THE COMMANDER OF SEAL Team 6 has circulated a memo, obtained by The Intercept, to members of the command in response to The Intercept’s two-year investigation into the unit’s war crimes and subsequent cover-ups. In the memo, the commander claimed the article was “full of grievous, accusatory claims” and allegations that had been “previously investigated and determined to be not substantiated.”
“The article alleges involvement of ST-6 personnel in law of armed conflict violations, including accusations of cover up by senior officials,” the memo continued. “The 41-page online article goes into great detail on various operations naming specific people and operations dating back to 2002 up to 2011.”
“While this article appears damning on many members of our team and most likely evokes strong emotions,” the commander wrote, “we must be mindful about what a journalist can do who latches on to unfounded claims and is willing to print based on limited evidence.”
The commander’s letter does not dispute any facts or details in our January 10 report, which describes, in detail, accounts provided by former SEAL Team 6 leaders of what they believed were war crimes committed by members of the unit in Afghanistan and Iraq that were largely ignored or covered up by senior officers.
The memo obtained by The Intercept advised military personnel to avoid commenting on or acknowledging “The Crimes of SEAL Team 6,” even “among yourselves or with others via personal electronic devices,” in order to “maintain the highest OPSEC posture and limit the spread of the article.”
The current commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 is a longtime member of the unit and was the senior officer on the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The Intercept is not publishing his name because he is an active-duty member of the unit.
The Intercept’s investigation was the result of interviews with 18 former and current members of SEAL Team 6, as well as other military and intelligence officials who served with or investigated the unit. 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. According to two former SEAL Team 6 leaders, the practice was often documented in post-operation photos stored at the unit’s Virginia Beach headquarters.
SEAL Team 6’s leadership has failed to hold its command and itself accountable for war crimes during the post-9/11 wars, according to former SEAL Team 6 leaders. The former and current SEALs also described other serious misconduct that occurred more recently.
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. The officer, Cmdr. Richard Diviney, claimed weekend trips to spend time with NFL quarterback Drew Brees, a college classmate, as work and training trips. Diviney, who was the officer in charge of the unit’s operations department, was quietly allowed to retire, rather than face punishment. Diviney declined to comment.
SEAL Team 6 Responds to Allegations of its War Crimes
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is the only accusation the desecration of dead combatants?
it is unneeded shooting bullets into a dead enemies head trying to split their skull into a 'V'… but I mean, is that really a scandalous war crime?
It honestly doesnt evoke much emotion from me when I hear about already dead people getting mutilated. Granted, thats what psychopaths do, at least its happening to somebody whos already dead
Sounds like something I'd do if I'd racked up a lot of bodies and ill will towards them tbh.
Ya idk. Being put thru war and seeing your buddies get killed will prolly drive anyone to do some weird, psychopath shit.
On a side note, i was reading about this, theres worse allegations than mutilation of dead bodies.
apparantly a short time before they took out Osama, there was a convoy they saw with a drone they thought Osama was on, due to a tall male's long white garbs.
The seals and military bombed this convoy and went down and shot everyone who was still alive.
Turned out it was a family going to a wedding. the dead contained many women and children, and of course, no Osama
Yeah but something something Benghazi… she left them to die.
Also reading that a certain Seal made so-called 'war-porn' videos, where he would video tape himself taunting dying insurgents as they bled out.
He would take these videos back to Bagram and play them for the military personnel, and crack jokes while they watched the person bleed out.
This guy was aparantly forced out of the seals a year later for being drunk and pistol whipping a fellow seal (lol, seal clubbing?)
Well it eventually was Osama.
Kill'em all and let God sort it out works again! Checkmate terrorists!
Only 4 people died in Benghazi, too.
Fuck the two CIA agents/ex seals…
But idk, the ambassador and the intelligence officer just have desk jobs. they dindu nuffin
checked.
wish it was:
Everything these people do makes me want them to like,
die slowly
It's funny, because our SAS was in shit recently because one of them broke the code about war crimes and admitted to shooting dying soldiers when they were asking for it/disemboweled/in the middle of the desert.
Out of these two cases, the seals are actually legally in the right.
This may not be the case, but you may know more about it than I do. There's often quite the overlap between ambassadors, intelligence officers, CIA and ex-special ops.
Mercy killings are war crimes? i didnt know that
this is a valid point. All i know is what wikipedia tells me, which is that the embassador was a career lawyer and diplomat, while the intelligence officer had served in the air force as a radio mechanic
huh. also accoridng to wikipedia's article on the intelligence officer:
Yeah it's a serious no-no. They're classed as POWs and you're supposed to get them a medevac. Obviously when you're sneaking around behind enemy lines this is not really a realistic expectation.
