Speaking of the Seals .... Sara Carter, Circa News, doing what reporters should do:
A retired Air Force captain says Pentagon covered up real cause of deadly chopper crash by Sara A. Carter
http://circa.com/politics/retired-air-force-captain-says-attack-on-extortion-17-could-have-been-prevented
An excerpt:
One of the SEALs was ejected from the burning Chinook helicopter and Marquez watched from her infrared monitor as his heat signature faded from red to blue as life was slipping from his body.
“We had to sit and watch that, and I think that was one of the hardest things that I had to do,” she said. “That man was, you know, dying on the ground.” Marquez says the pain of living with what happened has taken its toll and she was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is in therapy.
“If we would’ve been allowed to engage that night, we would’ve taken out those two men immediately. I mean, it’s just one of those things where you know that it could’ve all been prevented,” she said, tearing up at times as she recollected that night.
Great catch heres a clip from your link:
The mission
August 6, 2011: Retired Air Force Capt. Joni Marquez and her crew were working the dark morning hours aboard an AC-130 gunship after being summoned to a mission she describes “as almost like a 9-1-1 type of a situation.”
The gunship was ordered to fly close-in air support above Afghanistan’s dangerous Tangi Valley, in Wardak Province, assisting troops with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment who were being fired on by eight heavily armed Taliban insurgents.
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The Rangers had called in for assault helicopters to engage the enemy hiding among the rocky valley. The air weapons team fired on the Taliban fighters, but not all of the insurgents were killed as originally believed.
Related:Marine who lost leg in Afghanistan runs marathon
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“I had the sensor operators immediately shift to the eight insurgents the helicopters had taken out,” Marquez told Circa, in her first interview about the incident. “Two were still alive.”
Marquez was the fire control officer aboard the AC-130 gunship, making sure that the sensors and weapons were aligned and allowing the crew hone in on targets.
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Permission denied
That night it didn’t matter, because the gunship was not given permission to fire. “We had seen two of them (insurgents) moving, crawling away from the area, as to not really make a whole lot of scene,” she recalled.
Monitoring the scene from above, she relayed the scene to the ground force commander. “You have two enemy forces that are still alive,” she said. “Permission to engage.”
They were denied.
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Marquez told Circa the ground commander’s decision to not allow her crew to engage the two enemy fighters sealed the fate of those involved in Extortion 17.
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38 dead
There was little left to do for Marquez and her team but simply track the two enemy insurgents with the surveillance equipment. She watched as the two moved tactically through the open field, making their way to a village where they began to rally more fighters.
Meanwhile, a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, with the call sign Extortion 17, was called into the hours-long firefight.
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U.S. Central Command’s official investigation concluded that a rocket-launched grenade from a Taliban fighter hit the Chinook and sent the helicopter into a downward spin. The crash killed all 38, including thirty Americans and eight Afghans. Seventeen of the U.S. servicemen were Navy SEALs. Months before, SEALs were made famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden.
If we would’ve been allowed to engage that night, we would’ve taken out those two men immediately.
—Retired Air Force Captain Joni Marquez
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Deaths prevented?
Marquez believes that had her team been allowed to fire, those deaths could have been prevented.
“They continued to essentially gain more and more force behind them because they just kept knocking on doors,” she said. “And the two personnel that initially fled ended up becoming a group of 12 people.”