More on Pat Tillman from the Nation Magazine

A while back I wrote a post about both Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, and the sad use of their persona as poster boy and poster girl by the Pentagon to market the wars in the Middle East.

As you’ll recall, Lynch was fairy-tale rescued female solider, and Tillman was the beefy, handsome, real life G.I. Joe who Ann Coulter described as “an American original – virtuous, pure, and masculine like only American males can be.”

The only problem was neither story associated with either of these walking billboards for the government were true – in fact, quite the opposite.

To this day, I have seen almost no coverage in the corporate media regarding the lies surrounding either solider, the incredible anger, frustration and humiliation felt by their familes and friends, or any apologies from either the Bush administration or the Pentagon.

Dave Zirin at The Nation Magazine has recently written a bit more about Tillman in particular – who was quoted referring “fucking illegal” Iraq war by his close friend in the Army – and how completely opposite he was in actuality from the way you’ve seen him depicted by the Pentagon, and the “liberal media.”

As the (San Francisco) Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling, “a side of Pat Tillman not widely known – a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted and fought and died in service to his country, yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books…to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.”

Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq war. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, “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 fucking illegal.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah.’ That’swho he was. He totally was against Bush.”

With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq war.

Read the rest here.