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Correspondents on Capitol Hill for NBC and ABC turned instead to House hearings into the Pentagon's handling of the notorious death of Pat Tillman, the former NFL football player, on a battlefield in Afghanistan (note that yesterday (text link) we questioned CBS' elevation of Tillman to "star" status; now NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's Charles Gibson perform the same athletic inflation). At stake was how high up the chain of command the decision had gone to portray Tillman's death, falsely, as heroic.
The witnesses were the three men in charge at the Pentagon at the time, all now retired: then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Chairman Richard Myers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen John Abizaid, then commander of Central Command. NBC's Chip Reid reported that Abizaid testified he had been warned of the true facts of the incident within one week and that he relayed that information on to Myers.
Rumsfeld for his part "vigorously denied" deception, according to Reid, although--reminding us of his relish for indirect rhetorical soundbites--his use of words was not categorical: "I know that I would not engage in a cover-up" was his formulation, without explaining the force of the "know" and the "would." ABC's Pentagon correspondent Jonathan Karl commented that "the military says the buck stops with three-star Gen Philip Kensinger…the committee tried to get Kensinger to testify but not even the federal marshals could find him."
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