Im not going to tell you this didnt happen. He wasnt surprised. Its a question, why was he a threat? A fierce firefight erupted between the four SEALs and a much larger enemy force of more than 50 anti-coalition insurgents. You dont whistleblow on the teams and when you win on the battlefield, you dont lose investigations.. Id almost wish theyd beaten him to death. Vasely told Moore he wanted an investigation into the incident. After the raid, the White House struggled to describe the exact circumstances of bin Ladens death. By all accounts, Slabinski, a second-generation SEAL who joined Team 6 in 1993, was an excellent sniper and reconnaissance operator. One source said his superiors repeatedly refused to address the issue. Shortly after that operation, Slabinski returned to the SEAL Team 6 base at Dam Neck. Theres no military purpose for it, a former Red Squadron operator told me. 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. The truth about what happened in bin Ladens bedroom may never be fully known. 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. Why would I do that? he asked. O'Neill has gone. 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. 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. If a guy cuts off another guys head and nothing happens, that becomes the standard, said oneof the former SEAL Team 6 leaders. Iraq was a different kind of war nothing wed ever seen, said the now-retired Team 6 leader. SEAL Team 6 patches. We killed bad guys. Red came to a stop and fired two shots with his suppressed rifle. Toni Trucks as Lieutenant (junior grade) Lisa Davis. According to Hyder, the encounter ended there. Conflicting accounts have emerged about how many other SEALs fired rounds into bin Ladens 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. Richard Marcinko hoped that the number six would lead the Soviet military to inflate its assessment of the Navys SEALs. Former Seal Upvoted by Edward Tomlinson , former Damage Controlman at United States Navy (1988-1992) and Pavanne Halpin , former Manager of Pacemaker/Holter Clinic at United States Navy (2001-2005) Updated 7 mo Bad news. They realized the man had been trying to protect the women and children. The enemy had the SEALs outnumbered. Should they seek revenge for Roberts? Both should have remained on the second floor. 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 targethad displayed hostile intent. In exchange, Smethers, who never filed an official allegation or complaint, was sent back to the U.S. Smethers did not respond to requestsfor comment. The operators were unhappy about the new restriction, arguing that call outs gave up the tactical advantage of surprise. Top: Capt. A third of the guys literally think theyre Apache warriors, then you had the Muslim way of removing a head. 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. The defense contractor, Atlantic Diving Supply, or ADS, has military supply and equipment contracts with SEAL Team 6, according to several former SEAL Team 6 operators, as well as other. Evidence was presented that Slabinski gave an order to shoot all the men they encountered during another raid, whether or not they were armed. Both declined to comment. 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. 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. A drone flying above the convoy showed the occupants of three vehicles were heavily armed. He also claimed that bin Laden had been standing when he fired and that a weapon was visible nearby. 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. According to two senior SEAL Team 6 sources, however, the leadership dynamic in Blue Squadron was a failure. This meant there was less oversight over their missions and less accountability if things went wrong. Hed 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. 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. Others used them to break doorknobs on raids or kill militants in hand-to-hand combat. His superiors believed he had become unglued over the 2007 deployment. The request was approved and Slabinski was promoted. Killing unarmed civilians whether on purpose or by accident has a profoundly harmful effect on the human soul. Neither wasloaded. Late that year, the CIA joined operators from Gold Squadron for an operation near Jalalabad. The unit conducted a captains 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. ONeill 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. 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. Allowing a lack of integrity to grow and develop within any organization will lead to abuses like it or not. Answer (1 of 5): The Stolen Valor Act of 2013 (which replaced the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 because it was ruled unconstitutional) makes it illegal to claim military honors FOR TANGIBLE BENEFIT (e.g. 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. Top left: Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette in2001. Red encountered and shot bin Ladens 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. 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. 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. Several of us confronted the officers, said one former noncommissioned officer who tried to stop the criminal behavior. SEALs were given wide berth as long as they could explain why they made the decision to shoot an unarmed person. One of their teammates killed the other two targets in another room. He was quietly removed from Team 6 and returned to a regular SEAL unit. ONeill has not been shy about the fact that he canoed bin Laden. 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. A few days after the attempted interview, investigators obtained photos purporting to be of the dead fighter. The raid, several of the SEALs said afterward, was one of the easiest missions theyd ever conducted. His account credits Red with the shot that felled bin Laden and holds that he and a third SEAL presumably ONeill fired several rounds into bin Laden as he was lying on the floor. In the room with four of the suspected insurgents, four SEALs counted down and canoed each sleeping man with a shot to the forehead. He was told that the photographs were part of SEAL Team 6s greatest hits of terrorists killed since 9/11. ONeill, 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. Ten days later, the internal JSOC investigation was closed. It wasnt complex, and had it been several one-off events, a guy chopping a head off it wouldnt be such a failure. 