From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is out this week.

I'm Maroon Roth.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

It's been almost four months since Democrats took back the gabble on Capitol Hill, and they've been banging away ever since.

This week, they defied the White House by passing a war funding bill with a timetable for troop withdrawal and issuing

subpoenas to administration and Republican Party officials involved in alleged wrongdoing.

But it was a House hearing on Tuesday that provided the most searing TV images.

The topic at hand was the Pentagon's management of war stories. Specifically, those of Jessica

Lynch, remember her? And Corporal Pat Tillman, the former NFL star, turned Army Ranger,

who was killed in Afghanistan three years ago. The Army originally said Tillman was ambushed

by hostile forces, but it later emerged that he was killed by friendly fire.

His family now accuses the Pentagon of a deliberate cover-up. Here was Pat's brother Kevin on Tuesday.

To further exploit Pat's death, he was awarded the Silver Star for Valor. And we believe the strategy had the intended effect. It shifted the focus from the

grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib and a downward spiral of an illegal act of aggression to a great

American who died a hero's death. An army investigation found that Tillman's family should have been

told about the fratricide right away,

but there was no broader cover-up.

That may be true, but there's little doubt that at the time the military benefited from the trumped-up tale of battling the enemy.

We asked military historian and Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman, speaking as a historian, not as a military spokesman,

to give us some perspective on hero-making in other wars.

Government involvement really starts in the First World War.

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