Posted on 05/06/2009 11:24:09 AM PDT by Starman417
Background Joe Miller at Annenberg FactCheck says he was told by the Pentagon that the USS Bainbridge arrived at the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama on Friday February 10th and that authorization to send in the first SEAL team came at 8:00PM that night, rebutting a purported word-of-sailor report of a 36 hour delay. But news reports on the 9th said that the Bainbridge actually arrived before dawn local time on THURSDAY. Since 8:00 P.M. Friday was 4:00AM Saturday in Somalia, that would make the actual delay, local time to local time, about 48 hours.
Bill Gertz at the Washington Times also talked to the Pentagon, but his report uses slightly different language than Miller's, relating that the Bainbridge “took charge” of the hijack scene on April 10th without being specific about when it arrived on the scene. Could the Pentagon have been making a distinction between arriving on the scene and taking control?
I thought that unlikely, given that a spokesman for the Maersk Alabama said on the 9th that the Navy took immediate control. As I quoted in my “Pentagon lied” post:
"When the Navy comes in, they're in charge," Speers told CNN.
Gertz says that the Pentagon WAS making a distinction between arriving on scene and taking control
Via email, from Bill Gertz:
April 10 was when the Pentagon was put in charge of the operation, which is different than arriving on the scene. Prior to that point, the owner of the ship was in charge and was advocating a money-for-hostage deal.
If this is what Gertz was told, why wasn’t it in his article? And why didn’t he question it, given that Maertz itself denied staying in control after the Navy arrived?
If Gertz let his readers know that the USS Bainbridge arrived on scene early on the 9th, then the Pentagon claim that the Captain of the Bainbridge waited a full day to ask for additional resource that he obviously might need becomes implausible. That grounds for skepticism should have been exposed, but Gertz covered it up.
Larry Johnson’s intel
Larry Johnson has some important information about the timeline, and an interesting take. First the intel (via email):
The Spec Ops folks received the first notice of the pirate attack around 8am edt on 8 April. They went forward with a recommendation to SOCOM [Special Operations Command]. SOCOM in turned made a recommendation to SecDef and it hung there in limbo until Friday at around 11 am edt.
At 8:00 AM edt on the 8th, the Bainbridge would have en route to the Maersk Alabama, but Johnson says that SOCOM was not responding to any request for resources from Bainbridge Captain Frank Castellano, since Castellano did not yet have any more information about the hostage situation than CENTCOM did. Rather, SOCOM was just reacting to the information then available (that the crew had regained control of the Maersk Alabama, and that the pirates had Captain Philips on a lifeboat).
Thus as far as Captain Castellano initiating his own request for special resources (a key point in both the Pentagon timeline and the SEAL-pals timeline), it seems the critical point would be the Bainbridge’s arrival at the Maersk Alabama, allowing Castellano to verify the situation for himself. Even if the Navy DID wait until the next day to officially “take control,” there was no reason for Castellano to delay in requesting resources that he obviously might need.
In the larger picture, Johnson’s intel makes Castellano’s role seem a bit of a red herring. The recommendation to send the SEAL teams was already put forward by SOCOM on Wednesday, and Johnson says that Castellano would not have been included in the discussions about whether to act on that recommendation, which would be undertaken at the Joint Chiefs/SecDef level. Once Castellano had verified what the Joint Chiefs had heard from the crew of the Maersk Alabama on Wednesday, they didn’t need Castellano to tell them what resources were called for. Castellano may well have made requests, but this seems almost irrelevant. The actual decision-makers already knew what he knew and they already had SOCOM’s recommendations.
From this point of view, the SEAL-pals account seems to have been a bit of good-luck for the Obama-defenders at the Pentagon. It put the focus on when Castellano made his request, which whenever it actually occurred would have been well after the Joint Chiefs' deliberations about sending in the SEALs actually began (back on Wednesday morning).
At the other end, Johnson says that the authorization to deploy the Kenya-based SEAL team came at 11:00 AM edt Friday, not 8:00 PM, as Joe Miller’s Pentagon source claimed. That again makes the real delay about 2 days: from Wednesday morning to Friday morning. (Add another 12 hours for the authorization of the SEAL sniper team, which was likely part of the original SOCOM recommendation.)
