Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

I plan to read this book. I don't think Chuck Pfarrer has an agenda more than trying to tell the story via the Seal Team 6 point of view of which he was a member of back in the 1980s. His political leanings may be more right of center, but personally I see the book as him trying to honor his ST6 brethren and their story of this mission. I'll know more after I read it though.

lotek wrote:Ow that...

Well I guess that finding justice has nothing to do with political calculations, now does it ?

I don't think it ever has.

Sardaukar Capt wrote:I plan to read this book. I don't think Chuck Pfarrer has an agenda more than trying to tell the story via the Seal Team 6 point of view of which he was a member of back in the 1980s. His political leanings may be more right of center, but personally I see the book as him trying to honor his ST6 brethren and their story of this mission. I'll know more after I read it though.

I know that SAS operatives aren't allowed to talk about operations. I assume this also is the case for US Navy Seals. In that case Pfarrer doesn't have inside information. Can anybody confirm whether the Seals are silenced like the SAS?

Man, they show SEAL training and missions on The Military Channel all the time.

I assume the standard is, NO, don't talk about it and if you wanted to you'd have to get clearance.

Hell, you can buy their memiors at Walmart: http://www.walmart.com/ip/16215921" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

horseshit - from the article on this book, the agenda is to not only distance the Obama Administration from the "operation" itself,
but to actually insinuate (if not outright state) that the Administration "dropped the ball", turning this "victory" into an actual tactical defeat:

President Obama stepped up to a podium in the East Room of the White House that night to announce bin Laden’s death. That rapid announcement, explained Pfarrer, posed a major threat to U.S. national security .... “There was a choice to keep the mission secret.” America, Pfarrer explained, could have left things alone for “weeks or months … even though there was evidence left on the ground there … and use the intelligence and finish off al-Qaida.” .... But Obama’s announcement, he said, “rendered moot all of the intelligence that was gathered from the nexus of al-Qaida. The computer drives, the hard drives, the videocasettes, the CDs, the thumb drives, everything. Before that could even be looked through, the political decision was made to take credit for the operation.”

how much fucking clearer does that have to be ?

as to the rest of it .... hyperbole & hyped-up horseshit .... so the details of some secret illegal Federal Military Adventure in a supposed "allied"
country got garbled by the press & government mouthpieces ? WELL HOLEE-FUCK, BATMAN !!! stop the goddamn world & get the Pope on the horn ...

if you think the timing of this book and the prime thrust of its content is not a political weapon aimed at the incumbent Federal President ....
well ... I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong ...

edit to add:
not that I give a fuck, mind you ... I swear to g-d, I really can't even begin to bring myself to have any true feelings about the US Federals,
their War Machine(s), or the mindless drone citizens who wave the same flags their children are buried in .... so I care even less about the
media circus and opinion-management that accompanies the sham of anointing the next American Emperor .... but let's some of us anyway
call it like it is .... this book is (appears to be) no different than the Swift boat book, or Mike Moore's 9/11 movie, &etc; the truth of whatever
issue something like that contains is secondary to the timing for maximum political benefit of various Federal asshats ...

You know, it's the interrogation techniques used under the Bush Administration that led to Obama... OOPS, I mean Osama's location.

So I give credit for OBL's capture to Bush.

Freakzilla wrote:Man, they show SEAL training and missions on The Military Channel all the time.

I assume the standard is, NO, don't talk about it and if you wanted to you'd have to get clearance.

Hell, you can buy their memiors at Walmart: http://www.walmart.com/ip/16215921" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It was the same with the SAS until the British government were not that amused any more after Some books ( Bravo Two Zero and others ) were published after the members had left the service. New recruits have to sign an agreement with prohibits from talking and publishing ANY THING about the training and operations, even after they leave the regiment. Isn't it possible that some thing similar is now in form for the SEALS?

I'm sure it is possible. But I imagine it's more along the lines of certain people or events they can't talk about.

If this guy made such an agreement I'm sure he'll hear about it... but we may not.

Freakzilla wrote:You know, it's the interrogation techniques used under the Bush Administration that led to Obama... OOPS, I mean Osama's location.

So I give credit for OBL's capture to Bush.

Thought you might, but there were articles at the time that talked about intelligence coming from other methods that do not break the Geneva Convention.

I don't care what methods are used if it saves American lives (especially those of soldiers) or destroys our enemies.

Why should our hands be tied by rules that our enemies don't afford us?

So I'm understanding you correctly Freak, An U.S.American life is of more worth than An Other? Hiroshima anyone.

