God bless, protect and hold dear our precious military. None better .. none! My heart aches for what they have to endure in this miserable term ...
I read this earlier today and I can’t see any reason not to believe it. Just as a matter of common sense, if you’re going into a multi-story residence at night via helicopter, would you start at the top floor, or at ground level and have to fight your way up?
That Obama lied about this is, as you say, “dastardly”.
Who knows. Granted that slimeball politicians have grabbed onto this and sucked it for all it’s worth, but the assertion that any special operation groups don’t kill or assassinate seems pretty lame to me despite what somebody claims - even if they’re connected. Now, I’m not saying that selected assassination is a bad thing neccessarily, just that denial of it as a legitimate mission objective is pretty hard to buy. Wasn’t that one of the roles MACV SOG performed in Viet Nam?
“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.”
I saw two Saudis in a parking lot next to a DrugMart over the weekend. Robes, scarves and everything. Males.
This in the middle of no place special in flyover country.
LLS
***President Obama stepped up to a podium in the East Room of the White House that night to announce bin Laden’s death.****
This reminded me of the Disney movie DRAGONSLAYER. After the dragon is killed by others, the king comes out of hiding, sticks the point of his big sword against the dragon while his adviser says...”All hail Cassiadorus Rex! DRAGONSLAYER!”
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.
Well, for all of his "inside" information, Pfarrer is obviously wrong here. The crash and subsequent explosive degrading of “Razor 2″ less than a mile from Pakistan's "West Point" blew the mission cover.
Here's my personal experience:
I saw the first FR post on the raid that claimed a former Rumsfeld had gone to the media claiming UBL had been killed a week earlier, nothing about a helo crash. I immediately went to my email to ask a PakMil contact what they knew. But there in my inbox was an email from that contact asking what I knew about a helo crash and degrade and he gave me the coordinates and event time.
Seeing that the event time was only about six hours earlier, I emailed another PakMil contact to see why there was a Pak helo scramble when Pak helos rarely ever fly at night (thinking the Pak's were on a raid). They told me there was no scramble, no jets, no helos, no raid, nothing from the Pak's.
That's when I realized it had to be a SEAL raid, no other operators could pull that off. I then started a new FR post citing a Pak media post about the helo crash and degrade and linking it to a supposed UBL raid by us not in Abbotabad, but in the mountains to the east, that was our military's original cover story. I stated that the original FR post was right and wrong, UBL was targeted, but not a week earlier, only six hours earlier. I posted the location of the crash in Abbotabad and Abotabad media links.
The FR mods pulled my post claiming that it was a duplicate and thus blew FR's shot at the biggest news scoop ever. The only thing I could do was start throwing comments into the original story, which I did.
Eventually other FR posters put up articles substantiating my pulled post. This is all in FR's database and in my user posting archives.
Regarding the rest of Pfarrer's story:
“An order to go in and murder someone in their house is not a lawful order,” explained Pfarrer.
Excuse me Mr. Pfarrer killing the enemy is most certainly a lawful order, armed or not.
Pfarrer bills the story as “absolutely factual.” He told TheDC that in order to protect American interests, his book is “full of names that are made up, and it is full of bases that are not quite where they really should be.” “But the timeline of my events,” he cautions, “and the manner in which it happened is 100 percent accurate. And they’ll know that.”
Pfarrer is correct in that there was a roof top assault but flat wrong on "Razor 2" tactical tasks. It always was intended to land in the courtyard and conduct a ground assault. It did crash and a backup helo was brought in joining Razor 1 in extracting the operators, including CIA that were in the mission. Contrary to what Pfarrer is saying.
That is common sense, that you would have CIA along as actionable intel ages within minutes and CIA operators and analysts are a critical link to potentially finding targets for drone strikes within hours of the raid.
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.”
Nuf said right there.
And...amen:
God bless, protect and hold dear our precious military. None better .. none! My heart aches for what they have to endure in this miserable term ...