SEAL Team 6 Accused of War Crimes
A former leader of the elite SEAL Team 6 described the environment in which he and his comrades operated as “night after night of kill or be killed.”
"If I told you I cut off a head after an operation, explaining that I got caught up in the moment, went over the line one time — you’d have sympathy for me," he told The Intercept. "War is awful and it’s human to go too far.
"But this isn’t one time. This is multiple times on each deployment.”
That quote captures the grim moral realm of battle found in Matthew Cole’s two-year investigation of SEAL Team 6. It drew on "interviews with 18 current and former members of the unit, including four former senior leaders of the command.”
The article reports that even as the team enjoyed legendary successes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban – including the killing of Osama bin Laden – “a rogue culture arose that operated outside of the Navy’s established mechanisms for command and investigation.”
It included the mutilation of bin Laden's body and others through "canoeing," or the firing of a single shot to the forehead to break open the skull and expose the brain.
Some SEAL Team members also used weapons to “hack dead and dying militants” to desecrate their bodies, send a brutal message to the enemy and acquire trophies of war.
“Using the excuse of collecting DNA, which required a small piece of skin containing hair follicles, operators were taking large strips of skin from dead enemy fighters,” Cole writes.
Cole notes that some SEAL members believed they were fighting fire with fire: "They don’t play by the rules, so why should we?”
The article suggests that blame belongs not simply with soldiers who engaged in such activities – some of which Cole describes as “war crimes” – but with commanders who did little to stop them.
Read the full article here.
