Officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6 is today the most celebrated of the U.S. military’s special mission units. But hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of “revenge ops,” unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities — a pattern of criminal violence that emerged soon after the Afghan war began and was tolerated and covered up by the command’s leadership.
Earlier that evening, general officers from the Joint Special Operations Command had scrambled the SEALs after watching a Predator drone video feed of a man they suspected was bin Laden set off in a convoy of three or four vehicles in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, where al Qaeda forces had fortified themselves. Although the video had revealed no weapons, and the generals had only tenuous intelligence that the convoy was al Qaeda — just suspicions based on the color of the man’s flowing white garb and the deference others showed him — they were nervous that bin Laden might get away again, as he had a few months earlier after the bombing of the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001. This was a crucial moment: Kill bin Laden now and the war could be over after only six months. The vehicles were headed east toward the Pakistani border, as if they were trying to escape. The mission was code-named Objective Bull.
Afghanistan’s Paktia province is about the size of New Hampshire, with 10,000-foot ridgelines and arid valleys with dried riverbeds below, nestled along the border with Pakistan’s tribal areas. The prominent mountain range often served as the last geographic refuge for retreating forces entering Pakistan. As the special operations helicopters approached the convoy from the north and west, Air Force jets dropped two bombs, halting the vehicles and killing several people instantly.
That was not how the SEALs wanted the mission to develop. Inside the helicopters, some of the operators had pushed to hold off any air attack, arguing that they had plenty of time to intercept the convoy before it reached the Pakistani border. “The reason SEAL Team 6 exists is to avoid bombs and collateral damage,” said a retired SEAL Team 6 member who was on the mission. “We said, ‘Let us set down and take a look at the convoy to determine if it’s al Qaeda.’ Instead, they dropped several bombs.”
The bombing stopped the convoy along a dry wadi, or ravine, with two of the trucks approximately a kilometer apart. Survivors began to flee the wreckage, and over the radio, Hyder and his team heard the order that the convoy was now in a “free fire zone,” allowing the Chinooks’ gunners to fire at anyone deemed a threat, regardless of whether they were armed. The SEALs had no authority over the helicopter gunners.
The two Chinooks landed separately, one near each end of the convoy. Both teams exited the helicopters to find a grim scene. The SEALs with Hyder came out and separated into two groups. One, led by an enlisted operator, took in the damage to one of the vehicles. Men, women, and a small girl, motionless and in the fetal position, appeared dead. Inside the vehicle were one or two rifles, as is customary in Afghanistan, but none of the men wore military clothing or had any extra ammunition. “These were family weapons,” said the retired SEAL.
The SEALs from the other helicopter immediately headed up a steep hill after landing to locate an armed man who had been shot from the helicopter. When they reached the hilltop, the operators looked down in disbelief at women and children, along with the man — all were dead or mortally wounded from the spray of gunfire from the Chinook’s gunners, who had unloaded after the free fire zone had been declared. They realized the man had been trying to protect the women and children.
Other SEALs on the ground proceeded as though the survivors were combatants. Hyder and an enlisted operator named Monty Heath had gone in a different direction and saw a survivor flee the bombed vehicle toward a nearby berm. Heath fired once, hitting the man, sending him tumbling down the back side of the small rise.
At that point, Hyder began assessing the damage and surveying the dead. “I was going around to the different KIAs with my camera to take photos,” Hyder told me in an interview, using the military term for enemies killed in action. “It was a mess.”
Hyder said that he and a few other SEALs began to bury the casualties near a ravine by piling rocks over them. As he did so, he approached the man Heath had shot. “He was partially alive, faced down, his back to me, and he rolled over. I shot him, finished him. He was dying, but he rolled over and I didn’t know whether he was armed or not. That was the end of that.” Hyder said that his single shot had blasted open the man’s head.
According to Hyder, the encounter ended there. But the retired SEAL who was on the mission tells a different story. According to this source, after shooting the man, who turned out to be unarmed, Hyder proceeded to mutilate his body by stomping in his already damaged skull. When Heath, who witnessed Hyder’s actions, reported them to his team leader in the presence of other members of the team, “several of the guys turned and walked away,” said the retired SEAL. “They were disgusted.” He quoted Heath as saying, “I’m morally flexible but I can’t handle that.” Heath refused to comment for this article.
The retired SEAL, who spent the better part of two decades at the command, said he never asked Hyder why he mutilated the corpse. It wasn’t necessary. He assumed it was a twisted act of misplaced revenge over the previous days’ events — specifically, the gruesome death of Hyder’s teammate Neil Roberts.
Less than 48 hours before Objective Bull commenced, a small reconnaissance group from SEAL Team 6’s Red Team had tried to establish an observation post on the 10,000-foot peak of Takur Ghar, overlooking the Shah-i-Kot valley, where forces from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division intended to strike the last redoubt of al Qaeda forces massed in Afghanistan. Neil “Fifi” Roberts, a member of the SEAL recon team, fell 10 feet from the back of a Chinook and was stranded as the helicopter took fire from foreign al Qaeda fighters who were already on the snow-covered mountaintop. Two hours passed before the SEALs in the damaged helicopter were able to return. They didn’t know it, but Roberts was already dead, shot at close range in the head shortly after his helicopter departed the mountaintop. A Predator drone video feed filmed an enemy fighter standing over Roberts’s body for two minutes, trying to behead the dead American with a knife.
Eventually, two other elements of a quick reaction force — one of which included Hyder — landed at the top of Takur Ghar. In the ensuing 17-hour battle with the al Qaeda fighters, six more Americans were killed, and several were wounded. After the bodies were recovered, Hyder and the other members of Red Team were forced to reckon with the mutilation and near beheading of their fellow SEAL. Hyder was new to SEAL Team 6, but as the ranking officer on the ground during that operation, he was technically in charge. He took Roberts’s death hard.
Neil Roberts was the first member of SEAL Team 6 to die in the Afghan war, and among the first elite operators who died after 9/11. Beyond the dehumanizing manner in which the al Qaeda fighters had treated his corpse, Roberts’s death pierced the SEALs’ self-perception of invincibility.
The battle of Roberts Ridge, as it came to be known, has been frequently described in books and press accounts. But what happened during Objective Bull, the assault on the convoy in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, has never been previously reported.
Roberts’s death, and the subsequent operations in eastern Afghanistan during the winter 2002 deployment, left an indelible impression on SEAL Team 6, especially on Red Team. According to multiple SEAL Team 6 sources, the events of that day set off a cascade of extraordinary violence. As the legend of SEAL Team 6 grew, a rogue culture arose that operated outside of the Navy’s established mechanisms for command and investigation. Parts of SEAL Team 6 began acting with an air of impunity that disturbed observers within the command. Senior members of SEAL Team 6 felt the pattern of brutality was not only illegal but rose to the level of war crimes.
“To understand the violence, you have to begin at Roberts Ridge,” said one former member of SEAL Team 6 who deployed several times to Afghanistan. “When you see your friend killed, recover his body, and find that the enemy mutilated him? It’s a schoolyard mentality. ‘You guys want to play with those rules?’ ‘OK.’” Although this former SEAL acknowledged that war crimes are wrong, he understood how they happen. “You ask me to go living with the pigs, but I can’t go live with pigs and then not get dirty.”
No single military unit has come to represent American military success or heroism more than SEAL Team 6, officially designated as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and known in military vernacular as DevGru, Team 6, the Command, and Task Force Blue. Its operators are part of an elite, clandestine cadre. The men who make it through the grueling training represent roughly the top 10 percent of all SEALs. They are taught to live and if necessary die for one another. The extreme risks they take forge extreme bonds.
Made up of no more than 200 SEAL operators when the Afghan war began, SEAL Team 6 was the lesser known of the U.S. military’s elite “special mission” units. Created in 1980 and based at the Dam Neck Annex of Naval Air Station Oceana near Virginia Beach, the command prided itself on its culture of nonconformity with the larger military. The unit’s name itself is part of an attempt to obscure U.S. capabilities. When it was commissioned, the Navy had only two SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) assault teams, but founding officer Cmdr. Richard Marcinko hoped that the number six would lead the Soviet military to inflate its assessment of the Navy’s SEALs.
When SEAL Team 6 first deployed to Afghanistan in January 2002, the command had three assault teams, Red, Blue, and Gold, each with a mascot. Red Team, known as the Redmen, employed a Native American warrior as a mascot; Blue Team, known as the Pirates, wore the Jolly Roger; and Gold Team, known as the Crusaders or Knights, wore a lion or a crusader’s cross.
The prevailing narrative about SEAL Team 6 in news coverage, bestselling books, and Hollywood movies is unambiguously heroic; it centers on the killing of Osama bin Laden and high-profile rescue missions. With few exceptions, a darker, more troubling story has been suppressed and ignored — a story replete with tactical brilliance on battlefields around the world coupled with a pattern of silence and deceit when “downrange” actions lead to episodes of criminal brutality. The unit’s elite stature has insulated its members from the scrutiny and military justice that lesser units would have faced for the same actions.
This account of the crimes of SEAL Team 6 results from a two-year investigation drawing on interviews with 18 current and former members of the unit, including four former senior leaders of the command. Other military and intelligence officials who have served with or investigated the unit were also interviewed. Most would speak about the unit only on background or without attribution, because nearly every facet of SEAL Team 6 is classified. Some sources asked for anonymity citing the probability of professional retaliation for speaking out against their peers and teammates. According to these sources, whether judged by its own private code or the international laws of war, the command has proven to be incapable and unwilling to hold itself accountable for war crimes.
Most SEALs did not commit atrocities, the sources said, but the problem was persistent and recurrent, like a stubborn virus. Senior leaders at the command knew about the misconduct and did little to eradicate it. The official SEAL creed reads, in part: “Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond.” But after 9/11, another code emerged that made lying — especially to protect a teammate or the command from accountability — the more honorable course of action.
“You can’t win an investigation on us,” one former SEAL Team 6 leader told me. “You don’t whistleblow on the teams … and when you win on the battlefield, you don’t lose investigations.”
By the time the two dozen Red Team operators departed for Objective Bull, tension had built up between Hyder, a commissioned officer, and the enlisted operators technically under his command. The situation was not particularly unusual. Historically, SEAL Team 6 is known as a unit where officers “rent their lockers,” because they typically serve about three years before rotating out, whereas the enlisted operators remain for much of their careers, often for a decade or more. Simply put, the unit is an enlisted mafia, where tactics are driven by the expertise developed by the unit’s enlisted assaulters, whose abilities and experience at making rapid threat decisions make up the command’s core resource. Officers like Hyder, who did not pass through the brutal SEAL Team 6 internal training program, known as Green Team, are often viewed with suspicion and occasionally contempt by the enlisted SEAL operators.
Even before the attack on the convoy and the alleged mutilation of the dead Afghan, Hyder had committed at least one killing with questionable justification. Several weeks earlier, in January 2002, Hyder killed an unarmed Afghan man north of Kandahar during the unit’s first ground assault of the war. In that operation, Hyder led a team of Red operators on a nighttime mission to capture suspected al Qaeda militants in a compound. After securing several detainees and cordoning the area, Hyder and his men waited for their helicopters to arrive and extract them. During the mission, the SEALs reported receiving small arms fire from exterior positions, though no one was hit. After 90 minutes, as the helicopters were nearing the rendezvous point, one of the SEALs alerted Hyder that an old man who had been lying in a ditch nearby was walking toward the SEALs’ position.
In an interview, Hyder said the man had approached his position with his arms tucked into his armpits and did not heed warnings from other SEALs to stop. Hyder acknowledged that the man likely did not understand English and probably couldn’t see very well. Unlike the SEALs, the man was not wearing night-vision goggles. “He continued to move towards us,” Hyder said. “I assessed he was nearing a distance where he was within an area where he could do damage with a grenade.” Hyder said that a week earlier, a militant had detonated a concealed grenade after approaching some American CIA officers, seriously injuring them. “He kept moving toward us, so at 15 meters I put one round in him and he dropped. Unfortunately, it turned out he had an audiocassette in his hand. By the rules of engagement he became a legitimate target and it was supported. It’s a question, why was he a threat? After all that activity, he’d been hiding in a ditch for 90 minutes, he gets up, he’s spoken to, yelled at in the dark … it’s disturbing. I’m disappointed he didn’t take a knee.”
Hyder, who was the ground force commander for the Kandahar operation, was cleared in an after-action review of the shooting. The rules of engagement allowed the ground force commander to shoot anyone he viewed as a threat, regardless of whether they were armed at the time of the shooting. But in the eyes of the enlisted SEALs of Red Team, Hyder had killed a man who didn’t have to die. Two of the operators with Hyder reported afterward that the man was not a threat. One of those operators was Neil Roberts.
“The SEALs believe that they can handle the discipline themselves, that’s equal to or greater than what the criminal justice system would give to the person.”
The morning after Objective Bull, Red Team gathered at Bagram Air Base. Most of the operators held a meeting to discuss what had happened on the mission. No officers were present, and the enlisted SEALs used the meeting to address Hyder’s alleged mutilation of the dead Afghan the previous day. The discussion covered battlefield ethics. Inside a heated tent, as many as 40 SEAL Team 6 operators asked themselves how they wanted to treat their fallen enemies. Should they seek revenge for Roberts? Was it acceptable, as Hyder had done with the wounded man whom he executed, to desecrate the dead?
“We talked about it … and 35 guys nodded their heads saying this is not who we are. We shoot ’em. No issues with that. And then we move on,” said a former SEAL who was present at the meeting. “There’s honor involved and Vic Hyder obviously traipsed all over that,” he said. “Mutilation isn’t part of the game.”
Nonetheless, Red Team did not report Hyder’s alleged battlefield mutilation, a war crime. In what would become part of a pattern of secrecy and silence, the SEAL operators dealt with the issue on their own and kept the incident from their chain of command.
“The SEALs believe that they can handle the discipline themselves, that’s equal to or greater than what the criminal justice system would give to the person,” said Susan Raser, a retired Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent who led the agency’s criminal division but did not investigate this mission. “They have an internal process that they think is sufficient and they are not inclined to cooperate unless they absolutely have to.” Raser, who conducted investigations into both regular SEAL units and SEAL Team 6, said that in her experience, SEALs simply didn’t report wrongdoing by their teammates.
Senior leaders at the command knew the grisly circumstances of Roberts’s death had unsettled Red Team. “Fifi was mutilated,” said a retired noncommissioned SEAL leader who was involved in internal discussions about how to prevent SEAL Team 6 from seeking revenge. “And then we had to address a very important question, how do you get the guys’ heads straight to mitigate any retaliation for Fifi? Otherwise we knew it’s going to get out of control. A third of the guys literally think they’re Apache warriors, then you had the Muslim way of removing a head. I understand the desire, I don’t condone it, but there was definite retaliation.”
Hyder told me that he did not desecrate the body. “I deny it,” he said, adding that he didn’t understand why Heath would have claimed to have witnessed it. “Even if it was true, I don’t know why he would say that.” Hyder said he was not aware of the Bagram meeting held by the enlisted operators about him or the accusations. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “Somebody else is making this up. Memories get distorted over 14 years. They’re telling you how they remember it. There was a lot of chaos. I’m telling you the absolute truth.”
After the deployment, SEAL Team 6’s leadership examined Hyder’s actions during Objective Bull. For some of them, what was most troubling was not that Hyder might have taken gratuitous revenge for Roberts’s death on an unrelated civilian, but that on more than one occasion, as ground force commander, he had fired his own weapon to neutralize perceived threats. “If you have multiple incidents where the ground force commander pulls the trigger on a deployment, you have a total breakdown of operational tactics,” said one retired SEAL leader. “It’s not their responsibility — that is why we have DevGru operators.”
Beyond the story of the alleged mutilation, the sight of the dead civilians killed during the opening airstrikes of Objective Bull, especially the women and children, left members of Red Team with deep psychological scars. “It ruined some of these guys,” said the former SEAL operator on the mission.
Six days after Objective Bull, the Pentagon announced at a press conference that an airstrike had killed 14 people, who a spokesperson said were “somehow affiliated” with al Qaeda. Sources at SEAL Team 6 who were present during the operation estimated the number of dead was between 17 and 20. Inside the command, the incident became known as the Wedding Party bombing after it was learned that the convoy was driving to a wedding.
Hyder finished his tour at SEAL Team 6 shortly after returning from the Afghanistan deployment and was later promoted to the rank of commander, the Navy equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. He was awarded the Silver Star for his efforts at Takur Ghar to save Roberts and the rest of the Red Team recon element. A few years later, after Hyder’s name was mentioned for another rotation in Red Team, some of Hyder’s former operators informed SEAL Team 6 leadership that he was not welcome back in the unit.
Neil Roberts’s bent rifle was placed on the wall of Red Team’s room at the SEALs’ base near Virginia Beach, a visible reminder of their teammate, their first deployment, and the troubles that would follow.
The SEALs’ successes throughout 2002 resulted in the Joint Special Operations Command choosing the unit to lead the hunt for al Qaeda, as well as the invasion of Baghdad in March 2003. The rise of JSOC as the sharp tip of America’s military effort led to a similar increase in size and responsibility for SEAL Team 6 in the early years of America’s two post-9/11 wars. By 2006, the command rapidly expanded, growing from 200 to 300 operators. What were originally known as assault teams now formally became squadrons, and by 2008, the expansion led to the creation of Silver, a fourth assault squadron. One result of the growth was that back in Virginia, the captain in command of the entire 300-SEAL force had far less oversight over tactical battlefield decisions. It was at this point that some critics in the military complained that SEAL Team 6 — with their full beards and arms, legs, and torsos covered in tattoos — looked like members of a biker gang. Questions about battlefield atrocities persisted, though some excused these actions in the name of psychological warfare against the enemy.
Against this backdrop, in 2006, Hugh Wyman Howard III, a descendant of an admiral and himself a Naval Academy graduate, took command of Red Squadron and its roughly 50 operators. Howard, who has since risen through the ranks and is currently a rear admiral, was twice rejected by his superiors for advanced SEAL Team 6 training. But in 1998, after intervention by a senior officer at Dam Neck, Howard was given a slot on Green Team. Because of Howard’s pedigree, SEAL Team 6 leaders running the training program felt pressure to pass him. After being shepherded through the nine-month training, he entered Red Squadron. Howard took the unit’s identity seriously, and after 9/11, despite the questionable circumstances that led to his ascent, his influence steadily grew.
In keeping with Red Squadron’s appropriation of Native American culture, Howard came up with the idea to bestow 14-inch hatchets on each SEAL who had a year of service in the squadron. The hatchets, paid for by private donations Howard solicited, were custom-made by Daniel Winkler, a highly regarded knife maker in North Carolina who designed several of the period tomahawks and knives used in the movie “The Last of the Mohicans.” Winkler sells similar hatchets for $600 each. The hatchets Howard obtained were stamped with a Native American warrior in a headdress and crossed tomahawks.
At first the hatchets appeared to be merely symbolic, because such heavy, awkward weapons had no place in the gear of a special operator. “There’s no military purpose for it,” a former Red Squadron operator told me. “But they are a great way of being part of a team. It was given as an honor, one more step to strive for, another sign that you’re doing a good job.”
For some of Howard’s men, however, the hatchets soon became more than symbolic as they were used at times to hack dead fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others used them to break doorknobs on raids or kill militants in hand-to-hand combat.
During the first deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it was common practice to take fingers, scalp, or skin from slain enemy combatants for identification purposes. One former SEAL Team 6 leader told me that he feared the practice would lead to members of the unit using the DNA samples as an excuse to mutilate and desecrate the dead. By 2007, when Howard and Red Squadron showed up with their hatchets in Iraq, internal reports of operators using the weapons to hack dead and dying militants were provided to both the commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 at that time, Capt. Scott Moore, and his deputy, Capt. Tim Szymanski.
Howard, who declined to answer questions from The Intercept, rallied his SEALs and others before missions and deployments by telling them to “bloody the hatchet.” One SEAL I spoke with said that Howard’s words were meant to be inspirational, like those of a coach, and were not an order to use the hatchets to commit war crimes. Others were much more critical. Howard was often heard asking his operators whether they’d gotten “blood on your hatchet” when they returned from a deployment. Howard’s distribution of the hatchets worried several senior SEAL Team 6 members and some CIA paramilitary officers who worked with his squadron.
Beginning in 2005 and continuing through 2008, as U.S. Special Operations forces became more central to the American military strategy, the number and frequency of operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan increased dramatically.
One former SEAL Team 6 senior leader said that he and others at the command were concerned that the scale and intensity of the violence in Iraq was so great that U.S. operators might be tempted to engage in retaliatory mutilations, a tactic al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency sometimes employed. “Iraq was a different kind of war — nothing we’d ever seen,” said the now-retired Team 6 leader. “So many dead bodies, so many, everywhere, and so the potential opportunities for mutilations were great.”
The operational tempo was very high. “On my 2005 deployment in Afghanistan, we only went on a handful of ops,” said a retired SEAL who served under Howard. “By the time we moved over to Iraq, we were doing missions as much as five nights a week. Iraq was a target rich environment, and Wyman allowed us to be more aggressive.” According to several former SEAL Team 6 leaders, it was JSOC commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal who ordered the increased operational tempo and pushed SEAL Team 6, including Howard, to conduct more frequent raids to help wipe out the insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Howard, according to two of his former operators, was more willing than previous officers to greenlight operations based on “weak” intelligence, leading to more raids and strikes. As a result, Howard became popular among the enlisted SEALs under his command, several of whom defended and praised him.
Howard’s critics argue that the hatchets were emblems of the rogue, at times criminal, conduct on the battlefield the commander was encouraging. “Every one of us is issued and carries a suppressed weapon,” said one former senior SEAL, referring to the Heckler & Koch assault rifles, equipped with silencers, issued to the operators. “There just isn’t a need to carry a two-pound hatchet on the battlefield.” For those who favored them, this former SEAL said, the hatchets could be justified as being no more than knives. “It’s a great way to explain it away, but they have the hatchets to flaunt the law. Our job is to ensure that we conduct ourselves in a way befitting the American people and the American flag. The hatchet says, ‘We don’t care about the Geneva Conventions’ and that ‘we are above the law and can do whatever we want.’”
Critics inside the command were troubled by the combination of battlefield aggression and Howard’s lack of military discipline. A retired noncommissioned officer said Howard’s encouragement and provision of Winkler hatchets was simply adding fuel to the fire. The power of the Native American mascot, he said, was not to be dismissed. Since the 1980s, when Red Team was first created, there were many operators in the unit who had experienced a “metamorphosis of identity and persona” into Native American warriors. “Guys are going out every night killing everything. The hatchet was too intimate, too closely aligned with a tomahawk, to have been a good idea.” The former SEAL, who himself had served in Red during his career, said that by giving operators the weapon of their battlefield persona, Howard sent an unmistakable message to his men: Use it. “That’s when you take away a hatchet,” the retired SEAL said. “Not provide them.”
During one Iraq deployment, Howard returned from a raid to an operations center with blood on his hatchet and his uniform. Back at the base, he gave a speech to a group of analysts and nonoperational officers in which he told them that his bloody appearance was a demonstration of how a battlefield commander should lead. One operator, who confirmed Howard’s remarks, added his own: “That’s the business we’re in.”
The death and attempted decapitation of Neil Roberts on Takur Ghar affected no one so profoundly as Britt Slabinski, the operator who led the rescue team back up the mountain only to find that Roberts was already dead. One former teammate who served with Slabinski described his effort that day — outnumbered and with inferior fire support, taking incoming fire from the moment the helicopter landed — as “one of the most heroic things I’ve ever seen.” On the day when SEAL Team 6 lost its first operator in the post-9/11 era, Slabinski became a unit legend.
By all accounts, Slabinski, a second-generation SEAL who joined Team 6 in 1993, was an excellent sniper and reconnaissance operator. Thin and lanky, he was less physically imposing than many SEALs but was charismatic and dedicated. After Roberts’s death, Slabinksi wanted revenge. In audio of an unpublished interview with the late Malcolm MacPherson, author of a 2005 book about Roberts Ridge, Slabinski describes in great detail an operation that took place about a week after Objective Bull. In that mission, known as Objective Wolverine, Slabinski and his fellow SEALs were sent in Chinook helicopters to follow a convoy they believed was filled with al Qaeda fighters escaping to Pakistan. A drone flying above the convoy showed the occupants of three vehicles were heavily armed.
