Correcting the 'fairy tale:' a SEAL's account of how Osama bin Laden really died (dastardly)

Forget whatever you think you know about the night Osama bin Laden was killed. According to a former Navy SEAL who claims to have the inside track, the mangled tales told of that historic night have only now been corrected.

“It became obvious in the weeks evolving after the mission that the story that was getting put out there was not only untrue, but it was a really ugly farce of what did happen,” said Chuck Pfarrer, author of Seal Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden.

In an extensive interview with The Daily Caller, Pfarrer gave a detailed account of why he believes the record needed to be corrected, and why he set out to share the personal stories of the warriors who penetrated bin Laden’s long-secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Freelancer Nicholas Schmidle wrote that the SEALs had shot and blasted their way up floor-by-floor, finally cornering the bewildered Al-Qaida leader:

“The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. ‘There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,’ the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye.”

“The version of the 45-minute firefight, and the ground-up assault, and the cold-blooded murder on the third floor — that wasn’t the mission,” Pfarrer told TheDC.

President Obama stepped up to a podium in the East Room of the White House that night to announce bin Laden’s death. That rapid announcement, explained Pfarrer, posed a major threat to U.S. national security.

“There was a choice that night,” Pfarrer told TheDC. “There was a choice to keep the mission secret.” America, Pfarrer explained, could have left things alone for “weeks or months … even though there was evidence left on the ground there … and use the intelligence and finish off al-Qaida.”

But Obama’s announcement, he said, “rendered moot all of the intelligence that was gathered from the nexus of al-Qaida. The computer drives, the hard drives, the videocasettes, the CDs, the thumb drives, everything. Before that could even be looked through, the political decision was made to take credit for the operation.”

And in the days that followed, as politicians sought to thrust their identities into the details of the bin Laden kill, the tale began to grow out of control, said Pfarrer.

“The president made a statement, and as far as that goes, that was fine, that was the mission statement,” he explained. “But, soon after … politicians began leaking information from every orifice. And it was like a game of Chinese telephone. These guys didn’t know what they were talking about. Very few of them had even seen the video feed.”

Pfarrer suggests that much of the misinformation was likely born out of operational ignorance, even among those sitting in the White House.

“One of the things that happened was that there were only a handful of people who know about this mission,” he said. “On the civilian side, there were only a handful of people in the situation room who were watching the drone feed. They were looking at the roof of a building taken from a rotating aircraft at 35,000 feet.”

“None of those guys, not a single one of them, had a background in special operations, with the exception of General Webb who was sitting there running a laptop,” Pfarrer went on. “No one knew or could even imagine what was going on inside the building. They didn’t know.”

“There was an alternative feed going to CIA headquarters where Leon Panetta sat there with the communications brevity codes [a guide sheet for the mission's radio lingo] in his lap and a SEAL off-screen by his side to be able to tell him what was going on,” he said. “But these guys, none of them, really knew what they were looking at.”

Whether or not bin Laden resisted ultimately developed into a barrage of murky official and unofficial explanations in the days following. And statements from as high as then-CIA Director Leon Panetta offered confirmation that the endeavor was a “kill mission.”

“An order to go in and murder someone in their house is not a lawful order,” explained Pfarrer, who maintains that bin Laden would have been captured had he surrendered. “Unlike the Germans in World War II, if you’re a petty officer, a chief petty officer, a naval officer, and you’re giving an order to murder somebody, that’s an unlawful order.”

Couldn’t agree more, Sandy ..it’s beyond repugnant and appalling.

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Excerpt:

But a new book by former SEAL Team Six commander Chuck Pfarrer is turning it on its head again, calling into question critical details thought to be established facts in the terror raid. Pfarrer is no light weight:

a former assault-element commander for the SEALs in the ‘80s, he has been published widely on counter-terrorism and special operations and his book is the first account to boast interviews with SEALs who actually participated in the raid.

Advance copies of the book SEAL Target Geronimo have been provided to The Telegraph, New York Post, The Daily Caller and The Daily Beast and each publication is publishing different revelations about the raid.

http://news.yahoo.com/six-biggest-discrepancies-accounts-bin-laden-raid-174908464.html

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Bio

Charles Patrick “Chuck” Pfarrer, III is an American novelist, non-fiction writer, screenwriter, and former U.S. Navy SEAL. Pfarrer went through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S) in 1981 and spent 8 years as a Navy SEAL.

