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By Ken Stone,Times of San Diego, a member of the San Diego Online News Association
Photo: Former Rep. Duncan L. Hunter, shown in 2019, says NPR “twists things” on the April 2004 friendly fire incident. Photo by Ken Stone
June 13, 2023 (San Diego) - Ex-Congressman Duncan Lee Hunter, the father of disgraced Rep. Duncan Duane Hunter, says he traveled to Iraq at least four times when he was House Armed Services Committee chairman in the early 2000s.
So when the latest episode of NPR’s “Taking Cover” aired two months ago — focusing on one visit in June 2004 — the elder Hunter cried foul.
Said NPR: “What we didn’t know during this interview but learned soon after [was] Chairman Duncan Hunter visited Iraq [in] early summer of 2004, visited Fallujah, where he had a meeting with General James Conway just two days before Conway signed off on the [James] Mattis decision to drop punishments” of several officers in the incident that killed two fellow Marines and an Iraqi interpreter.
In an interview with Times of San Diego, the former Republican lawmaker blasted the National Public Radio podcast claim as “a damn lie” and “made out of whole cloth.”
In their second-to-last episode, reporters Graham Smith and Tom Bowman recount an interview with Hunter at a Washington, D.C., hotel about the friendly fire incident that their research shows involved his Marine lieutenant son.
The younger Hunter wasn’t among those recommended for discipline, but Hunter senior felt sandbagged at the hotel visit he said lasted 1 1/2 hours.
“You know, I don’t buy being sucked into an incident that I know nothing about,” he told NPR.
In a half-hour phone interview, Hunter told Times of San Diego that NPR “took a date and they leveraged that into implying that I leaned on the Marines and kept an investigation from coming out.”
What NPR aired was: “On June 28, 2004, Congressman Duncan Hunter visited Fallujah and met with Gen. Conway. Two days later, on June 30th, Conway signed off on Gen. Mattis’s decision to overturn the punishments, effectively closing the book on the whole incident.”
Hunter, who represented East County, says thousands of listeners took that to mean he was involved in a cover-up involving the April 2004 deaths of Marines Robert Zurheide and Brad Shuder by a mistargeted mortar blast.
But he insisted that he never knew about that friendly fire probe or had “any communication whatsoever” with any commanders about their Fallujah investigation.
Like his son — who declined many requests to speak to NPR — the 74-year-old Hunter says “NPR twists things.”
“They’ve taken the fact that I went over to Iraq leading the committee, which is my job, and they portrayed that as me going on a personal mission to the headquarters and leaning on the Marines to interfere with an investigation,” he said.
The elder Hunter also chafes over his son being blamed for a targeting mistake that tragic day — April 12, 2004.
He said his son was exonerated by Gregg Olson, the battalion commander at the time who OK’d the mortar mission that struck a schoolhouse where Marines awaited orders.
NPR reported: “When we talked to Olson before, he seemed to have really clear memories of Hunter pointing to the wrong target, said he just looked over his contemporaneous notes. Now he’s got no memory of that, doesn’t have any relevant notes, and he doesn’t even remember that he approved the mortar mission until we point out his own words sitting in front of him, black and white.”
Reporter Bowman continued: “It’s hard to know what to make of all this. And frankly, it’s odd that he wanted to call us in to change his story about Hunter and the map. It’s not like he said Hunter did a great job in the fire support center.”
Responding to a query, Hunter emailed me: “You printed a story assigning blame to Lt. Hunter on the basis that [Olson] related that ‘confusion’ started when Lt. Hunter ‘pointed to the wrong map,’ during the fire mission. This was the connection NPR and you used to tie Lt. Hunter to the ‘error chain.'”
Hunter cited the latest NPR interview with now Lt. Gen. Olson, director of the Marine Corps.
Quoting NPR, Hunter added capital letters: “After this story was initially published, Olson invited NPR back to the Pentagon for a follow-up interview and said he wanted to clarify his story about Hunter. He said it WAS ANOTHER OFFICER’S MISTAKE THAT TRIGGERED THE MISHAP and [said] ‘I didn’t have it right the first time I talked to you.'”
He quoted Olson as saying: “I don’t recall him pointing to anything.”
NPR’s Smith, who stands by his team’s reporting, replied to queries about the Olson flip-flop.
“It’s hard to know what to make of Olson’s abrupt about-face — clearly recalling, after referring to his contemporaneous notes, the sounds and the visuals and his sense of things and then later denying that he had any contemporaneous notes, and denying that he had any such memories,” Smith said via Facebook. “It was bizarre.”
An NPR spokesperson said: “NPR stands behind the reporting in Taking Cover, which is accurate and fair.”
The elder Hunter told Bowman that he didn’t disagree that the Army “screwed that thing up,” referring to the friendly fire death of ex-NFL player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman 10 days after the Fallujah incident.
“And obviously, they covered it up,” Hunter said. “My point is: That’s true, but the real tragedy is — at least from my perspective — that that story became the overwhelming story, and the bravery of Pat Tillman was subordinated to it.”
Hunter says in the podcast that friendly fire is “used to stigmatize the person who was killed by it. Right? [Tillman’s] death was turned into a review of the system that kept this hidden for so long. … It’s sensationalism. It sells Coca-Cola. But … I thought that subordinating his heroism to the here’s-how-we-screwed-up story was [a disservice].”
I asked Hunter why his son, now 46, doesn’t come to his own defense.
He replied that NPR has “made a career of smearing the military. He doesn’t want to be part of that.”
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