Author Topic: Delta Force: Never mind  (Read 3305 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Lanya

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3300
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Delta Force: Never mind
« on: October 06, 2008, 04:09:48 PM »
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/02/60minutes/main4494937.shtml

(CBS) Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon ordered a top secret team of American commandos into Afghanistan with a single, simple order: kill Osama bin Laden. It was America's best chance to eliminate the leader of al Qaeda. The inside story of exactly what happened in that mission, and how close it came to its objective has never been told until now.

The man you are about to meet was the officer in command, leading a team from the U.S. Army's mysterious Delta Force - a unit so secret, it's often said Delta doesn't exist. But you are about to see Delta's operators in action.

Why would the mission commander break his silence after seven years? He told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that most everything he has read in the media about his mission is wrong and now he wants to set the record straight.


"Our job was to go find him, capture or kill him, and we knew the writing on the wall was to kill him because nobody wanted to bring Osama bin Laden back to stand trial in the United States somewhere," the mission commander tells Pelley.

In 2001, just 10 weeks after 9/11, he was a 37-year-old Army major leading a team of America's most elite commandos. Even now, 60 Minutes can't tell you his name or show you his face. 60 Minutes hired a theatrical make up artist to take this former Delta officer through a series of transformations to disguise him. He calls himself "Dalton Fury," and is the author of "Kill Bin Laden," a new book out this week.

Dalton Fury is used to disguises. In fact in 2001, his entire team transformed themselves in Afghanistan. "Everybody has their beard grown. Everybody’s wearing local Afghan clothing, sometimes carrying the same weapons as them," he explains.

"The idea was that if this all worked out Osama bin Laden would be dead, and no one would ever know that Delta Force was there?" Pelley asks.

"That's right," Fury says. "That's the plan. And that always is when you're talking about Delta Force."

And there was no mission more important to the United States. "We'll smoke him out of his cave and we'll get him eventually," President Bush had vowed.

But the administration's strategy was to let Afghans do most of the fighting. Using radio intercepts and other intelligence, the CIA pinpointed bin Laden in the mountains near the border of Pakistan. Following the strategy of keeping an Afghan face on the war, Fury's Delta team joined the CIA and Afghan fighters and piled into pickup trucks. They videotaped their journey to a place called Tora Bora.

Fury told 60 Minutes his orders were to kill bin Laden and leave the body with the Afghans.

"Right here you're looking at basically the battlefield from the last location that we had a firm on Osama bin Laden's location," Fury explains to Pelley, looking at a ridgeline with an elevation of about 14,000 feet.

Asked how tough it would be to attack such a position on a scale of one to ten, Fury tells Pelley, "In my experience it’s a ten."

Delta developed an audacious plan to come at bin Laden from the one direction he would never expect.

"We want to come in on the back door," Fury explains. "The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side, over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind."

But they didn't take that route, because Fury says they didn't get approval from a higher level. "Whether that was Central Command all the way up to the president of the United States, I'm not sure," he says.

The next option that Delta wanted to employ was to drop hundreds of landmines in the mountain passes that led to Pakistan, which was bin Laden’s escape route.

"First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops. That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. Okay, there a big large group of Al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that," Fury explains.

But they didn't do that either, because Fury says that plan was also disapproved. He says he has "no idea" why.

"How often does Delta come up with a tactical plan that's disapproved by higher headquarters?" Pelley asks.

"In my experience, in my five years at Delta, never before," Fury says.
[........]
Planned Parenthood is America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.

Xavier_Onassis

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 27916
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #1 on: October 06, 2008, 04:25:05 PM »
If I were writing a novel about Delta Force, I am sure I could not devise a name better than "Dalton Fury".

I recently read a novel by Annie Proulx in which there was a character named "Francis Scott Keister", but I thought that was going a bit too far.

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Michael Tee

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12605
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2008, 04:33:34 PM »
Didn't he have an Afghan name he could go by?

I saw part of this on TV.  How does this guy justify letting his Afghan "allies" go home for the night at such a crucial time?  If anything, it shows (a) the unreliability of the Afghan "allies" and (b) that as soon as the Americans are gone, they're gonna do whatever they want, not what the Americans want them to do.

A clearer demonstration I could not ask for:  this entire effort is a total waste of American and Canadian lives and ought to be terminated ASAP before anyone else gets hurt.  How the Afghans govern themselves is nobody else's business.  OF COURSE they are a bunch of fucking barbarians, but THAT IS THEIR PROBLEM, not ours.

Xavier_Onassis

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 27916
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #3 on: October 06, 2008, 04:50:14 PM »
I am wondering if "Dalton Fury" has a brother named "Plymouth Fury". That name seems to ring a bell, somehow.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Michael Tee

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12605
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #4 on: October 06, 2008, 04:57:18 PM »
Was it the movie "All the Brothers Were [Plymouth] Valiant?"

Plane

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26993
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #5 on: October 06, 2008, 05:29:01 PM »
Didn't he have an Afghan name he could go by?

I saw part of this on TV.  How does this guy justify letting his Afghan "allies" go home for the night at such a crucial time?  If anything, it shows (a) the unreliability of the Afghan "allies" and (b) that as soon as the Americans are gone, they're gonna do whatever they want, not what the Americans want them to do.