Hiroshima is a bad example to compare to this and an example of revisionist history. To NOT use the a-bomb would have been criminal on the part of Truman. The Japanese were not going to surrender with the threat of invasion. Several orders of magnitude more Japanese and American soldiers would have died if we had invaded their home island and had to take it all. And we would have had to take every inch of that island and kill god knows how many Japanese to do it. Look at one of the last battles, Saipan. The Japanese army fought to the last man and 20,000 Japanese civilians committed suicide rather than be "captured" by Americans. Anyone who tries to say this would not have happened on a much larger scale on the Japanese home island is just a moron. As horrible as dropping the Bomb was, it finally showed Japan what a terrible loss of life would happen if they didn't surrender. That they could be wiped out from a distance instead of having the chance to take a ton of Americans with them in the final battle. And it showed the world the true horror of what a nuclear war would be like in the future. I sometimes think if the example of Hiroshima and Nakasaki weren't there, how reluctant would either side have been in using nukes in Korea or the Cuba Missile Crisis.

That being said, I don't agree with some of the more brutal torture techniques being used. I personally think we should be above that and follow the Geneva convention from the beginning. On the flip side, I think a lot of the terrorists in Git-Mo should have been tried as war criminals in military tribunals per the GC and executed.

inhuien wrote:So I'm understanding you correctly Freak, An U.S.American life is of more worth than An Other? Hiroshima anyone.

Yeah, if you're making those kind of decisions.

Let's see, suffer a million American causualties invading Japan or kill 220,000 Japanese... drop the bomb.

I'd have dropped it if it was even.

If the choice is me or them, them.

Ach, your points are valid, but Freaks jingoistic bullshit got under my skin.

If someone kidnapped your child but you captured one of the kidnappers who knew where the kid was, would you torture them for information?

Freakzilla wrote:If someone kidnapped your child but you captured one of the kidnappers who knew where the kid was, would you torture them for information?

I would.

Reluctantly, I agree with Freak. It's easy to think that one can act humanely when one isn't under pressure. When push comes to shove our instincts kick in, no matter how we may rationalize them after the fact. No one is advocating gratuitous violence upon another human being; no human life is worth more than another in the face of an indifferent universe, but humanity is composed of people with arbitrary interests and subjective values. There are no universal human rights, just personal feelings and regional common sense. Hence, I would put the well being of my family above the physical integrity of someone who intends to harm them.

Unfortunately, there is no just and unequivocal way to do this. Mistakes that cost (and ruin) lives are inevitable.

Like FH showed us, sometimes people survived because they did (or had to do) horrible things. That was the curse of OM.

Time to move this one to the sewer forum.

Fine

Shukran!

Freakzilla wrote:Like FH showed us, sometimes people survived because they did (or had to do) horrible things. That was the curse of OM.

Yep, but he didn't condone atrocity. The unavoidability of violence is one thing, the manner in which it is executed is something else entirely.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself--a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.
- The Apocrypha of Muad'DIb

But where do we draw the line? What is considered atrocious may vary from culture to culture ...

Freakzilla wrote:If someone kidnapped your child but you captured one of the kidnappers who knew where the kid was, would you torture them for information?

If that were to happen I'd gladdy take a pair of plyers to their eyes, but we're not taking about the selfish actions of a desperate parent here but the actions and justifications of a country.

inhuien wrote:

Freakzilla wrote:If someone kidnapped your child but you captured one of the kidnappers who knew where the kid was, would you torture them for information?

If that were to happen I'd gladdy take a pair of plyers to their eyes, but we're not taking about the selfish actions of a desperate parent here but the actions and justifications of a country.

OK, what if your brother was a soldier and the information gathered from interogation prevented him from being killed?

If hooking a car battery up to a terrorist's testicles saves one US soldier's life, all I have to say is... red is positive, black is negative.

If it was a personal family thing for me I'd torture the hell out of someone, and then I'd expect to be held responsible for this and properly jailed/punished.

I wouldn't want to live in a country where my government thought it was acceptable to do the same without accepting the consequences, if we can't hold ourselves to a higher standard then we deserve whatever the terrorists send our way frankly, might be that they're in the right after all.

If people are going to break with the Geneva Convention there's nothing I can do to stop them, but they should be damned aware that they're now war criminals and should pay the consequences.

There's two different debates here, the moral one and the legal one. The moral one is murky (I say take the high road but I'm not responsible for people's lives so my opinion is less valid I think), but the legal one is more clear - everyone involved should be tried as war criminals.

Spec-Ops Command: SEAL raid book 'a lie'


By KIMBERLY DOZIER - AP Intelligence Writer | AP – 5 hrs ago

..WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military is denouncing a former Navy SEAL's book that claims to describe the "real" version of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

"It's just not true," U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Col. Tim Nye said. "It's not how it happened."

