. A. J. Buckley as Special Warfare Operator First Class Percival "Sonny" Quinn a.k.a. His actions, if proven in a court of law, should be punished accordingly. If a SEAL couldnt justify the threat after a shooting, he was quietly removed from the unit. One retired senior SEAL Team 6 leader was there who led the unit during the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Conflicting accounts have emerged about how many other SEALs fired rounds into bin Ladens lifeless body, though one former SEAL Team 6 leader who viewed the body in Jalalabad told me the body appeared to be intact aside from the chest wound and obliterated face. But in the eyes of the enlisted SEALs of Red Team, Hyder had killed a man who didnt have to die. Robert J. O'Neill (born 10 April 1976) is a former United States Navy SEAL (1996-2012), TV news contributor, and author. The CIA team on the operation was angry because they had lost an opportunity to interrogate the suspected militants. They also had terrain advantage. It was just good therapy. After the raid, the White House struggled to describe the exact circumstances of bin Ladens death. Several months after the bin Laden raid, in October 2011, SEAL Team 6 held its annual stump muster, a reunion of current command members and their families, as well as past leaders and senior operators. By all accounts, Slabinski, a second-generation SEAL who joined Team 6 in 1993, was an excellent sniper and reconnaissance operator. Robert J. O'Neill. Hyder said that he and a few other SEALs began to bury the casualties near a ravine by piling rocks over them. Back at the base, hegave a speech to a group of analysts and nonoperational officers in which he told them that his bloody appearance was a demonstration of how a battlefield commander should lead. Its a question, why was he a threat? No cuts were visible in the photos, according to a military official who has reviewed the file. 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 command. He remains on active duty and has not responded to requests for comment. Heath fired once, hitting the man, sending him tumbling down the back side of the small rise. It was a hard transition initially--I went from Rock Star to Rock Bottom and had to, as you say, "re-define myself." This coupled with my survivor's guilt was the hardest . Theres no military purpose for it, a former Red Squadron operator told me. Photos: Facebook; airsoft-army.com; www.lightfigher.net; Facebook. There is and was no military reason whatsoever to split someones skull open with a single round, said a former SEAL Team 6 leader. Illustration: Attila Futaki for The Intercept. It was then that both Bissonnette and ONeill hung back on the stairway. Top left: Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette in2001. Blue Squadron was led at that time by Cmdr. The battle of Roberts Ridge, as it came to be known, has been frequently described in books and press accounts. No issues with that. The foreign fighters who suffered these V-shaped wounds were either killed in battle and later shot at close range or finished off with a security round while dying. After a joint British-American investigation into the operation identified the failures and recommended that only the SEAL who threw the grenade be punished, McRaven personally traveled to Dam Neck and determined that all three SEALs involved in the cover-up should be thrown out of SEAL Team 6. Richard Marcinko hoped that the number six would lead the Soviet military to inflate its assessment of the Navys SEALs. Vasely, who currently runs the operations divisions of JSOC. But the retired SEAL who was on the mission tells a different story. During a late-night raid at a northern Kunar compound, Silver Squadron operators killed several captors but accidentally killed Norgrove when an inexperienced SEAL threw a fragment grenade at one of the captors. Both should have remained on the second floor. In the room with four of the suspected insurgents, four SEALs counted down and canoed each sleeping man with a shot to the forehead. He was quietly removed from Team 6 and returned to a regular SEAL unit. How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters werent on the beat? Navy. Although the video had revealed no weapons, and the generals had only tenuous intelligence that the convoy was al Qaeda just suspicions based on the color of the mans flowing white garb and the deference others showed him they were nervous that bin Laden might get away again, as he had a few months earlier after the bombing of the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001. 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, according to four U.S. military and intelligence sources. After blowing open the iron gate blocking the main stairway, the lead assaulters, among them Bissonnette and ONeill, followed the operator known as Red up the stairs. He assumed it was a twisted act of misplaced revenge over the previous days events specifically, the gruesome death of Hyders teammate Neil Roberts. At that point, the second inquiry was commissioned by the SEAL Team 6 commanding officer, Pete Van Hooser. The publication came as a surprise to the Pentagon because Bissonnette had failed to clear it as required. Consequently, the SEALs initially reported to JSOC senior leaders that Norgrove had been killed by her captors. A retired noncommissioned officer said Howards encouragement and provision of Winkler hatchets was simply adding fuel to the fire. The squadrons commanding officer recorded it on a cellphone. Questions about battlefield atrocities persisted, though some excused these actions in the name of psychological warfare against the enemy. The hatchet was too intimate, too closely aligned with a tomahawk, to have been a good idea. The former SEAL, who himself had served in Red during his career, said that by giving operators the weapon of their battlefield persona, Howard sent an unmistakable message to his men: Use it. Iraq was a target rich environment, and Wyman allowed us to be more aggressive. According to several former SEAL Team 6 leaders, it was JSOC commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal who ordered the increased operational tempo and pushed SEAL Team 6, including Howard, to conduct more frequent raids to help wipe