[mainekitchen] Wot really happened to Seal Team 6?
- From: Josef Jurkiewicz <josef_jurkiewicz@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "mainekitchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <mainekitchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 07:11:27 -0800 (PST)
By Rowan Scarborough
-
The Washington Times
Sunday, October 20, 2013
* Enlarge PhotoElizabeth Strange, center, carries her son’s remains,
with Breanna Hostetler, fiance of ... more >
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Runtime: 04:13Washington Times Investigates Extortion 17
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15 PhotosInside the U.S. Navy SEALs: See America's elite warriors unleashed
*
8 PhotosFamilies suspect SEAL Team 6 crash was inside job
STORY TOPICS
* Jeffrey Colt
* Taliban
* Doug Hamburger
* U.S. Central Command
* Afghanistan
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Questions haunt the families of Extortion 17, the 2011 helicopter mission in
Afghanistan that suffered the most U.S. military deaths in a single day in the
war on terrorism.
The investigative file made available to The Washington Times shows that the
helicopter’s landing zone was not properly vetted for threats nor protected by
gunships, while commanders criticized the mission as too rushed and the
conventional Chinook chopper as ill-suited for a dangerous troop infiltration.
________________________________
PHOTOS: Families suspect SEAL Team 6 crash was inside job
________________________________
Every day, Charlie Strange, the father of one of the 30 Americans who died Aug.
6, 2011, in the flash of a rocket-propelled grenade, asks himself whether his
son, Michael, was set up by someone inside the Afghan government wanting
revenge on Osama bin Laden’s killers — SEAL Team 6.
“Somebody was leaking to the Taliban,” said Mr. Strange, whose son intercepted
communications as a Navy cryptologist. “They knew. Somebody tipped them off.
There were guys in a tower. Guys on the bush line. They were sitting there,
waiting. And they sent our guys right into the middle.”
Doug Hamburger’s son, Patrick, an Army staff sergeant, also perished when the
CH-47D Chinook descended to a spot less than 150 yards from where armed Taliban
fighters watched from a turret.
He asks why the command sent his son into Tangi Valley toward a “hot landing
zone” in a cargo airship instead of a special operations helicopter. The
souped-up choppers — the MH-47 and the MH-60 Black Hawk, which SEAL Team 6 rode
the stealth version of to kill bin Laden — are flown by Night Stalker pilots
skilled in fast, ground-hugging maneuvers to avoid detection.
“When you want to fly them into a valley, when you’ve got hillsides on both
sides of it with houses built into sides of the valley, that is an extremely
dangerous mission,” Mr. Hamburger said. “The MH, the new model, they’ve got
radar that will pick up an incoming missile or incoming RPG. They’re faster.
They’re quicker on attack. They’re more agile. So there was every reason in the
world to use the MH that night.”
Sith Douangdara, whose 26-year-old son, John, was a Navy expeditionary
specialist who handled warrior dog Bart, said he has lots of unanswered
questions.
________________________________
PHOTOS: Inside the U.S. Navy SEALs: See America's elite warriors unleashed
________________________________
“I want to know why so many U.S. servicemen, especially SEALs, were assembled
on one aircraft,” he said. “I want to know why the black box of the helicopter
has not been found. I want to know many things.”
Not all families believe the fact-finding investigation, conducted by Army
Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Colt covered all issues. Gen. Colt, who has since been
promoted to major general, told commanders that his job was not to find fault
and his report did not criticize any person or decision.
“I want people held accountable,” said Mr. Strange, a former union construction
worker who deals blackjack in a Philadelphia casino.
A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which overseas the war and conducted the
probe, declined to answer the families’ questions and referred a reporter to
Gen. Colt’s report.
Congress gets involved
More than two years later, more answers may be forthcoming.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Rep. Darrell E.
Issa, California Republican, is making inquiries after meeting with some
families.
Larry Klayman, who runs the nonprofit watchdog group Freedom Watch, has filed
suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Pentagon,
as well as the Air Force, Army and Navy. He wants a judge to order the military
to turn over an array of documents under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
He said the Defense Department stonewalled his written requests, so Freedom
Watch went to court last month and succeeded in forcing the government to turn
over records.
For the first time, Mr. Klayman allowed The Washington Times to view the
military’s investigative files turned over to family members two years ago.
