Free Republic

What really happened to Navy SEAL Team 6? In August 2011, the elite special forces unit suffered the worst battlefield calamity in its history. A Taliban fighter shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying 22 Navy SEAL Team 6 members in Afghanistan. All 38 persons on board — the Navy SEAL warriors, other U.S. military personnel and seven Afghan soldiers — were killed. Grieving family members have been demanding answers. They may now get some as Congress finally opens an investigation. Navy SEAL Team 6 has attained international prominence for one reason: They were responsible for killing Osama bin Laden. They...

Did the Obama administration put a target on the backs of members of Navy SEAL Team 6? This is the question that parents of slain SEALs are now asking — and rightly so. Forget Benghazi, the IRS, Eric H. Holder Jr. and the National Security Agency spying on U.S. citizens. Important as these scandals are, what happened to SEAL Team 6 could very well dwarf them. Our government betrayed America’s finest warriors. Navy SEAL Team 6 became a household name for their role in killing Osama bin Laden. On May 1, 2011, the country rightly celebrated the death of bin...

USA Today had a very different Title for the Report Pakistan's Mea Culpa******************************************************* Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit leaked the report on Monday, The unit's Josh Berstein filed this report The unilateral decision by the US to launch a military operation to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden on Pakistani territory constituted "an act of war", a Pakistani government investigation has found.The report of the Abbottabad Commission, which investigated the circumstances around the raid and how the al-Qaeda leader came to live in the country for nine years without apparently being detected, was exclusively released by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit on Monday.The report of...

10. Osama Bin Ladin Wanted Joe Biden Alive, because he knew that Biden was more dangerous to Americans if he remained in power. Bin Laden ordered his militants to look out for opportunities to assassinate President Obama or David Petraeus during any of their visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan.(SNIP)But Bin Laden warned them not to bother targeting Vice-President Joe Biden because "Biden is totally unprepared for that post [of president], which will lead the US into a crisis." 9. Senator Ted Cruz likes this license plate, and who can blame him? 8. Politico, Media Matters, and HuffPo (but I repeat...

Following the military raid on the Bin Laden compound in 2011, the Pakistani government set up a commission of inquiry to find out exactly what happened, if there were any lapses in leadership, and what follow-on actions should be taken. Today, Al Jazeera published the exclusive report from the "Abottobad Commission," which performed the investigation. Inside their report were many interesting details, but we've managed to get it down to just five. Bin Laden was once stopped by a cop for speeding in 2002, but nothing happened. From the report: "Maryam, of course had no occasion to speak to the...

A secret Pakistani report leaked online on Monday provides a series of stunning revelations about the life and death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, the long-time Al-Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 attacks against the United States in 2001.

Undated file picture of Saudi dissident Ossama Bin Ladin in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan. Ossama Bin Ladin speaks while siting in front of a bannar inscribed basic Islamic tenet in Afghanistan. The billionaire Bin Ladin, member of a family of wealthy Saudi construction tycoon, is blamed for two bomb blasts in his home country in 1995-96 that killed 24 US servicemen. "Hello, officer, would you like an autograph?" According to an official Pakistani government investigation into how, exactly, Osama bin Laden was able to hide inside the country for nine years, the Al Qaeda mastermind was once nearly caught...

Report: Bin Laden lived undetected in Pakistan for 9 years after 9/11 By Jeremy Herb - 07/08/13 11:45 AM ET Osama bin Laden lived in Pakistan for nine years at six different locations before he was killed in 2011 by Navy SEALs at his home in Abbottabad, according to a Pakistani commission report. The report, which was conducted in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid, was made public Monday by Al Jazeera. The 336-page report holds both Pakistani politicians and the military responsible for “gross incompetence” and “collective failures” that allowed bin Laden to live undetected in Pakistan. Al...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public. The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit that carried out the Osama Bin Laden raid and named the unit’s ground commander at a 2011 ceremony attended by Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal, according to a draft Pentagon inspector general’s report obtained by a watchdog group.