Never trust a goon.
It's not a war crime but it certainly shines a light on their mentality and the culture these guys are steeped in. Most Americans look at SEALS and other SOF members like virtuous freedom fighters. Scalping and skinning your enemies doesn't really align with that propaganda.
This is true. imho, Seals are steroid injected thugs working for a state sponsored mafia
I think that's the reason why it is considered a war crime: letting soldiers mutilate the dead contribute to a dehumanization process that might end up having much worse consequences than a few desecrated bodies.
Yeah that's totally not a recipe for disaster.
Agreed. If you read the article you can see the way this shit escalated and became the norm. The other problem is that these same guys wind up in leadership positions which just serves to normalize the behavior even further.
I for one, never actually thought that Seal team 6 was responsible for taking out Osama.
There were no photos of Osamas body (the one circulating was a fake. a high quality fake) and they claimed his body was dumped at sea.
Remember, that the CIA and the US govt are the powers originally responisble for putting Osama into power by funding the Mujahideen in the 70's and 80's and early 90's.
Osama was controlled opposition. He was used to gather these 'terrorists' in order to further America's goals of imperialism…. Osama ran the 'enemy' of America, but he secretly did it for America.
He also took responsibility for the 2001 WTC attacks, which were in reality, sponsored by secret interests in the US gov't and carried out by 'useful idiots'… this allowed the US to invade many countries.
The only people who could verify that the so-called Osama raid was a hoax are the highest members of the gov't (Obama, joint chiefs of staff) as well as the Seal team itself.
The seal team who carried out the attack all died at the same time in a helicpoter crash in 2011, leaving nobody outside of the political realm to ever tell the tale.
You know that means you just kill everyone. "Kill them all, God will know his own."
So if there is a hostage situation just kill everyone and then God will take his people into heaven. That doesn't sound crazy at all.
Exactly. You kill everyone who looks like Osama, eventually one of them is Osama.
Or in the case of russia, if there is a hostage situation, just gas the entire building with a chemical incapacitating agent and then storm the building while everyone is unable to fight back.
>en.wikipedia.org
Yeah because the SEALs mutilated his face by canoeing his skull.
Nope. That was a different squadron in SEAL team 6 (Gold squad). Red squadron carried out the Osama attack and they are mostly all alive. One of them wrote a book about it and was sued by the US government.
Just remember to bring the antidote!
can you give me a source?
Ive read things such as:
“…the attorney representing three families of Navy SEAL Team Six Special Forces members who were part of the Bin Laden raid in May of 2011, and were killed in a helicopter crash along with 26 others in August of 2011 in Afghanistan.”
Honestly, if they get the whole chemical incapacitation thing right, its not bad way to deal with hostage situtations
Osama was a financial backer of the Mujahideen during the 80's. Ayman al-Zawahri was in command and he didn't link up directly with bin Laden until the mid 90's. That whole narrative is completely removed from reality. The US government does plenty of fucked up shit already that we don't need to peddle myths.
The guy was obviously being ironic.
I'm on mobile but the information is out there. Over 50 SEALs took part in the raid so it's possible that some got transferred to a different squadron in the interim. Total sidenote but I actually went to high school with one of the guys who died in the crash.
>en.wikipedia.org
Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken;[2] funding began with $20–$30 million per year in 1980 and rose to $630 million per year in 1987.[1] Funding continued after 1989 as the mujahideen battled the forces of Mohammad Najibullah's PDPA during the civil war in Afghanistan (1989–1992).[3]
Now that you know about one of the most expensive CIA operations ever undertaken, operation cyclone, hopefully you will stop saying that the CIA didnt fund the mujahideen
When did I deny that the US was funding the Mujahideen? That's a fact. What's not a fact is that the US was working with Osama during that period. Osama was also funding the Afghans but he wasn't a CIA stooge. Even Ayman al-Zawahri denies the link during the Russian-Afghan war in his book.
You refuted this claim:
with this claim:
The above claim was when you denied the US was funding the mujahideen
also, you stated:
/argument
No. I denied that the US put Osama into power.
Saying that Osama was a financial backer isn't denying that the US wasn't also funding them. Organizations can take money from multiple sources.
The narrative that the US put Osama into power is completely removed from reality. Again I never denied the US was funding the Afghans.