Saturday, September 01, 2012 2:31:14 PM
Bài liên quan
WASHINGTON (AP) - Ngũ Giác Ðài hiện đang tính đến việc đi kiện một cựu Hải Kích vì viết một cuốn sách kể lại các chi tiết bí mật trong chuyến công tác giết Osama bin Laden, tuy nhiên, vẫn chưa có xác định rõ ràng là những bí mật nào bị tiết lộ.
Ông Little không cho biết Ngũ Giác Ðài đang xem xét hành động pháp lý nào hoặc lúc nào sẽ khởi sự vụ kiện.
Ông Little cũng cho rằng nếu ông Bissonnette ngăn việc chính thức phát hành cuốn sách trong tuần tới thì đây có thể được coi là một hành động tuân thủ các thỏa thuận với quân đội trước đây.
Việc có thể truy tố ông Bissonnette đã được luật sư Ngũ Giác Ðài, ông Jeh Johnson, viết trong bức thư gửi qua nhà xuất bản Penguin Group (USA) ở New York.
Hình bìa cuốn “No Easy Day,” (Hình: AP Photo/Dutton, File)
How I killed Bin Laden:
The first amazing Navy SEAL account of how the world's most wanted terrorist was shot dead in front of his wives and petrified children
By Sharon Churcher
|
The full extraordinary story of
the assassination of Osama Bin Laden has been revealed for the first
time by a member of the elite team that killed the arch terrorist in his
secret lair in Pakistan.
Bin
Laden was shot in the head by a ‘point man’ from the crack US Navy
Seals unit as the Al Qaeda leader peered out through his narrowly-opened
bedroom door.
Bursting into
his room, the Seals then fired more rounds into his body as he lay on
the floor in his death throes and as two of his wives wailed beside him.
The
gruesome last moments of the 9/11 mastermind are revealed in a book by
retired Seal Matt Bissonnette who took part in the raid and made sure
Bin Laden was dead.
Scroll Down for Video
The Navy SEAL Team 6 member who used the pseudonym Mark Owen to write No Easy Day
Former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette talking to US
TV show 60 Minutes this week about the Osama bin Laden Pakistan raid
which he claims to be part of. CBS
said they disguised his appearance for his safety
But the minute-by-minute account of
the heart-stopping, top-secret raid has infuriated Pentagon lawyers who
are demanding that its launch next week is cancelled.
Bissonnette,
36 – who uses the pen-name Mark Owen – is accused of breaching a
secrecy commitment that he signed when he left active duty last April.
And it has incensed Islamic fundamentalists, who have posted online
death threats against the author.
Owen’s
detailed account in his book, No Easy Day, tells how, on a moonless
night on May 1, 2011, 24 US Navy Seals left their base in Jalalabad,
Afghanistan, for Bin Laden’s one-acre walled compound in Abbottabad.
The Seals, who were to operate in teams of three, travelled in two Black Hawk helicopters.
They
knew that, as well as the terror chief, they could expect to find at
the compound Khalid, one of Bin Laden’s sons, and Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and
his brother Abrar al-Kuwaiti, who had acted as couriers for Bin Laden.
Owen tells how the mission soon hit difficulties when the plan to
‘fast-rope’ the Seals from one of the helicopters into the compound had
to be rapidly revised when one of the Black Hawks – with Owen inside –
crash landed inside the courtyard.
Target: A member of Seal Team Six shot and
killed Osama bin Laden during the elite squad's daring raid of his
compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan
The other Black Hawk, which was supposed to fast-rope its passengers on
to the roof of the main building in the compound, dropped them outside
after seeing the crash. They were let inside by their shaken but
uninjured comrades.
According to Owen’s book, they had 30 minutes to complete the mission
based on the amount of fuel the helicopters had been carrying.
Owen says his team headed towards a guesthouse in the compound where
they knew Ahmed al-Kuwaiti lived with his family. They also knew that
the occupants had heard them coming.