Laden with conspiracy theories and attacks on the Obama White House, Chuck Pfarrer's "SEAL Target Geronimo" claims an alternative version of the raid in which the SEAL team shot bin Laden within 90 seconds of arriving at the Pakistan compound where the al-Qaida mastermind was holed up.

Pfarrer claims the White House issued a fictional and damaging account of the raid that made the SEALs looks inept. He says President Barack Obama's speedy acknowledgement of the raid was a craven political move that rendered much of the intelligence gathered on the raid useless.

Pfarrer's account broke into Amazon's top 20 book sales list last week, and Pfarrer has appeared on Fox News, CNN and in other venues to promote it.

"I have truth on my side," Pfarrer said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I spoke to the guys on the ground and in the secondary bird," he said, referring to the aircraft full of a second SEAL team that was there to rescue the first if it came under attack so far inside Pakistan's borders.

"This is a fabrication," Nye countered, issuing an on-the-record denial on behalf of Navy SEAL Adm. Bill McRaven, who took command of all special operations this summer.

In his previous role, McRaven executed the raid in May as head of the military's elite Joint Special Operations Command. Nye said McRaven was concerned the book would lead Americans to doubt the administration's version of events. He also disputed Pfarrer's portrayal of friction between the CIA and the military special operations forces who carried out the raid.

"We have never come forward and gone after an author and say that is a lie," Nye said. "That tells you how far off the mark we believe this book is."

Nye says Pfarrer had no access to any troops connected to the mission. He said there will be no investigation into whether individual SEALs spoke to Pfarrer because his account is so off-base.

Among his other claims, Pfarrer insists the stealth helicopter that the White House said crashed within moments of launching the raid — and local Pakistanis reported hearing crash — actually crashed later. He says the SEALs were able to launch their raid as they'd planned it all along, landing on top of the building while another team surged from below.

Pfarrer defended the book as a patriotic way to laud the "heroes of the bin Laden mission." He insists the money he earns will barely cover his medical bills for a long and losing battle with colon cancer. His ruddy complexion and expansive girth bely an illness the personable Pfarrer says has now spread to his lungs.

Pfarrer claims he is still part of the fighting SEAL network, even intimating that he was part of the bin Laden raid preparation.

"In the weeks and months leading up to Neptune's Spear (the code name for the bin Laden mission), it was my privilege to help troops and platoons train for submissions and run parallel HVT (high-value target) missions," Pfarrer writes.

"That is categorically incorrect," spokesman Nye said of the passage. "He was not involved in mission planning, execution or close mission analysis."

Two senior military officials with knowledge of the raid seconded that denial. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Pfarrer deflected that criticism, saying he was conducting training for the SEAL Team 6's parent organization, the Naval Special Warfare Command, through his defense security company Acme Ballistics. He refused to describe how closely such training was related to the raid, saying the contracts are classified.

That is Pfarrer's frequent refrain when asked for proof of his controversial claims: that the accounts are from a top secret world only he has access to and that a reader must take his word on faith.

But Pfarrer gets a multitude of facts wrong in describing events that are part of the public record. For instance, Pfarrer states that Obama appointed McRaven as the first Navy SEAL to head JSOC in April of this year. McRaven was actually appointed to that post in early 2008 by President George W. Bush. He states that the Army Special Forces Green Berets were established in 1962, instead of 1952. When U.S. special operations forces rehearsed for the famous Son Tay Raid in Vietnam in 1970, they trained at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, not Offutt in Nebraska.

And a jet bombing run, not a drone strike, killed Iraqi al-Qaida ringleader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2006.

A series of special operations leaders have stepped forward to say Pfarrer is at best misinformed and at worst a profiteering self-promoter.

"The reaction is stunning, chagrined, disappointment," said retired SEAL Rear Adm. George Worthington.

"This is exactly the sort of thing the special operations community does not need," added retired Navy SEAL Capt. Rick Woolard, known for commanding some of the most elite units, and a contemporary of Pfarrer's.

Pfarrer has made a two-decade career out of his roughly eight years with the SEALs. After retiring as a lieutenant in the late 1980s he co-wrote the screenplay for the 1990 film "Navy Seals," starring Charlie Sheen. Two books about SEALs followed. His current book traces his own history with the unit, and finishes with two chapters on the raid. It includes romantic descriptions of the SEAL raiders.

"When a room is entered, SEALs go into a state like satori — a wide-awake Zen consciousness," Pfarrer wrote. "All of the SEAL's senses are magnified."

..