After the Chinook miniguns strafed the vehicles and stopped them, Slabinski and his team of snipers landed and moved to a rise several hundred yards away from one of the trucks and began firing sniper rounds at the militants. In that brief firefight, the SEALs killed nearly 20 foreign al Qaeda fighters, some of whom carried U.S. military equipment taken from Takur Ghar. Slabinski told MacPherson that Wolverine had been “really good payback.”
“Just a phenomenal, phenomenal day. We just slaughtered those dudes.” After describing one particular fighter who from a distance had resembled Osama bin Laden, Slabinksi continued: “To this day, we’ve never had anything as good as that. Oh my gosh. We needed that … there was not a better group of people to go and do that. The guys needed that to get back in the saddle because everyone was gun shy.”
“I mean, talk about the funny stuff we do. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. I mean, he was dead, but people have got nerves. I shot him about 20 times in the legs, and every time you’d kick him, er, shoot him, he would kick up, you could see his body twitching and all that. It was like a game. Like, ‘hey look at this dude,’ and the guy would just twitch again. It was just good therapy. It was really good therapy for everybody who was there.”
Audio from an unpublished interview with Britt Slabinksi conducted by Malcolm MacPherson, author of a 2005 book on the battle of Roberts Ridge.
Shortly after that operation, Slabinski returned to the SEAL Team 6 base at Dam Neck. He was awarded a Navy Cross, the second highest battlefield award for heroism. For several years afterward, the leaders at the command limited Slabinski’s battlefield exposure — assigning him to Green Team as an instructor, for example — hoping the psychological wounds from Roberts Ridge would heal.
By late 2007, Slabinski was deployed to Afghanistan as the senior noncommissioned officer in Blue Squadron. The war was entering its seventh year and had become intractable, with no clear path to victory. Early in the war, the SEALs’ mission was to hunt down al Qaeda’s senior leaders, who had largely vanished into Pakistan, but now Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the leader of JSOC, extended the mission to target the Taliban, who along with al Qaeda were moving back and forth across the Pakistani border with impunity. The SEALs were now going after low-level Taliban financiers and shadow governors.
Blue Squadron was led at that time by Cmdr. Peter Vasely, a Naval Academy graduate who had not gone through the advanced assault training of Green Team that the other members of SEAL Team 6 had endured. He was an outsider, despite having been at the command for many years. Like Vic Hyder, he struggled to command the respect of his men. Slabinski — experienced, charismatic, and by now legendary — bridged the gap.
According to two senior SEAL Team 6 sources, however, the leadership dynamic in Blue Squadron was a failure. By 2007, the command’s leadership was aware that some Blue Squadron operators were using specialized knives to conduct “skinnings.” Using the excuse of collecting DNA, which required a small piece of skin containing hair follicles, operators were taking large strips of skin from dead enemy fighters. The two leading officers at the command, Moore and Szymanski, were informed that small groups in each of the three squadrons were mutilating and desecrating combatants in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Slabinkski and others in the squadron had fallen under the influence of an obscure war novel, “Devil’s Guard,” published in 1971 by George Robert Elford. The book purported to be a true account of an S.S. officer who with dozens of other soldiers escaped Germany after World War II, joined the French Foreign Legion, and spent years in Vietnam brutalizing the insurgency. The novel, which glorifies Nazi military practices, describes counterinsurgency tactics such as mass slaughter and desecration and other forms of wanton violence as a means of waging psychological warfare against the “savage” Vietnamese.
“These fucking morons read the book ‘The Devil’s Guard’ and believed it,” said one of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders who investigated Slabinski and Blue Squadron. “It’s a work of fiction billed as the Bible, as the truth. In reality, it’s bullshit. But we all see what we want to see.” Slabinski and the Blue Squadron SEALs deployed to Afghanistan were “frustrated, and that book gave them the answers they wanted to see: Terrorize the Taliban and they’d surrender. The truth is that such stuff only galvanizes the enemy.”
One telling illustration of what had gone wrong with Blue Squadron occurred on December 17, 2007, during a raid in Helmand province. Slabinski had told his operators that he wanted “a head on a platter.” Although some of the more seasoned SEALs took the statement metaphorically, at least one operator took Slabinski at his word, interpreting it as an order.
Later that night, after Blue Squadron’s assaulters had successfully carried out the raid, killing three or four armed men and recovering weapons and explosives, Vasely and Slabinski conducted a walk-through of the compound. Vasely, who was wearing night-vision goggles, looked through a window and saw one of his operators, his back turned, squatting over the body of a dead militant. Vasely later told investigators he saw the operator moving his hand back and forth over the militant’s neck in a sawing motion. Alarmed at seeing what he believed was a decapitation, he told Slabinski to go inside and see what the young operator was doing. By the time Slabinski entered the room where the dead militant lay, according to three former SEAL Team 6 leaders, the operator had severed much of the dead man’s neck.
Slabinski did not report the decapitation, however. He told Vasely that the operator had been trying to remove the dead fighter’s chest rack, a small vest that can hold ammunition and clips. Slabinski told Vasely, and later, Navy investigators, that there had been “no foul play.”
After leaving the compound and returning to their base in Kandahar province, Vasely reported to Moore, his superior officer, that he believed he had witnessed a war crime, a mutilation. Vasely told Moore he wanted an investigation into the incident. Moore, sitting in his office in Virginia Beach, pressed Vasely: What had he actually seen? Was there another explanation?
Moore told his deputy, Szymanski, who was in Afghanistan, to sort things out. Ten days later, the internal JSOC investigation was closed. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service then opened an investigation but was forced to rely on photographs and witness statements because active hostilities made the alleged crime scene inaccessible. When investigators approached the operator accused of mutilating the dead fighter, he exercised his right to remain silent and his right to counsel. A few days after the attempted interview, investigators obtained photos purporting to be of the dead fighter. No cuts were visible in the photos, according to a military official who has reviewed the file. Three weeks after the incident, NCIS closed its investigation, concluding that there was no evidence the SEAL had violated the laws of armed conflict. But according to multiple SEAL sources, the incident did in fact occur.
Szymanski, according to these sources, was directed by Moore to make the episode disappear. “Tim took a dive,” said a former noncommissioned SEAL officer, and it was “at Moore’s direction.” Szymanski had known Slabinski for at least 15 years. They had bonded over Roberts’s death.
Although Blue Squadron had avoided criminal charges, their battlefield conduct continued to set off alarms within the command. Some SEAL Team 6 leaders were appalled by how easily Vasely and Szymanski had folded under Moore’s pressure.
Within two weeks of the apparent beheading, Moore deployed to Afghanistan. While he was there, he confronted the Blue Squadron troop and the operator who’d tried to behead the Taliban fighter. A former SEAL Team 6 leader who has knowledge of the episode told me Moore shamed Slabinski and the squadron for their conduct. That was the only punishment. (The Intercept is withholding the name of the operator, who believed he was following an order. He remains on active duty and has not responded to requests for comment.)
One of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders, who investigated several Blue Squadron incidents, including the mutilation of bodies, said he repeatedly asked the operators why they felt the need to commit such acts. “Often we’d hear, well, they’re savages,” the former leader said. “They don’t play by the rules, so why should we?”
The Intercept submitted three pages of questions to both Adm. Szymanksi, who as head of Naval Special Warfare now commands all SEALs in the Navy, and Capt. Vasely, who currently runs the operations divisions of JSOC. Both declined to comment. Moore did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson at Naval Special Warfare, which oversees SEAL Team 6, declined repeated requests for interviews and refused to answer a detailed list of questions, writing in a statement, “We do not entertain or support public discussion of classified information because it puts our forces, their families and our future operations at great risk.” The SEAL command asserted that “all members of Naval Special Warfare are required to comply with the Laws of Armed Conflict in the conduct of military operations.”
Top: Capt. Peter Vasely with members of Blue Squadron in Afghanistan. Bottom: Britt Slabinski, left, and Capt. Timothy Szymanski, commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Group, after Slabinski was blackballed by SEAL Team 6 in Norfolk, Va., March 25, 2011.
Photos: www.navyseals.hu; Robert J. Fluegel/U.S. Navy
In 2010, when Slabinski was up for a promotion at the command, SEAL Team 6 leaders conducted two internal inquiries before making a decision. Almost immediately, the issue that received the most scrutiny was the December 2007 attempted beheading. According to two former SEALs, Slabinski told his teammates and superiors that his remark about wanting a head was figurative and not a literal order. By then, there was no question about whether the attempted beheading had occurred; the question was why.
“We didn’t debate whether Slab had told his guys he wanted a head on a platter — he copped to that. The only issue was, was his order real, or just talk?” said one of the retired SEALs involved. “It didn’t make a difference. He said it and one of his operators did it because he believed he was following an order.”
Ten officers and master chiefs voted unanimously against allowing Slabinski to return to the command. At that point, the second inquiry was commissioned by the SEAL Team 6 commanding officer, Pete Van Hooser. Evidence was presented that Slabinski gave an order to shoot all the men they encountered during another raid, whether or not they were armed. According to the New York Times, Afghans accused Blue Squadron of killing civilians during that operation, but a subsequent military investigation determined that all those killed had been armed and hostile. When Slabinski was confronted by the command’s senior enlisted leader about whether he had instructed Blue Squadron operators to kill all males during the operation, code-named Pantera, Slabinski acknowledged that he had done so. The second inquiry also uncovered the “head on a platter” remark as the instigation for the beheading in December 2007, but the command’s senior enlisted leader told Slabinski he would not get the promotion or be allowed to serve at the command again because of the Pantera order. Overall, it had become clear that Slabinski’s run as a leader on the battlefield caused Blue Squadron to come “off the rails,” according to a former SEAL Team 6 leader.
Slabinski has not responded to multiple queries and requests for comment, though he did deny to the New York Times in 2015 that he gave the illegal pre-mission guidance to kill all males. In his interview with the Times, Slabinski asserted that it was he who had witnessed the operator slashing at the dead fighter’s throat, saying, “It appeared he was mutilating a body.” Slabinski portrayed himself as trying to police his men and said that he gave them “a very stern speech.” He claimed to the Times that he told his men, “If any of you feel a need to do any retribution, you should call me.” Slabinski says nothing in the Times story about Vasely ordering him to investigate the scene or the remark about a head on a platter.
“To this day, he thinks the guys turned on him,” said one of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders. “Well, they did. What we didn’t do was turn him in. You will step over the line and you start dehumanizing people. You really do. And it takes the team, it takes individuals to pull you back. And part of that was getting rid of Britt Slabinski.”
Two other SEAL Team 6 leaders with a combined 35 years at the command said the removal of Slabinski and the failure to pursue official punishment was an indictment of the senior officers — they had failed one of their most basic duties, to hold themselves and others accountable for wrongdoing.
When Szymanski, who was then commanding officer of all regular East Coast-based SEAL teams, heard that Slabinski had been rejected by Team 6, he requested him as his senior enlisted adviser. The request was approved and Slabinski was promoted.
“If a guy cuts off another guy’s head and nothing happens, that becomes the standard,” said one of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders. “You’re moving the bar and buying into an emotional justification, ‘War is hell.’ If you’re not disciplining your force, you’re saying it’s OK.”
Slabinski retired from the military in 2014 after 25 years in the Navy. The operator accused of the attempted beheading has experienced difficulties as a result of his service. Last year, the command became concerned about his psychological condition, determining that he was medically unfit to deploy again. His superiors believed he had become “unglued” over the 2007 deployment. He was quietly removed from Team 6 and returned to a regular SEAL unit. He has told at least one former SEAL Team 6 teammate that he hopes to never deploy again.
“He’s just beginning to suffer for what he did,” said another SEAL Team 6 leader.
On the second floor of the SEAL Team 6 headquarters in the Dam Neck naval annex, a computer, known as the “ops computer,” stores the classified data on every mission the unit has completed for the past decade. Here, commanders returning from a deployment leave their hard drives with technicians who transfer PowerPoints, after-actions reports, and photos of each operation a squadron conducted abroad. The database contains photographs of persons killed by SEAL operators during their missions and other mission documentation.
Some of those photographs, especially those taken of casualties from 2005 through 2008, show deceased enemy combatants with their skulls split open by a rifle or pistol round at the upper forehead, exposing their brain matter. The foreign fighters who suffered these V-shaped wounds were either killed in battle and later shot at close range or finished off with a security round while dying. Among members of SEAL Team 6, this practice of desecrating enemy casualties was called “canoeing.”
The canoeing photos are dramatic documentary evidence of the extreme and unnecessary violence that began to occur during multiple high-risk, exhausting, and traumatizing tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is and was no military reason whatsoever to split someone’s skull open with a single round,” said a former SEAL Team 6 leader. “It’s sport.”
The former SEAL Team 6 leader said that he first noticed canoeing in 2004, and that it does occur accidentally on the battlefield, but rarely. He said canoeing became “big” in 2007. “I’d look through the post-op photos and see multiple canoes on one objective, several times a deployment,” the retired SEAL said. When SEAL Team 6 operators were occasionally confronted about the desecration, the SEAL leader said, they’d often joke that they were just “great shots.”
Canoeing was just one of several acts of mutilation frequently carried out by SEALs. Two different sources said that over a six-year period — roughly 2005 through 2011 — battlefield reports and accounts of atrocities, particularly mutilations and taking of trophies, were ignored by SEAL Team 6 leadership. One source said his superiors repeatedly refused to address the issue.
The lack of battlefield discipline was not limited to a single squadron. Unlawful violence, aberrations from rules of engagement, mutilations, and disrespect of enemy casualties, actions that had been isolated at the beginning of the Afghan war, had by this point spread throughout SEAL Team 6.
In the early years of the war, SEAL Team 6 had an inflexible standard: Shooting people who were unarmed was forbidden and anyone who did so had to demonstrate the target had displayed hostile intent. Operators and officers prided themselves on their ability to kill only those who were deemed a threat.
If a SEAL couldn’t justify the threat after a shooting, he was quietly removed from the unit. But even that rule evolved over time. SEALs were given wide berth as long as they could explain why they made the decision to shoot an unarmed person. In 2007, for example, a Gold Squadron sniper was pushed out of the unit after he killed three unarmed people — including a child — in at least two different operations. He was allowed to return to the regular SEAL teams. No investigation into an unjustified killing has ever resulted in formal disciplinary action against a member of SEAL Team 6.
In 2008, tensions began to rise between SEAL Team 6 and the CIA over operations in Afghanistan. Paramilitary officers from the CIA, including a covert joint unit under the agency’s command called the Omega program, worked closely with the SEALs. These small teams of CIA, Seal Team 6, and Afghan commandos operated under the agency’s Title 50 authority, which governs covert activities. This meant there was less oversight over their missions — and less accountability if things went wrong.
Late that year, the CIA joined operators from Gold Squadron for an operation near Jalalabad. According to a CIA officer with direct knowledge of the incident, the CIA requested that the SEALs capture, rather than kill, their militant targets. During the pre-dawn raid, a small team from Gold Squadron breached a compound that was home to an insurgent cell that had targeted a U.S. base. Inside, they found six militants, four in one room, all sleeping with weapons near their beds. Despite orders to detain the men, the SEALs killed all six. In the room with four of the suspected insurgents, four SEALs counted down and canoed each sleeping man with a shot to the forehead. One of their teammates killed the other two targets in another room. All six were photographed.
The CIA team on the operation was angry because they had lost an opportunity to interrogate the suspected militants. “These were guys who were running a cell near our base,” the CIA officer said. “We could’ve used the intel.” Outside the compound, the SEALs were quick to show the photos to others on the assault team. “They were smiling, almost gleeful,” he said. “Canoeing them was funny.”
Shortly after that operation, a CIA paramilitary officer named Richard Smethers, who was himself a retired SEAL Team 6 officer, complained to his CIA superiors in Kabul that SEALs were committing atrocities. Smethers threatened to expose the SEALs for what he believed was a series of war crimes; the canoeing incident was just one of several operations in which Smethers alleged that Gold Squadron operators violated the laws of war. Over a period of several weeks, a fight erupted between SEAL Team 6 and CIA officers in Afghanistan. The SEALs quickly intervened and made a deal with the CIA station in Kabul. Gold Squadron was set to redeploy to the U.S., and the SEALs promised to rein in their operators. In exchange, Smethers, who never filed an official allegation or complaint, was sent back to the U.S. Smethers did not respond to requests for comment.
According to multiple members of SEAL Team 6, the fight with the CIA was one of the few instances in which the command’s battlefield misconduct was in danger of being exposed. A retired noncommissioned officer who tried to police the unit said the command suffered from “unspoken oaths of allegiance” among both the officers and the operators, and that the first instinct when misconduct surfaced was to “protect the command and then the men” rather than hold bad actors accountable.
“It’s important that you put this stuff in context,” the CIA officer said. “I’m not going to tell you this didn’t happen. Yes, we — they committed war crimes. It happens in war. War is an adrenaline rush. After three or four deployments in, you need more to get that stimulation. We didn’t hit women or kids. We killed bad guys. And afterwards, we added the psychological warfare.”
The CIA declined to comment for this article.
Smethers’s threat to expose Team 6 came just as Vice Adm. William McRaven settled in as the new commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. McRaven became the first Navy SEAL to lead JSOC and was already familiar with Dam Neck’s status as the disrespectful sibling in the U.S. special operations family. In the early 1980s, a group of seasoned enlisted SEAL Team 6 operators kicked McRaven off a training exercise, relieving him of his already tenuous command for being too rule-bound. McRaven was subsequently transferred from the unit.
Just eight months after taking over JSOC, after a series of complaints from the Afghan government over special operations night raids and civilian deaths, McRaven sought to pull Team 6 back from its overly aggressive stance. He ordered a pause in most SEAL and JSOC operations over a two-week period in February 2009. Although the stoppage was not limited to the SEALs, his former unit pushed back against a new set of operational guidelines.
First, the SEALs would now be required to do “call outs” before entering a compound. The intention was to permit women and children to get out of harm’s way before operators conducted their assault. The operators were unhappy about the new restriction, arguing that call outs gave up the tactical advantage of surprise. McRaven’s other directive required a more extensive post-operation review to document and justify combatant deaths. Previously, the command had required only a frontal shot and a profile of each dead militant. The new rule required a full photographic accounting of who was killed, photos of the entire body, where the target was when he dropped, what weapons he held, the vantage point of the operator when he fired, and other atmospherics.
This directive had one primary purpose: to protect U.S. forces from accusations of unjustified killings by Afghan government officials. The photos and other review documents could be shared with local officials to justify operations. But the directive had another benefit. With more extensive photographic documentation, SEAL operators had less time to fire unnecessary rounds into the dead, and they had to use the photos to explain why they fired their weapon. As a result, photographs of canoed enemy fighters virtually ceased to appear in after-action reports.
McRaven’s new orders set off a struggle between the JSOC commander and SEAL Team 6’s enlisted ranks that played out in a series of high-profile hostage rescues ordered by President Obama. The first and best-known was the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips, captain of the commercial vessel the “Maersk Alabama,” in April 2009 from Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Red Squadron snipers killed three pirates who were holding Phillips in a lifeboat. But McRaven, who commanded the operation, had not ordered the snipers to fire, and neither had a SEAL Team 6 officer. The sniper team leader acted under his own “emergency assault” authority to kill the pirates as soon as all three could be taken out at the same time. McRaven, who was informed of the killings only after he knew Phillips was safe, was incensed.
After the operation, $30,000 in cash, which the pirates had stashed in a lifeboat, went missing. The SEALs were suspected of taking the money. The FBI and NCIS investigated two members of Red Squadron and conducted polygraphs, but the money was never recovered and neither of the SEALs was charged.
Then, in October 2010, SEAL Team 6 set out to rescue a British aid worker named Linda Norgrove, who had been taken captive in Afghanistan. The operation, code-named ANSTRUTHER, an homage to Norgrove’s Scottish heritage, was authorized by British Prime Minister David Cameron. The operation commanded high-level interest because Norgrove, though in Afghanistan as an aid worker for DAI, an American NGO, secretly worked with Britain’s MI-6, according to four U.S. military and intelligence sources. Two of these sources told me that the British government informed SEAL Team 6 mission planners that Norgrove worked for the spy agency, and that they had been tracking her movements since the abduction. Asked for comment, the British government told The Intercept that it does not comment on security matters and would “neither confirm nor deny” that Norgrove worked for the intelligence agency.
During a late-night raid at a northern Kunar compound, Silver Squadron operators killed several captors but accidentally killed Norgrove when an inexperienced SEAL threw a fragment grenade at one of the captors.
The operation’s team leader believed that a suicide vest had been detonated by one of the captors, and two Silver Squadron operators initially withheld the fact that a grenade had been thrown. Consequently, the SEALs initially reported to JSOC senior leaders that Norgrove had been killed by her captors.
Later, a JSOC officer watching drone footage of the operation noticed one of the SEALs throw an object that landed and exploded near where Norgrove’s body was found. One of the two SEALs who knew about the grenade eventually told his team leader, who then failed to inform his commanders until he was confronted the next day.
The operation commanded high-level interest because Norgrove, though in Afghanistan as an aid worker for DAI, an American NGO, secretly worked with Britain’s MI-6.
After a joint British-American investigation into the operation identified the failures and recommended that only the SEAL who threw the grenade be punished, McRaven personally traveled to Dam Neck and determined that all three SEALs involved in the cover-up should be thrown out of SEAL Team 6. The “admiral’s mast” was an unprecedented disciplinary action at the command, which had always been allowed to discipline itself. Normally, SEAL Team 6’s commanding officer, a captain, would conduct a captain’s mast, a form of non-judicial punishment. According to a senior JSOC official, the Norgrove operation was an “I told you so moment.” Even so, two of the three SEALs later returned to the unit.
In the world of SEAL Team 6, where operators never face criminal charges — despite allegations of war crimes, unjustified killings, and corruption — the admiral’s mast was a serious rebuke. One former SEAL leader who attended the proceeding told me McRaven’s message to the command’s leadership was clear. “What you’re saying is you have no faith in the commander,” he said. “All of us were upset.” The former SEAL Team 6 leader told me that for the unit’s operators, the greatest punishment was being kicked out of the unit in front of their peers.
McRaven, who did not respond to requests for comment, also held a meeting with a large group of senior officers under his command and said that SEAL Team 6 had effectively made lying to protect a teammate an honorable course of action, according to a person who attended the meeting. “He told us they had put unit and self before mission and country,” the retired officer said. “He reminded us all that our first loyalty was to the Constitution.”
Tactically, however, the command was winning on the battlefield, and despite McRaven’s directives, there was no serious internal scrutiny of the SEALs’ most excessive conduct.
“Several of us confronted the officers,” said one former noncommissioned officer who tried to stop the criminal behavior. “We knew what needed to be done to police the kids.” The former senior enlisted leader said he pressed several commanding officers to address what he believed were war crimes. “We failed to fix the problem,” he said. “It wasn’t complex, and had it been several one-off events, a guy chopping a head off — it wouldn’t be such a failure. But this started in 2002 and continued through the wars. Our leadership punted and I’m not sure it will ever be corrected.”
The failure of SEAL Team 6 to hold itself accountable for battlefield atrocities has resulted in lasting consequences for operators at the command. “No one prepared our guys for the collateral damage and the second- and third-order effects of this war,” the former SEAL leader said. “Night after night of kill or be killed. [There was] so much savagery. I’m not condoning the behavior — there’s no justification to hacking a body — but we didn’t prepare them either. If I told you I cut off a head after an operation, explaining that I got caught up in the moment, went over the line one time — you’d have sympathy for me. War is awful and it’s human to go too far, but this isn’t one time. This is multiple times on each deployment.”
By the time Robert O’Neill entered Osama bin Laden’s bedroom in the Abbottabad compound on May 2, 2011, the al Qaeda leader was bleeding out on the floor, possibly already dead, after being shot in the chest and leg by the lead assaulter on the raid. That operator, known as Red inside the unit, is still an active-duty member of SEAL Team 6 and has never been publicly identified. O’Neill entered the room, walked over to where bin Laden lay on the floor, and shot him twice in the face. He then stood above the now indisputably dead man and canoed him, firing a round into his forehead and splitting open the top of his skull, exposing his brain. Osama bin Laden had been branded by SEAL Team 6.
