From Truthout:
By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t Report
Tuesday 17 July 2007
According to the Waxman and Davis letter, the withheld email was from a White House speech writer who was preparing a speech President Bush ultimately delivered to the annual White House correspondence dinner on May 1, 2004. The email was a request for additional information about Tillman after news of his death had been reported.
This request seems to have been answered by what the investigators describe as a "high-level military memo warning that the president should be informed that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire." The memo written by Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Task Force for Afghanistan, explained Tillman was killed by US forces, and was an attempt to "preclude any unknowing statements by our country's leaders which might cause public embarrassment if the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public."
Despite the warnings from the general, Bush's correspondence dinner speech included the fabricated story of Tillman's heroic death. Speaking on behalf of his family in front of the Oversight Committee nearly three years after the speech, Pat Tillman's brother, Kevin, said, "We believe this narrative was intended ... to deceive the American Public."
The investigation has been stymied by what members of Congress have called "stonewalling" by the Bush administration. Lawyers for the Bush administration have asserted the release of White House documents to investigators in not constitutional because the documents "implicate executive branch confidentiality interests," according to Special Counsel to the President Emmet Flood.
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