The guesthouse was in darkness and had a set of metal double doors with windows at the top.
Owen describes kneeling at the side of the door while he attached an
explosive charge. As one of his team headed towards the stairs that led
to the roof of the guesthouse, AK-47 rounds from inside shattered the
glass above the door, narrowly missing him and showering him in glass.
‘The first rounds always surprise the s*** out of you,’ he writes. Will,
another member of Owen’s team, yelled in Arabic for al-Kuwaiti to come
out while Owen returned fire. The door started to open and a woman
called out.
Owen says that in the green glow of their night-vision goggles, the
Seals could make out the figure of a woman clutching something in her
arms. The first suspicion was that it was a bomb.
Owen recalls in his account how he started applying pressure to his
trigger. Lasers on the Seals’ guns targeted the woman’s head – she could
be dead in a second.
However the bundle was a baby. Al-Kuwaiti’s wife, Mariam, emerged with
the infant and three more children behind her. Owen kept his weapon
trained on her as she told them that Al-Kuwaiti was dead.
Owen says he spotted a pair of feet lying in the doorway of a bedroom
and that he shot the body of al-Kuwaiti several times to make sure. With
the guesthouse secured, the Seals sprinted to the main compound. Bin
Laden’s house was split into a duplex and his family lived on the second
and third levels and had their own private entrance.
A team led by a Seal referred to in the book as Tom was to clear the
first level, according to Owen. Again, the building was dark but the
soldiers’ night-vision goggles revealed a long hallway with two doors
opening off on each side.
The point man – the leading Seal – spotted a man’s head sticking out of
the first room on the left. The point man shot him and he disappeared
back into the room. When the team reached the doorway the man, later
identified as Abrar al-Kuwaiti, was writhing on the floor. The Seals
opened fire on him. Al-Kuwaiti’s wife Bushra, who jumped in the way to
shield him, was also killed.
Owen says a woman and several children were huddled in the corner
crying. An AK-47 was found in the room and Tom unloaded it while the
rest of the team searched the remaining rooms.
After one of the US troops blew up an iron gate blocking access to the
second level, the Seals started filtering up a spiral staircase
punctuated by small landings. When Owen reached the second level, he
could see a body splayed out on its back on the landing above, between
the second and third levels. One of the Seals had shot Khalid, one of
Bin Laden’s sons, who had probably been living on the second floor.
Commando: A photo purported to be of Matt Bissonnette was published by Business Insider on Thursday
By now, Owen writes, Seals were queuing up behind Owen on the staircase,
and the second-level hallway already had sufficient troops to search
and clear it, so he continued to the third level, up steps slick with
blood and passing Khalid’s unused AK-47 propped up on a step.
‘We had planned for more of a fight,’ he writes. ‘For all the talk about
suicide vests and being willing to shed blood for Allah, only one of
the al-Kuwaiti brothers got off a barrage.’
He describes how, as he and his team slowly ascended the narrow
stairwell, his ears strained to hear footsteps or the sound of a round
being chambered. He was less than five steps from the top of the
staircase when he heard shots.
He writes: ‘BOP. BOP. The point man had seen a man peeking out of the
door on the right side of the hallway about ten feet in front of him. I
couldn’t tell from my position if the rounds hit the target or not. The
man disappeared into the dark room.’
They cautiously approached the room where they found two women,
hysterically crying and standing over a man lying at the foot of a bed.
The younger of the two women rushed at the point man who grabbed them
both and herded them into a corner. Owen comments that had the women
been wearing suicide vests, this action would have cost the soldier his
life but saved those of his colleagues.
According to No Easy Day, the fallen man, wearing a white sleeveless
T-shirt, tan trousers and a tan tunic, had been shot in the right side
of his head.
‘Blood and brains spilled out of the side of his skull,’ writes Owen.
‘In his death throes, he was still twitching and convulsing.’