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. We failed to fix the problem, he said. But the directive had another benefit. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. For some of Howards men, however, the hatchets soon became more than symbolic as they were used at times to hack dead fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Early in the war, the SEALs mission was to hunt down al Qaedas senior leaders, who had largely vanished into Pakistan, but now Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the leader of JSOC, extended the mission to target the Taliban, whoalong with al Qaeda weremoving back and forth across the Pakistani border with impunity. In the ensuing 17-hour battle with the al Qaeda fighters, six more Americans were killed, and several were wounded. When SEAL Team 6 operators were occasionally confronted about the desecration, the SEAL leader said, theyd often joke that they were just great shots.. That was the end of that. Hyder said that his single shot had blasted open the mans head. Inside a heated tent, as many as 40 SEAL Team 6 operators asked themselves how they wanted to treat their fallen enemies. Moore, sitting in his office in Virginia Beach, pressed Vasely: What had he actually seen? But in 1998, after intervention by a senior officer at Dam Neck, Howard was given a slot on Green Team. To this day, he thinks the guys turned on him, said one of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders. Its 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. Bissonnettes helicopter crashed into bin Ladens side yard. The SEALs were suspected of taking the money. I didnt give their different accounts much thought, the SEAL said. After blowing open the iron gate blocking the main stairway, the lead assaulters, among them Bissonnette and ONeill, followed the operator known as Red up the stairs. Well, they did. The hatchets Howard obtained were stamped with a Native American warrior in a headdress and crossed tomahawks. The first and best-known was the rescue of Capt. As far as the teams are concerned these individuals are persona non gratis. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. They were not the private collection of some individual operator, but the commands official after-action pictures. You guys want to play withthose rules? OK. Although this former SEAL acknowledged that war crimes are wrong, he understood how they happen. Night after night of kill or be killed. When Slabinski was confronted by the commands 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. Then officials took all three of those details back, though they maintained the al Qaeda leader posed a threat. ONeill later implied in the Esquire profile that he shot bin Laden because he wasnt sure Reds shots had hit the target. What we didnt do was turn him in. Photos: Facebook; airsoft-army.com; www.lightfigher.net; Facebook. The hatchet says, We dont 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 Howards lack of military discipline. ), 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. He was allowed to return to the regular SEAL teams. As a result, Howard became popular among the enlisted SEALs under his command, several of whom defended and praised him. Bravo 2/2B. Other SEALs on the ground proceeded as though the survivors were combatants. SEAL Team 6 headquarters at Dam Neck naval annex, Virginia Beach, Va., showing the 30-foot trident sculpted from a fragment of the World Trade Center. Timothy Szymanski, commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Group, after Slabinski was blackballed by SEAL Team 6 in Norfolk, Va., March 25, 2011. They dont 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. Senior leaders at the command knew about the misconduct and did little to eradicate it. 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. It was really good therapy for everybody who was there.. . 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. Then, as two of bin Ladens eldest daughters began to scream, Red quickly corralled themat the doorway, a move considered heroic by other SEALs on the mission. Later, a JSOC officer watching drone footage of the operation noticed one of the SEALs throw an object that landed and exploded near where Norgroves body was found. Howard took the units identity seriously, and after 9/11, despite the questionable circumstances that led to his ascent, his influence steadily grew. A former SEAL Team 6 leader told me that ONeill and Bissonnette originally agreed to cooperate on a book or movie project after the raid was over, but later had a falling out. Bissonnette's name is reportedly inscribed on a "rock of shame" outside SEAL Team 6 headquarters, alongside others who are officially "persona non grata" at that elite unit. 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. All of us were upset. Theformer SEAL Team 6 leader told me that for the units operators, the greatest punishment was being kicked out of the unit in front of their peers. Yet immediately after the mission, ONeill described shooting bin Laden while he was on the floor. The squadrons commanding officer recorded it on a cellphone. They were told, Go in, kill him, and bring the body back, said a former SEAL Team 6 leader involved in the raid. They soon discovered he had violated a series of Navy regulations. thymeleaf multiple select dropdown. Bottom: McRaven, left, and Capt. 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. 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 andknown in military vernacular as DevGru, Team 6, the Command, and Task Force Blue. (The Intercept is withholding the name of the operator, who believed he was following an order. These small teams of CIA, Seal Team 6, and Afghan commandos operated under the agencys Title 50 authority, which governs covert activities. Once inside, the SEALs proceeded slowly and methodically. Bissonnette left Red Squadron soon after the raid and retired from the Navy almost one year later. No officers were present, and the enlisted SEALs used the meeting to address Hyders alleged mutilation of the dead Afghan the previous day. No issues with that. Audio from an unpublished interview with Britt Slabinksi conducted by Malcolm MacPherson, author of a 2005 book on the battle of Roberts Ridge. 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