Truth…Missing in Action

CBS reported some news. Yes…actual news and journalism and reporting. It happened. Really!

Now, you might have missed it. But they reported on the strange death of Specialist Ciara Durkin, member of a finance unit deployed to Afghanistan.

This is from the report linked above:

The Army National Guard soldier from Massachusetts was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in Afghanistan last week, and now her family is demanding answers from the military.

Initially the Pentagon reported that Durkin, part of a finance unit deployed to Afghanistan in November 2006, had been killed in action, but then revised its statement to read she had died of injuries “suffered from a non-combat related incident” at Bagram Airfield. The statement had no specifics and said the circumstances are under investigation.

Durkin had a desk job doing payroll in an office about three miles inside the secure Bagram Air Base. About 90 minutes after she left work last Friday, her family says she was found dead near a chapel on the base with a single gunshot wound to the head.

Strange, isn’t it?

Well, it gets stranger. Because her death came after a visit back in the States during which she told her family that they should investigate her death, should she die.

Why?

Well, she’d found some irregularities during her work and said. “I discovered some things I don’t like and I made some enemies because of it.”

Then she died…within a secured zone…one gunshot to her head.

And, like the Pat Tillman debacle, the military is changing the official story and explanation. Again.

You’ll recall, Tillman was killed after becoming disillusioned with the wars and making contacts with people like Noam Chomsky. He was due to return and was, according to his family, going to make a splash telling the public what he, the Pentagon’s Superpatriot, thought of the wars.

But he died, shot by “friendly fire.”

Then there is the bogus rescue story of Private Jessica Lynch. Of course, the media obsession with the “rescue” of cute, little Jessica was not matchedwhen she went before Congress and testified that the story wasn’t true and she “wondered” why they–the Pentagon–lied about it.

In fact, Iraqi hospital staff tried to deliver her to the US Army…but were fired on and forced to return to the hospital. They kept her alive until troops, armed with guns and…not coincidentally…cameras came to “rescue” her.

It was a great, constantly-played story during those early days of Shock and Awe. Jessica’s story caused a lot of shock over the little fair-haired girl in the clutches of evil brown people and the rescue inspired more than its fair share of “aww” from the media and the public.

But that was a long time ago, and since we have lingering questions about billions and billions of missing dollars…$10-12 billion cash just vanished from Iraq…and huge, wasteful contracts to cronies of the Adminstration throughout the War on Terror, perhaps the death of Ciara Durkin requires a similar sort of scrutiny.

The kind of scrutiny that has given us a clearer picture of Tillman and Lynch. The sort of scrutiny that was lacking for poor Lynddie England, who took that fall for following orders that came from the top of the Pentagon.

The grunt always pays the price.

So I give “kudos” to CBS for putting this story out there. Now it is up to us to give Ciara’s story the kind of watercooler chats we gave Tillman and Lynch.

If she was killed for uncovering some corruption and doing her duty, the least we can do is fulfill our duty to be active citizens and force the media and the government to give us answers, and giver her grieving family the justice of closure.

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