O’Neill has not been shy about the fact that he canoed bin Laden. “His forehead was gruesome,” he later told Esquire magazine. “It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face.” He has even alluded to the grisly practice on Twitter. What he has not done is name the practice or reveal that by canoeing bin Laden he had secured the ultimate war trophy, the culmination of a decade’s worth of bloody “sport” by elements of SEAL Team 6 who considered themselves craftsmen of killing.
The story of the bin Laden raid has been told and retold, but crucial details have never been made public. And from the moment President Obama announced the operation’s successful conclusion in a televised address, a variety of individuals and institutions have sought to profit from the elimination of America’s most hated enemy.
Two different SEALs, Robert O’Neill and Matthew Bissonnette, have publicly taken credit for killing bin Laden. According to multiple sources, both of their accounts contain multiple self-serving falsehoods. The texture of those accounts reveals much about what went wrong with the most celebrated special operations command in the U.S. military. The falsehoods, both significant and slight, demonstrate that even when conducting the most important missions, SEAL Team 6 was unable to rise above the culture of deceit, personal enrichment, and self-aggrandizement that has corrupted a fighting unit legendary for its discipline and code of honor.
“The beauty of what they have constructed,” said a former teammate about how Bissonnette and O’Neill cornered the market on the bin Laden raid, “is that there is only one guy, essentially, who can come forward and say they’re lying — and he won’t ever talk.”
O’Neill’s and Bissonnette’s careers mirrored one another. They each entered Red Squadron at the same time, and were both recipients of the Winkler hatchets handed out by Wyman Howard. They were both talented and competitive, and they were determined to profit from their experiences as SEALs.
Bissonnette was viewed by Howard as the prototypical SEAL Team 6 operator: a college-educated enlisted man with a savvy understanding of tactics and technology. O’Neill, by contrast, was not considered as clever as his teammate, but he was a deadly sniper and had a successful tour as a team leader in Red Squadron.
Both men were notorious among their teammates for their self-promotional tendencies — a trait not well-suited for a “team-first” environment. In the end, their inclusion in the bin Laden raid and their roles defined where they fit in: Bissonnette worked closely with the CIA and SEAL Team 6 superiors during the planning phase to help plot out the assault, and would lead a team of operators to find and kill bin Laden’s courier. O’Neill was chosen as a team leader for a group providing external security but ultimately traded that leadership role for a junior spot on the team he and Bissonnette believed would get the first shot at bin Laden.
The 23 SEAL Team 6 operators assigned to the mission prepared constantly for the entire month of April 2011, practicing on two different full-scale mock-ups of the bin Laden compound. Tactically, there was little about the upcoming raid that was complex. Unlike the hundreds of other assaults SEAL Team 6 had carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the operators would plan and carry out a raid within a matter of hours, this time they had weeks to prepare. They had detailed plans of the Abbottabad compound provided by the CIA and knew where they could expect to find bin Laden. The SEALs’ biggest concern was how much time they would have, which was dictated by the amount of fuel the two Black Hawks could carry for the round trip.
The planning was so meticulous, one retired SEAL Team 6 leader told me, that a helicopter pilot warned mission planners that one of the two stealth Black Hawks they were to use would likely experience a “vortex ring state,” which means air disturbed by the rotors would prevent the helicopter from getting the lift necessary to continue hovering. The pilot noted that the two mock-up compounds had chain link fences around the buildings, allowing the air to disperse, while the real compound had thick concrete walls.
Less than a week before the assault, Bissonnette and O’Neill got into a shouting match at the Dam Neck base over who would sell the inside story of the raid. Several of their teammates on the mission had to intervene, according to a former SEAL Team 6 operator. A former SEAL Team 6 leader told me that O’Neill and Bissonnette originally agreed to cooperate on a book or movie project after the raid was over, but later had a falling out. The former SEAL leader said the extensive amount of training for the mission, combined with Bissonnette’s planning role, gave both men ample opportunity to find ways to put themselves on the third floor, in a good position to kill bin Laden.
Despite claims by John O. Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, that the raid was a capture or kill operation, the SEALs were told explicitly to kill bin Laden. There was no plan for capture, and no contingency for a surrender. “They were told, ‘Go in, kill him, and bring the body back,’” said a former SEAL Team 6 leader involved in the raid.
On May 1, two stealth Black Hawk helicopters took off from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and headed east toward Abbottabad. The flight took 90 minutes, and as the Black Hawk Bissonnette rode in approached the compound walls, it effectively slammed on the brakes. The pilot who had warned that one of the helicopters would stall was right. Bissonnette’s helicopter crashed into bin Laden’s side yard. Bissonnette and his teammates were nearly killed, and many of the operators aboard ended up with chronic injuries.
Bissonnette and a small team of SEALs moved from the helicopter to a small building adjacent to bin Laden’s main house. After the SEALs tried blowing the building’s gated front door, someone inside fired several rounds out a window. They were the only shots not fired by the SEALs during the raid. One of Bissonnette’s teammates then put his gun through the front door, which was now slightly ajar, and shot the gunman in the head. He was Ahmed al Kuwaiti, one of bin Laden’s couriers.
Afterward, Kuwaiti’s wife confirmed that bin Laden could be found on the third floor of the main building, just as the team had been briefed. Bissonnette and his team then moved to the main house.
Once inside, the SEALs proceeded slowly and methodically. O’Neill’s teammates shot and killed Kuwaiti’s brother and his wife on the first floor. After blowing open the iron gate blocking the main stairway, the lead assaulters, among them Bissonnette and O’Neill, followed the operator known as Red up the stairs. Red encountered and shot bin Laden’s son just before the second floor landing, and the SEALs following behind him fanned out into the hallways and rooms on the second floor to search and secure the area. It was then that both Bissonnette and O’Neill hung back on the stairway. Both should have remained on the second floor. Instead, as Red began his ascent to the third floor, they followed him up, hoping to get in on the kill. O’Neill was closer to Red, one of the first five assaulters. Bissonnette was much farther back down the stairwell.
As he approached the third floor bedroom, Red saw bin Laden standing in the doorway, peering out. He was unarmed and wearing pajamas. A few of his female relatives were nearby. Red came to a stop and fired two shots with his suppressed rifle. One shot hit bin Laden in the chest and the second shot glanced off his hip or thigh as Bin Laden stumbled backward into his room and fell toward the foot of his bed.
Red could see bin Laden bleeding out from his chest wound but he still had not entered the bedroom.
Red watched bin Laden fall. He later told his teammates that it was possible one arm was twitching reflexively as he died, but otherwise he was effectively dead and not a threat. The distinction was crucial. As the lead assaulter, it was Red’s job to make the most important tactical judgments because he largely blocked the view of the SEALs behind him. According to several former members of SEAL Team 6, the most basic principle of assault training is “follow your shot,” meaning that an operator who has fired on a target must ensure the target no longer poses a threat. Your teammates beside and behind you will cover all the other possible angles and areas of a room as you move forward.
Red could see bin Laden bleeding out from his chest wound but he still had not entered the bedroom. Then, as two of bin Laden’s eldest daughters began to scream, Red quickly corralled them at the doorway, a move considered heroic by other SEALs on the mission. Had the daughters been wearing explosives, Red would have died while shielding his teammates from much of the blast. Instead, he held them back long enough for his teammates, including O’Neill, to enter the bedroom.
O’Neill and two or three more assaulters moved past Red into the bedroom as bin Laden lay on the ground. O’Neill then fired two rounds. According to his own description, the first two rounds hit bin Laden’s forehead. Then O’Neill canoed bin Laden with a final shot.
Conflicting accounts have emerged about how many other SEALs fired rounds into bin Laden’s lifeless body, though one former SEAL Team 6 leader who viewed the body in Jalalabad told me the body appeared to be intact aside from the chest wound and obliterated face.
The SEALs had been specifically asked to avoid shooting bin Laden in the face. O’Neill’s decision to canoe the al Qaeda leader made him unrecognizable. A SEAL who spoke Arabic interviewed bin Laden’s wives and daughters until he was able to get two positive identifications. O’Neill later implied in the Esquire profile that he shot bin Laden because he wasn’t sure Red’s shots had hit the target. He also claimed that bin Laden had been standing when he fired and that a weapon was visible nearby. Yet immediately after the mission, O’Neill described shooting bin Laden while he was on the floor. The two weapons found on the third floor were not discovered until the rooms were searched. Neither was loaded.
O’Neill’s canoeing of bin Laden cost his teammates precious time, but his final shot to bin Laden’s head was unremarkable to them. They ransacked the compound for documents and media for intelligence, left the survivors inside, and returned to Jalalabad air base with the body.
The Red Squadron assaulters later gathered in a private area of Bagram Air Base and debriefed the mission in front of a military lawyer. The squadron’s commanding officer recorded it on a cellphone. Bissonnette claimed he shot and killed al Kuwaiti and had fired bullets into bin Laden on the third floor. According to three sources familiar with the debrief, Bissonnette never fired his weapon at Kuwaiti. At least two of Bissonnette’s teammates who were with him when al Kuwaiti was killed were angry about the deception — taking credit for a teammate’s actions on a mission was unprecedented and dishonorable — but did not contradict him in the presence of a military lawyer. Several of Bissonnette’s teammates later informed their superiors that he had lied about his actions.
During the debrief, Red was identified as having hit bin Laden with a fatal shot, and O’Neill was credited with putting security rounds into him after bin Laden had already gone down. There was no discussion of a visible weapon, no claims that one of bin Laden’s wives had been used as a shield or a threat. The raid, several of the SEALs said afterward, was one of the easiest missions they’d ever conducted. There were no heroics, and, apart from al Kuwaiti’s shots, no firefight.
The SEALs in the unit were furious that the White House revealed to the world that Navy SEALs had carried out the raid, violating the traditional code of silence about their missions.
Some of the assaulters on the mission were also angry with Bissonnette and O’Neill because they neglected their responsibilities after bin Laden’s son was shot. Instead of helping search and secure the second floor, both headed to the third floor, hoping to get a chance for the historic kill. Both operators were accused of breaking with standard operating procedure to get themselves in position to be among the first to see or kill bin Laden. Morale at Red Squadron fell apart shortly after the team returned to Virginia Beach from Afghanistan. The SEALs in the unit were furious that the White House revealed to the world that Navy SEALs had carried out the raid, violating the traditional code of silence about their missions. Within hours, news trucks and reporters fanned out through the seaside town looking for anything affiliated with Navy SEALs.
O’Neill was soon removed from his role as a team leader in Red Squadron after he was observed publicly bragging in Virginia Beach bars that he was the man who shot bin Laden. Bissonnette left Red Squadron soon after the raid and retired from the Navy almost one year later. He had already set himself up for a profitable future. While on active duty, he’d formed a consulting company with four other SEALs and secured a contract with one of the command’s biggest equipment suppliers.
Bissonnette’s bestselling book, “No Easy Day,” was published in September 2012, four months after he retired and less than two weeks after O’Neill got out of the Navy. The publication came as a surprise to the Pentagon because Bissonnette had failed to clear it as required.
In the book, Bissonnette implies that he was directly behind Red just below the third floor when bin Laden was shot, and was one of the next two SEALs who entered bin Laden’s bedroom. His account credits Red with the shot that felled bin Laden and holds that he and a third SEAL — presumably O’Neill — fired several rounds into bin Laden as he was lying on the floor.
After the raid, the White House struggled to describe the exact circumstances of bin Laden’s death. First, bin Laden was armed, involved in a firefight, and using one of his wives as a human shield. Then officials took all three of those details back, though they maintained the al Qaeda leader posed a threat. Bissonnette’s book was the first eyewitness account, and it contradicted the Obama administration’s narrative.
After the publication of “No Easy Day” — which in one chapter describes in great detail the specialized gear, along with brand names, Bissonnette wore on the bin Laden mission — the Navy opened several inquiries into Bissonnette’s outside business contracts. They soon discovered he had violated a series of Navy regulations. A joint NCIS-FBI investigation into whether he disclosed classified material in the book lasted two years. During the investigation, Bissonnette surrendered a photo of bin Laden’s dead body that he had unlawfully retained.
Bissonnette eventually settled his legal case with the government, agreeing to return $6.7 million in profits from the sale of “No Easy Day” and giving up any proceeds from future sales of the book.
Other active-duty SEAL Team 6 operators who worked with Bissonnette on his various consulting deals were punished as a result of their profiteering. The unit conducted a captain’s mast on at least seven SEALs for revealing sensitive information during a series of promotional videos for the video game “Medal of Honor: Warfighter.” The reprimand ended the careers of two veteran SEAL Team 6 noncommissioned officers.
Although Bissonnette was able to sell a book and tell his story first, O’Neill arguably got the better deal. In March 2013, Esquire’s profile of O’Neill portrayed him as a humble “quiet professional” who after 16 years in the Navy would no longer have health insurance and was otherwise a downtrodden American hero. The account did not dwell on the fact that O’Neill had chosen to separate from the Navy nearly four years before he was eligible for extensive retirement benefits.
In O’Neill’s account, he did not see Red fire his shots at bin Laden because he was looking back down the stairs for reinforcements. When he finally entered the bedroom, alone, bin Laden was standing uninjured, a weapon nearby, his wife in front of him like a human shield. Only inches from his target, O’Neill claims, he shot bin Laden twice in the forehead. Bin Laden dropped and O’Neill fired the security round that canoed him.
Some of O’Neill’s teammates were outraged he’d been so brazenly inaccurate and self-serving in his account. For many on the raid, including those who had been present in bin Laden’s bedroom with O’Neill, it was the first time they’d heard anyone in the command say the terrorist leader was standing, posing a threat of any kind.
In 2014, O’Neill unveiled himself as the man who killed bin Laden in an hourlong Fox News special, just as Bissonnette published a second book. The former teammates both hit the press circuit, each telling reporters off the record that the other was a liar. Already a popular motivational speaker, O’Neill now charges up to $35,000 per speech. Today, he is a paid on-air commentator for Fox News and is reportedly eyeing a run for the Senate in his native Montana. He even has his own line of clothing.
Both Bissonnette and O’Neill declined to answer questions for this article.
The truth about what happened in bin Laden’s bedroom may never be fully known. One former SEAL Team 6 leader who was involved in the raid told me he was never too concerned about the discrepancies between O’Neill’s and Bissonnette’s claims. A veteran of hundreds of raids and assaults during his career, the former SEAL said he disagreed with the order to kill bin Laden, regardless of whether he was armed, and compared it to Britt Slabinski’s order to his Blue Squadron men in 2007. “I didn’t give their different accounts much thought,” the SEAL said. “They shot an unarmed dude. It was disappointing. I’d almost wish they’d beaten him to death. That seems more fair.” And here were two guys who set out to make money off a mission that required 23 SEALs to pull off: “It’s dishonorable.”
Bissonnette and O’Neill are no longer welcome at SEAL Team 6 headquarters. The command’s top noncommissioned officer placed their names on the SEAL Team 6 rock of shame, the unofficial list of unit pariahs. The list also includes Britt Slabinski, who was blacklisted in 2015 following the New York Times article that quoted him denying he’d ever ordered his men to kill unarmed Afghan targets. “That’s what’s wrong with my community,” the former SEAL Team 6 leader told me. “Our sense of what’s right and what’s wrong is warped. No one was upset that he ordered a beheading or all the men shot even if they were unarmed. They were mad because he spoke to the New York Times and lied.”
Several months after the bin Laden raid, in October 2011, SEAL Team 6 held its annual “stump muster,” a reunion of current command members and their families, as well as past leaders and senior operators. That year’s reunion, the first under Wyman Howard as commanding officer, was held at their new headquarters, a $100 million, state of the art testament to the stature of the command as the home of the “President’s Own,” the clandestine global force capable of striking anywhere, killing anyone, the tip of America’s military spear. Outside the main entrance stands a 30-foot trident sculpted out of a fragment of the World Trade Center.
At the reunion, a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean, a small group of current and former master chiefs stood around drinking and telling war stories. One retired senior SEAL Team 6 leader was there who led the unit during the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over the years, he had worried about battlefield discipline and retaliation after Neil Roberts had been nearly beheaded, and he had feared his men would seek retribution in Iraq during the height of the violence there. He’d left the SEALs before the worst of the atrocities had taken place, though his former teammates would occasionally call him to report what was happening on deployments. He’d been told that Blue Squadron had collected ears and that mutilations had become common. He wasn’t surprised. After more than 30 years in special operations, he knew that elite forces would inevitably cross ethical, moral, and legal boundaries if they were given too long a leash. When he first arrived at Dam Neck, operators in the unit who had served in Vietnam warned him that war crimes and battlefield atrocities hung like a cloud over the entire unit — even if only one SEAL had participated.
Sitting with old friends, the retired SEAL was handed a ring-bound portfolio. Opening it up, he saw a collection of photographs, more than a dozen canoed enemy heads. He was told that the photographs were part of SEAL Team 6’s “greatest hits” of terrorists killed since 9/11. They were not the private collection of some individual operator, but the command’s official after-action pictures. The old sailor put the portfolio down. After a short while, he quietly left the base. He hasn’t returned since.
Illustrations: Attila Futaki, Colorist: Greg Guilhaumond
So How does one ( any country,anywhere, at anytime in History ) conduct a Politically Correct War?
under $urveillance by
$CIA$KGB$ $FBI$FSB$ $NSA$NKVD$
the past 43+ years for
Pro Peace Anti War
Pro Environment Anti Nuclear
sentiments and activities.
Ref:
http://intelligence.atspace.com
Some historical context…
http://frontierpartisans.com/9452/rule-303-and-the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/
Thank you Mr. Cole for validating what I have been saying about the Bin Laden raid, ever since I heard (& read) all the fiction spewed out of the mouths of the Obama administrations’ conspirators.
First: That the raid was a kill or capture mission.
Second: That Bin Laden was armed.
Third: That the reason the administration (war crime coconspirators) didn’t release the death photos of bin Laden, was that they would show powder burns on his face -proof that he was shot point blank. Unarmed on the ground -a violation of the rules of engagement -a war crime.
Fourth: That the U.S. Govt only applies ‘war crimes’ charges to other countries individuals -a double standard that self insulates against charges at The Hague.
What an unfair and deceptive/irresponsible article.
“The crimes of SEAL team 6″ and yet you call out 2 or maybe 3 people and a handful of occasions that warcrimes may have been committed…. How uncredibly deceptive is that?
I think it is you, Mr Cole, who is now attemlting to benefit and exploit the name of the SEAL team to your own journalistic benefit and you havent even spent a day in the military much less specops. You are more pathetic than bissonett and all the rest combines.
Pure journalistic exploitation here. Shame on you and The Intercept
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
? Friedrich Nietzsche
The soldiers are never to blame unless acting outside of their military orders and on their own account. Even then it’s very difficult to judge the actions of someone acting in this particular form of combat.
Not accurate. After WWII it was determined that the defense “I was just acting on orders” was insufficient, after the behavior of many Nazi soldiers.
As we used to say in the trade, “BZ.” That said, it made for very sad reading. Humans being asked to do the impossible: Behave inhumanely, but maintain their humanity. A couple of points of something-or-other…
NSWDG/DevGru and SEAL Team 6 are not interchangeable. The latter still does organizationally exist, and is a subset/component of the former. Apologies in advance if that comment brings more Neck Beard Commentary to the thread;
Dam Neck is where ST6 wound up. Originally, they operated out of the Amphibious Warfare Base at Little Creek VA, a chain-link fence away from SEAL Team 2. ST6 finished moving to Dam Neck in early ’83;
The… roguish behaviour in ST6 began with its plank-owners. It would be good to know what training op McRaven got bounced from. If it is what I think it is, it happened at the end of ’82. The author(s) missed a deep, important link between past and present.
I am not going to get into the vagaries of what happens in combat situations, some of this is disturbing, if your life and the lives of your buddies are at stake some people will cross the line.
One thing of note is that a Commander in the Navy is not the equivalent of Lt. Colonel more like full Colonel. There are actually fewer officer ranks in the Navy than Army or Marines or Air force and therefore tend to have more responsibility. (From a Navy vet who is proud to have served.)
The navy has the same number of O-ranks as anybody else. Navy Commanders wear a silver oak leaf, just like a Lt. Colonel. Navy Captains (rank, not the job), wear a bird, just like a “full” Colonel.
The only thing that keeps going in and out is Commodore. They go through fits of call them Rear Admiral – Lower Half, but still wear a star.
What the heck are you talking about? A Navy Commander, and a Army/Air Force/ Marine Lt Col are 0-5s, and wear a silver oak leaf.
If this is true , I say good , no mercy to the enemies of the USA.
As a former TF Red guy I can only say that when men are exposed 24/7 to killing it sometimes affects them. It is my recommendation that all those on their high horses put on a ruck and stand a watch. It looks different in the sky at night, 8000 miles form home and it is cold as fuc&. It puts a different perspective on your life. But as commissioned officers and senior NONCOMS and PO’s we know it can get out of hand on occasion. Moral ambiguity huh?
Oh? So drones that wipe out extended families are a preferred methodology than targeted on the ground battles?
Peace on earth, if not just win!
@Benito Mussolini—“if a war hasn’t achieved its objectives within 15 years, stop fighting , rest up .
—————————————————————————————————
The war has achieved and continues to achieve its objectives , What the hell do you think the objective of Halliburton , Lockheed Martin , etc , is ?
For the WAR PROFITEERS a never ending global war is a dream come true . For humanity it’s the final nightmare .
Hey, wake the f*** up Snowlakes. Evil exists…our enemy’s are EVIL. THEY condone and carry out unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities… and only respond to the same. Just remember, Obama has killed more civilians with his drone strikes than anyone else…Wow, the Nobel “Piece” Prize!!! Go to Cuba asshats…
So is Obama the enemy ( because he’s 1/2 black )? Who the hell is the ENEMY ? Everyone that doe not have blue eyes ? Korea ? Afghanistan ? Iran ? Russia ? China ? Syria ? New Jersey ?
Well certainly not Israel ,, right ?
Your “TURKEY HEAD” bigot ranting is disgusting !!!
The only possible conclusion to draw from your comment is that you are as “EVIL” as your enemy. You openly condone “unjustified” killings, mutilations, and atrocities. Wouldn’t that mean that it’s open season on Americans, too? The only way to maintain even a shred of decency is to hold oneself to a higher standard. This article repeatedly acknowledges the inevitability of operators going over the line, but without accountability, becoming that which one despises is the ultimate result.
It is hard to read this article because of the horror it depicts. Americans have to begin to realize that Navy Seals are nothing more than well trained assassins encompassing every thing that word entails. They are ruthless, deadly, immoral, unethical and hubristic to the point of disaster. They don’t keep anyone safe, they simply add to the sins America will have to pay for in like blood some day! Extremely sad and extremely bad news!
Archie, you are full of shit. Americans are realizing our seal team goes out and takes revenge on our behalf – and they do a damn good job of it. they are a lot more than well trained assassins, they are cold blooded killers of anyone who tries to fuck with America. War is unethical you idiot. They don’t keep you safe because you are not an American citizen.. obviously. Nice Islam touch at the end.. but its not fooling me. Looks like your kind are the ones who paid, and will continue to pay. God bless the USA.
Calendar of torture events related to the Seal raid on Abbottabad:
September 2004
A court orders the CIA to produce or identify all records pertaining to the treatment of prisoners in its custody in response to an ACLU lawsuit.
November 2005
The CIA destroys 92 interrogation tapes documenting the harsh interrogation of Abu Zugaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri.
March 5, 2009
A Senate panel votes 14-1 to proceed with the investigation of CIA torture.
Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Kit Bond, R-Mo., formally announce the investigation. The press release says the review should take one year.
2009
The CIA tramples the Constitution for the United States of America and begins spying on the Senate as it investigates for it’s report on CIA torture.
February 2010
“Around this time, about 870 documents disappear from the computers in the CIA facility where congressional aides are conducting the investigation, Feinstein later alleges.”
May 2010
“Another 60 documents allegedly go missing. As Feinstein tells it, CIA personnel first deny that the documents are missing, then blame the IT contractors, then blame the White House. The White House says it did not tell the CIA to remove the documents. After a preliminary review, the Justice Department’s special prosecutor clears CIA employees of wrongdoing in 99 cases of alleged detainee mistreatment. He recommends that the Justice Department investigate just two cases of detainee deaths.”
February 2011
The ACLU renewed it’s case to have the CIA held in contempt and sanctioned for trampling on a judge’s order by destroying torture tapes.
