Correcting the 'fairy tale:' a SEAL's account of how Osama bin Laden really died (dastardly)

Forget whatever you think you know about the night Osama bin Laden was killed. According to a former Navy SEAL who claims to have the inside track, the mangled tales told of that historic night have only now been corrected.

“It became obvious in the weeks evolving after the mission that the story that was getting put out there was not only untrue, but it was a really ugly farce of what did happen,” said Chuck Pfarrer, author of Seal Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden.

In an extensive interview with The Daily Caller, Pfarrer gave a detailed account of why he believes the record needed to be corrected, and why he set out to share the personal stories of the warriors who penetrated bin Laden’s long-secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Freelancer Nicholas Schmidle wrote that the SEALs had shot and blasted their way up floor-by-floor, finally cornering the bewildered Al-Qaida leader:

“The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. ‘There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,’ the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye.”

“The version of the 45-minute firefight, and the ground-up assault, and the cold-blooded murder on the third floor — that wasn’t the mission,” Pfarrer told TheDC.

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 that night,” Pfarrer told TheDC. “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.”

And in the days that followed, as politicians sought to thrust their identities into the details of the bin Laden kill, the tale began to grow out of control, said Pfarrer.

“The president made a statement, and as far as that goes, that was fine, that was the mission statement,” he explained. “But, soon after … politicians began leaking information from every orifice. And it was like a game of Chinese telephone. These guys didn’t know what they were talking about. Very few of them had even seen the video feed.”

Pfarrer suggests that much of the misinformation was likely born out of operational ignorance, even among those sitting in the White House.

“One of the things that happened was that there were only a handful of people who know about this mission,” he said. “On the civilian side, there were only a handful of people in the situation room who were watching the drone feed. They were looking at the roof of a building taken from a rotating aircraft at 35,000 feet.”

“None of those guys, not a single one of them, had a background in special operations, with the exception of General Webb who was sitting there running a laptop,” Pfarrer went on. “No one knew or could even imagine what was going on inside the building. They didn’t know.”

“There was an alternative feed going to CIA headquarters where Leon Panetta sat there with the communications brevity codes [a guide sheet for the mission's radio lingo] in his lap and a SEAL off-screen by his side to be able to tell him what was going on,” he said. “But these guys, none of them, really knew what they were looking at.”

Whether or not bin Laden resisted ultimately developed into a barrage of murky official and unofficial explanations in the days following. And statements from as high as then-CIA Director Leon Panetta offered confirmation that the endeavor was a “kill mission.”

“An order to go in and murder someone in their house is not a lawful order,” explained Pfarrer, who maintains that bin Laden would have been captured had he surrendered. “Unlike the Germans in World War II, if you’re a petty officer, a chief petty officer, a naval officer, and you’re giving an order to murder somebody, that’s an unlawful order.”

“There was a choice that night,” Pfarrer told TheDC. “There was a choice to keep the mission secret.” America, Pfarrer explained, could have left things alone for “weeks or months"

Well, for all of his "inside" information, Pfarrer is obviously wrong here. The crash and subsequent explosive degrading of “Razor 2″ less than a mile from Pakistan's "West Point" blew the mission cover.

Here's my personal experience:

I saw the first FR post on the raid that claimed a former Rumsfeld had gone to the media claiming UBL had been killed a week earlier, nothing about a helo crash. I immediately went to my email to ask a PakMil contact what they knew. But there in my inbox was an email from that contact asking what I knew about a helo crash and degrade and he gave me the coordinates and event time.

Seeing that the event time was only about six hours earlier, I emailed another PakMil contact to see why there was a Pak helo scramble when Pak helos rarely ever fly at night (thinking the Pak's were on a raid). They told me there was no scramble, no jets, no helos, no raid, nothing from the Pak's.

That's when I realized it had to be a SEAL raid, no other operators could pull that off. I then started a new FR post citing a Pak media post about the helo crash and degrade and linking it to a supposed UBL raid by us not in Abbotabad, but in the mountains to the east, that was our military's original cover story. I stated that the original FR post was right and wrong, UBL was targeted, but not a week earlier, only six hours earlier. I posted the location of the crash in Abbotabad and Abotabad media links.

The FR mods pulled my post claiming that it was a duplicate and thus blew FR's shot at the biggest news scoop ever. The only thing I could do was start throwing comments into the original story, which I did.

Eventually other FR posters put up articles substantiating my pulled post. This is all in FR's database and in my user posting archives.

Regarding the rest of Pfarrer's story:

“An order to go in and murder someone in their house is not a lawful order,” explained Pfarrer.

Excuse me Mr. Pfarrer killing the enemy is most certainly a lawful order, armed or not.

Pfarrer bills the story as “absolutely factual.” He told TheDC that in order to protect American interests, his book is “full of names that are made up, and it is full of bases that are not quite where they really should be.” “But the timeline of my events,” he cautions, “and the manner in which it happened is 100 percent accurate. And they’ll know that.”

Pfarrer is correct in that there was a roof top assault but flat wrong on "Razor 2" tactical tasks. It always was intended to land in the courtyard and conduct a ground assault. It did crash and a backup helo was brought in joining Razor 1 in extracting the operators, including CIA that were in the mission. Contrary to what Pfarrer is saying.

That is common sense, that you would have CIA along as actionable intel ages within minutes and CIA operators and analysts are a critical link to potentially finding targets for drone strikes within hours of the raid.

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