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Couldn't help it. I ordered this from Amazon and read it in one sitting.
I know there's a lot of controversy about whether or not the author should have written this book, given his position as a member of "SEAL Team 6".I've known just a couple of spec ops guys, (neither of them were SEALs) and they certainly weren't the kiss and tell types. But in this instance, with this mission, and given just how it was told, I'm not so sure that the publication of this book was a bad thing.
I found nothing in this book that jumped out as anything that would be considered classified. A lot of the info had already been reported by the media via White House Press Releases. Hell, he didn't even mention that the choppers they used to infil were "stealth" choppers, although that was common knowledge which even the White House verified.
The author denies that it was a kill mission...he states they were told to bring Bin Laden back if offered no resistance. But the tone of the book makes it pretty clear (to me, anyway) that nobody had any intention of doing that. To borrow a phrase from Martha Stewart, "...and that's a good thing." At least as far as I'm concerned. For instance, he relates speaking to the CIA operative who was primarily responsible for locating OBL prior to the mission. He asks her if she wanted to see the body when they got back. She backed away from that, and the author told that she needed to...she just spent five years tracking him down.
I wonder if it's the fact that the book confirms that OBL was unarmed when he was killed (and that upon entering the room, a couple of other operators put a few more rounds through his twitching body to make sure) that bothers Washington so much. From what I understand, that has been standard practice for these kind of teams since at least when the SAS hit the Iranian embassy in London way back when. As each operator came in, if they came across a downed terrorist, they'd put a couple of rounds in them to make sure they wouldn't get up and back shoot them after they passed.
I know that the DOD and Spec Ops community may be worried that if they don't clip this guys wings, other books may be written that would contain info that could cause harm to our guys. I don't know. But this cat, if there is one, is already out of the bag, and a large portion of it was released by the White House itself.
I know there's a lot of controversy about whether or not the author should have written this book, given his position as a member of "SEAL Team 6".I've known just a couple of spec ops guys, (neither of them were SEALs) and they certainly weren't the kiss and tell types. But in this instance, with this mission, and given just how it was told, I'm not so sure that the publication of this book was a bad thing.
I found nothing in this book that jumped out as anything that would be considered classified. A lot of the info had already been reported by the media via White House Press Releases. Hell, he didn't even mention that the choppers they used to infil were "stealth" choppers, although that was common knowledge which even the White House verified.
The author denies that it was a kill mission...he states they were told to bring Bin Laden back if offered no resistance. But the tone of the book makes it pretty clear (to me, anyway) that nobody had any intention of doing that. To borrow a phrase from Martha Stewart, "...and that's a good thing." At least as far as I'm concerned. For instance, he relates speaking to the CIA operative who was primarily responsible for locating OBL prior to the mission. He asks her if she wanted to see the body when they got back. She backed away from that, and the author told that she needed to...she just spent five years tracking him down.
I wonder if it's the fact that the book confirms that OBL was unarmed when he was killed (and that upon entering the room, a couple of other operators put a few more rounds through his twitching body to make sure) that bothers Washington so much. From what I understand, that has been standard practice for these kind of teams since at least when the SAS hit the Iranian embassy in London way back when. As each operator came in, if they came across a downed terrorist, they'd put a couple of rounds in them to make sure they wouldn't get up and back shoot them after they passed.
I know that the DOD and Spec Ops community may be worried that if they don't clip this guys wings, other books may be written that would contain info that could cause harm to our guys. I don't know. But this cat, if there is one, is already out of the bag, and a large portion of it was released by the White House itself.