May 2011
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is four months away. Nothing to show for it except quagmires, torture and deaths. Bin Laden continues to haunt. The CIA is spying on Congress. The CIA is under investigation by Congress for it’s torture. The CIA is embroiled in an ACLU court case for destroying torture evidence.
May 2011
The CIA is desperately in need of a big score.
The Seal raid on Abbottabad is conducted.
The CIA declares it got Bin Laden but promptly destroys or hides all evidence.
Everyone believes the CIA when it says it got Bin Laden.
May, June, July…etc 2011
The Honorable Dick Cheney is everywhere to be seen declaring that torture made getting Bin Laden possible.
August 2011
Millions upon millions of words are written about the heroics of the Seals at Abbottabad. Movie scripts and books are being written. The news casts are 24/7 filled with talk of the Seal’s heroics. In the midst of mega public adoration for the raid on Abbottabad the judge in the ACLU court case rules and let’s the CIA off the hook, his bottom line is “we need our spies”. The judge however thanks the ACLU for bringing the issue before the court and orders the CIA to cover the ACLU’s court costs.
April 27, 2012
“Reuters reports that the committee has found “no evidence” that CIA torture led to any significant intelligence breakthroughs. At this point, the report is still being finalized.”
The Army is form of stable employment chosen by a lot of folks to secure an income even more in current times.
If there is something to be done about our colonial enterprises throughout the world and call a halt to the war-lobby it will never be the Republicans nor the Democrats doing this. These parties are to heavily undermined by and involved with the economic-elite’s lobby-machinery suppressing change for the better. Getting the people fired-up for war calling on their patriotism and love for our country. The elite however isn’t interested in patriotism but merely profits.
How it stands now our Democracy is a thing of the past. If we want to get it back, the people are still ones able to do it. Therefore the 2 party system has to be broken-up and big-money banned from the elections / politics. This will open-up the Democratic-Process for other contenders giving everyone an equal choice to participate in Democracy and a humane society.
What an interesting and articulate ( possibly award- winning) article! Not lost on this reader that all the “gruesome” and “bloody sport” were in the end tolerated. No price was paid or punishment metered, UNTIL Bissonnette’s book revealed classified information that was too public & profitable (no matter it was inaccurate). So we see the order of important sins of the Elite military’s ‘code’. Not to mention the (by now familiar) Executive Branch of government’s plague on the houses of those who spill secrets! ONLY the Obama administration is allowed a profit from this mission! Profiteering is strictly allowed in THIS form: votes & government- condoned weapons contracts! Always amazed at the Intercept’s sources and true mastery of investigative journalism. Your stories have the ability to make fiction boring in comparison! I closed Grisham’s newest book the other day.I found it was simple in plot, compared to this year’s …spectacular web of lies (both true & false one’s), conspiracies and crimes around the globe. Art was no match to truth this year. Thanks again.
Typical SEAL coverup, crimes, and mission to publicize their “secret” missions. Leave the quiet professionalism to Army SOF.
While one never to condone an actual “war crime” it does strike me as quite unjust that KSM and other 9-11 perpetrators (to say nothing of the daily war crimes committed by al Qaeda and ISIS) go unpunished, while United States commanders and their judge advocates wring their hands and, on occasion, prosecute our own for the slightest perceived infraction. Moreover, anyone that requires a US warrior to wait to shoot until a bad guy points or fires a weapon is woefully or willfully ill-informed about the realities of a gunfight!
Bo: “anyone that requires a US warrior to wait to shoot until a bad guy points or fires a weapon is woefully or willfully ill-informed about the realities of a gunfight”
I bet you wrote that on an Xbox, while sitting in an MRAP at the local donut shop in a town of 10-20,000 people.
The problem is YOU. Go back to Rome with your legions of – we the people weren’t purchased as cheaply as your opinion was, and all those lies about “Saddam has weapon of mass destruction.”
Tell me that joke again, about ‘those who sacrifice liberty for security’ again? Oh yeah- punchline ‘ it’s the guy with brain of a 12 year old, and the faux penis loaded with bullets.’.
And this is the level of self-delusions and outright brainwashing that it so prevalent in America.
You mean Russia with its one functional aircraft carrier? Or China that is one of our biggest trading partners, that spends about 1/8 as much on “defense” as the US and who would no sooner invade us than to immolate their own economy.
You mean one of those two countries 10s of thousands of miles away with no physical capacity to move the necessary troops overseas to American shores where they would be met by 200 million heavily armed citizens and another 2 or 3 million activity duty military personnel on our own turf?
If you actually even think that’s likely much less possible you are a perfect shining example of exactly how deluded, paranoid and afraid of your own shadow that most Americans are.
@ BobWhoGivesaDamn
I could give a flying fuck what North Korea and South Korea do to each other. That is for them to hash out.
Yeah, as I said, see above. I owe the men and women in the military nothing more than what I stated above, and sympathy for their “service” in support of the American experiment in empire that will most assuredly fail as has every other in human history.
And as far as I’m concerned invading other nations in “service” of any agenda other than self-defense of our territorial integrity is a war crime, no matter how America or Americans delude themselves into thinking otherwise.
If and when an invader nation ever comes to America’s shores I will stand beside me fellow citizens to repel them, but short of that I am very familiar with the aims and agenda of the American politicians that send my fellow citizens to “war” at “the other’s gates.” And it has nothing to do with the freedom and liberty of Americans you sniveling dupe.
And trust me I’ve seen the direct price paid by my family members and others rating disability and pension claims for the VA and what your “service” amounts to in shattered lives, futures and destroyed bodies of teenagers and 20 somethings all in “service” of lies.
So like I said, if you think you’ll get an iota of deference from me you are sadly mistaken. I owe you nothing that I haven’t already paid. And if you don’t like my opinion, then welcome to the “freedom” and “liberty” you supposedly “served” (i.e the freedom and liberty to speak truth even to dupes like you and even if you don’t like it.)
“self-defense of our territorial integrity” ?
OK MORON ,,, what f–kin territory ? New Jersey ? Mars ?
Look pal , if South Korea is part of your integrity I suggest you take a brain enema ,, if you can locate a brain in your personal territory .
Oops ! Sorry rrheard . The comment was aimed at BobWhoGivesaDamn
Bastards like him upset me to the point of wanting to kill !!
Oops ! Wrong guy rrheard . It was meant for BobWhoGivesaDamn !!
It seems that never-ending war may be starting to take a psychological toll on US soldiers. My rule of thumb is that if a war hasn’t achieved its objectives within 15 years, stop fighting, rest up for a bit and then start a new war. Let a new generation that doesn’t carry so much emotional baggage grow up, before turning them into killing machines.
The war has achieved and continues to achieve its objectives , What the hell do you think the objectives of Halliburton , Lockheed Martin , etc , are ?
For the WAR PROFITEERS a never ending global war is a dream come true . For humanity it’s the final nightmare .
The day will come when truth will emerge and these war criminal terrorist groups will be recognized as their paradigm: the nazi german Schutzstaffel , the repugnant SS!
WAR CRIMES AGAINST MUSLIMS BY A UNITED STATES GENOCIDAL ORGANIZATION, THE NAVY SE.A.LS.: No wonder the Taliban fight back.
———————————————————————————————-
“My (Mister Dilip Joseph, Medical Doctor) thoughts were interrupted by the
noise of a dog barking, followed by the bleating of a pair of sheep.
Apparently our host’s livestock were restless.”
“I heard someone in the room stir. [The] Senior Mulla said something and
was answered by Wallakah….”
“[The] Senior Mullah and Wallaka exchanged more whispered words. Then I
realized that Wallakah was slipping under the blanket that covered the
entrance and stepping outside…”
“I listened intently but heard nothing. Wallakah returned less than a
minute later and had another quiet chat with [the] Senior Mullah. It seemed
Wallakah seemed Wallakah was just being his usual diligent self and
apparently hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual…”
“CRACK!”
“The gunshot was incredibly loud…”
“Fast movements in the room. Narrow beams of green light shooting this way
and that…”
“`Everyone put your hands in the air!'”
“`Everybody stand up! Stand up!”
“Put your hands where we can see them!…”
“`Stand up!'”
“`Stand up NOW!'”
“…I didn’t know if the Taliban understood the command to stand, if the
soldiers [Naval Special Warfare Development Group (Dev Gru.), See, Air, and
Land (SE.A.L.) Team Six (6)] were gesturing “up” or if they were grabbing
each of my captors and forcing them to their feet.” But all the Taliban,
except for Hopeless, quickly stood, and Hopeless rolled back off of me. I
suspect Wallakah dropped his weapon [Avtomat Kalashnikova or AK-47] at this
point.”
“[Earlier] Hopeless, Ahmed, and [the] Junior Mullah all stacked their
Kalashnikovs in the far corner of the room, away from the opening. I
dropped my ammunition belt there too. [The] Senior Mullah didn’t carry a
gun…The lone exception was Wallakah. He kept his AK-47 slung over his
shoulder.].”
“…another soldier [sailor: United States Navy SEAL] standing near my leg
shouted at Hopeless, `Are you good or bad?’.”
“When Hopeless didn’t reply, this soldier [sailor] yelled to me, `Is anybody
else with you? What about your two friends [Rafiq, M.D. (Physican) and
Farzad Physcians’s Assistant (P.A.)]’…”
“`So are the rest of the guys good or bad?’ the soldier [sailor] shouted.”
“Hopeless spoke up then. I didn’t know if he understood the soldier’s
[sailor’s] words and tried to reply in English or if he was saying something
else, but what came out was `Goo!, Goo!, Goo!'”
“`No, he’s bad,’ I said. `He’s bad.’…”
“A strange, muffled noise filled the room: Pop! Pop! Pop!…”
“Pop!” “Pop!…”
“Pop!” “Pop!…”
“I sensed, more than actually saw, bodies on the floor as my gaze
immediately went to the figure that still breathed. He sat in an almost
fetal posture, knees up with arms wrapped around tightly around them, his
chin resting on one knee.”
“Wallakah.”
“We were just three feet apart. He appeared unhurt.”
“Our eyes locked…”
“The look between Wallakah and me felt like hours, but it couldn’t have been
more than a few seconds…”
“The two soldiers [sailors] with me steered me toward the outside the room.”
`Stand right there,’ one of them said in a respectful tone. `Don’t move
around too much. Wait right here.’…”
“A minute later, a soldier [sailor] said, `We’re going to have you stand
inside the again and wait for a little bit.’…”
“`There were five of them and four guns between them,’ I said. `Did you
guys get all the guns?”‘”
“`Yes,’ the soldier [sailor] answered. `Everything’s been taken care of.'”
“He took my left arm and guided me back toward the room. `When we go in,’
he said, `don’t look around.'”
“I didn’t. Not at first. The soldier [sailor] escorted me to the corner
directly across from the entrance…”
“When the soldier came to retrieve me, curiosity took over. I took a quick
peek at the room as we walked out. The first thing I saw was [The] Senior
[always unarmed] Mullah’s body on the ground, blood oozing out of him in a
dark pool.”
“The second thing I saw was Wallakah. He also was on the ground, a pool of
blood beside him [probably from a slit throat]. Clearly he was dead…”
“They all [unarmed] were dead…”
“When I was escorted outside [again]…Another group [of sailors] attended
to a comrade [Nic] lying on a gurney. The fallen soldier [sailor] had
bandages wrapped around his head…”
“He had the dangerous assignment of being the first man to enter our room
that night. Wallakah, lying on the floor, had had just enough time to
raise his Kalashnikov and get off one shot.”
“The bullet struck the SEAL in the forehead (“between the eyes”).”
(KIDNAPPED BY THE TALIBAN: A STORY OF TERROR, HOPE, AND RESCUE BY SEAL TEAM
SIX, Dilip Joseph, MD with James Lund, 2014, W Publishing Group, an imprint
of Thomas Nelson: Nashville, Tennessee, pp. 144, 145, and 152-157)
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/
c:\users\resident\desktop\taliban
Saturday 14 January 2016
I looked at a few more of the reader comments. There are a lot of very sick individuals in the readership. Again, thanks to rrheard.
Most of those sick individuals are not regular readers or commenters here. You can be reasonably certain that they received a heads-up at whichever dens of warmongering bloodlust and hatred they normally infest and came here specifically to spew their vile.
Rick P. Breda’s association with racist, anti-semitic white nationalism, for instance, took me about 3 minutes to track down.
Uh, spew their bile. Vile bile, of course.
To rrheard: Your comment is all I need to read to assure myself that there is yet some honor and dignity remaining amongst my fellow citizens. I was a pilot, transport, in the Vietnam War, USAF. I take no pride in that. Every time I hear Obama brag about the killing of bin Laden, I nearly vomit. To try and stand in the boots of the enlisted men described in this article, I will not do. To say that I am thoroughly disgusted with the government leaders who are directly responsible for all the horrors committed and described in this article, I will do. Millions of people have been murdered around the world, amongst them our own, due to the cowards who sit in their plush positions of power ordering those millions to their deaths, physical and emotional.
@ Rick P Breda
I’ll pass. I owe you and every other person in the military absolutely nothing that you aren’t already receiving via the US taxpayer. With the exception of the Civil War and WWII I can’t think of any other instances where the US military has fought to “protect or defend” the “American people” or America’s territorial integrity. Which are really the only morally defensible things for the US military to be doing in the first instance. Hell the founders didn’t even believe in “standing” armies. And neither do I.
If anything, you and all members of the military owe the majority of American civilians who provide each of you with the vast bulk of your salaries, benefits, medical care, training, job opportunities through veteran’s preference laws, and a ridiculous amount of unearned (arguably demanded by some) adulation for “your service”.
I personally believe the average teacher, doctor, lawyer and social worker makes America safer than any US soldier has with the exception of those who served in the Civil War (fighting for the North rather than the treasonous Confederates) and WWII.
So as far as I’m concerned you can seek/demand your adulation wherever you can find it, but you won’t ever get a drop of it from me, because I’m well aware of what it is you are blindly “serving” and it sure as shit isn’t my or my fellow citizens “interests” and hasn’t been for a very long time.
Except that if didn’t have a standing military, Russia and/or China would invade and no amount of lawyers or teachers or your sorry ass would be able to stop them.
Hey Bob,,,it’s too bad your mom did not exercise her right to abort .
What do you plan on confronting North Korea with when they decide to storm the South, flowers and hot tea?
The 60’s are over…the hippies lost…get with the times. America and individual freedom will always have enemies and those men and women in uniform who ‘owe you so much’ have volunteered to meet them at the gates.
If North Korea decides to “storm the South,” it will overrun and control the entire peninsula so quickly that the choices for “confrontation” will be sending in a million grunts to kill and die for no purpose other than to support our endlessly-corrupt puppet or to start a nuclear holocaust.
Personally, I would have been working on ways to sort out the relevant issues non-confrontationally for decades, rather than to exacerbate and exploit them as the US government has consistently done.
What ridiculous horseshit. How did so many of you become so blinkered that you haven’t noticed, in seven decades, that the gates where you and your “heroes” “meet enemies” are always in someone else’s distant homeland and that the battles serve the wealth and power of the class of Owners and no one else’s “freedom” at all?
What an investigation. Fascinating article. This blows away any preconception I had about a perquisite understanding of honor within elite forces. I suppose there are still knuckle-dragging egotistical swine with no real sense of honor lurking even in the most elite ranks of THE ELITE. Sorry if that is a tad naive of me, but I really am shocked by the level of high school bullying and psychopathic mentality you’ve uncovered in what is supposed to be a group of some of our best warriors. so much for that… Thanks for your journalism.
The members of ST6 make up a very small percentage of SOF soldier/operators. Not to mention the even smaller number of guys within ST6 that were actually committing war crimes. This should not and does not paint a picture of the entire SOF community which by in large is filled with the best men that America has to offer.
Its called group think and it is rampant. Honor non existant when facing the unflattering truth. It is completely condoned and acceptable to lie and retaliate for what is misleadingly considered greater good of protection from embarassment or loss of power credibility or position. Seen it first hand..truly shameful behavior.
Thank you for the great piece to M. Cole and to all the other individuals involved.
So basically a contrived sensationalist story about nothing really, some alleged disfiguring of al quested combatants and the reality of combat for those men.
The mentioning and yet strange omission of follow-up the real war crime by the Chinook gunners regarding woman and children merely undermines this article of mainly hearsay then presented in a seemingly contrived and sensationalist manner.
Poor journalism would have expected better from the Intercept.
Virginia Beach SEALs sounds like ocean-side scene in nature, not something in man’s worst nature. Almost makes one forget those guys are even there.
Factually these guys are deep infiltrated agents of Russia. You will see that in the near future they will start to commit crimes against Americans on US soil.
Sad for their souls. There are very good reasons for rules of war. They do injustice to themselves and future comrades.
There is more story in their private and business lives. How they use their gear and access to train for mercenary work, like practicing torture on innocent civilians to sell the craft to the highest bidder. Their business is about to boom.
This article would be a lot better if you had to do a few deployments with a tier 1 unit or any combat unit before forming an opinion… Last time I checked war wasn’t pretty, this article just confirms that it still isn’t pretty.
Interesting perspective from someone who lacks the courage to go do the fighting himself. It would be interesting to see how “brutal” you become when you end up fighting for your OWN life. But that won’t happen will it? Because you are a coward who chooses to judge those whom you have no concept of what they face.
Can’t wait to join this community and serve honorably.
Sorry to the coward Greenwald and his cabal of professional complainers:these cowards are protected by brave men who do this job.
Happy Hunting dudes!
the same community that blacklisted these over the top publicity seeking corpse mutilators? that community?
Matthew Cole, time to grow up, this is what war is, and has always been for ALL human history from Sparta, Rome, the Vikings, and of America’s Wars. From the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (War between the States), including the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. This IS NOTHING NEW. These personal accounts are not issues to be made public, to criticize, nor scrutinize these professional warriors, nor to “air dirty laundry” with “anonymous” unnamed sources for your sanctimonious nonsense. The only “Thing” you have exposed is yourself. I have even more respect for these men for having to endure your childish insults. SHAME on YOU! SHAME. Semper Fidelis. USMC Wpns Co. 2/1. We owe our SEAL brothers nothing but thanks and gratitude.
Are you the same Rick P. Breda who wrote this?
The above is a comment posted on September 22, 2016 at 5:25 pm, in response to an article entitled Blacks: A More Criminal Race than Whites on the National Vanguard, a white nationalist publication.
Is that you, Rick?
Bullshit. These “personal accounts” are chronicling actions taken by our fellow citizens on behalf of the fellow citizens who hired them, and what they describe are acts that aren’t in the job description.
Blatantly false. Certainly, bad acts occur in most, if not all conflicts, but they arguably happen less-so and/or are stopped with more transparency and public scrutiny. The article chronicles examples of this (i.e., canoing). There are many more.
But you’re say these aren’t “bad acts.” Again, bullshit.
Scrutinizing, criticizing and reflecting on why we do what we do as a nation, whether it concerns how and why we wage war, or deciding how many of our fellow citizens we allow to die due to lack of adequate health care is how we decide what kind of society we want to live in, and these are acts that I, and thankfully, most Americans, want no part of.
Great story. As with everything in the media today things should be seen from every angle possible to get raw / unbiased information. The fight between the two seals that took credit was openly shown and obviously embarrassing. It’s not surprising that some of these brave men get carried away while fighting. War is a horrible experience and we can’t expect everyone to act accordingly after a traumatic experience. I am not condoning wrong doing. We cannot paint every member of this group as a war criminal as every group has bad apples and they unfortunately ruin reputations for all. There are good things that have come from their efforts too. Maybe this article can help the good guys clean house and rid themselves of their embarrassing teammates.
Forgot to add: There is NO HONOR nor HEROISM in what they do — pure BLOODLUST mercenaries!
Go spread your liberalism in the Middle East. I’m sure it’ll be at least 24 hours before you’re raped and murdered.
They traded their humanity and souls (or were socio/psychopaths to start with) to literally become serial killing machines. And all the commenters that are proud of them for “protecting America” are clueless — they don’t give a hoot about American citizens/the 99%! They work for The POTUS, CIA, MIC, and other .01 – 1.0% interests! They become addicted to killing, are not accountable to anyone, it’s pure shameless BLOODLUST!
Are you kidding me? Do you know any of these men? Maybe while living in your glass home you should meet one of these “bloodlust men” and their family’s before blasting some uneducated, judgemental response like this. Oh wait, you must be one of those bleeding heart liberals that welcomes all in our country until they start rapiing, enslaving and mutilating your family before you realize and wander what our government is going to do to stop the horror. It’s people like you who don’t realize the horror and atrocities that occur around the world, and the sacrifices these men make not only for us, but for those who cannot protect themselves. Your ungrateful, judgemental attitude makes me sick and I assume I’d rather spat on you then know my loved one risks his life for you.
Navy SEALs shoot people in the face? You don’t say. Shocking.
The entire country of Afghanistan isn’t worth the life of one Navy Seal.
really? war criminals.
Obviously A biased liberal spin of war. It is a dirty, cruel, horrible necessity until all of mankind changes. In the mean time there is no way to civilize war as this author is desperately trying to do by presenting the facts in a 20/20 hindsight liberal way. If you are forced into war you do your best to act ethically but you fight, win, and come home alive. To do otherwise is foolish and invites disaster as the enemy senses weakness and capitalizes on your civil awareness.
The author needs to head to a frontline sometime and get experience. I’ll bet he would gain a new perspective when someone is trying to kill you. SMH
Fighting, winning, and coming home alive doesn’t entail committing unnecessary war crimes you fucking degenerate.
Amazing !
“Fake News” is on everyone’s lips these days.
Who is more “fake news” then the CIA? Who?
Yet, after the Abbottabad raid and back at base,
one CIA agent announces to a general and Seals that it is verified
that we got Bin Laden and then there is an echo chamber on steroids.
One CIA agent and **no** evidence.
What evidence have you seen? What?
Answer: None
An echo chamber on steroids. Millions upon millions of words written
in articles, talking heads flapping their jaws on news casts 24/7,
books and movie scripts written.
Based on no evidence and an echo chamber beginning with one “Fake News” CIA agent.
There was one critical subtext to the raid on Abbottabad – “torture works”.
Remember Dick Cheney? He was everywhere to be seen after the raid telling
us the important lesson to be learned – “torture works”.
Had you forgotten? No evidence and a contribution to “fake news” from Dick Cheney.
Just more anti-American crap–everyone wants to drag-down a hero. The SEALS have more integrity in one soldier’s one finger than the media have in their whole collective industry.
That’s what the public always said about those brave elites in the SS too.
The more of these 3rd world degenerates they can kill the better off we’ll all be!
I doubt any of the inbred, sociopathic piles of poo in Team America Seal Team 6 killed Bin Laden. It’s impossible to figure out what happened based on obvious pieces of disinformation like this and Hersh’s story. The only genuinely objective piece on the subject I’ve found is Nafeez Ahmed’s “The Bin Laden Death Mythology.”
I think that you shouldn’t worry about what they do up there, they do what they do so you have the right and freedom to write this garbage with out getting your head chopped off
Could care less about canoeing. Yeah it’s not kosher per the geneva conventions. But it doesn’t necessarily strike me as a horrible war crime, like torture. However, much more infuriating is the number of civilian deaths caused by bad intel or “just kill them to be sure” type kills. Like in the 1st mission described in this article or the random women killed in the UBL raid. Very rarely should unarmed women and children be harmed.
Superb article- in depth, facts about the horrors of war and the men that wage it.
Hatred and vengeance only beget hatred and vengeance. No matter how justified or righteous, the only way to break the cycle is absolution.
Excellent article. A deep fact based look into their world and the mental damage war causes to man. Can’t judge them, can only hope to understand them.
zzzzeeezzzuuuss!! doesn’t even cover it. fantastic piece of work and thank you for taking the time and trouble to expose this. But I have to say, so what though? It hasn’t changed anything….but thank you for exposing it. When it’s supposedly the best of the best like this behaving like this it’s no wonder that lower level g-men from pigyobs to council officials behave and get away with what they do either….
One other new bit of information though “Norgrove, though in Afghanistan as an aid worker for DAI, an American NGO, secretly worked with Britain’s MI-6.”
You really got away with publishing that also? As long suspected and always denied by PTB…..this totally undermines all Aid organisations. I must remember that if I ever take up arms to defend myself, other people, the cause…..first thing to do is to shoot all the aid workers as they’re spying for the enemy! Necessary precaution.
