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. Bissonnette and his teammates were nearly killed, and many of the operators aboard ended up with chronic injuries. They ransacked the compound for documents and media for intelligence, left the survivors inside, and returned to Jalalabad air base with the body. The CIA team on the operation was angry because they had lost an opportunity to interrogate the suspected militants. My character and honor are steadfast. 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. 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. Bravo 3/3B. There was no plan for capture, and no contingency for a surrender. Its a work of fiction billed as the Bible, as the truth. 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 Ive ever seen. On the day when SEAL Team 6 lost its first operator in the post-9/11 era, Slabinski became a unit legend. No one prepared our guys for the collateral damage and the second- and third-order effects of this war, the former SEAL leader said. Almost immediately, the issue that received the most scrutiny was the December 2007 attempted beheading. Previously, the command had required only a frontal shot and a profile of each dead militant. Top right: Robert ONeill with his tattoo of two bloody feathers, representing his kills. And it takes the team, it takes individuals to pull you back. The war was entering its seventh year and had become intractable, with no clear path to victory. Bottom left:Screengrab from drone feed during the battle of Roberts Ridge. Paramilitary officers from the CIA, including a covert joint unit under the agencys command called the Omega program, worked closely with the SEALs. Today, heis a paid on-air commentator for Fox News and is reportedly eyeing a run for the Senate in his native Montana. He said it and one of his operators did it because he believed he was following an order.. We couldve used the intel. Outside the compound, the SEALs were quick to show the photos to others on the assault team. Neither wasloaded. 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 decades worth of bloody sport by elements of SEAL Team 6 who considered themselves craftsmen of killing. Moore, sitting in his office in Virginia Beach, pressed Vasely: What had he actually seen? After all that activity, hed been hiding in a ditch for 90 minutes, he gets up, hes spoken to, yelled at in the dark its disturbing. 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 theyd surrender. They shot an unarmed dude. Bissonnette was much farther back down the stairwell. Howards critics argue that the hatchets were emblems of the rogue, at times criminal, conduct on the battlefield the commander was encouraging. Oh my gosh. When investigators approached the operator accused of mutilating the dead fighter, he exercised his right to remain silentand his right to counsel. 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. Some of ONeills teammates were outraged hed been so brazenly inaccurate and self-serving in his account. Top right: Adm.William McRaven. who is on the navy seal rock of shame. After three or four deployments in, you need more to get that stimulation. 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. Even if it was true, I dont 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. Private sector and then Delta Force Bissonnettes bestselling book, No Easy Day, was published in September 2012, four months after he retired and less than two weeks after ONeill got out of the Navy. Shortly after that operation, Slabinski returned to the SEAL Team 6 base at Dam Neck. 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. Outside the main entrance stands a 30-foot trident sculpted out of a fragment of the World Trade Center. It ruined some of these guys, said the former SEAL operator on the mission. 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. It was given as an honor, one more step to strive for, another sign that youre doing a good job.. 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. Some of the assaulters on the mission were also angry with Bissonnette and ONeill because they neglected their responsibilities after bin Ladens son was shot. 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. Alarmed at seeing what he believed was a decapitation, he told Slabinski to go inside and see what the young operator was doing. 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. Its a schoolyard mentality. These were family weapons, said the retired SEAL. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. The photos and other review documents could be shared with local officials to justify operations. I understand the desire, I dont condone it, but there was definite retaliation., Hyder told me that he did not desecrate the body. Moore did not respond to requests for comment. The CIA declined to comment for this article. The group gave him a five-star rating, its most ignoble designation. Peter Vasely with members of Blue Squadron in Afghanistan. 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. There just isnt 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. Consequently, the SEALs initially reported to JSOC senior leaders that Norgrove had been killed by her captors. They were disgusted. He quoted Heath as saying, Im morally flexible but I cant handle that. Heath refused to comment for this article. 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 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. He was unarmed and wearing pajamas. We said, Let us set down and take a look at the convoy to determine if its al Qaeda. Instead, they dropped several bombs.. The lack of battlefield discipline was not limited to a single squadron. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. 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. 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 crusaders cross. And earlier this week, the independent Navy Times reported that six members of SEAL Team 10 tested positive last year for cocaine use and other drugs while serving. O'Neill (born 10 April 1976) is a former United States Navy SEAL (1996-2012 . The discussion covered battlefield ethics. The code is a conspiracy of silence, one that many more are complicit in than just the SEALs themselves. Some SEAL Team 6 leaders were appalled by how easily Vasely and Szymanski had folded under Moores pressure. 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 emergedsoon after the Afghan war began and was tolerated and covered up by the commands leadership. 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. 471K views 6 years ago http://democracynow.org - A stunning new expos published today in The Intercept about the elite military unit SEAL Team 6 reveals a darker side of the group best. A former SEAL Team 6 leader who has knowledge of the episode told me Moore shamed Slabinski and the squadron for their conduct. 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. Army 1942-1945 WW II S/Sgt 4/26/1916 6/21/20072126th AAF BU,. They were smiling, almost gleeful, he said. Several weeks earlier, in January 2002, Hyder killed an unarmed Afghan man north of Kandahar during the units first ground assault of the war. As a result, photographs of canoed enemy fighters virtually ceased to appear in after-action reports. musical red book full. 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. This directive had one primary purpose: to protect U.S. forces from accusations of unjustified killings by Afghan government officials. His forehead was gruesome, he later told Esquire magazine. Men, women, and a small girl, motionless and in the fetal position, appeared dead. 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. 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 mans neck. 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. Vasely later told investigators he saw the operator moving his hand back and forth over the militants neck in a sawing motion. You do something atrocious or sell out your name is on it. Its important that you put this stuff in context, the CIA officer said. He said canoeing became big in 2007. The guys needed that to get back in the saddle because everyone was gun shy., I mean, talk about the funny stuff we do. Officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6 is today the most celebrated of the U.S. militarys special mission units. The operation commanded high-level interest because Norgrove, though in Afghanistan as an aid worker for DAI, an American NGO, secretly worked with Britains MI-6. Top left: CIA paramilitary officer and former SEAL Team 6 member Richard Smethers. 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. Memories get distorted over 14 years. 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. They were mad because he spoke to the New York Times and lied.. It didnt make a difference. 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. In his interview with the Times, Slabinski asserted that it was he who had witnessed the operator slashing at the dead fighters 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. 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