A clearer demonstration I could not ask for:  this entire effort is a total waste of American and Canadian lives and ought to be terminated ASAP before anyone else gets hurt.  How the Afghans govern themselves is nobody else's business.  OF COURSE they are a bunch of fucking barbarians, but THAT IS THEIR PROBLEM, not ours.


It would be entirely their problem if none of them had a hobby of burning down buildings in NYNY.

Michael Tee

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12605
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #6 on: October 06, 2008, 05:41:56 PM »
<<It would be entirely their problem if none of them had a hobby of burning down buildings in NYNY.>>

By now, they probably learned their lesson.  If they did not, go back next time with a nuke.  And in the meantime, move on.  It's time.

Plane

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26993
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #7 on: October 06, 2008, 07:18:41 PM »
<<It would be entirely their problem if none of them had a hobby of burning down buildings in NYNY.>>

By now, they probably learned their lesson.  If they did not, go back next time with a nuke.  And in the meantime, move on.  It's time.

They consider each other worthless , if we quit before they are suficiently humiliated they will learn that it "only" costs a few thousand  of their own people to attack the USA. The Al Queda will rebuild itself on its same thesis that it only requires patience and a willingness to stack your own dead high to defeat the US.

Michael Tee

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12605
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #8 on: October 07, 2008, 03:29:44 AM »
<< . . if we quit before they are suficiently humiliated they will learn that it "only" costs a few thousand  of their own people to attack the USA. >>


WE are the ones who are being humiliated.  All those billions worth of high-tech weaponry and we can't after seven years defeat a bunch of bearded guys in cotton gowns who don't even have an air force?  These guys aren't being humiliated they gain in glory every time one of them goes to Paradise to collect his 72 virgins.  This is basically all the punishment they're gonna get.  They don't give a shit that infidels have come to their land.  Easier to kill 'em there than to have to buy more tickets to come to America.

<<The Al Queda will rebuild itself on its same thesis that it only requires patience and a willingness to stack your own dead high to defeat the US.>>

Well, obviously somebody has to talk to these guys, make some deals.  Nobody knows what they want except a whole bunch of Jewish American "scholars" who make a great living publishing books on "the Islamic mind" all of which happily conclude that you can't talk to the bastards because they're all raving lunatics.  Time to stop taking this Israeli-flavoured bullshit as Gospel and actually TRY to sit down with these guys to see where the differences are and how they can be resolved.  There's no question in my mind that they have legitimate beefs against America and Israel, and it's time to get serious about addressing them.  Seven years is way too long a time to waste on a military campaign.

Plane

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26993
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #9 on: October 07, 2008, 03:37:10 AM »

<<The Al Queda will rebuild itself on its same thesis that it only requires patience and a willingness to stack your own dead high to defeat the US.>>

Well, obviously somebody has to talk to these guys, make some deals. 


Who do you suggest we send , and who would he speak to?

What kind of deal?

Michael Tee

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12605
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #10 on: October 07, 2008, 03:49:00 AM »
Maybe we oughtta float some trial balloons their way first.  To the Taliban leadership.   Would you talk to a Palestinian secular delegation?  A Hamas one?  Why not?  What about talking directly with a Congressional delegation?  Give us your top 20 complaints against "the West" first, and we'll give you ten possible delegations to discuss them with in more detail.

I mean, I can't figure this out in five minutes.  Maybe NONE of the above are any good.  But there's always a way to get talks going.  Always.

All the rest is detail, detail, detail.  But the very first step is to recognize IN PRINCIPLE that there is no military solution.  That talks leading to agreements are the only way out.

Plane

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26993
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #11 on: October 07, 2008, 03:51:42 AM »

All the rest is detail, detail, detail.  But the very first step is to recognize IN PRINCIPLE that there is no military solution.  That talks leading to agreements are the only way out.


That would not be a correct principal.

It might be better to say that there is no potential of negotiation , no more true and no less.

BT

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 16141
    • View Profile
    • DebateGate
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 3
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #12 on: October 07, 2008, 03:53:28 AM »
The Taliban would not be on the outside looking in if there were no military options and or solutions.

Michael Tee

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12605
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #13 on: October 07, 2008, 04:18:15 AM »
<<That would not be a correct principal.

<<It might be better to say that there is no potential of negotiation , no more true and no less.>>


I find it hard to say there is no potential for negotiation.  It's like denying that your opponent is a human being.  If it were only one person, it would be possible that he might be so mentally unbalanced that negotiation would be impossible, but we're dealing with large groups here.  They can't all be nuts.

Plane

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26993
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Delta Force: Never mind
« Reply #14 on: October 07, 2008, 05:51:29 AM »
<<That would not be a correct principal.

<<It might be better to say that there is no potential of negotiation , no more true and no less.>>


I find it hard to say there is no potential for negotiation.  It's like denying that your opponent is a human being.  If it were only one person, it would be possible that he might be so mentally unbalanced that negotiation would be impossible, but we're dealing with large groups here.  They can't all be nuts.

It isn't like denying their humanity at all , if there is basis for compromise it can be explored , if there isn't there isn't.

Sometimes compromise isn't a good idea, late in WWII the Axis learned that "uncondisional surrender" was an exact term, although the war might have been over months sooner with a compromise the allies were adamant and agreed on the need to weed out the NATZIs.

There isn't much good compromise availible with the Taliban right now , if they survive a few more years the Afgan Government can make a deal with them as it pleases.