But it’s impossible to know what to believe. It had been reported that all members of the attacking force that killed Bin Laden….all died within a few weeks of that mission. The implications being obvious….that not true now? Is this? how can you tell?
There was some, unsubstantiated, assertions that operators of the UBL raid were killed that fall in 2011 in the Extortion 17 crash. While never officially confirmed or denied, it’s totally unlikely. The guys on the raid and the helo crash were from two different squadrons (Red and Gold, respectively).
point still remains, impossible to know what to believe…….
same with that thing on the laws of physics for that matter
One of the most compelling piece of journalism I encountered in the last few years. Congratulations to the writers on this huge work. This type of investigating journalism critical of the military is needed to contrast with the constant whitewash portrayed by a most media organisations and the entertainment industry.
I wonder how these elite military units (and their accountability) will fare under the presidency of someone like Donald Trump, who probably won’t be appealed at all by the findings exposed in this article.
Great reporting! #DisbandSealTeamSix I hope the horrors they inflicted on others go on and haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Not gonna lie, I want one of them sweet Red Squadron patches.
Don’t even care a little bit. Glad there are men out there willing to do the dirty work for us.
IOW…”MOMMY! Don’t want RULES! Rules are TOO HARD!”
I second that. These guys have for courage in their left toenail than any of these whiney progressives will ever have.
I’m progressive and I still appreciate our military. The two are not mutually exclusive. Please don’t paint with a broad brush.
these murderers are cowards, it takes a lot more courage to capture/ take risks/ be professional about the job they’re supposedly doing….
You have no clue what you’re talking about. Go roll out on patrol for 6 months straight in a hot Taliban area in A-stan and then come back and make that statement. Stupid
you, sir, have no penis
Yet if this was happening to american “boots” it would be a different story for you, eh? Spoken like a true coward.
These lots should be tried forcwar frimes. How hideous and deceptive. The ugly face of heroism.
Excellent work. unfortunately some of your readers making comments, assumptions and judging of solders you know nothing about is indefensible and ignorant.
The majority of these guys are honorable warriors, they are generally well educated. The comments here seem to want to paint everyone with the same brush and that is simply unfair to all the professionals in the armed forces. It would have been nice to point out the positive valuable work they do instead of just focusing on the things that went bad. there needs to be balance and truth all round. even just a sentence or two recognizing the the honest solders putting their lives on the line and being consummate professionals for our security and freedom
But providing a balanced report wouldn’t fit the narrative Jager.
War is indeed hell. Lest we forget that the French, British, Russians, etc. were busy slaughtering each other literally by the millions a hundred years ago before the U.S. even got involved. You think “canoeing” is bad? Look at what happens when a 100, 200, 400mm shell hit a person. Now multiply that carnage by around 10,000,000.
To point out the atrocities of a FEW bad apples relative to empires willingly sending tens of millions to their deaths is utterly inconsequential within the context of war.
Nurembourg? Joint Enterprise law? these things mean anything to you….?
different sets of rules for different people is not rule of law or anything even approaching a measure of justice.
Truly outstanding work!
Beautifully written, vivid. Thanks.
Love Team 6. Canoe to your heart’s content.
A hit piece on the un-hittable.
TheIntercept_ serving up some click bait on the most respected and feared irregular warfare unit in the world. And we’re supposed to be moved by a dead terrorist having his brains spilled? Hah, this is comical at best.
Oddly enough it was Orwell who I believe wrote “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Get off your knees, wipe your chin, and pull yur pants up. You’re embarrassing yourself.
I would but your Mom’s vag tastes too good.
You believe wrong. It wasn’t Orwell.
We ask these guys to put their lives on the line while providing a blanket of freedom for our country, and then have the balls to question the manner in which they provide it. Love, kindness and prayers will not defeat our enemies. These guys will. And these guys are damn good.
You don’t think the killing and mutilation of unarmed civilians by an occupying force is questionable? How about video taping and distributing people (enemy or not) bleeding to death on the battlefield? Sounds “good”.
Thanks, Col. Sicko Jessup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2F4VcBmeo
These Lying Scumbags has nothing to do with the Death Of Osama Bin Laden.
He died in December of 2001. Recompense was given Seal Team 6 when the
entire Lot of them were murdered in the Copter Crash. Good Riddance.
And you know this how?
Learn some grammar and get some facts
Less than 10% of DEVGRU operators were killed in the downing of Extortion 17. The SEALs who were killed were a completely different squadron than those SEALs on the UBL raid….
There are believed to be be seven squadrons / 4 line squadrons / A RECCE squadron / A Black Squadron (that is believed to be an AFO unit) and lastly a squadron of SWCC (Maritime operations)
Each squadron has roughly 50 members and it is believed that Black Squadron has roughly 100 members
And they handed out (not Rxd) sleeping pills to those blokes like they were tic tacs after that, didn’t they?
The article in well researched and I will not dispute any of the informational put forward as factual. As one of those that has chosen a career serving others, who puts on body armor regularly as part of my job, I take issue with the general attitude many have begun to take towards the warrior-classes of our respective societies, be it military, police or other.
The reason most people can sit in front of their computer and read articles such as this in relative safety is because there are those people out there willing to perform very damaging and dangerous jobs which provide protection on a day-to-day basis.
These jobs are not always nice. They are not always civilized. They are not always played with the norms that your average white-collar worker lives by. That’s why people like me do the job while others do theirs. Each is needed.
Any article that’s tone about the killing of Bin Laden is anything but, “awesome . . . nice job guys and thanks”, to me is disturbing. He was responsible for killing nearly 3,000 American who were just sitting at work on September morning in 2001. If you don’t cheer his death, regardless of the circumstances, you did not lose someone close to you that morning and you probably have to direct ties to the 9/11 attacks.
Again, it is a well researched article and well-written. I just wish that more people would understand that safety, law and order is a dirty job that ultimately needs the support of everyone.
Do you ever realise that you fight people like you? The other side also sees their canoed heroes as people who sacrifice everything to give them peace, prosperity etc. So you fundamentally only need each other…
well, it’s exactly that kind of mentality that IS THE PROBLEM. People like you shouldn’t be doing that job, is the point…..the wrong people ‘crave’ that kind of work and the more balanced/ professional type people who would be capable of doing the job how it should be done don’t want it.
Maybe I would ‘cheer’ the deaths of those involved in firing those 70 odd cruise missiles fired into Kabal in ’98, killing 10 000 or more innocent men women and children. I still struggle to understand how the ‘enemy’ managed to turn off the rules of physics to strike back in the attack you refer to.
“If you don’t cheer his death, regardless of the circumstances, you did not lose someone close to you that morning and you probably have to direct ties to the 9/11 attacks.”
Wow. That pretty much sums up one side of the problem. By your logic, if someone didn’t express glee when UBL died, or know someone who died in 9/11, I am directly linked to terrorists? That’s just plain stupid.
Uhuh…so an onsite SEAL Team leader exercised a standing order ( his emergency assault authority during pirate raid) , applied his JUDGEMENT and acted within the engagement procedures and that is a ‘crime?’
Three armed skinnies take an American hostage, get their brains blown out by professional hostage rescuers operating within their established Rules of Engagement and we’re supposed to blame the result on the SEALS.
What a piece of trash.
All this piece reveals is that Progressives continue to live in a bubble, believing that they will vanquish the disaffected and end millions of years of human instinct and evolution through ridicule.
These guys are part of irregular warfare units, not some regular Army PFC’s or Air Force Tech Sgts. You WANT these guys to have an EDGE and run TOWARDS the fight without reservation and if that means busting open a few terrorist skulls with a hatchet or a .40 round, then so be it.
Hopefully you’ll never be the hostage of a terrorist organization who’s life is relying on borderline maniac warriors ready to shed their blood to save your whinny leftist asses
Fuck em. You wanna war, here it is
I’m still laughing. Best fake news site I have read in a long time.
and not one mention about the deaths of many (30) Seal Team 6 members deaths in a Chinook 47 helicopter crash that was brought down by a ‘taliban’ RPG and that Obama’s regime stymied an investigation.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/5/obama-stonewalls-seal-team-6-extortion-17-helicopt/
Why should it be mentioned? It has nothing to do with the article. Invading forces helicopters get shot down.
The worst aspect of Obama’s foreign policy is not that he pulled our troops out of the endless and aimless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, opposite his promise, Obama has kept troops in those countries. The most deplorable aspect of his policy is that he has re-shifted the burden of an entire military force onto the backs of several thousand special operators and placed them in untenable predicaments with egregious rules of engagement in pursuit of undefined and conflicting goals. I read an article 6 months ago titled “Afghan War Rules Leave U.S. Troops Wondering When It’s OK to Shoot,” which vividly demonstrates how our special operators are placed in the most dangerous and vulnerable positions defending the conspicuous Afghani military against the Taliban, but must place a call to a lawyer before taking a shot at the enemy or calling in an air strike when their lives are in danger.
What Obama is doing to the SOCOM community in Afghanistan is likely a bigger scandal than Benghazi. Here is the game Obama plays: In order to maintain the illusion that he is pulling out of an unpopular and endless war, Obama announces that most troops are leaving the theater of war. He has the media tell the public that there are merely 9,800 troops in Afghanistan just to train the Afghani army or a few thousand “advisors” in Iraq to help with the effort against the Islamic State, but most combat operations have ceased. What he doesn’t say is that most of those few thousand special operators are sent on endless missions with the full intensity of special operations, yet are responsible for holding the entire region together – a task that typically requires a force of over 100,000 conventional soldiers. This is while their comrades are deployed to over 135 other countries.
Obama increased the number of monthly special operations missions between 2009 and mid 2011 by a factor of six. During Obama’s first term, casualties almost tripled in Afghanistan from the previous seven years combined despite the supposed end of combat. Over 90 percent of the wounded in action were incurred during Obama’s presidency. That is because he placed our warriors in the most precarious position possible. The military had already withdrawn in large numbers, there was no longer any strategic mission with a definitive outcome, yet our special operators were sent out on endless deployments and dangerous missions. To make matters worse, they couldn’t even fight the enemy and are now governed by worse rules of engagement than even conventional forces were ever bound by.
Even worse, the Afghani government is aware of every special operations mission before it is carried out. It is no secret that many personnel in the government and military are double agents for the Taliban. Many believe double crossing Afghanis were the source of the Extortion 17 tragedy – the group of over two dozen special operators, including 15 members of SEAL Team 6, being shot out of the sky in August 2011. They were also likely killed as a result of the egregious orders from the top not to bomb the known Taliban fighters spotted in the landing zone. That was clearly a more tragic, impactful, and consequential scandal than Benghazi,(because so many more died) yet nobody in our congressional leadership has ever seemed interested in pursuing it – which is shameful.
I wonder if Sarah Palin read this article. I guess it wouldn’t matter, she would probably still be smitten with these sick bastards.
TLDR
Objective Bull. Couldn’t imagine a better name for it. They’re going in to kill a literal phantam, a bogeyman. Objective Bull indeed.
Incredible, isn’t it? The world’s best satirist is working for the JSOC.
Glory whores, the bulk of them. Appears too many are borderline narcicists who played too many violent video games as children. Bin Laden died in 2002—otherwise a good article.
i dont understand is that Snowden says bin laden is in the Bahamas collecting pay checks. I also read from another i guess credible source he died in 2001 because he had kidney failure. Yet i read this and they say they killed him even though there is no body. my question is who are we supposed to believe. If bin laden was killed in 2001 or he is in hiding then what are they doing and wouldn’t they know this is all some kind of scam. Its like everyone is in on the lie except the public because we have no clue whats going on.
I was sent here by the groundskeeper of the Grassy Knoll…
go google ‘operation northwwoods’. The govt believes they have the power to violate the constitution to save it.. planning a terrorist-style attack to rally american opinion. Souund familiar? They are afraid of collapsve and in theur fear they become twisted. Vonstitutional rights are violated, the go vernnent has lost all legitamacy to power and they ate agraid as fucjk about secrets revealed. WHen you fibnd out some of the things they did, whar they discovered through exploration of reaklity, kbowledge that has a right to currency… war crimes and mutilating corpses is no different.
We’re alls figthing a battle with ouraelves. seal sixers do it wtih guns and bodirs and adrenaline. Vitizens do it with work abd play and internets and sportsd. Thw emotnional intensity van be equal betweens systyems. We’re all stuck in this together, knifing ourselves in the side, unrtil we notice, then notice again, then understand pain, tehn learn to stop hurting. so I do have compassiomn for the government fucks who think thias way; they are more twrrified than me. But what they do is wrong any weill only unravel every foundration that hath been lain.
What is happening now, you are.seeing it happen. In this. very article. In these comments. Embrace love, it’s the only way to fly.
What kind of hippie communist liberal lies are you peddling?
I’m a communist. I am not a hippie. I don’t like liberals. Are you trolling or are you just completely ignorant and ideological/partisan?
Its funny, I have read Devil’s Guard, and what these guys started doing would have been considered by the (maybe fictional) former SS commander as some petty, inconsequential, and ineffective crap. What is depicted in that book is much different, and it was applied during a much different conflict, and never would have been remotely tolerated or even possible.
A closer approximation would have been something like rounding up all women and children from Taliban controlled villages and forcing them to ride around on convoy’s, so that anyone setting off an IED would be blowing up their own relatives.
Or setting out deep into Pakistan to take out the Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds there. Not random and wanton killing, or killing of all men, or even mutilation of bodies. The book does glorify war crimes, just different war crimes.
Dont see the problem here.
your problem
You’re or your? You must be an Afghan
your. you’re either an esl student or a reject from the seals. that’s your problem.
Yeah, no kidding. Busting open dead terrorist skulls and trying to make a few extra bones off an incredible story? C’mon.
Meanwhile hundreds of innocent civilians are massacred in Syria…but SEAL Team 6 needs to be investigated.
Get over yourselves.
“Meanwhile hundreds of innocent civilians are massacred in Syria…but SEAL Team 6 needs to be investigated.”
Like you care.
You’re right, I don’t care. News flash…wars happen, people die. Continue wasting your own life yearning for utopia and equality of outcome, I’m certain you’ll find it.
Bob ,, I thought I knew what the lowest level human slime could sink to .
You have made me recalibrate my lowest estimate of the level that human excrement can sink to .
You are truly something that should have been done away with while still in your mother’s horror oven !
Many Intel experts have stated that the initial interview, in which Bin Laden denied involvement in the 9/11 attacks was genuine, and that the later “confession” was a fake. To be a member of one of these units, you have to have a certain gullibility, and most of these guys are too busy honing their skills to be well informed enough to question what they are being told.
The majority of these guys are honorable warriors, they are generally well educated. The comments here seem to want to paint everyone with the same brush and that is simply unfair to all the professionals in the armed forces. I am not questioning the truth or accuracy of the article, but the comments, assumptions and judging of solders you know nothing about is indefensible and ignorant on the part of those leaving comments like yours.
So, journalism is not dead after all!! Congratulations on this excellent, well-written, and deeply sourced piece.
Lol. Yeah, great reporting!! Nothing but reliable unnamed sources. I’m surprised CNN has made this a headline yet.
Soooo…let’s demand a full investigation.
So Obama hand selected a unit with a history of unauthorized killings for this mission, told them kill but do not capture, then publically outed them…shoulda called this “Objective Lee Harvey”.
Thank you for this great article! What a great read, and very enlightening to those of us who have no affiliation or way of knowing this kind of information without doing a LOT of research (and probably ending up on some watch list – private VPN’s FTW).
I agree. I could not have imagined that the Seals, so venerated by so many Americans, were so corrupt and dishonorable.
Were the situation reversed and this were an Afghan army unit operating in America, do you suppose Americans would not be outraged at these atrocities? Do you suppose that this wouldn’t create new warriors prepared to fight — by any means, including terrorism — against their invaders?
Actions have consequences and if they didn’t already hate us before, they surely do now.
…and isn’t this the fallout that is precipitated by all meddling in foreign affairs. Our taxpayer-funded clandestine and covert ops, used to destabilize foreign entities have a lot of foreigners pissed and have for years. I’m surprised that we don’t have more terrorists’ attacks than we do, considering our history. Our Government has always had a very loose leash on the CIA and, now, the Clandestine branches of the DOD, as well. They go about wreaking havoc, abroad, all in the name of forwarding “our agenda”. I’m not so sure…
It could go either way. Maybe they would come up with some clever memes to post on Twitter.
An article like this deserves a pulitzer. War is hell
Excellent piece of journalism. The process of war invariably unleashes some of the worst elements of human nature.
The fact that these atrocities are are so very understandable and forgivably human does not in any way make them acceptable.
The truly sad part is that it enriches arms makers and various elites while accomplishing nothing but creating new enemies.
It is a never-ending, bizarro-world game of whack-a-mole where even the carnival barker, who is the only one who profits, has his soul corrupted utterly.
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I can’t speak for the stress or courage which must be great, but these guys go a long way as to why we can’t win the war:
What if Trump’s Russian troops occupy here and kill wedding parties, raid houses killing unarmed civilians and mutilating the corpses … you think you might join an insurgency? Even if you don’t agree with the insurgency’s politics or brutality, wouldn’t you just join the most effective form of resistance?
That’s what happens when discipline breaks down … which it obviously did — all these guys trying to profit from their secret raid. A mess.
Let’s not mince words: anyone who joins the U.S. military becomes a criminal, who should be stopped from his/her predations by any means that prove necessary.
That is a very bold claim that you have zero evidence to back it up with. Don’t bother pointing to this article either as you just claimed EVERYONE in the military is a criminal.
Glad there are real men and women out there protecting your right to spew this ignorant BS
Have an exceptionally awful day,
Alex
I was there in Afghanistan and involved in mission planning for Tora Bora.
(USMC 1st Battalion 1st Marines, S3- Operations with secret security clearance during Operation Enduring Freedom)
I saw this firsthand, but behind the scenes from HQ. We were killing women and children because the orders coming down from up high was not to allow the pilots flying overhead to get closer looks at their targets to determine if they were friendly or hostile. We wiped out an entire convoy on one of the first nights and we didn’t know if they were members of Al Qaeda or our Northern Alliance allies, which if they were our allies they would have had reflective tape on the roofs of their vehicles…. but orders were for the pilot to not even bother flying any lower to see if they had the markings or not. I saw how Intelligence officers were saying this is bad and we can’t do this, that it would have a negative impact on the War on Terror and not a positive one. To their credit they did fight this, but to their dismay, they were ignored.
Pilots however did begin to disobey orders and I know for a fact their actions avoided the killing of women and children on a school bus, and another time an old farmer on a tractor. Then the Forward Operating Base pushed on and I stayed behind in Camp Rhino so I stopped hearing about these stories from the guys in S-2 Intel and merely logged reports, which I have no way of knowing if they were truly enemy combatants that were killed I was logging or if they could have been non-combatant men, women and children. Those in command didn’t give a shit about the brown skinned peoples, they were cowboys that wanted revenge and no questions were going to be asked at the time.
The orders were to destroy and not risk the pilots life by getting a closer look, but that was just an excuse in order to increase the number of killed combatants. That and because 100 innocent Afghani lives do not equal 1 pilot’s life and 1 helicopter, in which case good old Uncle Sam is more worried about the $12 million dollar helicopter than the pilot. Not when they can simply write it up as 100 enemy combatants and make it appear as a serious blow against the terrorist enemy who just killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
Americans themselves wanted revenge for 9/11. We knew no questions were going to be asked by the American people, at least not in the initial phase, which really didn’t happen until we expanded the war into Iraq based on lies, manipulation and outright deception, in which Establishment Democratic leaders such as Hillary Clinton also played a very active role in. She knew better, she just plays it off like she believed the faulty intelligence was accurate, when it was coming from 1 man nicknamed “Curveball” in the Intelligence community. All so she could win political points with her base, as she got money for 9/11 survivors and family from Bush for being his cheerleader for the Democrats to support him.
It did her in ultimately in two Presidential elections and continues to split the Democratic Party.
Glenn Greenwald frequently – and rightly – criticises anonymously sourced articles. Yet here, on the pages of his own publication, an article that relies extensively on anonymous sources. Why should we believe any of it?
If military exercises, or ‘raids’, are to be judged on the achievement of their objectives, then the Pentagon should start examining what exactly the broader aim of those objectives are. If the objective of an exercise is to terrorise communities into fear of joining groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda then to judge by the war in Syria they have failed miserably. Recruitment to Islamic terrorist groups has made huge strides since the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Then again, if the sole objective is victory on the battlefield, then we might be forgiven for asking why failure after failure is being touted as victory.
As for the stated objectives of bringing democracy and peace to nations in need of rebuilding, well, I need not comment on that, as massive casualty figures, ruined cities and devastated economies speak for themselves.
The same confusion occurs with the killing of Osama bin Laden. If it was to put and end to terrorism and discourage its spread, again it has signally failed to do either, quite the opposite.
The mere fact that so much information about the killing has been withheld has fuelled a huge amount of speculation of the type the US government and intelligence services are now labelling ‘fake news’. Something they also claim to want to discourage.
If the objective was to make Osama bin Laden a martyr and a recruitment tool for terrorism, then that has been achieved beyond the wildest dreams of the terrorists. Again, as the result was entirely predictable, some of us may start to question, whether that indeed was the objective of some of those involved in the planning and execution. After all, there was no need to make bin Laden into a villain, to his enemies he had always been that.
As it is highly unlikely bin Laden posed much of threat from Abbottabad, once it was known he was there, it would have been much wiser to keep him under close observation while monitoring all his movements and communications.
Eliminating bin Laden was just another publicity stunt, even the two Seals that claim to have killed him were aware of that, as this excellent article reveals, by exposing how much they exploited it for personal enrichment.
We seem to have entered an era of decadence and degeneration, where base actions are given heroic status. Our leaders are morally corrupt and corrupting. We should all know where this bus is careering, and we should start searching for the brakes.
Glory seeking fools. How dishonorable and disgusting their behavior was. How many U.S. war crimes went unpunished? Too many.
Great journalism. Compliments to the intercept !ù
When they go low, we go High….
This work deserves a Pulitzer. Unfortunately, in this political climate you’ve probably just put yourselves on some government watch list instead (heck, as a member of the Green Party, I’m probably on one myself http://www.utne.com/politics/fusing-california-zm0z16wzsel) .
Outstanding work nonetheless, and future generations, if there are any after this period of madness, will note that at least some people still believed in values such as truth and human dignity.
Finding these sources and getting their stories was great journalism, yes, but this story is not what I would think of as Pulitzer-level writing. The problem I had with it is that it is a great big dirty laundry basket full of stuff of varying relevance. The very worst atrocity described – the attack on an innocent wedding – was apparently not the SEALs’ doing, and the crime then described – the shooting/head-smashing of a wounded innocent – comes down to a confusing he said/he said. The electronic “footnotes” where everything is credited to two former SEAL leaders or a retired SEAL etc. are confusing first because you can’t really look at them at once (or even see them much at all) and more importantly because there’s no way to tell if it is the same two SEALs from one to the next. This is different, in a bad way, from the standard journalism you like to see where you read one person’s full first hand account then another person’s account and so on. We have no idea if one person is going on bitterly because of a personal issue and another is saying “yeah, maybe” when asked about what he said. Last but not least, there are “crimes” mixed in like the shooting of bin Laden or the shooting of the Somali hijackers that I don’t think many Americans would really hold against someone. Sure, yes, I understand military has to follow orders and they’re picky about little details that we as civilians would be sloppy about, but for me to demand that someone standing in a house potentially wired with explosives not make sure that the world’s foremost terrorist is well and surely dead? Would I do that? Hell no, I wouldn’t go in the door, obviously, the place is full of terrorists! Beyond that I have no leg to stand on to judge their courage.
My comments not lefty enough for you.
You’re not journalists. I love America. Interceptor your staff cannot be trusted with the smallest things of a comment, how can you be trusted with more important matters.
