The Extortion 17 conspiracy theory is one of the dumbest around. CENTCOM investigation should qualify as a thorough debunking. At that pace of ops, a JSOC strike force was going to be lost to a lucky RPG eventually; see this prediction from a SEAL Team 6 chief a year before: Image
The Extortion 17 conspiracy theory comes in many flavors and has many fatal flaws. But a basic one is the premise that the shootdown killed SEALs who were on the bin Laden raid. It didn't: bin Laden raid was Team 6's Red Squadron, Extortion 17 was Gold Sqn
This person is trying to revive the Extortion 17 conspiracy theory—claiming to have new documents. But the redacted documents pictured here are just from the declassified CENTCOM investigation (under "Wardak CH-47 investigation" at www3.centcom.mil/FOIALibrary)
Have a look yourself at www3.centcom.mil/FOIALibrary. First photo is from exhibit 48 (interview w/ JSOC task force leaders), second photo exhibit 60 (JCAT assessment), third & fourth photos exhibit 55. All been sitting on a public website for nearly a decade.

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More from @wesleysmorgan

13 Oct
This was going to happen eventually. Kind of amazing that it took this long. There are roughly as many US troops in Somalia as there are in Syria (500 is the Pentagon's official number).
Here's former JSOC and SOCOM commander Gen. (Ret.) Tony Thomas, who presided over JSOC strikes and raids in Somalia, recently saying that "whether al Shabab is a threat to the US is subject to debate." counthttps://twitter.com/TonyT2Thomas/status/1312414701092036610?s=20
Here's another US counterterrorism and intelligence veteran echoing that assessment:
Read 4 tweets
12 Oct
In this story for which @natepenn interviewed Clint Lorance, Lorance comes across pretty badly—but his defense/pardon team comes across a lot worse, touting “biometric” evidence that was really just willfully misread common Afghan names in a database story.californiasunday.com/clint-lorance-…
.@natepenn’s story about what Clint Lorance did, and what Lorance’s defense team and Fox News did to get Trump to pardon him, is worth reading in full. It sounds like Lorance himself accepted he was guilty and fairly convicted—until convinced otherwise. story.californiasunday.com/clint-lorance-…
Also, it’s funny that the story is about the Arghandab and is titled “The Last Patrol.” So is this fantastic Brian Mockenhaupt story about paratroopers from the same brigade in the same district on their previous, surge-era deployment theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Read 4 tweets
15 Sep
That 100 estimate is kind of a fascinating thing. Although they would repeat the number, a lot of senior military and IC folks, when asked, will say they don't really know what there were supposedly 100 of/how "AQ fighters" was defined: Arab AQ fighters? Non-Afghan AQ fighters?
Here are three comments different counterterrorism officials made to me about the longstanding "100 AQ in Afghanistan" (now supposedly 200) estimate for my Pech book: a senior CIA official, an Obama NSC CT official, and a senior JSOC officer
A 2015 unclassified military report suggested that 100 was the number of AQ fighters (however defined) who stayed year-round in Kunar/Nuristan with Farouq al-Qahtani, and didn't count others who came into other eastern provinces for the warmer months.
Read 8 tweets
17 Aug
Today I learned that during the 1970 NYC postal strike, the Nixon administration deployed 18,000 troops for a few days to replace strikers in New York—mostly sorting mail.

Here's the Department of the Army's after-action report on Operation Graphic Hand: governmentattic.org/2docs/Army-AAR… Image
As the strike heated up, the Pentagon drew on a standing contingency plan to prepare to deploy troops to post offices in as many as 35 cities to take over for striking postal workers.

They came close to deploying to Boston and Philadelphia, but wound up just going to NYC. Image
It wasn't just the National Guard, either. The 18,000 troops in NYC post offices at the peak of Graphic Hand included over 2,000 active-duty troops from across the services and about 9,500 Army, Navy, and Marine Reservists. Image
Read 7 tweets
5 Apr 19
This morning @USAfricaCommand's director of operations, MajGen Gregg Olson, did a call with reporters explaining how AFRICOM learned it killed a woman and child in a 2018 drone strike. These are the first civilians AFRICOM has admitted its strikes have killed in Somalia.
After @amnesty released a report last month alleging civilian casualties in 5 US strikes in Somalia (this wasn't one of the 5), AFRICOM publicly pushed back, saying Amnesty was falling for Shabab propaganda & couldn't get to the scene of the strikes (which AFRICOM also couldn't).
But on March 22, three days after @amnesty released its Somalia report, AFRICOM commander Gen. Waldhauser initiated an internal review of potential civilian casualties in Somalia, according to Olson.
Read 14 tweets
16 Aug 18
Going to do a thread here with some background/history on the 17-year-old US military hunt for al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan, the latest evolution of which I have a new story about (spoiler: US forces are now more focused on IS-K): politico.com/story/2018/08/…
Military says it has killed 65 AQ members in Afg this year. "We've been actively hunting AQ from the lowest rifleman up to their emir and everyone in between," Gen. Nicholson told me. But majority of CT strikes now are against IS-K.
Over the past 17 years, AQ, the group that brought the US to Afg, has always been a high priority for the CT folks, meaning the JSOC task force and the intel community (IC). But, just as it's not the priority today, it's often gotten pushed behind bigger Taliban fight.
Read 63 tweets

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