out the insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan. One former SEAL Team 6 senior leadersaid that he and others at the command were concerned that the scale and intensity of the violence in Iraq was so great that U.S. operators might be tempted to engage in retaliatory mutilations, a tactic al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency sometimes employed. One former SEAL Team 6 leader told me that he feared the practice would lead to members of the unit using the DNA samples as an excuse to mutilate and desecrate the dead. Among members of SEAL Team 6, this practice of desecrating enemy casualties was called canoeing., The canoeing photos are dramatic documentary evidence of the extreme and unnecessary violence that began to occur during multiple high-risk, exhausting, and traumatizing tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. The request was approved and Slabinski was promoted. Made up of no more than 200 SEAL operators when the Afghan war began, SEAL Team 6 was the lesser known of the U.S. militarys elite special mission units. These were family weapons, said the retired SEAL. Somebody else is making this up. The hatchet says, We dont care about the Geneva Conventions and that we are above the law and can do whatever we want., Critics inside the command were troubled by the combination of battlefield aggression and Howards lack of military discipline. The defense contractor, Atlantic Diving Supply, or ADS, has military supply and equipment contracts with SEAL Team 6, according to several former SEAL Team 6 operators, as well as other. The units name itself is part of an attempt to obscure U.S. capabilities. But in 1998, after intervention by a senior officer at Dam Neck, Howard was given a slot on Green Team. By then, there was no question about whether the attempted beheading had occurred; the question was why. 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. One result of the growth was that back in Virginia, the captain in command of the entire 300-SEAL force had far less oversight over tactical battlefield decisions. After the bodies were recovered, Hyder and the other members of Red Team were forced to reckon with the mutilation and near beheading of their fellow SEAL. Bottom right: Undated photo of Adm.Wyman Howard. They are taught to live and if necessary die for one another. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. 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. Im disappointed he didnt take a knee.. Our sense of whats right and whats wrong is warped. McRaven became the first Navy SEAL to lead JSOC and was already familiar with Dam Necks status as the disrespectful sibling in the U.S. special operations family. He kept moving toward us, so at 15 meters I put one round in him and he dropped. Top left: CIA paramilitary officer and former SEAL Team 6 member Richard Smethers. Well, they did. Had the daughters been wearing explosives, Red would have died while shielding his teammates from much of the blast. When it was commissioned, the Navy had only two SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) assault teams, but founding officer Cmdr. This was a crucial moment: Kill bin Laden now and the war could be over after only six months. The story of the bin Laden raid has been told and retold, but crucial details have never been made public. First, the SEALs would now be required to do call outs before entering a compound. It was really good therapy for everybody who was there.. THEY HAVE A GRAVESTONE/ROCK OF Shame at DEVGRU (Team 6 to the uninformed); they have a Grave Stone / Rock of Shame. Afghanistans Paktia province is about the size of New Hampshire, with 10,000-foot ridgelines and arid valleys with dried riverbeds below, nestled along the border with Pakistans tribal areas. A SEAL who spoke Arabic interviewed bin Ladens wives and daughters until he was able to get two positive identifications. The mission was code-named Objective Bull. Sitting with old friends, the retired SEAL was handed a ring-bound portfolio. . Top:Photo of helicopter onTakur Ghar. ONeill then fired two rounds. The SEALs with Hyder came out and separated into two groups. I shot him about 20 times in the legs, and every time youd kick him, er, shoot him, he would kick up, you could see his body twitching and all that. What do Navy SEALs think about fellow SEALs who cash in on the brand post-service? He was told that the photographs were part of SEAL Team 6s greatest hits of terrorists killed since 9/11. A third of the guys literally think theyre Apache warriors, then you had the Muslim way of removing a head. They soon discovered he had violated a series of Navy regulations. Red encountered and shot bin Ladens son just before the second floor landing, and the SEALs following behind him fanned out into the hallways and rooms on the second floor to search and secure the area. Guys are going out every night killing everything. Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward "Eddie" Gallagher, a highly decorated Navy SEAL, is fighting murder charges . Later, a JSOC officer watching drone footage of the operation noticed one of the SEALs throw an object that landed and exploded near where Norgroves body was found. Inside a heated tent, as many as 40 SEAL Team 6 operators asked themselves how they wanted to treat their fallen enemies. Slabinski has not responded to multiple queries and requests for comment, though he did deny to the New York Times in 2015 that he gave the illegal pre-mission guidance to kill all males. The retired SEAL, who spent the better part of two decades at the command, said he never asked Hyder why he mutilated the corpse. The former teammates both hit the press circuit, each telling reporters off the record that the other was a liar. Howards distribution of the hatchets worried several senior SEAL Team 6 members and some CIA paramilitary officers who worked with his squadron. Opening it up, he saw a collection of photographs, more than a dozen canoed enemy heads. One of those operators was Neil Roberts. 