Did Biden Out SEAL Team 6?

 

 

SEAL missions depend on courage, skill, daring — and secrecy. Initially, when the president announced that "a small team of Americans" had killed Osama bin Laden, he did not identify it was the SEALs.

At a Pentagon briefing on May 2, a defense official was asked if it was a Navy SEAL team that found and killed the world's most wanted man. The terse response was: "Not going to comment on units or numbers."

The next day, Vice President Joe Biden spoke at Washington's Ritz Carlton Hotel at a dinner event to mark the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Council. "Let me briefly acknowledge tonight's distinguished honorees," he said. "Adm. James Stavridis is the real deal. He can tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday."

The RPG that felled the SEALs may have been a random act of war. The Taliban could have just gotten lucky. 

Or they could have been plotting and waiting for revenge, looking for helicopters that might be carrying more SEALs on another mission, a big bull's-eye painted on their backs by a vice president who forgot that loose lips sink ships — and can get Navy SEALs killed.

 

How did the Taliban pull it off? Why were the SEALs packed into an aging, slow-moving Chinook helicopter flying at low altitude? Were they on a mission only they could pull off or were they being overused to save a failed Afghan strategy where the emphasis is on leaving and not winning? 

This, too, happened on President Obama's watch.

We honor the real heroes who served in secrecy and silence before they became a political prop, 

and the families who raised and mourn them. We ask, as Michener's character asked, "Where do we get such men?"