You have are elite American military doing what they do best. The enemy murders 3000 American civilians and you going to be cry babies because the US so carefully stops a threat with the least amount of collateral damage possible, better than anyone other country could dream. And thats even if the reports are true which I have doubt when filtered to media by a bunch of America haters. We won! We got em! You bunch of sore losers. Stand down down back off from American interests. Seal team 6 is only getting better and better. Do you get it? Seal team 6 got the bad guys. And with precision strikes and the finest analysts, engineers, weapons handlers and leaders we limited harm to innocents remarkably well. Wow! Way to go Seal Team 6 and the thousands of brilliant minds only found in America that bared down on terrorism.
and that same elite american military ostracised the 2 guys that lied about killing bin ladin, as well as some of the fellow seals that killed unarmed civilians without adequate justification. but did not, as required by their oath, report these scumbags.
The people who committed those 911 murders died in then planes. As for those who financed them, we killed some and others like the Saudi Arabian government we continue to arm. You can believe perhaps that Saudi Arabia didn’t know who they were sending money to but it is indisputable that they put money in those hijackers hands.
Don’t forget about Iran’s part! Court records prove that Iran coordinated with the Saudi’s & Al Qaeda to pull off 9/11. Among other things, Iran purchased a Boeing 757-767 flight simulator to train the 9/11 terrorists. Iran’s key role in the 9/11 attacks was detailed in the U.S. District Court’s Findings of Fact in Havlish v. bin Laden, et al — a case brought by 9/11 victims against Al Qaeda, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah and numerous other Iranian and Iranian-backed entities.
The case was the culmination of years of investigation prompted by information initially uncovered by the 9/11 Commission. Overwhelming evidence of Iran’s complicity included testimony from experts and a top former Iranian regime insider, in addition to damning documents, such as a May 2001 memo on behalf of Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, discussing communications regarding Al Qaeda’s then upcoming attack. As the court mentioned in the Havlish case, based on a U.S. Dept. of Treasury Press Release (July 28, 2011), the Obama administration concluded that Iran has materially assisted Al Qaeda by facilitating the transport of money and terrorist recruits. Obama has prevented the 9/11 families from collecting, even though the judge strongly ruled in their favor. Obama used much of these “frozen funds” that were set aside for payment to these families instead to pay off Iran so we could get our sailors back, who Iran had illegally captured in international waters.
Osama Bin Laden died in December 2001. Whether Seal Team 6 killed one of the CIAs impostors or not is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.
Kudos JohnG, scrolling down the comments and you got it right. Kinda pathetic no?
Glory whores, the bulk of them. Appears too many are borderline narcicists who played too many violent video games as children. Bin Laden died in 2001 or early 2002, otherwise a good article.
LLTB
How many people besides Amy Goodman will be horrified by your story? You also need to know how you come across – which isn’t very good. It is understood that you want to make a name for yourself but a reptilian demeanor will have you recalled not for your investatoty prowess but only for your obnoxious content and worse your delivery. I am repulsed – not by the story or transcripts – but by you and your delivery. Canoeing? How many time do you have to explain what this is? No one is going to care about how Bin Ladin was killed except for you and maybe 3 others.
Pedinska:
Strong second to all of that. Setting aside just for present purposes the atrocities we inflict on the “other side,” what we’re doing to our own men and women is unconscionable. Deciding to wage war necessarily means making and unleashing our people as killing machines.
This has consequences for “our side.” For the killing machines as individuals, for their families, and for society. If they make it back physically intact, the medical and other assistance made available is appallingly thin and slow. Bright shiny new weapons and ancillary high tech toys are so much more profitable for so many.
Most of how we use our military, in several senses of the word “use,” is fucked.
ContinuousDeception Liked a comment.
fwiw, this article provides an explanation for something that has long puzzled me–why they dumped bin ladin’s body. easier to explain dumping a body out of respect for religious beliefs (yeah, right) than blowing his head apart out of respect for religious beliefs. maybe somebody else has pointed this out, i haven’t read all the comments.
Obvious reason for this – and the secret burial story – is that the dude wasn’t Bin Laden.
Most of the time it’s not the screw-up but the cover-up that does one in!
I still have the suspicion that bin Laden is alive in some secret facility fifty floors beneath Diego Garcia, suffering in ways that no open source media report has ever conceived of. Either that or having a New Year’s toast with George Bush, one or the other. ;) The problem with reports from anonymous sources in secret agencies is that they have very good reason to lie and an even better reason not to tell the truth.
this is just outstanding reporting. well done doesn’t do it justice.
This was a well written article and extremely interesting. However, my question to you is, why, would you ever, include the exact location of the computer, that harvests the archives of individuals, killed by our special ops? It does not make sense. Also…The navy seals, special ops, etc., are our country’s elite in warfare. They are the epitome of those who care about this country and the people. They sacrifice their lives to protect ours and understand tactical, operationally operational warfare better then anyone. It’s a god damn shame, as our special ops are on tactical missions for our country, outside our country; the “leaders” within our country are fostering loopholes, solidified by non disclosures, allowing our “enemy” into our country from ALL angles and means. The ramifications of this gross negligence, in conjunction with the unspoken necessity to withhold all information (that would otherwise identify accountability)…amounts to the destruction of the people’s liberties. Without accountability; hate/fear and anxiety, precipitates throughout the country. If you will not allow yourself to focus on the problem….those hiding behind non disclosures, you are a part of the problem, not the solution. Maybe you wrote this to spark communication?…in that case…please engage in the conversation you started…
What I would have done if I were the CIA:
Take over al Qaeda for obvious advantages.
Supplanting Bin Laden could be achieved if a trusted courier could be duped into believing he was distributing messages from Bin Laden himself.
The CIA was confident that the real Bin Laden had died years before.
(The First person to die, the first target, in the Seal raid on Abbottabad was Bin Laden’s courier.)
To dupe a trusted courier I would establish a Safe House – a compound – in Pakistan. I would populate the house with relatives of Bin Laden to heighten belief. At the center of it all would be a body double of Bin Laden – Key !
The body double *of course!* would have to be one enlisted by and placed in the compound by the CIA. An agent of the CIA masquerading as a body double of Bin Laden. Key!
The wives of Bin Laden, previously captured by Pakistan, would know that they and their children would be in prison else they could stay in the relative comfort of a safe house. The son or sons of Bin Laden would remain to protect the women and children. They would all know that Bin Laden employs body doubles for his protection. Maintaining the credibility of the body double in the safe house would be an act of loyalty and protection for Bin Laden.
The key is the courier. If he could be duped into believing he was distributing messages for Bin Laden then the deed is done. The CIA would own the source of the messages carried by the courier.
After establishing a credible safe house a courier would then be lured to the compound. His phone communications would be monitored – Key! – to first monitor his location and then most importantly determine whether he, the courier, had accepted the body double as the real thing.
If the courier’s phone communications revealed that he had seen through the masquerade then the CIA, of course, would perform a “sanitation operation” – a clean up of the compound, killing all the males in the compound.
The public would never hear of the raid conducted by the Seals to sanitize the compound, unless of course a stealth helicopter crashed in the compound forcing Plan B – a cover story.
Naturally, knowledge of the original true purpose of the safe house would be on an needs-to-know basis. The Seals would need to know as little as possible, only who to shoot.
Cool story bro!
You should apply to the CIA and show them how it’s done.
On subconscious meditation of this article I’d like to officially propose that GWOT be changed to GWOW: Global War On Weddings. Or, perhaps GWOiW Global War On Islamic Weddings.
I like GWOW; recalls an attention seeking whore type personality.
Anyway good job gents here’s your medal for stopping those weddings; money & time well spent
“an attention seeking whore type personality” – excellent analogy!
What this article leaves out is the Rules of Engagement. The Wedding Party is a tragedy for sure but traveling in a war zone, in a convoy, with weapons, is a recipe for disaster. Should the SEALS have sought to get more intel? Maybe. I wasn’t “on the ground” for that. Neither was this reporter.
As for the Bin Laden stuff. Really? Reads more like speculation and unsubstantiated gossip.
Ah yes, been in the wars have we? The real crime is the author missed the opportunity to write, “he was discharged for clubbing a SEAL with his pistol.”
Where can I buy one of those hatchets? Does it come with
fake or real blood on it? Ultra bad-a** – I want one!
They killed Bin Laden and became aggressive twords the enemy – what happened to talking to our enemies – I assume they throw gay men off buildings because they are angry at American foreign policy. I assume they want to kill you because they hate George Bush. I don’t fear seal team 6 I fear people like this writer and all the liberals commenting below. Love to see you all in trouble, God forbid your family is held hostage – who would you call Bradley Manning or seal team 6.
I would like to turn each one of you liberal commenters over to the enemy and then ask who you would like to have come get you. I suggest you get real and realize that there is a very real and present danger from violent corner of humanity and to counter that has hatred for the west and without people willing to die you will be in a world of pain, women will be denied rights far worse than your petty little complaints – gays will be executed and freedoms gone. Yes in war it will get ugly and yet you sit in your warm chair in the greatest nation on this planet – full of food – drink and your MerillSteep movies and play arm chair quarter back over the men that protect you. In fact you don’t deserve it I really wish you would meet our enemy on the battle field then you may have more sympathy for them men who sacrifice their own humanity to protect you.
Charlie, remember back when we used to be the Good Guys, the sole superpower, right after 9/11, when almost everyone on the planet, so outraged by what Al Qaeda had done, rallied in SUPPORT of the USA?
Bin Laden would have been quickly marginalized (and Daesh would never have happened) if we hadn’t taken his bait and acted just like the heinous, bigoted imperialists he told his supporters that we were.
Imagine if we’d have invaded Afghanistan with extension agents and teachers, instead of working these exceptional men in DevGru so hard some turn into monsters.
America needs to bury the hatchet, stop playing this stupid medieval game. It’s not us. It’s not our history. We’re certainly not winning.
So yeah, right now I’d choose Chelsea Manning, and give ST6 a break, long overdue.
Win the war, not the battle.
“The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one other such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.”
—?Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus
Hard to believe Seal Team would go so far off the reservation as to “canoe” Bin Ladin’s face against direct orders not to do so on their most high profile kill ever. Surely they would expect Bin Ladin’s body photos would later be shown to pubic or other officials. It is easy to imagine Seals would adopt canoeing as a “signature” of their kills as to sow terror in cases where they vacated operations and left the bodies behind for the “terrorist” buddies to find. But to a body that would near surely be shown to the POTUS?
i think that was o’neills decision; he’d already discussed how to profit off the killing with his partner/rival, and he was marking it as his “kill”, which he could later use to valorize himself (and hey, a potential senate seat in the offing, he could be bigger than tailgunner joe). talk about stolen valor.
the painful truth is… I don’t fear terrorist… What I fear the most… the Asinine Stupid Foreign Policy that are the cause of terrorism!
It’s called the “Scourge of Colonialism!”
Billions of lives lost thru disease, plunder and pillage because of the ignorance and disrespect of other cultures that made the planet great by those who have “god complexes” and a barbarian mentality that exist to this very day! Why can’t they just leave people the Fk alone!
As the old saying goes… “you can take a barbarian out of his country, but you can’t take the barbarian out of a barbarian!”
The “Scourge of Colonialism” has fk this planet and it’s people up for ALL generations to come with NO cure in sight!
Hear hear!
absolutely.
Agreed
Thank god there are men out there willing to do this..More power to them.. If you keep living in a world full of puppies and roses you ignore the fact that there are horrible things that happen in war. I always find it funny that you are willing to have someone go and kill on our behalf but then try to tell them that the way they ended someones life or what happened after is to scary or brutal for you to handle. Get over it..Pull up best gore.com and see what is really happening,,,what these guys have done is nothing compared to what the savages do everyday to their own people, and yes I said savages that is what they are and they need to be delt with as such..
“Some of those photographs, especially those taken of casualties from 2005 through 2008, show deceased enemy combatants with their skulls split open by a rifle or pistol round at the upper forehead, exposing their brain matter. The foreign fighters who suffered these V-shaped wounds were either killed in battle and later shot at close range or finished off with a security round while dying. Among members of SEAL Team 6, this practice of desecrating enemy casualties was called “canoeing.””
There’s a difference between a security round and desecrating the enemy. Though both, through strict interpretation of the laws governing land warfare, are technically illegal. Pumping a security round in a fallen enemy, while not a particularly glorious part of armed combat, is a well accepted practice that serves a valuable purpose and saves lives and suffering.
We ask these men to go out and meet the most despicable of humans in our names and kill them, so we don’t have to. Unless you’re willing and capable to do their job, I suggest you don’t tell them how to do it.
Local police departments feel blessed when a former seal applies to serve and protect. Or not.
That’s a thought to ponder. Future loose canons with no one to administer a v shaped wound to. Or not. Getiing real weird out there.
Delta Force is the most elite unit in the US arsenal. They don’t seem publicity and one will never know how they are organized.
I’d hope the members of this unit would have had the foresight to realize that human intelligence sources would be reluctant to share information with a unit that has this reputation. These kinds of mutilations seem to compromise their mission.
I don’t care about “stories” from anonymous sources. Glen Greenwald told me that’s bad, except when his own outlet does it. Then it’s fine.
In all of the stories of American actions carried out with impunity one reflection is perpetually missing: how would Americans feel if treated by foreign invaders the way they have treated others? Contempt for other cultures, ignorance and firepower do not amount to moral superiority.
How many of America’s soldiers in Afghanistan knew the first thing about the culture of history or gave a damn about the people?
Did Osama Bin Laden really attack the US for no reason? I don’t condone what he did for a second but to imagine it was because “they hate us for our freedoms” is very stupid indeed. Now the US has had a taste of what it has dished out in terms of foreign interference and it leaves a bad taste and the conceit of exceptionalism is exposed for what it is. Bin Laden caused the US to spend triillons … On what?
Citizens in other western democracies get free healthcare and live longer than Americans and in more equal societies. That America can’t afford it is a lie. The 0.01%, the shareholders who own US corporations and politicians, prefer to spend your taxes on wars from which they profit.
Someday the endless, perpetual American war machine must stop.
World hunger could be ended for a fraction of the cost of war, nevermind providing healthcare for Americans.
“Someday the endless, perpetual American war machine must stop.”
No, it musn’t!
Why is it that people think that a ravenous hell engine which thrives on the misery of the world and has ALL resources at it’s disposal will somehow magically stop?
There is no stopping this. the carnage will continue unabated until there is no more meat left for the beast to gnaw on.
Plus la change , plus la meme chose– yes it has always been this way and may? always be this way.
Pillage ? check, Barbaric acts? check, War crimes? check, Psychologically disturbed (or high) “operators”? check, no accountability because it suits political goals? check
Welcome to Rome in 125 AD!!! And now the U.S. has a President Elect to match . Let the games begin
POTUS, in 2009, made the Look Forward, Not Backward policy…fluffing the pillows for Hillary the warhawk, who was upstaged by the human manure spreader. The last few weeks before Nov 8, in which the Democratic Party unearthed the corpse of Joe McCarthy, was very revealing indeed.
Between a crack house and a meth lab, the US elected a meth lab.
So you’re saying the stock market is a safe bet for the foreseeable future, eh? I’m starting to realize that investing in the American economy is basically betting on the American war machine to keep winning.
World hunger could be ended for a fraction of the cost of war..
US foreign policy is like a rabid dog on the loose. Expensive. Destructive. Strangulating. Poison to the planet.
Did Osama Bin Laden really attack the US for no reason?
I doubt it. What for? What did he gain? Why?
Nothing but propaganda to justify war and killing.
Is this the outlet that constantly smears Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz as “islamophobic”, where one of its hatchemen publicly bawled on twitter about the death of Bin Laden, the same “news” site that the Wall Street Journal pretty BTFO last month over their repeated lies about the circumstances surrounding Snowden’s arrival in Russia? Yeah I’m really gonna believe them. It stinks of, “oh murrica like this particular military unit, so we gotta dig up some shit on them because pathological edginess.”
The seals and similar outfits represent the worst in America’s humanity. They can and will do anything if you wrap in or around the flag. The flag has long since stopped being the symbol of a great nation but now represents the present rulers of the country. Insane genocidal degenerate politicians, banksters and global criminals. Seals and other agency stooges think they are fighting terrorism but they are only fighting Islamic groups created, trained and funded by the same people who fund their own paychecks. Seals also know about the lies foisted on the ignorant masses and still go along with all the disgusting insanity. They know that they didn’t kill Bin Laden in the Pakistan compound and that he had been dead for a decade. They knew this when they wrote or read the Bin Laden book afterwards. Theirs is a continuing dirty glory that has not gotten any cleaner over the years and it seems that they can never smell their own stink.
The U.S. military is, at the very least, psychopathic. This article merely presents details, but this is nothing new. Many people who join the military of any country are violent criminal types, but since the U.S. military is more aggressive and powerful that the others, it’s worse here. People in the military are a very long way from being noble warriors, as most of the country has been brainwashed to falsely believe. Instead, they are violent thugs carrying out the wishes of the ruling class for acquisition of resources and power, mainly oil and pipelines nowadays.
Really us military personnel veterans are not criminals or psychopaths. You need to rethink what you are saying! And I dare to say that to me in my face. As for this article there is no valid points and is another attempt to pull out idiots in you all!
Jeff thanks for stereotyping me as a criminal whose intentions are purely sadistic and psychopathic in nature I’m glad you know me personally or the sacrifices my family has made… I’ll continue to defend your right to speak in blissful ignorance…
Mike, if you’d like to distance yourself from the behavior described in this article, the floor is yours. Don’t be shy.
What are your intentions, then? What sacrifices do you make, while getting a salary that involves killing people who have done you no harm?
Do you ever contemplate that what you are doing (killing for money, sanctioned by a corrupt government) is degrading for a human to be doing?
You created a family without any goals to support them? Then came along an offer to kill other families to support your family?
Thank you Mike – As a 62 year old white female who remembers Vietnam Nam vividly- I was wondering when one of “the psycho criminals” was going to speak up. Asanign to attack the military. They didn’t start all this – they just signed up or were lucky/smart enough to get into a military academy.
I don’t need or want you or your ilk to defend me and I never asked for that. In fact, you are not “defending” anyone. You are the aggressors. People need to be defended from you.
Mike those who serve know people of all types soldier for many reasons. This articles is about the bad of the bad who cross the “line.” A small but devastating percentage. The stress of war sometimes makes it very hard to see the line and some will stray beyond the “rules of warfare” bad man and/or bad situation. I thank God I was never put between the devil and the deep blue sea, it is a “hell” of a chose. Maybe Jeff does not get out much and meet people outside his peer group. Their is honor and dishonor in every walk but not all professions are measured in life and death. That is why our leaders and congress should much more carefully consider before crying havoc.
Your position was repudiated by the Nuremberg Trials. You are responsible for what you do; “just following orders” is no excuse. Yes it can be an extremely difficult choice, but you joined the military so it’s on you. The victims are the only sympathetic parties here, not the damn soldiers. And while I’ve met cool people who are or were in the military, they are exceptions, not the rule. Most people who join are violent aggressive people.
There are only three reasons that people join the U.S. military. This is an all-volunteer military, no one is forced to join. People who join either believe what the U.S. military does (making them a voluntary part of the evil), are selling their souls (don’t believe in what the military does, but join to get benefits like college and/or training), or have no clue about what the military does (imperialism and oil/resource wars). The clueless ones are not blameless, because the information is available enough to anyone who wants to know, and there’s no excuse for joining an extreme organization like the military — it kills large numbers of people and destroys large portions of societies — without making an effort to find out what it really does.
BTW, I have right wing friends with whom I vehemently disagree on issues like this. Now, who doesn’t get out much?
Jeff D – How many people did the government under Joseph Stalin kill? Pol Pot? The Ottamans against Armenian civilians, The Roman Empire, the U.S. gov’t against Native Americans, etc. etc. etc.? Conversely, how many lives have military’s saved through just action?
Tens and tens of MILLIONS of non-combatants killed through non-military action. Gulags, prison camps, and gas chambers are their weapons. Political ideology their excuse. No military involved or needed when killing mostly unarmed civilians. “Extreme organizations” exist and have existed FAR from the boundaries of a military units.
One could argue, using your logic, that if one that works for a government, even in a non-military role, then they are responsible for murdering large numbers of people and societies because it has happened, time and time again, throughout history.
Step outside of your tiny little box and think critically, historically and logically before opening your cock holster.
Blade’s response makes my point perfectly. Just because there are exceptions doesn’t mean that a generalization isn’t true. And I didn’t say that all members of the military are psychopaths, I said that the institution is psychopathic.
In the present media environment, no mainstream outlet would call these guys anything but heroic, disciplined forces for good who do what is necessary to get the bad guys. And every mainstream media outlet would refer to a unit from Iran or Syria or Russia that was guilty of only half the things described in the article as cold blooded murderous regime thugs.
Ironically, there was a time when American media would have gradually moved to calling these guys a shame to the American military, or, if they were from one of America’s right wing dictatorships/authoritarian regimes, a death squad. (But still be as harsh to any ‘enemy’ unit)
Funny how the ‘democratization’ of news sources that the internet has made possible has decreased how critical and questioning the media is.
Not to mention the citizenry. Say what you will about the media, enough information has emerged that everyone knows *something* is wrong with U.S. military conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. People marched in the streets about war crimes in Vietnam. What has happened this time around?
Americans have concluded that their government doesn’t answer to them, maybe. (see the drop in percentage of Americans who vote, add in things like no one going to jail over the biggest financial fraud in history, and consider if they’re related)
Or the tools to suppress citizen action have raised the breakthrough point much higher.
And remember, when those marches took place, most of the marchers were confident that participation wouldn’t negatively effect their careers/lifestyle far down the road. Nowadays, with even small corporations being able to search out (thanks to social media) whether someone participated in such events as part of the hiring process, your most likely candidates to participate, young college/university students, also know they are the most likely to run into negative consequences in the coming years, even if they don’t get arrested, charged, or media notoriety, whether their cause prevails or not.
Marches were once covered in the media: the marches against the Iraq War had astonishing turnout in 2003 and were pretty much ignored by the mass media. To add insult, it was then claimed that nobody marched, not really like back in the Vietnam War, ah boomer nostalgia never die.
What is marching now, other than a curiosity?
More important is the mass indifference to non-American suffering unless it has been deemed of proper partisan usefulness.
People make partisan excuses for continued American Empire atrocity whenever their imaginary friend occupies the White House. In the Bush era I had this idea that liberals were actually against war, but that’s simply not true: the last 8 years have proved it.
What has happened is that there is no draft. If there were this would have been over with long ago. The military draft worked for WWII- After a decade in Vietnam not so much. This time around there was no way that parents who were in high school at the height of of that hideous quagmire where our boys “fought” an unseen enemy and were shot with bamboo arrows smeared with human feces – would have meekly gone along with a freaking draft. My oldest is nearly 34 and I remember telling my husband when he was in 7th grade (about 1995-96) “if there is another draft fow what’s coming we are outta here!”
Oh not again, not that idea that having a draft ends war? That one gets floated in discussions a lot. Luckily it doesn’t go anywhere.
A*M*A*Z*I*N*G F*A*C*T :
American drafts are not instituted to end wars, but to expand them
“No mainstream outlet”? I thought there was both an NYT and WaPo article linked above talking about these atrocities.
You turds wasted time and paper looking to sully the seals and most americans will read and shout bravo and you gotta love those seals…. war is hell and not a time for coffee and rolls and high ethics discussions by left moonbats…..all of you should be warterboarded.
if you were a real seal instead of a pathetic asskisser you would, like most of the seals in the story, including the ones named, criticise the people that violate their oaths.
I honestly don’t care, I’ve seen myself what savagery the islamist are capable of.
I’d rather not fight a war against them, it’s a war with no end and one that we obviously do not have the stomach to fight.
All the people in this comment section taking the moral highhorse and going of about war crimes as if these savages we’re fighting gives two damns about the Geneva Conventions.
Truth is that we’ve fought an enemy like this before, the things US Marines and Soldiers had to do to defeat Imperial Japan was brutal but necessary to defeating them, if you’re shocked and horrified of what goes on in modern combat than the things Marines in WWII had to do would give you a fainting spell.
Pull our boys out of the Middle East, it’s obvious we lack the gumption to fight this war properly.
So, that’s why we should be absolved from descending to savagery ourselves and also ignoring “quaint relics” such as the Geneva Conventions along with other treaties and international law?
You really ought to considering joining ISIS — you and they share the same moral principles.
Then why fight them?
Our war in the Middle East has end, we have to get out while we can.
How exactly would you fight an enemy that makes a spectacle of beheading its prisoners, an enemy that straps bombs to the mentally disabled and children to take advantage of our empathy, an enemy that will fight to the very end no matter what the cost for their afterlife?
