Twenty years later, a new review of Pat Tillman’s death delves into the decisions that led to the fratricide and the Army’s subsequent damage control effort.

Twenty years after Pat Tillman was mistakenly killed by members of his own platoon emerging from a rocky ravine in Afghanistan, the friends who took most of the blame remain frustrated that senior officers escaped punishment for orders they gave before – -and for lies they told after – the fratricide.

Over the past year, ESPN reached out to more than 50 people with various connections to the April 22, 2004 incident, including senior military officers, investigators, members of Congress, former President George W. Bush White House officials and even the former president himself .

The interviews and a review of 20 years of investigative reports and other documents, including a book recently published by a former Delta Force commander, provide an expansive look at the decisions that led to the shooting and the subsequent damage control efforts to minimize the Army’s embarrassment .

Among the new results:

  • Unreported in any publicly released government investigations, the tragedy almost turned into an even worse disaster: An entirely separate Ranger group was patrolling the same area as Tillman’s split platoon. All three units converged in the same hot zone, unaware of each other’s presence.

  • According to interviews, three officers commanding operations from remote consoles had more chances to reconsider potentially fatal decisions, but instead overruled platoon leaders on the ground and chose the most dangerous set of options.

  • The long-known cover-up of what happened reached the top ranks of the army. Despite his sworn testimony that he knew nothing about friendly fire until weeks after Tillman’s death, General John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command, was told of the probable fratricide in a phone call within 24 hours, according to a senior officer. for the call. On Abizaid’s watch, a myth was allowed to persist for 35 days that enemy fire killed Tillman.

  • A senior Bush administration official appointed in the aftermath, Army Secretary Pete Geren, told ESPN in his first public comments on the Tillman case since leaving office that the military’s deception and failure to report the fratricide could be construed as a cover-up.

“We found people who had engaged in deception,” Geren told ESPN. “We found people who knew the truth and looked the other way. And there were more. And you could, if someone wanted, call it a ‘cover-up’.”

Read the full ESPN report here.