“The families of our fallen heroes, who I am proud to represent, need closure
to this tragedy,” Mr. Klayman said. “There are many unanswered questions and
the military’s explanations of the causes of the crash do not add up.”
He said families also want changes to the military’s restrictive rules of
engagement that made it more difficult for U.S. helicopter pilots to fire back
at the Taliban fighters they believed brought down the Chinook.
“The families also want our military’s rules of engagement to be changed, as a
testament to and in honor of their dead sons,” Mr. Klayman said. “When our
nation enters into battle, it must be to win the battle, not the ‘hearts and
minds’ of the Islamic jihadist enemy and the Muslim civilian population it uses
as human shields.”
He also wants to know the identities of Afghan soldiers onboard, and why the
aircraft’s black box, washed away in a fierce rainstorm, was never found — even
though it has a homing device.
“We want to make sure our fallen heroes are respected and that answers are
provided,” he said.
About an possible insider betrayal, he says: “We’re not saying that happened,
but it needs to be explored because increasingly Americans are being killed at
the hands of Afghans.”
Even some military personnel involved that night questioned the operations
afterward.
The navigator aboard the AC-130 gunship that loitered for three hours over
Tangi Valley expressed in 2011 what the families are thinking today.
“One of the other things that we did talk about — kind of what you’re hitting
on, sir, is about the fact that, you know, for three hours we had been burning
holes in the sky,” the officer told Gen. Colt’s team. “You’ve got [Apaches]
flying around, so there’s a lot of noise going on and, basically, this entire
valley knows that there’s something happening in this area. So, to do an infil
on the X or Y, you know, having that element of surprise in the beginning of an
operation is good, but by the time we’ve been there for three hours, and the
party’s up, bringing in another aircraft like that, you know, may not be the
most tactically sound decision.”
The mission
After Gen. Colt’s report became public in September 2011, the military arranged
for him to brief next of kin Oct. 12 in Little Creek, Va., home to Naval
Special Warfare Development Group, popularly called SEAL Team 6. The crash took
the lives of 17 SEALs and five special warfare development group operators,
making it the worst one-day loss in the history of U.S. naval special
operations.
The chopper’s manifest included five Army soldiers, three Air Force airmen,
seven Afghan soldiers and one Afghan interpreter. All 38 died. Twenty-two of
them, such as Petty Officer Strange, were thrown from the aircraft. The rest
died inside the fireball.
The military morgue at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware reported that all
succumbed within seconds. Gen. Colt said they were “most likely rapid
fatalities.”
President Obama went to Dover to receive the fallen and console the families.
“‘Your son changed America,’” Mr. Strange said the president told him. “I
grabbed the president by the shoulders and said, ‘I don’t need to know about my
son. I need to know what happened.’”
The nation mourned as 30 funerals were held across the country, many in
small-town America.
The public was transfixed by the service in Rockford, Iowa, for Petty Officer
1st Class Jon Tumilson, a SEAL. His beloved Labrador, Hawkeye, stayed loyal to
the end, lying at the casket as more than 50 SEALs sat in attendance.
The military probe
Gen. Colt had the right experience to lead the probe: He is a decorated Iraq
and Afghanistan veteran and career helicopter pilot, including time in the
storied 160th Special Operations Regiment. He is now deputy commander of Fort
Bragg, N.C.
For the families on Oct. 12, he went over his main conclusions, then his staff
handed out DVDs.
But the questions the next of kin have today did not materialize until they
began poring over 1,300 pages of maps, charts, briefings and interview
transcripts of task force commanders and planners connected to the incident.
The tragedy unfolded at 10:55 p.m. on Aug. 5, 2011, when 47 Army Rangers set
down in two CH-47 Chinooks in high ground overlooking Afghanistan’s Tangi
Valley. The mission was part of an intensified campaign to kill or capture
Taliban leaders, a drive that put tremendous demands on the helicopter fleet
and left newer special “ops” models in short supply.
That night, the quarry was Qari Tahir, identified as the top leader in that
critical area south of Kabul where the enemy moved in and out of Pakistan.
The Rangers raided a house thought to hold Tahir. The fleeing enemy — the
military calls them “squirters” — escaped through a back door. The Rangers’
leader then made a pivotal decision: He asked the special operations task force
to send an immediate reaction force to help catch the squirters, though whether
any of them was Tahir was not known. It turned out he was in another village.
