SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines
“JSOC investigates JSOC, and that’s part of the problem,” said one former senior military officer experienced in special operations, who like many others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because Team 6’s activities are classified.
Even the military’s civilian overseers do not regularly examine the unit’s operations. “This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much,”
.. Delta Force members, who have a reputation for going by the book, often start out as regular infantry, then move up through the Army’s Ranger units and Special Forces teams before joining Delta. But SEAL Team 6 is more isolated from the rest of the Navy
.. Operators are trained “to slice and dice every major artery,” said one former SEAL.)
The rules boiled down to this, the noncommissioned officer said: “If in your assessment you feel threatened, in a split second, then you’re going to kill somebody.” He described how one SEAL sniper killed three unarmed people, including a small girl, in separate episodes in Afghanistan and told his superiors that he felt they had posed a threat. Legally, that was sufficient. “But that doesn’t fly” in Team 6, the noncommissioned officer said. “You actually have to be threatened.” He added that the sniper was forced out of Team 6.
.. Emphasizing these lines and rules becomes even more important when you’re fighting a lawless, remorseless enemy,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, the former senior law of war expert for the Army’s Office of the Judge Advocate General and now a professor at South Texas College of Law. “That is when the instinct for revenge is going to be strong. And war is not about revenge.”
.. When Captain Moore asked what had happened, the squadron commander, Peter G. Vasely, denied that operators had killed any noncombatants. He said they had killed all the men they encountered because they all had guns, according to the former Team 6 member and a military official.
.. But the killings prompted a high-level discussion about how, in a country where many men carried guns, Team 6 could “guarantee that we’re only going after the real bad guys,” one of the former senior team leaders said.