Pentagon lies on Iraq 'heroes' exposed

[Gromit]

Trufth is said to be the first casualty of war, but do you think that balantly duping your own people to keep up morale is acceptable?

At an hearing in the US, former soldiers have been telling of the lies presented to the US public about their ordeals in Iraq. In short, a solier killed by friendly fire was said to have been killed by the Taliban and a soldier who fought to her last bullet, never actually fired one.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml =/news/2007/04/25/whero25.xml

"He was the American football star who gave up fame and fortune to serve his country only to meet a hero's death fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. She was the plucky little girl-Rambo who fought to her last bullet before she was badly injured and captured in Iraq.

Those, at least, were the stories put out by the US military about Cpl Pat Tillman and Pte Jessica Lynch, the two most famous casualties from the front lines. Both turned out to be in large part false, and both came back to bite the Pentagon yesterday in the full glare of a congressional committee room.

In a remarkable double act, Kevin Tillman, fellow soldier and younger brother of Pat, testified alongside Miss Lynch in a shared determination to show that truth is only a temporary casualty of war.

Their testimonies provided a strong indictment of the conduct of the military under former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

[bigmalc]

It comes as no surprise to me that the US Defence Dept. (USDD) has attempted to 'sex-up' the stories of these two soldiers. The USDD are guilty not only of perpetrating this kind of nonsense about the lives of individual soldiers, but about the entire operation in Iraq as a whole.

It seems like barely a week goes by without some kind of cover-up being exposed. I suppose that's what we are to expect from an administration that couldn't get its story straight about its reason for invasion in the first place.
It is sad and degrading that people who risk and sometimes give their lives for a government who misleads them, should have their stories and memories distorted and used as propaganda.

[bigmalc]

Acceptable for who's morale tonyted? What possible gain can there be in propagandising acts of heroism that are later proven not to have taken place? The only people who can use these stories as morale-boosting are the very people we accuse of being untruthful and undemocratic in the first place. They can use these stories to believe further and disseminate the belief that we are the corrupt ones. Indeed we are it seems.