Call Sign Extortion 17

by Don Brown

  When President Karzai was the first to announce the shoot-­down of Extortion 17 on August 6, 2011, and when he offered his “condolences” for the lives of the Americans killed, he was offering condolences over a mission that he was furious about to begin with, after Special Forces had accidentally killed his cousin, after he had been complaining for months about the presence of US Special Forces in Afghanistan.

  So would it be surprising if the Taliban had been tipped off about this mission? Remember, the unidentified Afghans who boarded Extortion 17 were loyal to President Karzai, who now, after the death of his own flesh and blood, had a special and personal grudge against US Special Forces. And like it or not, martyrdom is a badge of honor for Islamic militants.

  Under these circumstances, neither the Colt team nor the National Security subcommittee asked any questions about it? Were they afraid of the answer they might get? Or did they already know the answer and were trying to keep the public from learning the truth?

  Chapter 51

  Karzai and the Taliban Playing Footsie for Years

  Years before Extortion 17 was shot down, and long before his cousin had been killed by US Special Forces, Afghan president Hamid Karzai had been playing footsie with the Taliban, thinking of the day when US forces would be gone. Karzai had already been negotiating with the Taliban for at least four years at the time of the shoot-­down. President Karzai, as recently as June 2011, two months after his cousin was killed, admitted to personally being in peace talks with the Taliban and even claimed that the United States was negotiating with the Taliban as well. This was reported by Fox News on June 18, 2011. The US government did not confirm or deny Karzai’s claim that the United States was negotiating with the Taliban.

  Reuters reported on September 11, 2007 that Karzai was urging the Taliban to negotiate peace. On September 29, 2007, NBC reported that “President Hamid Karzai offered Saturday to meet personally with Taliban leader Mullah Omar for peace talks and give the militants a high position in a government ministry as a way to end the rising insurgency in Afghanistan.”

  On November 17, 2008, the Washington Post reported that, “Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that he would guarantee the security of Taliban chief Mohammad Omar if he decides to enter into talks.”

  On November 3, 2009, the UK Telegraph reported that Karzai offered an olive branch to his “Taliban brothers.”

  On January 29, 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that, “Afghan President Hamid Karzai told world leaders Thursday that he intends to reach out to the top echelons of the Taliban within a few weeks, accelerating a peace initiative that has troubled US and many other Western leaders.” According to the Times, the Obama Administration was “cool” to the Karzai plan on the Taliban.

  On October 6, 2010, the Washington Post reported that the Taliban was in “high-­level talks” with the Karzai government.

  On October 10, 2010, CNN reported that Karzai had “unofficial personal contacts” negotiating with the Taliban on his behalf. The next day, October 11, 2010, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Karzai himself was negotiating with the Taliban.

  Of course, all these reports, and many others, predated the reports in June of 2011 (two months before the shoot-­down) that both the United States and Afghanistan were negotiating with the Taliban.

  There is no question that the Afghan government had ties with the Taliban. They were talking with the Taliban and had been doing so for months. Karzai wanted to cozy up with the Taliban and make peace with them because once the United States left, he didn’t want the Taliban to be on the other side of him, militarily.

  Yet, despite this uncontroverted recent history of talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, no questions were asked of any Afghans in the Colt investigation, nothing was mentioned about this in the Colt Executive Summary, nothing was said by General Mattis, and no questions were asked about any of this in the congressional investigation.

  Reputable British newspapers reported that the Taliban were tipped off. This raises other questions. Was the Taliban in communication with someone inside the helicopter? Could there have been a tracking device on one of the seven unidentified Afghans aboard?

  These questions were glossed over and were, in fact, never even addressed in the Colt Report, again, as if the whole subject was the pink elephant in the room. No Afghans were interviewed. There was no follow-­up on the UK Daily Mail report to either confirm or deny its accuracy.

  Why would the Colt Report simply ignore this seemingly important tip? Why would the National Security subcommittee ignore it in questions on February 27, 2014, at a time when Extortion 17 family members were so desperate for answers? How could this question be ignored in the investigation? Is it because the Army doesn’t want the real truth exposed? A serious report alleging Taliban infiltration has to be followed up on.

  Moreover, despite the fact that Afghans were routinely being ordered on these missions, not one single Afghan was questioned about anything regarding the Extortion 17 mission.

  The pink elephant was left to roam.

  Chapter 52

  Another Dirty Secret: Afghans on Every American Mission

  Most Americans have no clue that for every US military mission executed in Afghanistan, because of evolving political agreements and evolving political correctness, the US made the Afghans privy to every mission executed. This means, despite the big-­time problem of Green-­on-­Blue violence and the warnings by former US ambassador Ryan Crocker, the Afghans were brought in and made a part of Top Secret details of each and every mission conducted in Afghanistan. That means the Afghans were tipped off on Top Secret details of the Extortion 17 mission.

  Consider the following stunning testimony from the J3 officer of the task force, beginning at page 6 of Exhibit 1 of the Colt Report on the extent of Afghan involvement in US mission planning.

