Author Topic: The "Afghan Benghazi": Extortion 17, Betraying Seal Team 6  (Read 884 times)

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famousdayandyear

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http://news.investors.com/print/ibd-editorials/052813-657928-extortion-17-is-our-afghanistan-benghazi.aspx

Afghan Benghazi: Extortion 17, Betraying Seal Team 6
Posted 06:55 PM ET

War On Terror: As in Benghazi, we still don't know the full story of the greatest single loss in Afghanistan and the largest SEAL loss ever — members of a renowned group outed by a loose-lipped vice president.

It's not officially on the growing list of Obama administration scandals, but earlier this month families of Navy SEAL Team 6 members killed in a disastrous August 2011 shoot-down of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan gathered at the National Press Club asking for answers, calling for a congressional investigation and blaming their government for the tragedy, the indifference and the secrecy that followed.

Extortion 17 was the call sign of a special operations mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 6, 2011, that responded to an Army Ranger unit engaged in a firefight with the Taliban and in need of backup.

The Chinook helicopter carrying the rescue team was shot down by a Taliban-owned rocket-propelled grenade over the Wardak Province on Aug. 6, 2011, killing 38, including 30 Americans and 15 members of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden just three months prior.

The shoot-down was described at the time as a "lucky shot," but the families of the dead SEALs believe that, like Benghazi, it was a pre-planned operation of revenge facilitated by a government that put them in harm's way without adequate support and with a bull's-eye painted on their backs.

At a Pentagon briefing on Monday, May 2, 2011, a senior defense official was asked if it was a Navy SEAL team that found and killed the world's most wanted man. The terse and proper response was: "Not going to comment on units or numbers."

Then on May 3, Vice President Joe Biden got up to speak at a dinner at Washington's Ritz Carlton Hotel marking the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Council to spill the beans about Adm. James Stavridis and "the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday."

From that moment, the families believe, the Taliban looked for an opportunity for revenge, and a government more concerned with politically correct rules of engagement than victory helped them get it.

Doug Hamburger, whose son Patrick was killed, called the incident an "ambush" that could have been prevented.

Karen Vaughn says she wants to know why her son Aaron and his team were not using special operations aircraft that have defenses in place to help allow helicopters to go deep behind enemy lines.

The night her son Aaron died, he was in a helicopter that was built in the 1960s and last retrofitted in 1985.

Like Benghazi, where rescue teams were ordered to "stand down," suppressive fire was forbidden as the Chinook flew into disaster.

The rules of engagement prevented suppressive fire from being aimed at the tower firing on the Chinook.

Why?

Billy Vaughn, Aaron Vaughn's father, recalled how a three-star admiral explained this breach to the grieving families: U.S. forces couldn't fire back, the admiral said, because "we want to win hearts and minds."

Like that other war micro-managed by politicians, Vietnam? Perhaps that explains why there was no gunship escort that night.

"We go to Dover to see bodies, and we're all in the hangar down there," Charles Strange, father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, recalled. "And President Obama comes up to me and he says, 'Mr. Strange' — and he grabs me by the shoulders — 'Michael changed the way America lives.' I grabbed Mr. President by the shoulders and I said: 'I don't need to know about my son. I need to know what happened, Mr. President.'"

Charles Strange says the president told him. "Mr. Strange, we're going to look into this very, very, very deep." Since then, Strange says, "I haven't heard nothing." As with Benghazi, neither have we.