Does this mean that somebody did not want the Special Operations option to be available on scene?
I put that question directly to Johnson, because that is how it looks from the outside. Absent a pressing need for SEAL teams elsewhere, why in the world would there be ANY delay in deploying these teams to where they MIGHT be critical for a successful mission?
Deploying the teams and using them are two different things. If they turn out not to be needed, don’t use them. They don’t do any harm. Wouldn’t the only reason to keep the teams off-site be if somebody did not want the Special Operations option to even be available?
Johnson says no, that turf-battles ALWAYS happen, and that it is wrong to read so much into them:
The delay is quite normal. During the heat of the moment things are not always crystal clear. Then you get the turf battle of who is in charge and which agency is best positioned to help. Please recall that during the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 there was a huge fight at the scene between FBI, ATF, Port Authority Police and NYPD over who was in charge. It is just human nature.
This explanation for the delay sounds plausible, especially given that this was the first hijacking of an American-flagged vessel since forever, so the jurisdictional issues it raised had yet to be confronted. Johnson cites a host of agencies with a jurisdictional dog in the Maersk Alabama fight: “DOD, Homeland Security (because they are in charge of Coast Guard), State, CIA, DOJ and FBI.”
The outcome is bad: a resource that obviously might be needed should not be kept off-scene by turf battles, yet it happens. To attribute this to a particular agenda, we would have to have details about the positions the different parties were taking.
(Excerpt) Read more at Flopping Aces ...
I would believe the lowest ranking sailor on that ship before I’d believe the sleezy POTUS...oops, TOTUS.
unless it went terribly wrong...then the fingers would have been pointing the other way
I’m with you.
FactCheck would never lie to us, would they? I mean, anyone the Tooth Fairy vouches for has to be OK...
SWEET!! Can we hand out more of these to the correct people. No fake hole in theirs.
Someboby better market this hat! It is PERFECT!!
Is this ex-CIA guy larry Johnson?
ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of House and Senate Democrats on Friday, where he made similar criticisms of the president. A self-described Republican, Johnson argued that the failure of the president to fire Rove and anyone else supposedly involved in the leak had severely damaged national security and would certainly hamper future efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror.
He is scum
Thanks for posting this...worthy of much discussion.
That is very bad for our country and our enemies such as Al Qaeda terrorists, Taliban terrorists, North Korean communist regime, the Iranian terrorist regime saw this extreme weakness by Obama and they are greatly emboldened by this. Because of this they are going to cause us a lot of harm.
This situation would have been solved in the first few hours by dropping a Navy Seal team there who would have killed the pirates in seconds. Remember that it took hours of fighting between the unarmed crew and the four pirates and at the end the unarmed crew won and took control of the ship. We were following the events right here on FR and that would have been plenty of time to dispatch a Navy Seal team to solve the problem but it did not happen because of Obama great weakness.
The temperature is still below the dew point. The fog of battle still obscures a clear view.
In the end, the whole operation depended on the judgement of the Seals and the Capt of the Bainbridge. They knew that they were on the hook, but had the courage to do the right thing. They are double hero’s for risking their careers as well.
Let’s forget it. It may matter in the future and now the military knows that they are on their own. May be better that way. Any more noise on this subject may just hurt the people we love.
.....Any more noise on this subject may just hurt the people we love......
Amen
You can't engage in armed conflict and win when you have technical rules of engagement and you have to consult with JAG, or you have a TOTUS who is scared with a Ballet dancer for Chief of Staff and Axelrod who had Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, and Tom Vilsack—as past clients. Also remember it takes 36 to 48 hours for poll results.
bttt
Just practicing my Navy family pings!!
If you want on the Navy family ping list, please Freepmail me so I won’t miss it
Thanks. I read the others too.
Perhaps the real time line will never be established, as well as who screwed the pooch. At least we can salute our SEAL Team and support group (Navy-other unnamed) for a swift well done job once the thumb went up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.