The only true answer for someone with sense of moral principle would be to not fight them at all because to fight an enemy like would require you to violate your principles but if you get pushed to the point where not fighting them isn’t an option, then what?
I’d fight jihadi terrorists by not giving them arms and funding and directing our allies to do the same. Pretty easy. It’s interesting how some people ignore that the US is the major instigator of wars in the Islamic world.
I am painfully aware of this, I was in country when our arming of ISIS was going on unmolested, I saw entire convoys of gear, vehicles and weapons leaving for Iraq only to be “lost” to ISIS.
In fact, since the US practically created ISIS, wouldn’t the US have to defeat ISIS just based on moral conviction?
But I digress, the question I posed is really asking what a moralist would do if he found himself cornered by an enemy that has no morals.
I sympathize with you. You raise important questions. But I really do think you are right when you say the U.S. has to get out of the Middle East– frankly they should get their out of every country. ( war or economics) .
But then it wouldn’t be the “number one” country that all Americans worship and wrap themselves in the flag over. Its a trade off. Empires pillage and plunder economically or through direct war to keep their place.
And it is painfully clear to the rest of the world which choice the U.S. has made.
“In fact, since the US practically created ISIS, wouldn’t the US have to defeat ISIS just based on moral conviction?”
Yes Dave, for consistency’s sake. Creating AQ and ISIS, and using them as an excuse to torture people those brave Patriots™ don’t like demonstrates exceptional morality, and it’s brilliant. On top of that, the pay is fantastic and nothing is more fun than administering the torture, eh American?
“But I digress, the question I posed is really asking what a moralist would do if he found himself cornered by an enemy that has no morals.”
Glad you asked that. I’ve found myself cornered by many an enemy torturer with no morals over the years, and every single one of them was an American national or a rented collaborator. What I do is not break, keep going, and continue looking forward to seeing people like you get what’s coming — the sooner the better.
Keep up the good work, USA!™
Remember, kids in high school enlist at 18. They’re deemed too young to drink but old enough to kill? Unsafe behind the wheel of a car, yet we give them keys to the Apache? By design, most can’t afford college and the only way out of poverty is to enlist. Since America eliminated the draft, we entice recruits with Hollywood propaganda films like American Sniper, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, “instructing” who are the good guys/bad guys. Indoctrination begins in middle school with violent video games. The rude awakening happens after they witness the horrors of real war. Most have remorse, a tragic number commit suicide, and some become peace activists, like the late great Howard Zinn.
I do remember being 18 in Texas. I was doused with at least as much southern style patriot bullshit as anyone else around me, and I didn’t sympathize with those brain-washed ‘kids’ and their parents then, when I was 18, any more than I do now. I don’t lay any claim to an above average intelligence, but I am not evil, which is more than I can say for most Americans I’ve known, including blood (thirsty) relations in Texas.
I pity the millions butchered in the numerous offensive, unprovoked US wars, not these gullible ‘innocents’. They are responsible for turning their critical thinking units on before they rush into these slaughter fests. Nobody else is gong to do it for them. Furthermore, these morons make life very dangerous for those who are able to think for themselves.
I’d start by not bombing their babies, invading their countries, droning their weddings, supporting the dictators who oppress them, supporting settler-colonial invaders who have engendered multi-generational bitterness and hatred. . . And then, I’d sit back and carefully and dispassionately consider “why they hate us.”
Hint: It’s not for our freedoms.
Dave… the painful truth is… I don’t fear terrorist… What I fear the most… the Asinine Stupid Foreign Policy that are the cause terrorism!
It’s called the “Scourge of Colonialism!”
Billions of lives lost thru disease, plunder and pillage because of the ignorance and disrespect of other cultures that made the planet great by those who have a “god complex” and a barbarian mentality that exist to this very day! Why can’t they just leave people the Fk alone!
As the old saying goes… “you can take a barbarian out of his country, but you can’t take the barbarian out of a barbarian!”
The “Scourge of Colonialism” has fk this planet and it’s people up for ALL generations to come with NO cure in sight!
I think the larger point is that it is war. War is ugly, brutal and uncivilized by nature. The commentator refers to WWII and Japan but American (heck, Allied soldiers too) committed atrocities in Europe against German soldiers. Not as well documented. And the “heroics” of liberating Europe far outweighed the journalistic importance of a few “huns” getting killed/mutilated. Vietnam had similar issues. The Vietcong and NVA mutilated American soldiers. Conversely, when I visited the American War Crimes Museum in Ho Chi Minh City I saw the photos of Marines with VC heads on stakes outside their pup tents. Seems to be a symptom of war itself and something that ought to be considered.
Then why fight what your country creates, arms, trains, and funds?
I don’t have a clue, but america’s masters of geo-strategy know something. At least that’s what I have been told a few hundred times.
‘going asiatic’ as some did during WW2 did nothing but traumatize those who were warped to that point later, read ‘With the Old Breed’ by EB Sledge if you don’t believe me. Yes, the Japanese needed to be fought ruthlessly, no one would say that the standard approach of not trying to take prisoners, as the Jap soldier was almost certainly trying to kill you by doing so, was unjustified- they would have been fools to act otherwise. But mutilation and torture serves no purpose, other than to further justify a brutal enemy’s sadistic mindset toward us. When you become what you are fighting against, you have lost, regardless of any military ‘victory’. And to compare our current wars to what guys went through on places like Okinawa is absurd- these guys are having a cakewalk in comparison. Spend weeks and weeks continually assaulting a well equipped, entrenched enemy in sizable numbers, living among the dead in a stinking hellhole when not fighting, vs. riding in, shooting up an overmatched foe, then riding back to a hot meal and a soft, safe cot is night and day. The LRP’s and special forces dudes in Vietnam had it much tougher than these guys, and most of them would readily say that they had it much easier than any WW2 infantryman who spent significant combat time on almost any island campaign, or in other hell holes like the Huertgen.
You got this right. Many of us who served only deliver a few drops of sweat into a river of blood. My Uncle served at Normandy on D day. He had post traumatic stress but there was no name or treatment save alcohol then. When I was three I ask him a question he would never have answered for an adult. Did you kill anyone in the war Uncle xxx. His eyes went faraway he was back “There.” “God Freddie, everyone was shooting, I might have killed a dozen or no one.” In comparison my service was no big deal.
How many tours did you do?
The US did not want Japan to dominate the far east. The war between Japan and the US was a war between 2 imperial nations, largely for rubber. Hawaii was a commandeered outpost. Whities are haolies.
OMG! My dad has risen from the dead! Just one little tweak:
It would appear that Islamist and the American army hold the same values when unchecked.
The fact you don’t understand the nature of the article shows that you should not serve in any capacity with a gun.
Usa_naziland; a black mark on human history. These stories of death-squads are common place upon societies at the brink of self-destruction. And long may these cultures ruin themselves into the historical mythology. America has strayed so far from civil society in the pursuit of creating enemies & indeed funding terrorist groups to kill. It’s becoming the nation no one wants anything to do with & rightly so.
First I say thank you for all your hard work at the Intercept and this article. The world owes you a great thanks. That said there is a problem with the grammar in this paragraph or there is something missing in one sentence ?
” Some of those photographs, especially those taken of casualties from 2005 through 2008, show deceased enemy combatants with their skulls split open by a rifle or pistol round at the upper forehead, exposing their brain matter. The foreign fighters who suffered these V-shaped wounds were either killed in battle and later shot at close range. Among members of SEAL Team 6, this practice of desecrating enemy casualties was called “canoeing.”
“Either killed in battle and later shot at close range” seems to be the issue.
Great job Seal Team 6……do it again!
Says one while torturing his cat.
How dare the author of this article question the integrity of Seal Team 6!!!! If you have Seal Team 6 on your ass, its because you deserve a terrible death!!!
Or because you dared to be on your way to a wedding party.
This article is sloppy, irresponsible journalism. Typical hit piece designed to vilify our volunteer military to the world, therefore making the US enemy #1. It is easily to find jealous, disgruntled former members of any group to dream up accusations all under the veil of anonymity. Also keep in mind that there is certainly no way to verify the credentials of these “interviewed” individuals.
You call it sloppy journalism and a hit piece, but offer not real arguments for why that is the case. As stated in the article, they spoke to not just one or two disgruntled people, but 18 former and active duty members of SEAL Team 6. No, it’s you that are engaging in sloppily and irresponsibly dismissing an important piece of journalism.
Also, after reading this piece and seeing that you chose ‘Canoe’ as your username, I’m questioning whether your comments should be taken seriously.
“Typical hit piece designed to vilify our volunteer military to the world, therefore making the US enemy #1″
“volunteer military to the world”.
Are you for real? Were you born yesterday? I have read lot of non sense lately but your comment is the best, # 1.
Below, a poster writes:
Maybe this will help:
I seem to have utterly lost my ability to construct basic HTML. There’s clearly only one solution.
Pedinska must be banned.
Everyone makes mental errors when composing comments on the fly, do they not? I have learned to be just a little bit suspicious of the habitual use of overly polished commentary by certain regulars- it either speaks to a very unhealthy level of obsessive compulsiveness or connivance.
I have learned to be just a little bit suspicious of the habitual use of overly polished commentary by certain regulars- it either speaks to a very unhealthy level of obsessive compulsiveness or connivance.
It’s a long-running joke about my fyslexic dingers, not an actual bona fide request. ;-}
Having said that, it actually is easier on the eyes, as well as less likely for folks to be misread, if they can manage the simpler html stuff like italics and blockquotes. But it’s not absolutely necessary for comprehension. :-)
thanks for the reminder.
Which is completely ridiculous because war is a crime. To pretend like there are some acceptable standards while you shoot & bomb people is asinine.
Trained and willing to be homicidal maniacs unleashed on the world by the criminal corporate puppets in the central government barking out orders on behalf of the corporate and banking puppeteers. Wrongly celebrated for knowingly, willingly, and with premeditation committing 1st degree murder. And people wonder why there is so much violence in the streets of ‘mericer. Disgusting.
A fantastic article, Matthew Cole. Thank you so much for the hard work, analysis and triangulation that went into writing that piece. An excellent example of what good journalism and investigative reporting looks like.
This is one of the reasons I frequent The Intercept.
I second that!
“A retired noncommissioned officer who tried to police the unit said the command suffered from “unspoken oaths of allegiance” among both the officers and the operators, and that the first instinct when misconduct surfaced was to “protect the command and then the men” rather than hold bad actors accountable.”
If you think this is a military problem rather than an American culture problem consider that this is exactly how domestic police act in the states.
Yes, this ^ .
Of course. And obviously some of the infantrymen are coming back to become LEOs. Marine recruiters have informed prospective recruits/poolees that if they have any intention of becoming a police officer in civilian life then do not go into military police mos, go infantry.
Here’s an interesting story though:
“KING: A former Marine was fired as a W.Va. police officer after failing to shoot somebody”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-ex-marine-fired-w-va-officer-failing-shoot-article-1.2790284
Atrocities?
No act, or any behavior in this article, compares to the horrors the innocent victims suffered during the September 11th attacks in the NYC office buildings and on those airplanes that morning. Never mind the destroyed families left behind.
Not even close.
The Rulers thank you for your patriotic credulity and acceptance of war crimes.
But if we stoop the level of the 9/11 attackers we are no better then they are the act of self defence no longer becomes justifiable and we become the aggressors. We had world sympathy on our side after 9/11 but George Fucken Bush squandered it now we’re the most hated in the world.
You’re correct. We should have hugged Alqaeda and told them they were better than their acts of terrorism.
Yeah we should have hugged them with an IED strapped to our chest yelling Jesus Christ is the Saviour repent now fcken retard
It’s a pretty shitty indication of our collective societal morality, if we start giving a pass to the committing of atrocities, if they do not meet or exceed the level of another previous atrocity. If we live in a civilization of equivalent retributional violence, as you seem to be justifying, then perhaps the Jewish Diaspora should’ve been awarded the right to gas 6.1 million Germans?
Innocent, yes, horrible losses.
Responsible parties ?
We take years reassembling crashed airliners. Why was all the tower material, steel (evidence) melted down within months ? You don’t destroy evidence.
What was your gut, internal thoughts, questions when you saw the first, second, third, fourth and fifth towers fall – straight down on their footprints ?
We refuse to hold responsible, those at the top, from profiting from all sorts of destruction – financial and physical.
The military war machine needs perpetual war and we will continue to pay, in many ways, until we can return to restraint.
Toddlers have killed more US citizens than terrorists, take any period of time, data.
We suffer from a lack of responsibility.
The MIDDLE EAST would suggest you are talking out of your ARSE and I support them.
Simple maths and logic will do it for you, could i suggest an appropriate primary school?
Wow, just think of all the public outrage when this story gets picked up by ABC evening news or CNN tonight.
Oh wait….nevermind.
Indeed, these people have been trained and indoctrinated to be killing machines, and this inhumane behavior will never stop happening until such time as the whole war machine ceases to function. And for all that, the US has not succeeded in “winning” any of the several wars around the world in which it’s involved.
Disgusting savages like these U.S. military members are why all Americans are legitimate targets for the people of all of the countries that we’ve attacked, invaded, and/or occupied over the past few decades. It also disgusts me that both the democratic party and republican party absolutely worship the military and keep shoveling more and more money to them. Our country is falling apart, but we’ve got over 1,000 military bases all over the world, pissing away money and creating new enemies every single day.
LOL They’ve done nothing wrong. These mutilations are tame compared to the scalping of Native savages, the gang rapes of African savages, the litany of atrocities carried out by Muslim savages as well the Latino insurgent savages (hacking, burning alive), not the to mention the full sanctioned war crimes of Russians, Cambodians, Vietcong, North Korean and Chinese soldiers. Even after taking into account everything written here, the US soldiers still hold the moral high ground by a long way. None of it makes US ,NATO or ANZUS civilians a legitimate target. Many muslim civilians however actively create and support the terrorist culture and should not be surprised when they are targeted. You are a traitor and belong in Gitmo along with all the others who dare to threaten The Greatest Civilization Ever Built On Earth (that’s just a fact).
Is this satire?
This article is most certainly satirical.
Tell us, “Canoe,” are you a war criminal yourself or just a member of the cheerleading squad?
Damn, I would hope so…
Your rationalizing evil sickens me. Because others are so much worse you assert, our US soldiers hold the moral high ground. Judging one self in terms of others’ conduct is a pitiful rationale for integrity, “right action”, decency and responsibility. Indeed, such rationalization seems endemic to American culture – witness the Wall Street buzzards never ending up in jail for their large scale thievery and deception. However, as you see it – lying to your boss, lying to your colleagues, cover-ups, not holding people accountable for despicable actions – repeated despicable actions- war crimes, desecrating human bodies – all this is insignificant because, after all, other cultures are so much more dastardly.
If that is true, than I can conclude that “ethics” “morals” “law” and codes of military conduct are unimportant and irrelevant to you in the conduct of your own life and contribute nothing to the quality of life, your own or others. If that is so, I am sorry for you. Having a moral compass is essential to soul.
Yup. Its sad, but it seems to me that more Americans are ” waking up” to the reality of their governments lies and bs .
Some of us outside the US believe that the vote for Mr. Orange Hair could be a perversion of that very fact. As a result, some of us are now vaguely optimistic for your future (not immediate) i.e. when there is a positive expression of that awakening.
As the US becomes solely dependent on the making and exportation of weapons, when the time comes that the nations who buy weapons from US in exchange for food and supplies stop buying weapons, they become the enemy?
somebody with a suitable account on wikipedia should edit the seal team six page to reflect this.
Death Squads is nothing new. Conclusion I can draw from this piece is that these guys’ job is now finished.
Was it a success or not is unclear, as it seems the only step that can be taken to end this conflict in current paradigm would be lobbing tactical nukes all over the place. Sad times.
Somebody better suited than me should update the seal team six wikipedia page to reflect this.
Matty, you don’t understand international law. Operations and policies of Seal Team Six are ultimately the responsibility of the President. It is Obama and Bush that are the real war criminals. It is a war-crime to attack sovereign nations, bomb them, and attempt to install leaders you like.
Obama arms Jihadists in Syria who are far more brutal, misogynist, anti-gay, and racist than Seal Team Six. They actively engage in ethnic cleansing. Why does Obama get a pass? Why not document the atrocities of these groups that Obama supported to overthrow Assad. All the Intercept has done is glorify the fake White Helmets.
The contortions the Intercept goes through to shield Obama from the deserved mantel of ‘war criminal’ is astounding.
Most presidents since the inauguration of NSD68 during Truman Admin are guilty of war crimes; or hide behind, “plausible deniability”.
Our national elected officials are also deeply complicit for relinquishing their war declaring responsibilities…..The Cold War, Anti Insurgency, Vietnam, Grenada, all the murderous wars in Central and South America….my God!
Our Republic is now falling apart…..only time will tell if any sanity will come to this nation.
Thank-you for saying that. Some of us outside the U.S. have been saying that for a long time. It is so refreshing to hear more and more Americans say it too.
I have told friends that I thought I would never see this increasing realization happen in my life time. Its a sad thing this realization but you have to admit it before you can change it because denial a bitch– and some would say MIGHT have contributed to the event of 9/11
I love how you’re trying to tell someone who’s spent probably months writing the most controversial article in years that they “don’t understand the law”, whilst the laws & practices are clearly outlined in this article.
If anything, you should be firing shots at Colin Powell as he is the one who’s truly “ultimately responsible”. But I find it’s quite typical that when people throw completely baseless accusations at Obama, they have little understanding of how our government works and who should be held accountable for what. Please educate yourself.
Both Powell and Obama are assholes and war criminals, and both (and most other Presidents/generals/cabinet members/etc.) should be in prison via, at least, the Supremacy Clause.
“and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land”
Both should be tried in military tribunals for violation of their obligation to abide by the Geneva Conventions entered Treaties, and/or via violation of the UCMJ.
Baseless accusations? It is a fact that Obama armed radical Jihadists in Syria. It is a fact he armed Nazi groups in the Ukraine. It is a fact he bombed Libya and Syria, for the purpose of regime change.
It is amazing how vapid liberals like you give presidents a pass for arming the worst groups on earth … as long as they have a ‘D’ by their name.
LOL Somehow blame Obama. Seals always fight over taking credit, but always run from taking responsibility #NoisyAmateursLOL #ThanksObamaLOL
who’s the commander in chief again? who gave the order to kill, not capture, bin ladin? kill, not interrogate, bin ladin? i think that one came from the top.
Obama was the commander in chief who bombed Libya, Syria and who armed Nazi groups in the Ukraine and Jihadists in Syria. Obama also assisted and armed Saudi Arabia in their invasion of Yemen. You need a therapy dog.
“Our sense of what’s right and what’s wrong is warped.”
Endless war many places, multiple deployments, special operations become general operations and congress takes no responsibility to vote to declare war.
“Although this former SEAL acknowledged that war crimes are wrong, he understood how they happen”
The same kind of thing went on in Vietnam and you lost; used to strafe refugee columns in Korea and you lost; murdered millions in WWII and those you murdered are doing better than you. At least Hitler had Zyklon B gas developed for humane executions. Personally, I have infinitely more respect for the Mafia soldiers than those who commit atrocities in foreign lands for bullshit reasons. Worse than the worst gangbangers who have few opportunities. Yankee, go home, go now before you corrupt any more dictators/warlords and kill any more innocents. My sincere hope is that one of these amerikan monsters takes out some amerikan leaders but more likely they will kill their own spouses and children and hopefully themselves.
leave it to the internet to bring everything back to history’s favorite evil man Hitler. One atrocity does not cancel another one out so way to defend Hitler and then hope for someone to kill themselves. Way to be a real piece of shit
Here are some interesting links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzrYMEvAEyw
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/6hvynpc1hm1z8n4/Room_40_British_Naval_Intelligence_1914_18.pdf
https://archive.org/details/LiesOfOurTimesCollection
Paul Chappell, a West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran’s talk on waging peace is most striking to me for his meticulous description of the lengths to which the military must go in order to turn people into unquestioning killing machines. It is no surprise that we don’t handle war well. The military knows this, yet still it does whatever it takes to do so, then abandons these soldiers once they are, in fact, ruined. The waste, both monetary and, more importantly, human resources is unbearable and unconscionable. Yet the psychopaths who rule us will still train and send these young people out for reasons that never bear the sort of scrutiny they should, scrutiny that would almost certainly curtail such actions if the public were to know the real objectives instead of all the lies we are told and so readily accept.
Chappell’s talk can be seen here. I recommend it to everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRAOANK__r4
I wonder if it can be comprehended that maybe it actually “un-ruined” them – as humans.
I suppose it depends on what one means by “ruined” and the perspective of the person using the term. I would venture to observe, though, that being rendered “ruined” in terms of military usefulness would also be accompanied by other things that would likely render them “ruined” for civilian life as well. Not like we haven’t seen it in other soldiers who come home from such horrific experiences. All the more reason to make war as rare as possible.
“All the more reason to make war as rare as possible.”
Not perfect but the but best obtainable policy, in our present World.
Wonderful article – it’s good to see somebody stepping up to the plate with honest, in-depth reporting, classic journalism.
I would suggest that this sort of behavior is unavoidable, and we should be happy it isn’t worse. That’s what fifteen years of permanent, endless war footing will do.
…and then it comes home. There’s no way to brutalize men directed to brutalize others and then expect they will lead normal lives after. Only psychopaths will be unaffected — and they are another story altogether.
“The unit’s elite stature has insulated its members from the scrutiny and military justice that lesser units would have faced for the same actions.”
This is, in part, because they are set on missions lesser units would never attempt or survive.
I’ve never personally met a WW2 or Korea combat vet who bragged about what happened. Those with parents who served in combat in either of those wars may have noticed when they were asked about what happened, many simply changed the subject.
I couldn’t help but recall Ms. Clinton’s crowing remark about killing bin Laden: “we came, we saw, he died.” More cold than clever, IMO.
An excellent article, Mr. Cole. More, please.
Actually, Clinton’s psychopathic response was to the rape and murder of Kaddafi.
Bravo and well done Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Thomason, Ms. Williams and Ms. McNeill!
This is the sort of in-depth reporting of controversial and important events that are The Intercept’s raison d’etre .
Substantively, this is very disturbing. The article speaks to a fundamental lack of command oversight of certain military units, and an unwillingness of both command and serving personnel to conduct themselves consistent with their sworn oaths to the Constitution and International Law.
While I have some sympathy, if not empathy, for those who choose to nominally “serve” this nation in a military capacity, this sort of legally unaccountable conduct by a small segment of America’s military personnel is totally unacceptable.
I hope this reporting leads to further scrutiny, and verification of the necessary alleged facts (much of them anonymously sourced) and a re-opening of criminal investigations if warranted into those who participated in any illegal conduct.
Again, to the writers and contributors to this story–well done.
Very good comment. I felt sick reading this report: but it is essential journalism to make it available to anyone with the stomach to complete reading it. “Cry the beloved Country”; what an execrable leadership and political system that could allowed these event reported to have happened.
Disgusting, I could not finish reading this filth; not the writing, but the actions of these murderous psychopaths who our cowardly government hold up as heroes.
I see a person wearing a military uniform in the US and I see a suspected terrorist. Seal Team 6 are full-fledged terrorists.
What a bad joke this site is.
Empty comments are just that.
“What a bad joke this site is.”
Can you elaborate more about your empty comment? If you think this site is a joke why do you read it? You don’t make any sense.
I don’t blame the Navy Seal 6 totally. These people were created, trained and ordered to do a job and they did it. Do I support their behavior? Certainly not, however, that is war. It is horrible. If we think that these Navy 6 guys are going to live a normal life later on, we are wrong. If these people can have a normal sleep after they committed these actions it means they are mentally sick. I read long time ago that Pinochet’s Secret Police, DINA in Chile they have to take drugs to torture, killed and make people disappear for good. And it worked, the problem was that many of them became addicted to drugs and they could never functioned again in a normal society. Some of them committed suicide, friends disappear from their lives and they became very lonely people. When democracy defeated Pinochet in a referendum they were detained and sent them to jail. I don’t think the Navy Seal 6 guys are living a normal life, maybe some of them and if they do, I don’t want them in my neighborhood. The Bush, Clinton, Obama, etc…are more guilty than these people. They are hypocrites, liars, demagogues etc…The Navy Seal guys are more genuine people. I trust them more that these presidents.
