EXPRESIDENT
General
"Only the dead have seen the end of war" - Plato
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Post by EXPRESIDENT on May 3, 2011 8:03:18 GMT 8
The secret team that killed bin Laden By Marc Ambinder National Journal updated 5/2/2011 11:05:46 AM ET From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.
After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap — boom, boom — to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell NationalJournal.
Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.
This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound at Camp Alpha, a segregated section of Bagram Air Base. Trial runs were held in early April.
DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.
How did the helos elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so — and we may never know — two other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. These truly are the silent squirrels — never getting public credit and not caring one whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have become the U.S. government’s most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally unflattering, attention to themselves in the process.
JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.
But Sunday’s operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.
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KALOGERZ
Colonel
Serial # 06-008
Posts: 1,235
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Post by KALOGERZ on May 3, 2011 9:22:07 GMT 8
Ang kulet nung ad, hehe Congrats to the SEAL Team na demale dun kay Usama, mga instant millionaires sila agad!
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REEL
2nd Lieutenant
Serial # 09-002
Posts: 538
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Post by REEL on May 3, 2011 10:02:33 GMT 8
im rather concerned as to how the Pakistanis would react to this. or how US would react if they sum all of these up as Pakistan harboring their most wanted person.
whichever way it goes, ang kawawa dito are the young men in uniform and their families.
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REEL
2nd Lieutenant
Serial # 09-002
Posts: 538
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Post by REEL on May 3, 2011 10:12:32 GMT 8
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KALOGERZ
Colonel
Serial # 06-008
Posts: 1,235
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Post by KALOGERZ on May 3, 2011 11:47:47 GMT 8
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EXPRESIDENT
General
"Only the dead have seen the end of war" - Plato
Posts: 5,636
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Post by EXPRESIDENT on May 4, 2011 10:54:50 GMT 8
Fabled SEAL Team 6 ends hunt for Osama bin Laden (The Philippine Star) Updated May 04, 2011 12:00 AM
Zoom WASHINGTON – The raid that killed Osama bin Laden will go down in history as the most important covert operation since 9/11, earning the elite Navy SEAL team that carried it out permanent bragging rights for finishing off the most-wanted terrorist on Earth.
It was a near-textbook operation, despite the near-failure of one of the helicopters carrying the raiders. They all made it into bin Laden’s high-walled compound in Pakistan, sliding down ropes in darkness, as they’ve done on so many raids hunting militants since al-Qaeda declared war on the United States.
The Navy SEALs won’t confirm they carried out the attack, but their current chief, Rear Adm. Edward Winters, at Naval Special Warfare Command in California, sent an email congratulating his forces and cautioning them to keep their mouths shut.
“Be extremely careful about operational security,” he added. “The fight is not over.”
It was a warning few needed in the secretive group, where operators are uncomfortable with media coverage, fearing revealing details could let the enemy know what to expect the next time.
Made up of only a few hundred personnel based in Dam Neck, Virginia, the elite SEAL unit officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or “DEVGRU,” is part of a special operations brotherhood that calls itself “the quiet professionals.” SEAL Team Six raided targets outside war zones like Yemen and Somalia in the past three years, though the bulk of the unit’s current missions are in Afghanistan. The Associated Press will not publish the names of the commanding officers, to protect them and their families from possible retaliation by militants for the bin Laden operation.
The unit is overseen by the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army’s Delta Force and other special units. JSOC’s combined forces have been responsible for a quadrupling of counterterrorism raids that have targeted militants in record numbers over the past year in Afghanistan. Some 4,500 elite special operations forces and support units have been part of the surge of US forces there.
CIA Director Leon Panetta was in charge of the military team during the covert operation, a US official said. While the president can empower the SEALs and other counterterrorism units to carry out covert actions without CIA oversight, President Barack Obama’s team put the intelligence agency in charge, with other elements of the national security apparatus answering to them for this mission.
SEAL Team Six actually works so often with the intelligence agency that it’s sometimes called the CIA’s Pretorian Guard — a partnership that started in Iraq as an outgrowth of the fusion of special operations forces and intelligence in the hunt for militants there.
SEALs and Delta Force both, commanded by then-JSOC chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal, learned to work much like FBI agents, first attacking a target, killing or capturing the suspects, and then gathering evidence at the scene.
