Investigating Reports,

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also read : Friendly Fire Ambush

Army Lies to Mother of Slain Guardsman for Two Years, Says Killed by Insurgents Instead of Allied Iraqi Soldiers

Specialist Patrick McCaffrey was killed in June 2004 while on patrol near the town of Balad

Specialist Patrick McCaffrey and First Lieutenant Andre Tyson - both members of the California National Guard - were killed in June 2004 while on patrol near the town of Balad, fifty miles north of Baghdad.

Military officials initially told the families that the two soldiers had been attacked and killed in an ambush by insurgents. But that story turned out to be a lie.

An Army investigation concluded in September 2005 that the two were in fact killed by members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps - supposed allies that the Guardsmen had been training and patrolling with. McCaffrey and Tyson's fellow soldiers had suspected this was the case all along. Instead of sharing these findings with the families, the military sat on the story - for nine months.

It was only after Nadia McCaffrey - the mother of Specialist Patrick McCaffrey - asked California Senator Barbara Boxer in May to pressure the Pentagon to release information about her son's death that the truth came out.

The military revealed what it knew only this week - nearly two years to the day of the killings of McCaffrey and Tyson. An Army general briefed the families at their homes on Wednesday. The Pentagon is now being accused of a deliberate cover-up.

Senator Boxer said the case raises troubling questions and plans to raise the issue on the floor of the Senate.

She told reporters, "I think it" s pretty obvious that if the American people knew that the Iraqis we train would turn on our soldiers, support for the war would erode."

This is not the first case of its kind. Also in 2004, NFL star Pat Tillman was killed while serving in Afghanistan. The Army initially said Tillman was killed by enemy fire while leading troops into battle. The high-profile story was widely reported in the media. But the Army was later forced to acknowledge that Tillman had in fact been killed by gunfire from his fellow soldiers.

• Nadia McCaffrey, the mother of Specialist Patrick McCaffrey. She joins us on the line from Tracy, CA.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Tracy, California, to speak with Nadia McCaffrey, the mother of Specialist Patrick McCaffrey, welcome to Democracy Now!, Nadia.

NADIA McCAFFREY: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. And again our condolences on the loss of your son, Patrick.

NADIA McCAFFREY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what you learned this week?

NADIA McCAFFREY: Well, it was a bumpy week. This week I learned -- and I had a visit from a general and three high-ranking officers at my house. And this was to let me know that the report that I had received originally in 2004, after my son's death, was not true, was not exactly a report. Nobody bothered to give me a report. But what we know was exactly that Patrick and Andre were attacked in an ambush, and they were both killed.

We since then asked many, many times, a report on Patrick’s autopsy and a report on the result of the ambush or the investigation from the ambush. And then we were answered absolutely nothing. Letters, email, you name it. Phone calls. I don't know how many times I’ve personally called the Pentagon. Nothing. We would be given another phone number to call to or another direction within the country. The call to Iraq military here, some other person in Washington, D.C. It didn't make sense.

So I was just fed up with it, and I just walked up to Senator Boxer, and I just asked her, “Please, can you help me with this?” And then, boy, two or three days later, I started to get a phone call from the Pentagon, telling me that somebody would -- a doctor would call me in the next few days to give me a report on Patrick's death from the autopsy. It happened just like that. So the doctor that called actually worked on Patrick and remembered Patrick very well, when he came in from Dover. And he also sent me the next day by FedEx a CD with pictures of the arrival first of Patrick out of the body bag and all the procedure of the autopsy.

AMY GOODMAN: The San Francisco Chronicle piece on your learning this week, on the second anniversary of Patrick's death, what actually happened to him, begins, “Fellow soldiers knew within minutes on June 22, 2004, that California National Guard Specialist Patrick McCaffrey and First Lieutenant Andre D. Tyson had been killed by supposedly allied Iraqi soldiers who were patrolling alongside them. Army investigators reached the same conclusion in 2005.” So, his fellow soldiers knew immediately. Have you talked to any of his buddies who survived and came home?

NADIA McCAFFREY: Oh, yes, I did. And I actually had my own investigation, and I have accumulated a box -- actually I’ve got two or three boxes -- of papers. People sent me emails from across the country, people who were in Iraq, people who just were home, but also check from one soldier to the other, to the other. I accumulated that. And somebody in Los Angeles, a professor, Professor Wolf, he made a lot of time for this investigation. He followed it from the beginning. And he really helped me, you know. And obviously, something was wrong from the start. We needed to pinpoint what it was, and how it was presented to us was totally wrong. You know, it was just false. It didn't work. I mean, it didn't make sense. Many things did not make sense at all.

AMY GOODMAN: But no member of his unit came to you and said, “It's not as the Army has told you. I was there.”

NADIA McCAFFREY: Yes. Yes, two or three people did.

AMY GOODMAN: And did they tell you this?

NADIA McCAFFREY: They told me, yes, what they saw and what they have heard. As a matter of fact, just after Patrick and Andre were killed, one of the soldiers made his own report. And very complete, I may say. And this report was actually sent to the Sacramento Bee in Sacramento, newspaper. And this article was actually published by the Sacramento Bee. Immediately after that, this article was all over the world, because when Patrick's body returned to the airport in San Francisco, I called the media, and that made a huge fire within the news and so on, since the Pentagon had a ban on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's explain the idea that you called the national press to be at Sacramento airport, international airport, when Patrick's body came home, because President Bush had issued this executive order, saying that you shouldn't videotape, photograph, film the flag-draped coffins of the soldiers coming home. But you defied that?

NADIA McCAFFREY: Yes, yes. I didn't want to. That was my son. Frankly, I didn’t really care, you know. I needed to do it this way for us, and I wanted to honor my son. I was not going to pass him in the dark, returning home, no. He didn't leave in the dark; why should I do that when he comes back? No. But because of that, immediately after this, this article took off and was everywhere. What happened was, the soldier who wrote this article was threatened to be court-martialed immediately. And the only reason that the court-martial didn't happen is because it became too public too fast. But he nonetheless was in serious trouble. I know that through his mother, and she was extremely worried about it. So I talked to other soldiers in his unit, and I called, you know, [inaudible] in San Francisco that I know. I needed advice from just in case something would turn ugly. He's okay. But it was not easy for him for quite a long time.