  In this testimony, the J3 officer reveals the existence of a group known as the “OCG,” for “Operational Coordination Group,” made up largely of Afghans:

  Likewise you see on the left there the OCG. We made some real money with the OCG; they are the Operational Coordination Group and they assist us with the planning, and the vetting, and de-­confliction of our operation. Likewise once we are done executing the operation they are able to send the results report, the result of the operations up through their various administrates. They are made up of the ANA, Afghan National Army, the National Director for Security, as well as the National Police Force. They are here on site. They are here on site, but we also have them down at the regional level in RC-­South and in September we are going to stand up region site up in RC-­North.

  The next excerpt revealed that this Afghan “Operational Coordination Group” has visibility on “every operation.” Not only that, they knew about every US operation that went on in Afghanistan. Not only that, they were also “briefed” on every operation.

  IO-­DEP: So they have visibility on every operation?

  TF J3: Every operation.

  IO-­DEP: So they knew about the operations.

  TF J3: Oh yea[h].

  IO-­DEP: And they were briefed on it.

  The US media has not reported about Afghan knowledge of and involvement in these sensitive military operations. In fact, it isn’t even clear that the media is aware of it. Most of the American public is wholly unaware of this fact.

  Even more shocking was follow-­up testimony revealing that these Afghans were simply given authority to cancel or veto any US mission any time they wanted to. From Exhibit 1, pages 6 and 7 of the Colt Report:

  IO-­DEP: So they have the ability, do they have approval authority on that, to cancel an operation?

  TF J3: Technically they do, they don’t exercise it, but technically they do have authority.

  IO-­DEP: So they either task or approve the operation.

  TF J3: Yep. So aga
in another critical enabler as we move more towards Afghanization, as we move towards empowering Afghans, it will be a critical player as well, and we have—that we’re figuring those two units as well as the Task Force, those are our primary concerns with transition forward.

  This testimony showed that the Afghans actually approved all missions, and could even veto missions, even though they rarely did that.

  Think about the oddity of all this. You have an invading power, the United States, conquering a country, Afghanistan. Then after conquering the country and deposing of the Taliban-­supported government, while its forces still occupy the country (Afghanistan), and when the country is still the conquering power, at a time when the country is full of enemy insurgents anxious to kill forces from the conquering power, the conquering power cedes control and information over to the native forces of the conquering power, simply trusting, blindly that there will be no breaches of security from the native forces.

  That’s what the United States did—foolishly ceded control and access to Top Secret information to the Afghan government. A superpower gave up control and Top Secret operational planning to a government that it propped up and put in power, a country with which it has no longstanding history of trust.

  Part of the problem with this strategy of ceding control and providing Top Secret information to the Afghans is the ever-­uncertain volatility of radical Islam. With radical Islam being at the heart of the 9/11 attacks that started the Afghan war, and with radical Islam being responsible for countless bloody atrocities from AD 632 mercilessly extending into the twenty-­first century, in Europe, Russia, Africa and the United States, it becomes difficult to look under the radical veil and determine who your enemies are and who your friends are.

  This is especially true in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where some of the most violent Islamic atrocities have been reported. The numerous instances of Green-­on-­Blue violence, whereby Afghans who were supposed to be our friends simply shot Americans in the back, are well documented. Given Ambassador Crocker’s frank warnings about widespread Taliban infiltration into the Afghan military, the Green-­on-­Blue issues should have been on the minds of military planners at all times, with great care and great scrutiny given to the identity and philosophies of any Afghan boarding a US military aircraft undergoing combat operations.

  For whatever reason, that never happened with Extortion 17.

  Another problem with the US thinking here was that these Afghans, who were given inside information on every US mission, were under the operational command of President Hamid Karzai, who was opposed to US Special Forces operations, who was furious with the United States for continuing these missions, who on many occasions had argued that the United States should get out of Afghanistan, who was cozying up to the Taliban and having peace talks with them, and whose own cousin had been killed by Special Forces in the spring before Extortion 17 was shot down.

  As seen in the above testimony, part of the supporting theory behind all of this, at least from the Obama Administration’s standpoint, was that eventually control of the country would be turned over to the Karzai government.

  That’s all well and good. But it seems that the principal and pre-­eminent concern of the Administration should have been the safety of American forces. It seems unnecessary to make unreliable Afghan forces privy to Top Secret American military operations when the Afghan forces had no proven track record of reliability.

  Could this explain why, with sweeping powers to investigate, the Colt Report doesn’t contain any interviews of any Afghan forces whatsoever? Recall the original directive from General Mattis giving Brigadier General Colt very broad investigative powers, to “conduct your investigation in whatever matter you believe necessary and proper.”

  Yet, with such broad-­sweeping power to investigate and ask anybody anything he wanted about the investigation (unless his question called for a potentially incriminating answer), Colt’s sworn interviews did not include one single Afghan, even though (a) the Afghans were in on the mission to begin with; and (b) there were open, unanswered questions about the identity of the seven Afghans who illegally boarded the chopper; and (c) there was a documented history of Green-­on-­Blue violence whereby Afghan “allies” were killing Americans; and (d) the British press reported an Afghan governmental source saying the Taliban was specifically tipped off on the mission and the specific flight plan of Extortion 17.

