Paint A Vulgar Picture.

I've previously touched on the outrageous behavior that the Pentagon apparently engaged in when embellishing (to put it kindly) the story of how Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan, and they repeated such chicanery with Jessica Lynch's rescue in Iraq a few months later. Both Lynch and Tillman's brother Kevin testified in front of Congress today, and so did another one of Tillman's Army Ranger comrades. Ryan O'Neal stated that he was told not to tell the family that Tillman had died in a friendly fire incident.

Kevin Tillman was in a convoy behind his older brother, a former NFL star, on April 22, 2004, when Pat Tillman was mistakenly shot by other Army Rangers who had just emerged from a canyon where they'd been fired upon. Kevin Tillman didn't see what happened. O'Neal said he was ordered not to tell him by then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey, the battalion commander who oversaw Tillman's platoon.

"He basically just said, sir, that uh, 'Do not let Kevin know, he's probably in a bad place knowing that his brother's dead,"' O'Neal testified. "He made it known that I would get in trouble, sir, if I spoke with Kevin."

Both Kevin Tillman and Jessica Lynch testified to deliberate fabrications in both cases. ESPN's investigative reporter Mike Fish has put together a nice four-part series on Tillman for ESPN Mag, and I suppose this stuck out at me more than anything in the first part:

[Lt. Col Ralph] Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know."

If you don't know how an atheist would think, it's probably better not to say anything, really.