Great article, the truth sometime makes people sick and this one made me sick, same as the terrorists. I suppose that is what war is all about. I am so glad that the warmonger sick woman, Hillary Clinton was defeated and Trump is an incognito.
Exactly!
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Very good insight.
Well said Frank. I always thought it was: he who turns himself into a monster, removes the responsibility of being a man. I stand corrected, thank you.
Aren’t theses guys doing exactly what we trained them to do. I’m always confused when the people who we train to be professional murderers are accused of war crimes. You can’t really be suprised that the people we train to kill become killers and have trouble adjusting when they are no longer allowed to kill when they come back home. The press are the ones who romanticize killing in war and then turn around and criticize war fighters for not killing people fairly. As if there is such a thing. This is another nonsense piece from a group of reporters that want us to play by rules that our enemies refuse to play by. Where was the “call out” from the terorists during any terrorist attack in the last 15 years?
“Bin Laden…Bin Laden…Bin Laden…”
Yet another article contributing to the myth that “Bin Laden was killed at Abbottabad”.
Where is the evidence? Where?
Any of it.
It exists in the same fluffy cloud where the 911 attack ‘facts’ float around.
Reminding people that:
a) the body was thrown immediately overboard, mafia-style, to the unreachable bottom of the ocean
b) the pictures of the body were ordered destroyed or locked away in CIA vaults outside the reach of FOI
c) the helmet cameras, at first heralded, we were later told, “never existed”
d) the witnesses, the navy seals, were ordered to be silent forever
e) the DNA was handled by the CIA itself
f) the CIA agent that was head of the operation was none other than the same agent that sat personally with Colin Powell going over the “evidence” in preparation for Powell’s Feb 2003 speech before the UN and the world, the “Saddam Has WMD” speech. Same guy ! (Michael Morell)
g) Matthew Bissonnette in his book “No Easy Day” said that he spent more time at Abbottabad with the body than any Seal – taking photos, blood samples and comparing the body to photos he had brought with him on the raid. Bissonnette said he refused to id the body as Bin Laden. Refused. But was later told by the CIA, back at base, that it was Bin Laden – the CIA.
h) By Robert O’Neill’s account he had less than a second to id Bin Laden. And in that “less than a second”, while observing through the four tubes of night vision goggles, he did six things – raised his weapon because the target was taller than he had anticipated; made sure he wasn’t going to hit any women or children; observe that there was a weapon nearby and that the target appeared to be motioning to retrieve the weapon; made an id that it was Bin Laden; discharged his weapon into the target. Five things AND make an id in under one second.
Well based on the article, you can essentially diregard any truth in O’Neill & Bissonnette’s accounts; And they should be treated as self-serving glory hunters who instantly attempted to cash in on the raid with highly fictional accounts.
Regardless of whether it was or wasn’t him who was killed, if he was alive even one day after the raid it seems pretty impossible that a video showing him alive wasn’t released by AQ. Would’ve been an enormous propaganda coup and snubbing of the US.
So…is it both your contention that bin Laden wasn’t killed in that raid, AND that he was alive elsewhere at the time? If so, why no such video?
And if it wasn’t him but he was already dead at the time of the raid, somehow the US knew AQ hadn’t produced a video of his body/funeral which they could also then produce to refute the raid’s claim? Almost seems as if it would need conspiring between AQ and the US for anyone other than bin Laden to have actually been killed in this raid.
Please explain why the US, knowing they hadn’t killed bin Laden, felt confident enough to expect no refutation after announcing they had.
Fuck the US, but fuck conspiracy theorists lacking logic too.
Come on HippoDave,
Try harder.
You proposed a big fat strawman. Do I even need to point out the hippo in the room? (where oh where did I say Bin Laden was alive and living elsewhere? In fact, in my post of 10:44 pm 1/10/17 I suggested just the opposite)
HippoDave,
You had a second question (is it technically also a strawman?):
“why the US … felt confident enough to expect no refutation?”
They could anticipate a refutation and even welcome it.
The story of Bin Laden in the eyes al Qaeda was a major recruiting tool: “the defiant Arab standing up in Jihad to the ‘great satan’ ”
Both the US and al Qaeda had something to gain by keeping alive the myth that Bin Laden was out there being the defiant Arab fighting the ‘good jihad’.
The US had their boogeyman, used to terrorize the West and justify outrageous military budgets and invasions. And Al Qaeda had their recruiting tool.
Al Qaeda would have to demonstrate that all along they knew the ‘glorious defiant Arab fighting Jihad’ was a big fat lie. Al Qaeda knew he was dead but had lied and lied to their recruits all this time.
The US could either dismiss the video as a fake or say that the real purpose of the mission into Abbottabad *all along* had been an attempt to draw out Bin Laden into the open (if alive) or more importantly *verify* that Bin Laden was dead.
Bin Laden had not been seen for years. Now the US would either know he was in fact still out there or much more advantageous: show that al Qaeda lied to their recruits and “case closed”: Bin Laden was dead.
“Mission Accomplished”, the US/CIA could do the touch down posture, “we got al Qaeda to verify that Bin Laden was dead”
What a well-written article! Thank you.
Your article alleges that Linda Norgrove worked for MI6 but the heading midway through the article states this as fact. You should change the heading to reflect that this is only an allegation – and an unbelievable one for anyone who knew her.
Great reporting.
Things that stuck out as I read:
“You ask me to go living with the pigs, but I can’t go live with pigs and then not get dirty.”
-exactly, this is a take on fight fire w/ fire or ie you become your enemy; if you fight a terrorist you become a terrorist. Whatever you fight you likely become; perhaps this is the idea or superiority in philosphy of non0-violence. You’re able to maintain better control of who you are as a person.
“My word is my bond.”
-but that’s not really true either. The art of war is, in part, deception. At what point does any idividual turn that off?
“We talked about it … and 35 guys nodded their heads saying this is not who we are. We shoot ’em. No issues with that. And then we move on,”
-great, really. But then you have folks “back home” like Dana Loesch defending descration of dead combatants. BTW, recall that marine involved in that died from overdose
“The SEALs believe that they can handle the discipline themselves, that’s equal to or greater than what the criminal justice system would give to the person,”
-that’s very Lord of the Flies.
What Glenn Greenwald is hammering about w/ the fake Russia news is and the lesson learned from Bush/Iraq, that the US only goes to war when it is absolutely certain and necessary.
Keeping in mind it was all unnecessary, look how distorted these people have become, it bends them into monsters even if they’re only imagining the brutality/war crimes, it bends them or their minds into the terrorists their supposed to be fighting. Or causes a very very difficult internal struggle for some: having to be strong in the face of such horror (ptsd). According to Tony Vaccaro’s account it happened in WWII as well, the struggle and brutality: a bayonet in the vagina of a german.
We should not be doing this.
fucking god help us if we get involved in a real deal conventional war with Russia, China, or Iran or whoever. We accidentally won the other wars, doubt the US will be so lucky in the next. If we lose, the enemy will likely have no mercy on those captured.
I now pronounce the laws of war are dead.
PS this apache business reminds of Tarantino’s film Inglorious Bastards
PSS it’s apparent from this story that Seals are the personal military of the CIA; is that Constitutional?
How jealous us the author of SEAL team members? Just thank them and move on you idiot.
Aahhh…an eager consumer of kneepads and Lypsyl gives a petulant opinion.
Sad news foryah…SEALS wouldn’t give your snivelling ass the time of day.
You don’t thank people for murder, you execute them.
So how exactly do you thanks someone for murdering innocent people and then covering it up?
What’s the wording you would use?
Semper Fi, eejut
How many versions of the Seal Team Six Islamabad raid have we heard to date? Each version seeks to fill the gaps that the previous failed to address; Lie after lie after lie, yet a few very significant gaps remain.
1. How did the Seal team know that the man they targeted for execution was Osama bin Laden? For years, US intelligence sources claimed that bin Laden used body doubles for security purposes.
2. Within 24 hours of Osama bin Laden’s purported death, various “official sources” began to claim that DNA and Photo analysis confirmed that the man killed was Osama bin Laden; the very need for employing such analysis suggests that there was doubt concerning the dead man’ true identity. How then could Seal Team Six claim that the man that they allegedly shot and defaced – contrary to orders – was Osama bin Laden? The act of defacing the corpse could have been set into play for the purpose of hiding the fact that Osama was not killed in the raid. The fact that two seal team members beached team protocol and affected the purported death and defacing of Osama bin Laden on their own might even suggest that there was no true expectation of finding Osama bin Laden in the compound.
3. In order for DNA analysis to be conducted on a male subject, a sample of that DNA would have already had to have been available for comparison. Yet it was widely reported that the DNA which was was used to positively identify bin Laden came from the maternal line; thus it would have been impossible to definitively identify the body as that of Osama bin Laden. More curious still is the claim that photo analysis was used to identify the body in the wake of the DNA claim. Now that we know the body was defaced, that story proves to be equal specious. Why were there reports in Kenyan newspapers that DNA analysis was being conducted on the recovered remains of Osama’s purported corpse by Kenyen based laboratory a full week after the raid?
4. There were reports that a second raid took place at the compound whereby sensitive equipment on the “crashed” helicopter could be properly secured. However Pakistani press gave eyewitness accounts from neighbors to the compound that reported seeing the second helicopter explode and then clash after attempting to leave the compound, not upon arriving. The same eyewitnesses claim that burned bodies could be plainly seen on the ground in proxity to the crashed helicopter. Furthermore, it is routine operating procedure to not leave sensitive equipment behind that can be captured and possibly back engineered by ones enemies. If the Seal Team was actually carrying explosives with them that were capable of blowing holes in stone walls as reported, then why weren’t they used to destroy the “crashed” helicopter during the initial raid. After all, we have just found out how “easy” the raid was… (Wikipedia now give a modified version of this story wherein it has the seals destroying the helicopter prior to leaving the compound with Osama’s purported remains – why then return to the scene at all?).
5. All of the reports that came from the White house claimed that Osama’s body was moved directly from the compound to an Air Craft Carrier for analysis. In fact, some report how it was necessary for a member of the Seal team to sit directly upon Osama’s corpse for the entire trip to the carrier due to the number of passengers and their equipment. Now we are being told that Osama’s corpse was removed directly to Bagram Air force base.
6. We were also told that, upon completion of the DNA and photo analysis, Osam bin Laden’s body was buried at sea out of respect for Islamic burial tradition. Now there is significant reason to believe that the corpse never left the compound. Or, if it did, its intended destination was Bagram. Thus the initial fiction of removing Osama’s body directly to an Air Craft carrier was constructed as a mean by which Osama’s purported remains could disappear for ever in a watery grave.
All of your questions are important but this snippet is incorrect:
Yet it was widely reported that the DNA which was was used to positively identify bin Laden came from the maternal line; thus it would have been impossible to definitively identify the body as that of Osama bin Laden.
Mitochondrial DNA, sometimes called maternal DNA because it is inherited solely from the mother, is a much better tool for the purposes of identification than nuclear DNA which is inherited from both parents and therefore has changes associated with recombination.
https://nij.gov/topics/forensics/evidence/dna/research/pages/mitochondrial.aspx
So, IF they had samples of mtDNA from someone in bin Laden’s maternal line (e.g. a sister who shared the same biological mother with him), and IF those samples were tested in a lab experienced in using sequencing technology with a strong quality assurance program and good laboratory standards, and IF they matched the DNA from the maternal relative to that taken from the body presumed to be bin Laden, then the male killed was either bin Laden or a brother who shared the same mother. And, all of the above still begs the question of where the genetic material used in the comparisons came from since it does need to be compared to DNA extracted from known, maternally linked, relatives.
They also could have been lying about doing the tests for all we know….or for all we’re ever likely to know, at minimum, for a very, very long time.
Bin Laden has 50 half-brothers and half-sisters but no full siblings, whose genetic package would be most similar. Yes, the closest that DNA tests could come to definitively identifying Osama was to statistically conclude that either he or a half brother was killed in the raid. In 2001, USA today ran a story that claimed the government had no DNA by which Osama bin Laden could be identified at that tie. In July of 2011 it was revealed that, in a run-up to the raid on the Islamabad compound, US intelligence ran a phony inoculation program with the hope that they could collect the necessary DNA for comparison; it was said that this effort failed to get the DNA it desired. There is no argument that the compound was being used by the bin Laden family at the time of the raid. However, there is substantial reason to believe that Osama bin Laden was not among them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna
Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik has long claimed that Osama bin Laden suffered and died from Marfan syndrome in 2001. Two months before the attacks of 911, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported that French intelligence had become aware of Osama meeting with the CIA in a Dubai hospital where he was being treated for an undisclosed illness. Both the guardian and Salon picked up on that story at the same time. An Oct 31, 2001 article by the guardian also claimed that, “Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden.”
Bin Laden has 50 half-brothers and half-sisters but no full siblings, whose genetic package would be most similar.
No full siblings, but his mother remarried and had four other children, including another son, all of whom would carry the same maternal DNA as Osama.
Still, your other point(s) remain. And to date no actual physical evidence has been presented that could be taken as proof of his death in that attack.
Before you drag out conspiracy theories, it might help if you knew the name of town where it took place.
Yes, of course you are right to point out that I meant “Abbottabad” rather than Islamabad. However your sniping condescension is ill received and eerily reminiscent of that employed by Mona and her sock puppets (as is the curious use of the avatars Hector and Hypatia which both draw on Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia). Everyone makes mental errors when composing comments on the fly. In fact, I have long since stopped reviewing my own posts for errors prior to posting them as the effort that goes into researching and constructing them is already exceptional to most others. However, If the forum software allowed for preview and editing then I would probably be more inclined to self-edit. Thus, I only resort to a bit of editing in circumstances where clarity has been overwhelmingly compromised.
Had your correction(s) been offered with even a modicum of goodwill, I would have offered up an expression of appreciation. But seeing how your apparent intent was to dishonestly marginalize an accurate assessment of the glaring inconsistencies and evolving distortions surrounding the Seal Team Six narrative by faulting a simple mental error, I will leave you with this final thought as it best suits a person of your narcissistic nature… [ Fill in the Blank ]
I appreciated your very valid questions. As I.F. Stone said ” All Governments Lie” (great documentary out about him right now– Glenn Greenwald and others in it). Ignore Hector
Thanks for the feedback Torontonian. The White House attempted to use the Seal Team Six Raid of the Abbottabad compound as a photo-op in the run-up to the 2016 election cycle. Numerous newspapers published a picture of key democrats crowded into the White House Situation room “watching the raid in real-time” via helm cameras that were attached to the team members helmets. Yet, a day later, it was reported that every helm cam failed to capture the events that unfolded in the compound (WTF!!!). Here is a short list of other lies that were told in the days that followed the raid:
1. One of the two helicopters crashed upon approach to the Abbottabad compound – this was debunked by eyewitness accounts. The Helicopter exploded while attempting to exit the scene. Subsequent news stories reported a second raid wherein the sensitive equipment aboard the helicopter was destroyed to avoid having it fall into the enemy’s (Pakistan?) hands. The latest version of that story has the seals destroying that equipment prior to departure from the first raid. If the helicopter blew-up upon departure as witnesses claimed, then a number of Navy Seals would have been killed; yet no seal fatalities were listed. However, just a few months later, a helicopter crash in a remote area of Afghanistan purportedly claimed the lives of many Seal Team Six members who participated in the Abbottabad raid.
2. Armed resistance necessitated the use of deadly force by the Navy Seals. This claim turned out to be utter bullshit. By their own admission, the Navy seals entered the compound with the specific intention of staging the assassination of someone that they could subsequently claim matched the description of Osama bin Laden – such first person claims were made necessary by the intentional defacement of the corpse. Virtually everyone who was shot and killed posed no immediate physical danger to the the seal team.
3. Osama used his wife a s a human shield – False
4. Osama offered armed resistance – False; an unarmed, berobed man was fatally shot in the chest by Navy Seals while standing in a hallway. He was then repeatedly shot and defaced after dying for the purpose of concealing his identity. This in spite of the fact that the team purportedly had specific orders not to apply dead force to the face or head.
5. Photo analysis provided incontrovertible proof that the the corpse was that of Osama bin Laden – False; canoeing the corpse predictably made visual identification impossible.
6. DNA analysis provided incontrovertible proof that the the corpse was that of Osam bin Laden – False; no samples were preserved for independent testing. No alleged body of Osama bin Laden was disposed of in a way that rendered subsequent investigation impossible. No DNA sample was available for comparison in the months leading up to the raidwhich necessitated a failed attempt to collect DNA from an immediate family member via a bogus inoculation program.
7. The Navy Seal team retreated directly to an Air Craft Carrier from the Abbottabad compound – False; why lie about this fact unless the groundwork is being laid wherein the method used in the disposal of Osama’s body could be even remotely justified?
The death of Osama bin Laden provided Obama with bragging rights which were liberally used through the 2012 campaign season. In turn, Hillary Clinton used the alleged White House directed death of Osama bin Laden in the attempt to bolster her own anti-terror persona during her own 2016 presedential campaign.
Nailed it.
Isn’t it odd SEAL Team 6 member were taking ears, fingers, large portions of skin and other personal trophies…. but didn’t take anything from the man EVERY SEAL wanted to be the one to bag?
They were cutting off whole fingers for “DNA purposes” for low ranking members of Al Qaeda, yet nothing was taken from Osama?
Took the time to “canoe” him, but not the time to take a finger?
Red shoots him in the chest and after Osama had been put down, O’Neill STANDS over his lifeless body and puts 2 “security rounds” in his face and THEN “canoes” him? It’s almost like that was O’Neill’s true purpose, to destroy his face. The fact they didn’t want to take Osama alive in the fist place is telling. They had all that time to prepare for the raid, and it was a “cakewalk” with “Osama” in his pajamas and unarmed.
I’m calling bullshit. I called bullshit the moment we dumped the body in the ocean. He probably died YEARS earlier, either from complications with his kidney dialysis or in the mountains of Tora Bora when we let the illusion of him get away in a convoy using the only escape route we left unprotected.
They left the myth of him alive. We never got any real video after 9/11, just that BS video we found like a needle in a haystack during a raid. The only thing we got was audio, which an easily be manipulated and couldn’t be 100% confirmed by the FBI, who only stated it was “maybe/likely” his voice. We probably killed a look alike, and they went against orders and destroyed his face to prevent a positive identification from photographs.
Reminds me of when Boston Corbett went against direct orders from his superiors and killed John Wilkes Booth when they had him cornered in a barn and wanted to take him alive.
I have no doubt at all that certain members of the team were specially tasked with breaking rank and securing a defaced body that could be passed of as Osama’s. I also believe that the helm cams successfully recorded the wanton violence inflicted upon the defenseless occupants of the compound. Remember, absent the claim of Osama’s presence, every death amounts to a war crime. If the team left the compound without a body, then any subsequent claim of his death would have been received with great skepticism.
Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, one is still labeled a conspiracy theorist for pointing out glaring inconsistencies in the ever-evolving narrative that are never addressed – even by the alt-media. Questions that a first year intern would have enough sense to ask. Yet seasoned veteran reporters look genuinely mystified when confronted with such inconvenient irregularities.
I’m a little confused … The caption for the final image in the article mentions a 30-foot trident sculpture. But where is it in that picture?
Is it the large object on the far right of the image, a little more than halfway down?
that’s what i concluded, sort of near the entrance. looks about 30 feet tall very rougly, apparently a large piece of metal. i didn’t see anything else that would fit.
Pheeew! This whole narrative, every step of the way, is so quintessentially American — indeed, just about as American as apple pie — in its encapsulation and evincement of the truly sordid depths of depravity to which that US has sunk. Thanks, Matthew Cole, who I hope will decline all Hollywood offers to acquire rights to do a remake of that infamous movie — you surely know the one I mean, the name of which escapes me just now. Btw, I’d love to learn Jesse Ventura’s opinion on all this — he’s a real Mensch with, at least by now, notwithstanding his early career, his heart and his mind in just the right place: #JesseForPresident
Not much of any other response can be made when propaganda has failed.
Thanks for the effort in keeping us informed. Each one of these people sent out to these futile and barbaric wars must live with conscience and consequence for their own actions. The bent politicians who sent them are even more reprehensible, regardless of carefully manicured hands that give the illusion they remain antiseptic. It’s clear these foreign wars in others’ lands can never be won, except in the sense of profits won by the corporations that feed off faraway death and destruction. But what goes around over there, comes around here. Veterans go crazy and kill unaware innocents at home; too often also become the trigger happy police who think they are occupying our cities as war zones. Even our civilians become ever more amoral as they pretend they have no connection to what their leaders do and willingly believe the lies. It’s clear we never cannot easily end these wars that have become so embedded in our off shored economy, our financial security now dependent upon the profits and jobs they provide.
That could be said about any and all atrocities.
Investigate journalism is rare in this world. I am grateful some people are still doing it. As William C Banks said, “If you’re not acknowledged on the battlefield, you’re not accountable.” Only a free and determined press can provide a measure of accountability on behalf of we the people. Kudos to the whole team involved in this story.
The author claims that the bin Laden compound raid has been “told and retold”. But why wasn’t Seymour Hersh’s piece wasn’t mentioned once? Elements of this article confirm his account, and it was the first to dispute the government’s narrative in a huge way.
Funny how SEAL Team 6 were heroes during the Obama administration, but monsters before hand. I guess this is why Valerie Jarrett sold them out by giving their movements to her jihadi friends in Afghanistan so they could be shot down while in a Chinook on August 6, 2011. By the way, Fuck You.
Oh! They were criticized by the Bush admin, Right Wing “Christians” and Israel. Please tell me when.
You mean they got what they, and any other murderers, deserved?
So let me get this straight…….
The biggest baddest hombres in Universe, along with their counterparts in all the military services who are unable to protect the civilian population on 9/11 are similarly unable to bring and un-armed man in front of a civilian court.
I get it now……………Government Theatre for the Masses
” In the early 1980s, a group of seasoned enlisted SEAL Team 6 operators kicked McRaven off a training exercise, relieving him of his already tenuous command for being too rule-bound. ”
So the rot had started over 30 years ago? “Mommy! He wants to FOLLOW RULES! It’s TOO HARD!”
President Obama also failed when he was too determined to “…kill Osama Bin Laden.” Istead of bringing a miscreant to justice. It’s a cancer that has been metatasticizing in the USA, and spreading to NATO for decades, reinforced by Hollywood movies. Yeah…”liberal” Hollywood.
Hollywood has been pathetic in this area.
Yeah, sure. Shame on America for killing Osama. We should have brought him to “justice,” put him on trial…and THEN killed him. >_>
Let’s be real. Even if that capture or kill order had been real, there was no way Bin Laden was leaving that compound alive.
I 2nd barabbas.
Haven’t read all the way through yet; but this story ties with Mattathias Schwartz’ article on James Mattis a bit and gives an answer to why the founders believed a standing army was the greatest of all evils.
Agreed. Also reminds me of the idea maintaining a CIA that engages in covert operations at all.
In the end of one book about William Stephenson, known as Intrepid, he expressed the idea that a CIA would be a good thing, and I disagree. The longer an organization exists, the more chances are that it will be compromised, and a rot will set in. The ladt US election makes that point perfectly clear.
Thank you for understanding and appreciating my point.
very much appreciated.
A problem i most want to solve is, since everyone needs to have and earn life support and comfort, and “presumably” everyone would have to have a job to do so, meaning there must be a job for everyone, what would everyone be doing? i keep seeing lots of vacation time and i keep thinking kibbutz, indian riverside settlements.
I believe I understand; it was Butler’s take on waging war, that it should only be done in defense of your home and/or defense of the US itself. Butler dismissed the idea that any army could invade and keep at it to succeed.
So the problem: are you sayin what do you do with all the active members of the military, what do they do for jobs when relieved? Well it’s possible we’d still need some active military. I believe Paine mentioned this in Common Sense pointing to Captain Death the privateer as an example and his successful use of previously non-military assets.
It’s possible that folks can be gardeners full-time, say, and then also be warriors. I believe this was the original intent. Well and like you mention, look at israel now; folks there casually walk around w/ military gear.
Reminds me of reading about Einsatzgruppen SS operations in Eastern Europe during WW2. Paramilitary death squads.
the whole 9 yards, excellent!
longworthy & and thanks.
There is one thing nice about only-at-home self defence, you dont have to want to kill anyone.