McChrystal described it as building a network to chase a network, where the special operations forces work with intelligence analysts back at a joint operations center. The raiders, he said, could collect valuable “pocket litter” from the scene, like documents or computers, to exploit the hunt for the next target.
The battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan had been informally divided, with the SEALs running Afghanistan and Delta Force conducting the bulk of the operations in Iraq, though there was overlap of each organization. There is considerable professional rivalry between them.
Delta Force units caught Saddam Hussein late in 2003 and killed his sons Uday and Qusay in a shootout in Mosul earlier that year. Delta Force later tracked down al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pinpointing the building where he sheltered for the aerial bombing that ended his life. The race to be the unit that captured bin Laden had been on ever since.
“Officially, Team Six doesn’t exist,” says former Navy SEAL Craig Sawyer, 47, who advises Hollywood and acts in movies about the military.
After undergoing a six-month process in which commanders scrutinized his every move, Sawyer says he was selected in the 1990s to join the team.
“It was like being recruited to an all-star team,” he said, with members often gone 300 days a year, only lasting about three years on the team before burning out.
“They train around the clock,” he said. “They know that failure will not be an option. Either they succeed or they don’t come home.”
Other special operations units joke that “SEAL” stands for “Sleep, eat, lift,” though the term actually stands for Sea, Air, Land.
“The SEALs will be the first to remind everyone that the ‘L’ in SEAL stands for land,” says retired Army Gen. Doug Brown, former commander of US Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida. “They have skills on the land equal to their skills at sea.” Brown, who led the command from 2003-07, said the operation against bin Laden is the most significant mission conducted by US commando forces since the organization was formed in 1987 in the wake of the failed attempt in 1980 to rescue the American hostages in Iran.
“I can’t think of a mission as nationally important,” Brown said. The last time the public was made aware of a SEAL raid on Pakistani soil was 2008, when the raiders flew only a mile over the border to the town of Angurada, according to Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic matters. The high-value targets the Americans had been told were there had fled, and those left behind in the compound fought back, resulting in a number of civilian casualties, US and Pakistani officials say, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a classified operation.
While the US usually does not comment on covert actions, especially ones that go wrong, the 2008 incident was caught on cellphone video, so they confirmed it and apologized publicly, US officials said.
The successful bin Laden mission is a much-needed boost for the unit. The SEALs’ reputation took a hit within the special operations community after a 2010 rescue mission led to the accidental killing of British hostage Linda Norgrove, held by militants in Afghanistan. One of the SEALs threw a fragmentation grenade at a militant when the team stormed their hideout, not realizing Norgrove was curled on the ground next to the militant, and then lied about throwing the grenade.
The SEALs originally reported that Norgrove had been killed by a fighter’s suicide vest, but when the SEAL commanding officer reviewed the tape from simultaneous surveillance video, he saw an explosion after one of the SEALs threw something in Norgrove’s direction, US officials say, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a classified operation.
One SEAL was dismissed from the unit for his action. DEVGRU is the same unit that rescued an American ship captain, Richard Phillips, held hostage on a lifeboat by Somali pirates after his capture from the USS Maersk Alabama in 2009. A DEVGRU unit fired precision shots from the rocking stern of a Naval ship, killing three of four pirates. – AP
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EXPRESIDENT
General
"Only the dead have seen the end of war" - Plato
Posts: 5,636
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Post by EXPRESIDENT on May 4, 2011 14:13:56 GMT 8
Bin Laden unarmed when shot dead: US
The United States revealed Tuesday that Osama bin Laden was unarmed when US commandos shot him dead and said the Pakistani authorities had been kept in the dark because they might have tipped off the Al-Qaeda leader.
Unusually frank remarks from the CIA chief betrayed the extent of the distrust between the United States and Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally and key partner in the war against the resurgent Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.
"It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission," Leon Panetta told Time magazine in an interview. "They might alert the targets."
US officials, meanwhile, debated whether to scotch conspiracy theories by releasing a "gruesome" photo of the dead bin Laden, conscious that such an image would likely inflame strong passions in parts of the Muslim world.
Focus: Details on bin Laden raid raise more questions
The White House gave the fullest account yet of the dramatic and momentous raid on Sunday night that killed the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks and sparked scenes of relief and joy around the Western world.
But officials did not clearly explain why bin Laden was shot dead and not captured, given that he was unarmed, fueling speculation that the elite Navy SEAL team had been ordered not to take him alive.
