Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party

John Krakauer wrote a book detailing the investigation and exposes the truth about General McChrystal, explaining it to Jon Stewart:

Krakauer: Friendly fire happens and it's sad how that happened to him but what's worse is what happened to him after he was killed. The way he was used by the last administration to advance their political ends and that's upsetting to me.

The Tillman family warned President Obama not to put the General in charge of the Afghanistan mission.

The parents of slain Army Ranger and NFL star Pat Tillman voiced concerns Tuesday that the general who played a role in mischaracterizing his death could be put in charge of military operations in Afghanistan. In a brief interview with The Associated Press, Pat Tillman Sr. accused Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal of covering up the circumstances of the 2004 slaying. "I do believe that guy participated in a falsified homicide investigation," Pat Tillman Sr. said.

He later apologized for his role in the cover up.

I bet his apology made the Tillmans forget about all their troubles. The President should have listened to their warning.

There are parts of the Rolling Stone article that nobody is talking about, but should. It was primarily the center left wing blogs that screamed about the way the military high command lied and then covered up the true events that led to the death of Pat Tillman and General McChrystal played a pivotal role.

But it was during his next stint – overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force – that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.)

A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.

"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.

How does a man, no matter how gifted he is, be given a free pass not only by the military, but also by the media? What is their function? Why does every piece of usuful information have to be in the form of an exclusive? Or are they that afraid to call events as they actually when it comes to a General in our armed forces? It was despicable.

John Karakuer wrote a book detailing the investigation and exposes the truth about General McChrystal.

As I said, blogs like C&L covered this cover-up with a sharp eye and we have the videos to prove it. Here's what Pat's brother had to say:

We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family but more importantly the American public," Kevin Tillman told a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee hearing. "Pat's death was clearly the result of fratricide," he said, contending that the military's misstatements amounted to "fraud."---"Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters ... so the truth needed to be suppressed,"...read on

Here's President Bush refusing to make a pledge to get to the bottom of the Tillman investigation.

A military officer actually referred to Pat as 'worm dirt' because Pat's family were not Christians.

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."

Henry Waxman told Pat's sister that was really horrible. You think? Crazy religious freaks have infiltrated the military and here's another example of that happening with the most vile results.

And then there was the torture scandal that rocked him a little later.

Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official.

In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan. The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies.

We expect this behavior from Congress unfortunately, but the press has no excuse. Are they that afraid to investigate the military elites?