errr I mean defended by US elite military units. Trust that they will make the right call and let the warriors judge the warriors. And whats funny is, is they give him credit for doing something very heroic, that had they been wearing suicide vests, he put himself on top of them and would have absorbed the blast. Top photo: An undated official portrait of retired Master Chief Special Warfare Operator (SEAL) Britt K. Slabinski. Collect, curate and comment on your files. Miller described The Intercept report as an attack on the officers named in the report and said that unfortunately I note that our PA [public affairs] machine is not geared to respond and attack back except in rare cases.. Thats the kind of war crimes the Special Forces and SEALS are all about. And what we know is that despite the fact that. And those guidelines were, in a lot of ways, done to protect SEALs. We continue our conversation with reporter Matthew Cole about his stunning new expos published this week in The Intercept about the elite military unit SEAL Team 6 that reveals a darker side. It doesnt just hurt us. It happens in war. He was unarmed. There are bad eggs in every bunch, and unfortunately this is true with the teams. The only people who can make these calls are the ones who were there. Because the oil being transported wasnt from the parts of Libya the U.S. has supplied with a puppet dictatorship. It is effectivelyits tantamount to ordering murder or an execution, precisely as the SEALs were ordered in the bin Laden raid to do. Normally, the presentation of the Medal of Honor is a solemn and meaningful recognition of bravery and heroism. In 2016, after the Pentagon began reassessing silver stars and service crosses awarded during the war on terror, the Air Force put together forensics and drone video that they claimed showed Chapman got up after Slabinski and the SEALs retreated and continued to fight, alone and outnumbered, before succumbing to his wounds. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. And he was put down with two shots, one to the chest and a second which glanced off his hip as he fell back onto the floor. And every time youd kick him or shoot him, he would kick up, and you could see his body twitch and all that. on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadnt done it? The Intercept claims that the leadership of several SEAL teams read the book Devils Guard, a fictional account of an escaped Nazi who goes on the warpath in Vietnam, imagining a campaign of hunting, desecration, revenge and psychological warfare, and that these SEALs apparently took this as inspiration. And so, Admiral McRaven stepped in and conducted whats called an admirals mast, which was unprecedented. It hasnt happened. AMY GOODMAN: You write about a celebration, a reunion, really, of Navy SEALs back in Virginia at the headquarters. Hes a nice guy. And so, they wrote his evaluation report in such a way that he wouldnt be allowed into SEAL Team 6, but he could leave the unit and continue on as ain his career as an officer in the Navy SEALs. The military refused to respond to this story for five months, with dozens of questions, specific questions, to get them to say, Hey, wed like your help here. And it was total silence. Whatever war crimes are being pointed out are a calculated tactic to instill fear in the enemy with the intent to demoralize them and avoid more deaths. Sgt. All six were photographed., SEAL Team Six was also the one on the famous raid that ended in the death of Osama Bin Laden. Author has 6.8K answers and 134.9M answer views 2 y Related There are many SEALS who say they killed Osama Bin Laden. Among the most disturbing details was that SEAL operatives reportedly started taking inspiration from a book lionizing a fictional Nazi. Millions of high-quality images, video, and music options are waiting for you. But we never could prove anything. And, you know, I think thats probably largely true for a lot of people. There were multiple reported instances of what the SEALs called canoeing, in which dead enemy combatants had their skulls split open by a rifle or pistol round at the upper forehead, exposing their brain matter.. And as one source said to me, the commander ofcommanding officer of SEAL Team 6 at the time said, We dont want to punish him, because it will hurt his family. I mean, he was dead, but people have got nerves. Slabinski also admitted he had given an illegal order for his men to shoot all males on an operation regardless of whether or not they were armed, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation. Itll hurt the administration. Don't worry, we'll never share or sell your information. The Elite of the Elite: Understanding the Distinctions Between SEAL Team 6 and Other SEAL Teams. You areyour time is up, and you are quietly told that you just wont be able to come back here. That all being said, allegedly ordering a team to kill all men (armed or otherwise) encountered on a mission, allegedly lying about the OBL raid for personal gain, those are just objectively bad internal dynamics that one would think need to be addressed by DevGru's leadership in order to keep the unit as effective as possible. Browse 8,940 seal team stock photos and images available, or search for navy seal team to find more great stock photos and pictures. Theyre essentially trophies. This account of the crimes of SEAL Team 6 results from a two-year investigation drawing on interviews with 18 current and former members of the unit, including four former senior leaders of the. Get started today on securing your financial future with BridgeLight Capital. Audio from an unpublished interview with Britt Slabinksi conducted by Malcolm MacPherson, author of a 2005 book on the battle of Roberts Ridge. [He said,] 'As a former Navy SEAL, he has incredible leadership skills and an attitude of doing [whatever] it takes to win. 2023 Getty Images. I mean, Iyou know, on the bin Laden raid, obviously, he has very good knowledge. Just as important as mental toughness and physical fitness are to being a complete operator, spiritual resiliency is an often overlooked aspect of a healthy and effective warrior. Dam Neck should have rules, and those guys should be violating those rules sometimes, when it's called for, because the moral thing and the right thing and the legal thing are not always the same thing. Youve closed this ugly part of