Chuck Pfarrer author photoHe served as a military advisor in Central America, trained NATO forces in Europe and the Mediterranean, undertook duties in the Middle East, notably in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War.

As executive officer of the SEAL Team assigned to the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force, he witnessed the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut.

Pfarrer was one of the SEAL Team leaders responsible for the apprehension of Abu Abbas and the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Pfarrer ended his service as Assault Element Commander at the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), formerly known as SEAL Team 6.

After leaving the military, Pfarrer embarked on a career as a Hollywood screenwriter. His film credits include writing, acting and production work in Navy SEALs, Darkman, and Hard Target.

Pfarrer was the screenwriter on The Jackal. His spec screenplays for Virus and Red Planet were also made into movies. He is an uncredited writer on the films Arlington Road, Second Nature, Sudden Impact and Green Hornet. Pfarrer was active in the 2004 effort to recall Writer’s Guild of America president Charles Holland, who had claimed, wrongly, to be a wounded combat veteran, intelligence officer and Green Beret. Holland eventually resigned under fire.

Pfarrer’s best-selling autobiography, Warrior Soul, The Memoir of a Navy SEAL, was published by Random House in 2004. His debut novel, Killing Che, was published by Random House in 2007.

He is the author/creator of six graphic novels for Dark Horse Comics, and wrote and produced two interactive full motion videos, Flash Traffic and Silent Steel, both for Tsunami Media.

From an early age, it was clear Chuck’s interest in marine life and the sea would lead him to the Navy.

Pfarrer has written broadly on terrorism and counter-terrorism, and serves government and industry as a subject matter expert on special operations, terrorist operational methodology, counter-proliferation and terrorist employment of weapons of mass destruction.

He has written Op Ed for the New York Times and the Knight Ridder syndicate, appeared as an author and counter-terrorism expert on CSPAN-2, NPR, the Arabic network Al Hurra, Voice of America, Fox News and ABC, America Tonight and The Australian Broadcast Company.

Pfarrer serves presently an Associate Editor of “The Counterterrorist”, a journal of international security, special operations, counter insurgency and counterterrorism.

Pfarrer is the son of Charles Patrick Pfarrer, Jr., a career naval officer, and Joan Marie (née Hoyle) Pfarrer, a registered nurse. Born in Boston, Pfarrer considers Biloxi, Mississippi to now be his hometown. The Pfarrers share with many other old Biloxi families the distinction of losing homes in both Hurricane Camille (1969) and Hurricane Katrina (2005).

Pfarrer is a graduate of the Staunton Military Academy, and studied Clinical Psychology at California State University at Northridge and the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

http://chuckpfarrer.com/about/meet-chuck-pfarrer/

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SEAL target Geronimo

http://chuckpfarrer.com/books/seal-target-geronimo/

The CIA trying 'to drive a victory lap'

One of the things that I think we are learning through a number of such revelations is that any good that came out of Iraq, Afghanistan and the effort against Al Qaeda seems to have been largely at the hands of well trained combat professionals and well-trained FBI investigators coupled with intelligence provided by the NSA. THese are all competent, trained, technically up to date outfits.

Unfortunately for every three steps forward we have taken two back because the neo-cons put their faith in the CIA and their so-called black-ops contractors. The more we learn, the more incompetent they appear. Obviously there are competent CIA officers, but somewhere between the political maneuverings of liberals, and the political maneuverings of the neo-cons, it would appear that those who are on top in the CIA are the bunglers and professional suckups, rather than those who work hard developing skills over a life-time and using them for the interests of the country. In other words, instead of looking different from what we expect from our government agencies, say like the SEALS, the CIA seems to behave more like every other incomptent, compromised, neutered politicized agency in the US government. PS for those of you who think Obama is worse than the neo-con RINOs in this regard, DOE loan guarantees - AND SOLYNDRA - actually got their start at the end of the Bush administration. [Things are really bad when RINO political payoffs and dim political payoffs at the taxpayers expense are indistinguishable.]

I am not sure who in the end will have been worse, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Obama, or their political pawns and patsies. At the end of the day none of them seemed to have understood the difference between what skilled professionals do and what those whose motives are political will do.

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