As we mentioned in an earlier editorial about her possible appointment as secretary of state, "In 1996, while serving as assistant secretary of state for African affairs under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Rice helped persuade President Clinton to rebuff Sudan's offer to turn Osama bin Laden, who was then living there, over to U.S. authorities." Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," told World Magazine in 2003 that Rice played a primary role in scuttling the deal in which Sudan could have turned over bin Laden to the U.S.

Note: Photo included with article. SNIPPET: "U.S. authorities have transferred Younis al-Mauritani, held in Afghanistan, to Mauritania, officials in the West African nation said on Saturday. Pakistan said in September 2011 it arrested al-Mauritani, better known in his homeland Mauritania as Youssouf Al Mauritani, during a joint operation with U.S. intelligence services." SNIPPET: "Pakistani military authorities said Al Mauritani was planning to attack U.S. economic interests including pipelines, hydro-electric dams and oil tankers when he was captured."

Loose talk by senior members of the Obama administration may have condemned Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor who assisted America's hunt for Osama bin Laden, to 33-year term in prison on trumped-up charges. According to Fox News, an official 357-page report by the Pakistani government that examined the security failures that allowed the U.S. to evade that country's defenses in the raid on May 2, 2011 concluded that Dr. Afridi was implicated by a "statement by the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was the CIA Director when May 2 happened, confirming the role of Dr. Afridi in making the...

It was the Obama administration that sealed the fate of the Pakistani doctor jailed for helping nail Usama Bin Laden, by divulging key details after the fact and dooming any chance Shakil Afridi's cover story could win his freedom, according to a confidential Pakistani report. When former Secretary of Defense and ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly acknowledged Afridi's role in the ruse which helped the CIA pinpoint Bin Laden's presence in an Abbottabad compound, any chance that Pakistani authorities could help him get out of the country vanished, according to what some have called Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission,...

President Obama is being accused of selectively quoting Usama bin Laden, by using a snippet of an anti-America screed to make it sound like Al Qaeda was breaking under the weight of the U.S. drone program. snip Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued that bin Laden's full quote has a far different meaning than that conveyed by the excerpt Obama cited last week. "When you look at the context of the whole statement, it doesn't support their story," he told FoxNews.com.

Osama Bin Laden 'blew himself up with suicide belt after Navy SEAL shot him in the thigh' claims terror leader's former bodyguard Osama Bin Laden was not 'shot dead by Navy SEALs but instead blew himself up with a suicide belt', it has been claimed. The terror leader's former bodyguard, Nabeel Naeem Abdul Fattah, has claimed that the al-Qaida chief triggered his explosive belt when US soldiers broke into his compound, killed two of his guards, and shot him in the thigh.

YES, THERE ARE SPOILERS.It’s generally a bad idea to go into darkness. You tend to bump into things and hurt yourself. You break things and people will get very cross.And yes, there are fans very cross at STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. To them, this is STAR TREK dumbed down. It’s looking backwards and recycling old storylines in a banal way. It shits on Gene Roddenberry’s legacy. It’s hollow fanservice. The counterargument is this is STAR TREK for the kids, for people who have never seen Star Trek or liked it before.I don’t hate STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. It’s a fast,...

Accompanying the families of these dead Navy SEAL Team 6 special operations servicemen will be retired military experts verifying their accounts of how and why the government is as much responsible for the deaths of their sons as is the Taliban.

I find it interesting that they kinda rhyme...

President Barack Obama wasn’t shy about invoking Osama bin Laden’s killing during the 2012 campaign — but when it comes to his larger approach to terrorism he’s pursued a policy of speaking softly and ordering lots of drone strikes. That delicate balance was shattered by the Boston Marathon attack, thrusting a downplayed anti-terror campaign into the spotlight and the issue of terrorism to the top of Obama’s second-term priorities, at least in the short term. Obama, whose 2008 election was propelled by opposition to the Iraq War, has jettisoned the clash-of-civilizations rhetoric favored by George W. Bush — even as...