"In the room with bin Laden, a women -- bin Laden's wife -- rushed the US assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. "Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed."
Pressed about the so-called "kill mission," Carney said there had been significant resistance, a "volatile firefight," and insisted: "We were prepared to capture him if that was possible."
The fact that, after a years-long manhunt, bin Laden turned up in an fortified compound in Abbottabad, home to the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point and Sandhurst military academies just two hours' drive north of Islamabad, has been greeted with incredulity.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari rejected as "baseless" charges that his country extends safe haven to extremists, but outraged US lawmakers are calling for billions of dollars in aid to be cut back or dropped entirely.
The Obama administration last year said it would seek another $2 billion for Pakistan's military, on top of a five-year, $7.5 billion civilian package approved in 2009 aimed at weakening the allure of Islamic extremists.
US analysts were scouring documents and computer files seized from bin Laden's hideout for evidence after top counter-terrorism official John Brennan said it was "inconceivable" he had not had some kind of support network.
White House: Bin Laden corpse photo 'gruesome'
For a decade, Islamabad has been America's wary Afghan war ally, despite widespread public opposition and militant bomb attacks across the nuclear-armed country that have killed several thousand people.
But Pakistan has never been fully trusted by either Kabul or Washington, which accuse its powerful military of fostering the Afghan Taliban it spawned during the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Pakistani intelligence officials said the nation's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had no idea bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, despite searching the compound in 2003 while it was still under construction.
In a Washington Post opinion piece, Zardari acknowledged the US commandos carried out the raid without Pakistani collaboration -- but stressed Islamabad had initially helped to identify the Al-Qaeda courier who led them to bin Laden.
US officials say DNA tests have proven conclusively that the man shot dead above the eye in Sunday's raid was indeed the Al-Qaeda leader who boasted about the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the September 11 attacks.
But they are also mulling whether to release a photo as proof.
"It is fair to say it is a gruesome photograph... it could be inflammatory," Carney said. "We are reviewing the situation."
In Sunday's operation, which lasted less than 40 minutes, Navy SEALs, arriving in two helicopters, stormed bin Laden's compound, which stood out from other properties because of its towering perimeter walls and heavy security.
In addition to the bin Laden family, two other families resided there: one on the first floor of the main residence and another in a second building.
"On the first floor of bin Laden's building, two Al-Qaeda couriers were killed along with a woman who was killed in cross-fire," Carney said.
"Bin Laden and his family were found on the second and third floor of the building. There was concern that bin Laden would oppose the capture operation and indeed he resisted."
After the firefight, the "non-combatants were moved to a safe location as the damaged helicopter was detonated," Carney said. "The team departed the scene via helicopter to the USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea."
US officials have revealed how the trail for bin Laden had gone cold for years until August 2010, when the CIA tracked a courier and his brother to the large compound in Abbottabad, north of Islamabad.
Interview: bin Laden death will not affect Al-Qaeda
After months of top-secret planning, the operation came down to a simple command delivered by Obama on Friday -- "it's a go."
On Sunday, the president and his top lieutenants gathered in the White House Situation Room to watch the dramatic operation unfold. Then came confirmation that bin Laden -- codenamed "Geronimo" -- was now "EKIA": Enemy Killed in Action.
The fifth person killed in the raid was believed to be one of bin Laden's sons.
The United States says bin Laden received Muslim rites before his body was "eased" into the Arabian Sea on Monday so no one could turn his grave into a shrine. Muslim leaders have condemned the sea burial.
Focus: Navy SEALs shine in risky bin Laden strike
With Pakistan's main Taliban faction vowing vengeance, the United States said Tuesday it was closing its consulates in the cities of Lahore and Peshawar to the public until further notice.
Hundreds of curious Pakistanis descended on the bullet-riddled villa Tuesday that had hidden bin Laden from the world, some taking pictures and home videos of the battered compound.
Gathering outside to get a look at the now notorious high-walled villa, dozens of youths staged a demo mocking the United States, shouting "Osama is alive!"
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REEL
2nd Lieutenant
Serial # 09-002
Posts: 538
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Post by REEL on May 4, 2011 23:21:25 GMT 8
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KALOGERZ
Colonel
Serial # 06-008
Posts: 1,235
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Post by KALOGERZ on May 12, 2011 15:59:01 GMT 8
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