something that sounded alarms when they learned of her death.

Durkin told them that in her work she had come across some things that concerned her and raised objections to others at the base.

‘‘Then she said, in her light-hearted way, ‘If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,’’’ Canavan said.

The family met with Army officials for four hours Wednesday night. Army officials say they are investigating the death ‘‘as if it were a homicide,’’ although they have not ruled out suicide - a possibility the family dismisses.

National Guard Troops Denied Benefits After Longest Deployment Of Iraq War
10-03-07

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (NBC) -- When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

"It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

Anderson's orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

"Which would be allowing the soldiers an extra $500 to $800 a month," Anderson said.

Probing Pat Tillman's Final Mission  
Raquel Christie
American Journalism Review August/September 2007 issue     

Pat Tillman was us, but he was superhero us. He was down-home and toothy and friendly and well-mannered, that big-jawed California boy we could so easily adore because he was like us. We rooted for him when he joined the NFL and put on that big uniform, Arizona Cardinals, No. 40, and we rooted for him even more when he put on that bigger uniform, U.S. Army Ranger, and went to that big war, because, he said, he hadn't "done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that," and he had "a great deal of respect for those that have and what the flag stands for."

Then, on April 22, 2004, three bullets pierced his skull, and he was dead. And the newspapers gave us good, heroic reasons for his death, the way we liked it. The Boston Globe, April 24: "[H]is Rangers patrol was attacked by small arms fire and mortars during a coordinated ambush." The White House praised Tillman as "an inspiration both on and off the football field." And in May there was a funeral with a flag and a speech by a fellow soldier. And so he died for the right reasons. And we were angry. But we were satisfied.

But we were misled. We found out, months after that dusty April night, that what killed Pat Tillman in Afghanistan was not enemy fire, but fratricide, jargon for friendly fire, jargon for his fellow troops. And that a fellow soldier burned Tillman's body armor, just hours after he died. And that Tillman had talked about getting in touch with angry antiwar academic Noam Chomsky just before he left for war. We learned the story wasn't what we thought it was, and we reported it vigorously. And the Pentagon said it would keep digging. And we were angry. But we were calmed, because we were tired. Because it was time to lay the story to rest. Because we were, now, a little more skeptical, but we were satisfied.

But some of us weren't.

Like Mike Fish, an investigative reporter for ESPN.com. The story just didn't sit well with him. Brainstorming with colleagues at the sports juggernaut in Bristol, Connecticut, in January 2006, he decided the story couldn't rest until we knew just what happened that night, until the soldiers of the Black Sheep platoon and the Tillman family had their chance to speak after two years of being spoken for.

"It was too simple, too easy, too perfect," Fish says now. "It had to be more complex."

They finally got their chance. Five months, 2,000 documents, countless interviews, cross-country flights and FOIAs and threats later, Fish's "An Un-American Tragedy" painted their stories with vivid anecdotes, document descriptions, interactive maps, timelines and videos. A 19,000-word, four-part series posted on ESPN.com in July 2006, it's a journalistic goliath, a painstaking multimedia venture that is not just a bold recollection of the horrors faced by Tillman's unit and an enlightening look at Tillman himself but also a glimpse at the misdirection that still plagues the war.

It doesn't answer all the questions, Fish says. But, unlike most other coverage of the Tillman tragedy, it poses them.

In October, "An Un-American Tragedy" will receive an award in Arlington, Virginia, from Military Reporters and Editors, the top prize in the group's annual competition that honors military-interest journalism. "Tillman's Final Mission," the 30-minute ESPN documentary inspired by Fish's work, will take home the MRE television award. The two are the first MRE awards the sports network has received, says Michael Knisley, a senior deputy editor at ESPN.com who edited the story...

War-Crimes Prosecutor Quits in Pentagon Clash
William Glaberson
New York Times
October 6, 2007

In the latest disruption of the Bush administration’s plan to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for war crimes, the chief military prosecutor on the project stepped down yesterday after a dispute with a Pentagon official.

It was not clear what effect the departure would have on the problem-plagued effort to charge and try detainees.

The prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force, was to leave his position immediately, a Defense Department spokeswoman said. But the spokeswoman, Cynthia O. Smith, said officials were working to minimize interruption in the work of the prosecution office, which includes military lawyers supplemented by civilian federal prosecutors...

...The Pentagon’s system of prosecuting suspects has been beset by practical problems and legal disputes that have reached the Supreme Court. As a result, more than five years after the first terror suspects arrived at Guantánamo Bay, only one detainee’s war-crimes case has been completed, and that was through a plea agreement...

...Colonel Davis, a career military lawyer, had been in a bitter dispute with Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, who was appointed this summer to a top post in the Pentagon Office of Military Commissions, which supervises the war crimes trial system.

General Hartmann, an Air Force reserve officer who worked as a corporate lawyer until recently, was appointed this summer as the legal adviser to Susan J. Crawford, a former military appeals judge who is the convening authority, a military official who has extensive powers under the military commission law passed by Congress in 2006.

Among other powers, under the law, the convening authority can approve or reject war-crimes charges, make plea deals with detainees and reduce sentences.

People involved in the prosecutions, who spoke on condition of anonymity, have said that General Hartmann challenged Colonel Davis’s authority in August and pressed the prosecutors who worked for Colonel Davis to produce new charges against detainees quickly.

They said he also pushed the prosecutors to frame cases with bold terrorism accusations that would draw public attention to the military commission process, which has been one of the central legal strategies of the Bush administration. In some cases the prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty.

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