our commands history, and everyone gets away with it. Furthermore, the op tempo at the time was ridiculous and some DG dudes have killed more people than the electric chair. Organize, control, distribute and measure all of your digital content. Seems like DevGru did take actions to address those somewhat by putting the guys' names on that rock of shame blacklist. Thats their justice. Diviney, who was the officer in charge of the units operations department, was quietly allowed to retire, rather than face punishment. In the view of senior SEAL Team 6 leaders, Slabinski had lied. on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadnt done it? Their justice was to throw him out of the unit. They were going to, you know, spank him. Streamline your workflow with our best-in-class digital asset management system. Some openly talk about it and it's all bullshit, but there are some that actually join to do it. Age Press J to jump to the feed. It's a war crime to use certain kinds of bullets, but if you're going to drill a man's brains out onto the ground, who gives a fuck if it's an FMJ round doing it. AMY GOODMAN: What did Matt Bissonnette say? According to a former SEAL Team 6 leader and a SEAL Team 6 consultant, the unit caught a senior officer at the command committing travel fraud. MATTHEW COLE: Howard wasHoward is a very interesting individual. And, you know, I feltwe felt we had to put that in there to explain sort of the full narrative of what the values are, sort of how the values are off at SEAL Team 6. AMY GOODMAN: And President Obamas knowledge of all of this? And after he shifted positions inside SEAL Team 6, the people who followed him discovered his paperwork and realized he had beenhe had a long pattern of it. One of his men interpreted that remark as an order, as a direction to be given and followed through. His career should have been over, yet he was given a promotion. MATTHEW COLE: So, Congressman Zinke was a member of SEAL Team 6 as a mid-career officer and junior officer in the 1990s. There were, frankly, a whole host of criminal activity, excessive violence, brutality, unjustified killings, some of which were not criminal in nature or intent, but were certainly problematic and poor judgment. AMY GOODMAN: Lets go back to that clip, which we played in Part 1 of the conversation. Matthew Cole[emailprotected]theintercept.com@matthewacole. But there wasthis was not an isolated incident, is the sense that I have from talking to folks who were in the Navy with him. And, in fact, what had occurred was that one of the SEALs, a young SEAL operative on his first hostage rescue mission, had thrown a grenade and hadnt seen her, and initially had reported that he had thrown the grenade. According to two former SEAL Team 6 leaders, the practice was often documented in post-operation photos stored at the units Virginia Beach headquarters. In addition, SEAL Team 6 operators were canoeing dead or dying enemy targets firing bullets at close range to the top of the skull, splitting it open at the forehead and exposing the brain matter. Way back in the day, I remember being told that Paramedics driving ambulances in most jurisdictions had the right to violate every traffic law, but that they'd be held liable if they caused an accident and couldn't justify it. He hasin his 2014 campaign, to give him his side of it, he reported that he wrote a checkreturned a check to the Navy for something like $214, that covered a travel voucher that he did, and that he had been duly punished for this. It wasnt to bring him up on charges or suggest that he should retire, or provide any other sense of accountability. So, thats thethat really gets at the heart of what is at this story, which is that they knew what was going on. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. What everyone learns from this is that cover-ups work dont say anything bad about your teammates, keep quiet and well get through it. http://democracynow.org - We continue our conversation with reporter Matthew Cole about his stunning new expos published this week in The Intercept about . In the days after Takur Ghar, Slabinski and others in SEAL Team 6 sought payback for Roberts, Chapman, and the other casualties. We do not need investigations and outsiders meddling in our activities. By the militarys own standard, Slabinski should have been disqualified from the Medal of Honor for his actions in subsequent deployments to Afghanistan. And what I thinkwhat I took away from this investigation, what I hope happens is that the senior leaders of the command, who knew about it or should have known about it, are held to account from the standpoint of their ability to be promoted. AMY GOODMAN: And explain further what he did and how many times he did it. He had made a poor decision. The team guys that chose to walk down that road are certainly never coming back psychologically. But the announcement of the award for Britt Slabinski and the concurrent decision to give the same award to John Chapman, a deceased Air Force combat controller came after a yearslong campaign to recognize disputed events 16 years ago on a remote mountain in Afghanistan. All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device. Required fields are marked *, January 13, 2017 9 comments. We do not accept funding from advertising, underwriting or government agencies. According to two senior SEAL Team 6 sources, however, the leadership dynamic in Blue Squadron was a failure. And SEAL Team 6 said, How do you know where she is with such precision, in a place where weve been operating for years, and you just dont get that kind of fidelity in such short time? And the British government disclosed, according to my sources, to four sources, that she was working for MI6 and had been essentially working undercover for British intelligence, and so they had asome form of tracking on her and knew her exact location. Some of those accounts described a form of desecration known as canoeing, in which some SEAL Team 6 members fired bullets into dead or prone militants in an effort to split their skulls into a V shape. And that was another case where the punishment, you know, the way the command tried to hold itself accountable, was considered insufficient. Often documented in post-operation photos stored at the time was ridiculous and some DG dudes have more. 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