Commanders assembled the reaction force in 50 minutes and loaded them on one
conventional CH-47, call sign Extortion 17, for the brief flight piloted by a
seasoned National Guardsman and a younger reservist.
At that point, it was a far more risky flight than the insertion of Rangers 3
hours earlier. The Rangers had the benefit of surprise. Extortion 17 did not.
It was flying into a firefight, with the noise of Apache attack helicopters,
AC-130 gunships and drones above telling everyone in the valley that a military
operation was underway.
It lifted off a forward operating base at 2:22 a.m., held for several minutes
at one point, then announced it was one minute out at 2:38. At that moment,
Extortion 17 slowed to 58 mph, at no more than 150 feet, approaching a spot
framed by trees and mud-brick huts, and “sparkled” by the infrared designator
on an AC-130 gunship.
In darkness, the Taliban fired two or three rocket-propelled grenades, a
Soviet-designed OG-7 anti-personnel version that is accurate inside 170 yards.
The shooter had positioned himself well within the weapon’s effective range.
One of the rocket-propelled grenades clipped a rotor blade and sent the Chinook
into a violent spin, then fiery crash. Within 30 minutes, bragging about the
hit from Taliban fighters started appearing on communications nets.
The command press office in Kabul at first told reporters that Extortion 17 was
on a rescue mission. But the Rangers did not need rescuing. They had secured
the target compound and were chasing squirters.
“A reactionary force is usually sent in as a rescue, meaning our guys are in
trouble and you send them in,” Mr. Hamburger said. “You don’t send a reaction
force to stop a group of the enemy escaping out the back side of the village,
especially in a dangerous valley in a dangerous entry like they were doing.”
The Colt report supports Mr. Hamburger’s position. The special operations
command in Afghanistan rarely assembled a reaction force, much less the elite
SEAL Team 6, for the chore of chasing fleeing Taliban fighters.
A Colt investigator asked the task force operations officer, “How often do
[you] employ the [immediate reaction force] on a target?”
“Rarely sir,” he answered. “It is rare to have a separate IRF element that is
planned like this one.”
Likewise, an officer in the combat aviation brigade that provided Extortion 17
said he knew of no previous mission to send a reaction force to catch squirters.
“It has not happened sir,” he told Gen. Colt.
This officer said Extortion 17 already had taken off before he had a chance to
tell the brigade’s top officer. There was little intelligence information about
the landing area, except that it was 2.5 miles from the compound raided by the
Rangers.
“I think he [the commander] called directly to try to get more information,”
the officer told Gen. Colt.
The officer then acknowledged that the brigade never fully assessed the
possible dangers that could await Extortion 17.
“But the immediacy of it, we didn’t delve as much as we needed to into the
threat at that location,” he said.
Betrayal?
Some family members believe the Americans were betrayed by the Afghan
government, that someone tipped off the Taliban.
One reason they cite is that the Taliban had begun planting loyalists inside
the international security force to kill Americans, a practice known as “green
on blue” assassinations.
They say SEAL Team 6 had a target on its back since it became known through
various Obama administration leaks to the press that the unit killed bin Laden
three months earlier.
Commanders told Gen. Colt’s investigation team that the Taliban put 100
fighters into Tangi Valley for the express purpose of bringing down U.S.
aircraft. A flight with 17 SEALs would be a coveted target.
Then there is the fact that a group of Taliban fighters, equipped with
hand-held radios, shifted positions and gathered near Extortion 17’s landing
zone — a spot never before used by the Americans.
Two Taliban fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades just happened to be
stationed in a high turret less than 150 yards from Chinook’s “hot landing
zone,” or (HLZ).
One paragraph in the Colt report grabbed the families’ attention. In it, crash
investigators were interviewing the top leadership of the joint special
operations task force that put together the mission. One of them was asked
about a manifest.
“Yes, sir,” a commander answered. “And I’m sure you know by now the manifest
was accurate with the exception of the [redacted] personnel that were on. So
the [redacted] personnel, they were incorrect — all seven names were incorrect.
And I cannot talk to the back story of why.”
