The Arizona Republic and The Argus of Fremont (Calif.) both reported the Army would announce Tillman, 27, was killed by fire from his fellow soldiers.

"It does seem pretty clear that he was killed by friendly fire," Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Republic. Franks said his panel was alerted to the information by the Army's Legislative Liaison Office.

The Argus cited a family friend and also government sources it did not name as confirming the friendly fire report. Tillman's family declined to comment.

An Afghan military official told The Associated Press on Saturday that Tillman died because of a "misunderstanding" when two mixed groups of American and Afghan soldiers began firing wildly in the confusion following an explosion.

The Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also contradicted U.S. reports that the American soldiers had come under enemy fire.

The Army has said Tillman was leading his comrades against enemy shooters who had pinned down other soldiers when he was killed on April 22.

Tillman, a member of the elite Ranger unit since 2002, was posthumously promoted from specialist to corporal. He also was awarded a Purple Heart and Silver Star.

If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce.
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

John Kerry's advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don't want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party.

They would like Mr. Gore, who brought bad karma to Mr. Dean with his primary endorsement, to zip it and go away. But more and more Democrats think it is Mr. Kerry who should zip it and go away.

The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration.

• This hype is coming from Ashcroft and the FBI, *not* Homeland security. I thought Tom Ridge was the one who was supposed to talk to us about terror threats.
  
• Ashcroft and Mueller have a lot of PR work to do to repair the fact that the 9/11 Commission is going to tear them to shreds.
  
• The "news" was released after the daily news cycle and after all Gov't offices were closed, hence making any analysis of this threat/press release impossible before Ashcroft's own tightly controlled press conference.
  
• The Administration needs to get Bush's terrible Monday night performance and lousy policy speech off of the front pages. It has been their M.O. to "create" a crisis when there is bad political news for the past three years.

"United States authorities had been holding Mr. Mayfield, ,[sic] a former Army lieutenant and convert to Islam, because they said that a fingerprint lifted from a plastic bag filled with detonators found at the bombing scene was traced to him. On Thursday, Spanish authorities said that the fingerprints attributed by American authorities to Mr. Mayfield belonged instead to an Algerian, Ouhnane Daoud. They said the prints were of Mr. Daoud's thumb and middle finger on his right hand.

Just after the attacks, the Spanish authorities said they could come up with no match for the prints when they ran them through their database, so they sent them to investigators abroad as a routine matter.

The F.B.I. then said the prints matched those they had in their records for Mr. Mayfield, whose prints were on file from his Army days."