Many months later, after the cover-up unraveled and the Tillman family pressured government officials and the Army to reveal who was responsible for the lies they’d been told, McChrystal would spin the P4 memo as proof that he never meant to conceal the fratricide. But his secret back-channel memo didn’t urge anyone to divulge the truth and end the cover-up; it merely sounded the alarm that someone needed to warn speechwriters to be ambiguous about the cause of death when crafting statements about Tillman, in order to provide President Bush with deniability. (In the speech Bush gave at the
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