Owen and another Seal shot more rounds into his chest until he was motionless.
At least three children sat stunned in the corner of the room as the
commandos cleared two small rooms just off the bedrooms. Other Seal
teams cleared the rest of the third level until it was declared secure.
Guard: A policeman keeps guard outside the gates of the compound where the Al Qaeda leader was killed
Owen and his comrades then examined the body.
He says: ‘The man’s face was mangled from at least one bullet wound and
covered in blood. A hole in his forehead collapsed the right side of
his skull. His chest was torn up from where the bullets had entered his
body.
He was lying in an ever-growing pool of blood. As I crouched down to take a closer look, Tom joined me.
‘ “I think this is our boy,” Tom said.’
Owen writes that Tom did not want to report over the radio that this was
Bin Laden because he knew that call would be rapidly relayed to
Washington where President Obama was listening. The Seals wanted to be
sure first.
The dead man was the correct height and looked like the composite photos
the Seals had been given. They wiped the blood from his face using a
blanket from the bed and he looked more familiar but younger than
expected. It transpired his beard had been dyed.
Owen says he took photos of Bin Laden’s full body and then his head.
‘Pulling his beard to the right and then the left, I shot several
profile pictures.’
Watching: In this undated image from video
seized from bin Laden's compound, the Al-Qaeda chief watches a TV
programme showing an image of President Obama
Tension: The raid of bin Laden's Abottabad
compound was watched by President Obama and his closest advisers in the
Situation Room of the White House
He asked his colleague to hold Bin Laden’s ‘good eye’ open. ‘He reached
down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now lifeless brown eye. I
zoomed in and shot a tight photo of it.’
Meanwhile other Seals were collecting computers, videos and notebooks
and a team was preparing to blow up the crashed Black Hawk.
The remaining Black Hawk and a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, that had set up
a forward refuelling point 15 minutes from the compound, and was
carrying a ‘quick reaction force’ of additional troops, were circling
the compound, using up precious fuel. Time was pressing.
Owen says a comrade, ‘Walt’, took DNA samples by dipping a swab in Bin Laden’s blood and used another to swab his mouth.
He tried jabbing a spring-loaded syringe provided by the CIA to get a
marrow sample from Bin Laden’s thigh but the needle did not work and
he gave up after several attempts.
Owen says two sets of DNA samples and two sets of photographs were
needed so that if one of the helicopters was shot down on its way back
to Jalalabad, one set of evidence would survive.
Meanwhile, Seals were trying to get confirmation from Bin Laden’s wife,
who had been wounded in the ankle, that the dead man was the Al Qaeda
leader. She gave a series of aliases for him such as ‘the sheikh’.
Owen recalls how one Seal then approached the children outside on the
balcony. ‘They were all sitting silently against the wall. Will knelt
down and asked one of the girls, “Who is the man?”
‘The girl didn’t know to lie.’
‘ “Osama bin Laden.”
‘Will smiled.’
‘ “Are you sure that is Osama bin Laden?”
‘ “Yes,” the girl said.
‘ “OK,” he said. “Thanks.”
‘Back in the hallway, he grabbed one of the wives by her arms and gave her a good shake.
‘ “Stop f****** with me now,” Will said, more sternly than before. “Who is that in the bedroom?” ’
Mission: The Al Qaeda leader was killed at this
compound in Abbottabad by U.S. Special Forces - and Matt Bissonette
claims that if SEAL Team 6 had never made it there they were to explain
that they were searching for an unmanned drone to their Pakistani allies
Owen continues: ‘She started to cry. More scared than anything else, she didn’t have any fight left.’
‘ “Osama,” she said.
‘“Osama what?” Will said, still holding her arm.’
‘ “Osama bin Laden,” she said.’
With dual confirmation, the Seals ‘called it in’ to Admiral McRaven in Jalalabad, who was keeping President Obama updated.