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. He claimed to the Times that he told his men, If any of you feel a need to do any retribution, you should call me. Slabinski says nothing in the Times story about Vasely ordering him to investigate the scene or the remark about a head on a platter. We didnt hit women or kids. It was disappointing. Instead, as Red began his ascent to the third floor, they followed him up, hoping to get in on the kill. The operations team leader believed that a suicide vest had been detonated by one of the captors, and two Silver Squadron operators initially withheldthe fact that a grenade had been thrown. 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. McRavens new ordersset off a struggle between the JSOC commander and SEAL Team 6s enlisted ranks that played out in a series of high-profile hostage rescues ordered by President Obama. Red came to a stop and fired two shots with his suppressed rifle. A Predator drone video feed filmed an enemy fighter standing over Robertss body for two minutes, trying to behead the dead American with a knife. The SEALs quickly intervened and made a deal with the CIA station in Kabul. Morale at Red Squadron fell apart shortly after the team returned to Virginia Beach from Afghanistan. In March 2013, Esquires profile of ONeill portrayed him as a humble quiet professional who after 16 years in the Navy would no longer have health insurance and was otherwise a downtrodden American hero. In keeping with Red Squadrons appropriation of Native American culture, Howard came up with the idea to bestow 14-inch hatchets on each SEAL who had a year of service in the squadron. The sniper team leader acted under his own emergency assault authority to kill the pirates as soon as all three could be taken out at the same time. One operator, who confirmed Howards remarks, added his own: Thats the business were in.. 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. Should they seek revenge for Roberts? Senior leaders at the command knew about the misconduct and did little to eradicate it. Simply put, the unit is an enlisted mafia, where tactics are driven by the expertise developed by the units enlisted assaulters, whose abilities and experience at making rapid threat decisions make up the commands core resource. Survivors began to flee the wreckage, and over the radio, Hyder and his team heard the order that the convoy was now in a free fire zone, allowing the Chinooks gunners to fire at anyone deemed a threat, regardless of whether they were armed. SEAL Team 6 headquarters at Dam Neck naval annex, Virginia Beach, Va., showing the 30-foot trident sculpted from a fragment of the World Trade Center. He was allowed to return to the regular SEAL teams. When investigators approached the operator accused of mutilating the dead fighter, he exercised his right to remain silentand his right to counsel. They each entered Red Squadron at the same time, and were both recipients of the Winkler hatchets handed out by Wyman Howard. The planning was so meticulous, one retired SEAL Team 6 leader told me, that a helicopter pilot warned mission planners that one of the two stealth Black Hawks they were to use would likely experience a vortex ring state, which means air disturbed by the rotors would prevent the helicopter from getting the lift necessary to continue hovering. McRaven, who did not respond to requests for comment, also held a meeting with a large group of senior officers under his command and said that SEAL Team 6 had effectively made lying to protect a teammate an honorable course of action, according to a person who attended the meeting. When he first arrived at Dam Neck, operators in the unit who had served in Vietnam warned him that war crimes and battlefield atrocities hung like a cloud over the entire unit even if only one SEAL had participated. In the ensuing 17-hour battle with the al Qaeda fighters, six more Americans were killed, and several were wounded. War crimes case expands to SEAL Team 6. These small teams of CIA, Seal Team 6, and Afghan commandos operated under the agencys Title 50 authority, which governs covert activities. After securing several detainees and cordoning the area, Hyder and his men waited for their helicopters to arrive and extract them. The FBI and NCIS investigated two members of Red Squadron and conducted polygraphs, but the money was never recovered and neither of the SEALs wascharged. No one prepared our guys for the collateral damage and the second- and third-order effects of this war, the former SEAL leader said. In that operation, Hyder led a team of Red operators on a nighttime mission to capture suspected al Qaeda militants in a compound. Moore told his deputy, Szymanski, who was in Afghanistan, to sort things out. Six days after Objective Bull, the Pentagon announced at a press conference that an airstrike had killed 14 people,who a spokesperson said were somehow affiliated with al Qaeda. Not provide them., During one Iraq deployment, Howard returned from a raid to an operations center with blood on his hatchet and his uniform. A few of his female relatives were nearby. Bissonnette left Red Squadron soon after the raid and retired from the Navy almost one year later. Moore did not respond to requests for comment. Ten days later, the internal JSOC investigation was closed. Thin and lanky, he was less physically imposing than many SEALs but was charismatic and dedicated. 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. It ruined some of these guys, said the former SEAL operator on the mission. Photos: www.navyseals.hu; Robert J. Fluegel/U.S. Bottom left:Screengrab from drone feed during the battle of Roberts Ridge. The distinction was crucial. Its a great way to explain it away, but they have the hatchets to flaunt the law. Ever since SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden, the SEALs who make up less than 5 percent of the nation's active-duty Special Operations forces have been catapulted into the spotlight,. In reality, its bullshit. According to multiple SEAL Team 6 sources, the events of that day set off a cascade of extraordinary violence. Slabinkski and others in the squadron had fallen under the influence of an obscure war novel, Devils Guard, published in 1971 by George Robert Elford. Canoeing them was funny.. Almost immediately, the issue that received the most scrutiny was the December 2007 attempted beheading. Peter Vasely with members of Blue Squadron in Afghanistan. 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