  Either Colt was incompetent, or he was covering something up and did not want certain information in the record.

  Here’s a hint: Brigadier General Colt, a decorated Army Special Forces aviator, is not incompetent. Just the opposite is true. All signs point to a cover-­up. Remember, this pink elephant never came out of the jungle until the sergeant major’s telling comments in the Vaughn home in January of 2013 that “this was a very big deal.”

  This obvious attempt to hide information about the key security breach in this mission points to the conclusion that the Telegraph and Daily Mail reports are exactly right—that the Taliban knew the mission, knew the flight plan, and therefore, was waiting near the landing zone with RPGs loaded, ready to fire as the chopper approached to around 100 feet above the ground.

  The same conclusion can be drawn about the House National Security Subcommittee’s decision to ask no probing questions about the identity of the Afghans who boarded that chopper.

  If it leaked out that the Afghans tipped off the Taliban, leading to the deaths of the Extortion 17 crew, it could have proved highly embarrassing to high-­ranking US officials, which would have been especially undesirable in the election year of 2012.

  But Brigadier General Colt was, by all accounts, an honorable officer with a distinguished record. But still, he was just a one-­star general at the time of this investigation. That means he was one rank above a full-­bird colonel. That’s a very significant honor and achievement in one sense. But in another sense, it’s not.

  While a brigadier general commands tremendous respect among the troops, and rightly so, the fact is, the guys wearing four stars on their collars, and presidential appointees in the Pentagon are the ones who set policy.

  In this case, the case of Extortion 17, the narrative is this: “The shoot-­down of Extortion 17 is just one of those things that happens in the fog of war. It’s no one’s fault on the American side, and nothing could have been done to stop it.”

  That narrative, of course, is an incomplete narrative, and it is a false one. But despite the numerous inaccuracies and shortcomings pointed out in the Executive Summary of the Colt Report, inaccuracies that help paint this false narrative, it is likewise important to remember that the blame for the narrative should not be laid at the feet of Colt.

  The decision to paint such a false narrative would have come at a level above Colt. Remember, it was General Mattis, the four-­star commander of CENTCOM, who strapped Colt’s hands by limiting the investigation with the instructions on Article 31 matters.

  Whoever ordered the cover-­up—and it may have gone higher in the chain of command than Mattis—was more concerned about protecting someone from a court-­martial or guarding against the release of potentially embarrassing information than they were about getting to the bottom of what happened to Extortion 17.

  Chapter 53

  Shocking Discovery: Bullets in the Bodies

  Perhaps the most shocking revelation about this whole affair comes in information that has not yet been publicly revealed and was not in the Colt Report. It certainly wasn’t touched upon in any of the questions asked on February 27, 2014, by the House National Security Subcommittee.

  This author gained access to two autopsies of US Navy SEALs who died aboard Extortion 17. In both of the autopsies, bullets were found and removed from the bodies of the service members, immediately determined to be irrelevant by the pathologist, and then simply thrown away.

  How did the bullets get in
to the bodies of the SEALs?

  Why did the pathologist decide to throw the bullets away?

  Normally it is up to a prosecutor, not a pathologist, to ultimately determine what’s relevant or irrelevant in a crime scene investigation, and pathologists certainly should not throw away bullets found in a victim’s body. But, incredibly, that’s what happened here. In at least two cases—it is possible more than two bodies contained bullets (the author did not gain access to all the autopsies)—the pathologist unilaterally disposed of the bullets.

  The revelations that bullets were found in the bodies appeared on page 4 of both of these autopsies, with these words: “Cook-­off rounds recovered at autopsy are not retained by the AFMES because they are of no evidentiary value.”

  Then, in addition to the revelation about the “cook-­off rounds,” one of the two autopsies adds these words: “Four grey metal fragments are recovered from the torso and are retained by AFMES.”

  What is a cook-­off round? It is a bullet that has “cooked off,” and exploded, usually in a fire. The Armed Forces medical examiner found bullets in the bodies of two SEALs who died aboard Extortion 17.Sounds like a reasonable assumption, right? That the bullets got so hot in the fire that they actually fired off and somehow fired into the torsos of these men? Actually, such an assumption wouldn’t be reasonable at all.

  Here’s the classic example to demonstrate what happens with cook-­off rounds that aren’t inside the barrel of a gun.

  Assume there is a house that catches on fire. Inside the house, inside the master bedroom, say there is a box of .22 caliber bullets in the middle of the fire. Assume that the fire gets hot enough that the gunpowder is ignited inside those bullets. First off, it’s not a given that this will happen, as bullets do not always cook off, even in a fire. But even if the rounds do cook off in a box, they are for the most part harmless, unless they are in the barrel of a rifle or a gun. That’s because a bullet in a fire, even if it pops, has nowhere to go, unless it’s in a gun barrel.