While the soldiers cleared the building of material that would provide
useful intelligence, Owen watched two Seals drag Bin Laden’s body by his
legs down the stairs.
Searching the tiny bathroom, Owen found a box of Just For Men hair dye, which he assumed was what Bin Laden used on his beard.
Owen records that he was surprised by how tidily Bin Laden kept his
clothes. All of his T-shirts were neatly folded into squares and his
clothes were hung evenly spaced.
He discovered a rifle and a pistol, neither of them loaded.
Cover: No Easy Day is scheduled for release on September 4
Owen writes about his surprise that Bin Laden ‘hadn’t even prepared a
defence’. He says the terror leader had no intention of fighting, though
he asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes
into buildings.
He says: ‘In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon.
The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a
pussy he was.’
He says leaders are less willing to fight and that it was always the
young and impressionable who strapped on the explosives and blew
themselves up.
He writes: ‘Did he [Bin Laden] believe his own message? Was he willing
to fight the war he asked for? I don’t think so. Otherwise, he would
have at least gotten his gun and stood up for what he believed.
‘There is no honour in sending people to die for something you won’t even fight for yourself.’
The Seals had now been in the compound for 30 minutes and were reluctant to leave areas unsearched but had no choice.
Owen says Bin Laden’s body was put into a body bag. As many of the women
and children as possible were herded into the guesthouse to protect
them from the explosion when the Seals blew up the crashed helicopter.
Owen’s group of Seals, which had Bin Laden’s body, travelled on the
remaining Black Hawk which, as a smaller, more manoeuvrable aircraft,
had less of a chance of being shot down than the CH-47.
In the Black Hawk, one of the Seals had to sit on Bin Laden’s body which lay at Owen’s feet in the centre of the cabin.
At one point during the flight to Afghanistan, he says, they searched
the body again but found nothing and the Seal returned to his seat on
Bin Laden’s chest.
Despite having the body at his feet, Owen writes that he felt a sense of
failure that the teams had left intelligence behind because they had
run out of time.
Back at base in Jalalabad, the Seals loaded the body on to the back of a truck. It was to be transported to Bagram.
Admiral McRaven asked to see it. Owen says he pulled the body bag from the truck.
‘It flopped on the cement floor like a dead fish. Kneeling down, I
unzipped the bag. Almost all of the colour had faded from his face and
his skin looked ashy and grey. The body was mushy and congealed blood
had pooled at the bottom of the bag.
‘There’s your boy,’ I said.
This undated file photo shows al Qaida leader
Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. A firsthand account of the Navy SEAL
raid that killed Osama bin Laden contradicts previous accounts, raising
questions as to whether the terror mastermind presented a clear threat
when SEALs first fired upon him
As McRaven stood over him, Owen pulled Bin Laden’s head from side to
side by his beard so that the admiral could see his profile.
A crowd gathered as McRaven knelt down to take a closer look, writes Owen.
McRaven pointed at a Seal and asked how tall he was. ‘Six-four,’ the Seal answered – the same height as Bin Laden.
McRaven then asked the soldier to lie down next to the body so he could compare heights.
Owen claims that the measurement was mostly a joke but reflected the
fact that, because of his darker beard, Bin Laden did not look exactly
as expected.
But there was no real doubt that the Seals had got their man.
Last night a Defence Department spokesman, Lt Col Todd Breasseale, told
The Mail on Sunday that the Pentagon and CIA were ‘shocked’ to learn
only a week ago that 575,000 hardback copies of the book have already
been printed.
It is already heading the Amazon bestseller list, displacing the Fifty
Shades of Grey series, and Bissonnette is due to appear on US current
affairs TV show, 60 Minutes, within the next few days.
The Pentagon has notified Bissonnette that he faces possible civil and criminal charges unless he cancels the book launch.
l No Easy Day by Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer is published by Michael Joseph at £18.99.
Đọc thêm:
Đọc thêm:
No comments:
Post a Comment