The “seven,” family members say, refers to the Afghan soldiers. The open Colt
report makes no reference about why the manifest was inaccurate. Military
censors redacted any reference to the Afghans. Some families believe the task
force at the last moment was forced to remove seven Afghans whose names
remained on the manifest and replace them with seven others.
Senior Afghans had been aware of the mission because each operation must be
approved by a joint operational coordination group made up of Americans and
Afghan national security forces.
A Central Command spokesman declined to discuss the issue.
“My thought is they were being set up by the Afghanistan military,” Mr.
Hamburger said. “I really have a feeling that is why the Afghans were switched
at the last minute. That is why they were not on the manifest. I think that our
military discovered that and did not want to disclose that truth to the
families. I don’t know that for sure, but you just add everything up that
wasn’t right with the mission that night, it really worries you.”
Gen. Colt wrote that he believes the Taliban stood ready to fire for one simple
reason: The 3-hour Ranger operation, with aircraft continually buzzing
overhead, alerted every enemy in the area that more helicopters might be on the
way.
“The [Apache helicopters’] early arrival at both HLZ [redacted] coupled with
earlier kinetic engagements of enemy elements, likely provided early warning to
Taliban fighters that additional helicopters may be inboard to the area,” he
wrote.
The wrong aircraft
Family members also believe the SEALs took off in the wrong aircraft.
The CH-47D, a conventional helicopter flown by a non-special operations pilot
and co-pilot, is fine for ferrying cargo and troops to uncontested areas.
But to insert commandos into a “hot” zone, specialized choppers such as the
MH-47 and MH-60 flown by special operations pilots should have been used,
family members say. Army Special Operations Aviation aircraft fly fast and low,
while the CH-47D descends to a landing zone from a significant height, making
it an easy target.
A special operations commander told Gen. Colt that, of the CH-47D, his “comfort
level is low because they don’t fly like ARSOA. They don’t plan like ARSOA.
They don’t land like ARSOA. They will either, you know, kind of do a runway
landing. Or if it’s a different crew that trains different areas, they will do
the pinnacle landing.”
The officer said conventional choppers make commandos less effective.
“It’s tough,” he told Gen. Colt. “I mean, and I gave them guidance to make it
work. And they were making it work. But it limited our effectiveness. It made
our options and our tactical flexibility — our agility was clearly limited by
our air platform infil — where we could go. How quickly we could get there.”
Unlike the MH models, the CH-47D was not equipped with any defensive alert
system against rocket-propelled grenades.
Gen. Colt’s own final report shows that MHs have a better track record, at
least in the 45 days before the shoot-down.
On June 6, two CH-47s inserting troops into Tangi Valley aborted the mission
after encountering fire from rocket-propelled grenades. Later that night, an
ARSOA MH-47G encountered the fire while inserting troops to the same landing
zone and reported no damage.
It is notable that the command sent the combat rescue, and ordnance disposal
teams, to the crash site in MH-47s, not CHs, and that the 47 Rangers left the
Tangi Valley in special operations choppers.
Mr. Hamburger said he was told that no MH models were available when Extortion
17 was tapped for its doomed flight.
The Colt report states that surveillance aircraft, likely a Predator drone,
stayed fixed on the squirters and did not shift to 17’s landing spot to look
for the enemy.
But Mr. Hamburger said a soldier told him he watched a Predator video feed of
the shoot-down at a nearby base. If true, the father wants Central Command to
turn over the video.
Mr. Hamburger cites as another motive for his push to obtain more information
the rules of engagement for U.S. troops. He wants them changed.
Gunship crews cannot fire on fleeing Afghans before confirming they are
carrying weapons, even though they obviously are Taliban fighters.
Such rules inhibited the Apaches and the C-130 gunship that night. The special
operations commander in Kabul wanted to authorize a strike on the squirters,
“but was unable to determine whether the group was armed,” the Colt report
says. The commander then ordered the ill-fated SEAL mission to help the Rangers
round up every one. More aggressive rules of engagement might have removed any
need for the mission.
Moments after the shoot-down, an Apache pilot pinpointed the source of the
rocket-propelled grenade, but could not fire.
“Due to [rules of engagement] and tactical directives, I couldn’t fire at the
building where I thought the [shooter] was, so I aimed directly to the west of
the building,” the pilot told Gen. Colt.
Mr. Hamburger also said the mission did not follow protocol. The flight
included no “stacked” escort of Apaches and a C-130 gunship that would put more
eyes on the landing zone to look for shooters. The command relied on the
gunships that had been sent with the Ranger team, but they had two tasks and
paid more attention to the first — watching the squirters.
There appears to be a discrepancy between Gen. Colt’s public 27-page report and
what Apache pilots told him during his probe.
The AH-64 Apaches serve as the Chinooks’ bodyguards during a typical troop
insertion, escorting them to the landing zone and then targeting enemy on the
ground.
But Extortion 17 had no Apache escorts.
Gen. Colt’s report said that special operations commander at headquarters did
not order the Rangers’ two Apaches, equipped with night-vision goggles and
night-gun sights, to move to Extortion 17’s landing zone. A Ranger commander on
the ground took it on himself to issue that order, he wrote.
But the interview transcripts show a more complete story, one that troubles the
families who believe Gen. Colt left the wrong impression.
During his investigation, Gen. Colt himself told the special operations
commander: “I’m just going to give you the feedback. The [Apache] guys, they
really thought that their primary task was continuing to monitor these guys.
That’s where their focus was. And as far as the amount of attention that they
paid to the [hot landing zone] and the [infiltration] route, it was a secondary
task to them.”
The pilot of one of two Apaches, called Gun 1 and Gun 2, assigned to protect
the Rangers told Gen. Colt they never broke off to inspect the landing zone for
threats as Extortion 17 got closer — until it was just three minutes out.
“Honestly, sir, I don’t think anybody had really looked at the LZ,” said the
pilot of Gun 1. “I mean, at any time if we would have found these squirters, or
they would have found weapons, we were — the way I was understanding it, we
were going to be clear to engage due to the fact that they had weapons, but we
had to [positively identify] them first.
“So we hadn’t started looking at the LZ yet, just due to there was so much more
of a threat to the east with the squirters,” the pilot said. “I would say that
on the three-minute call is when Gun 2 started. looking at the LZ, giving an LZ
brief op. I would say that was the first time that we really had eyes on the
LZ.”
Planning for an immediate reaction force is supposed to be in conjunction with
the main mission. It was not. Planning began at shortly after 1 a.m. and lasted
less than an hour.
The AC-130 commander said no one properly coordinated who would watch the
squirters on the valley’s east side and who would move west to watch Extortion
17’s back.
“That coordination probably could have gone better, could have been better and,
I think, I’m not sure, it just appeared to us the whole plan for getting into
this area was rushed, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s the case, but
that’s kind of one thing that I thought might have been done a little bit
better.”
The gunship’s sensor operator said, “It just didn’t feel comfortable to us to
bring another helo in, especially not having a ground team down there securing
an LZ for them.”
Assessment
In the families’ eyes, the mission was snakebit from the start: using sing the
wrong aircraft; flying into an uninspected and unwatched landing zone infested
with Taliban fighters assembling a plan and a reaction team in minutes for an
action that should have been conducted hours earlier.
The Times asked a special operations officer for his opinion. He is on active
duty and cannot speak on the record.
“In this case, the CH-47 was used in a completely inappropriate manner given
its design and the result was the deaths of everyone aboard,” the officer said.
“Tier 1 personnel must be employed with careful planning,” he added. “The cost
and time to train them means that using them in such a haphazard manner as a
reaction force in this context places critical personnel at too great a risk,
especially in this concentration on such a noncritical mission.”
SEAL Team 6 and Army Delta Force are considered Tier 1 personnel as the armed
forces’ most elite counterterrorism units.
Asked how a Taliban at night could hit the 98-foot-long Chinook, he said, “I
never questioned how he could aim. There’s is no such thing as ‘pitch black’
and the CH-47 airframe is a loud, enormous target.”
Gen. Colt’s legal adviser began one interview session with ground troops by
saying, “Obviously, we got a general officer appointed duty investigation by
CENTCOM to make sure we have all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed and our
report is going to be as accurate and complete and unlikely to be
second-guessed by a bunch of folks outside the military.”
A month after the worst day in the war, the U.S. gained revenge of a sort. The
NATO command in Kabul announced that it had killed Tahir with a precise
airstrike as he stood outside with a fellow terrorist.
by Taboola
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