Call Sign Extortion 17 by Don Brown Page B

military defendants, to get to the bottom of what happened?
    And going back to the testimony at Exhibit 1, page 118 of the Colt Report, why, during that testimony, did the commander cut off his subordinate, to prevent any discussion on the record about the seven unidentified Afghans? Is the commander trying to hide something by cutting off the topic and changing the subject?
    What was the operations officer about to say that necessitated the cut-­off by his commander?
    Was he going to say, “But their presence was unauthorized”? Or “but . . . their presence was a breach of safety protocol”? Or “but . . . our men have concerns that seven unidentified Afghans may have compromised the safety of this mission”?
    What were they trying to hide?
    There is no way to know, because the brusque interruption by the Task Force commander kept the operations’ comments off the record, and successfully changed the subject.
    The Joint Special Operations Task Force commander who cut off his subordinate’s thoughts on the unidentified Afghans was the same person who ordered the SEAL team into that chopper to begin with. This was revealed at page 99 of Exhibit 1, when Brigadier General Colt asked who ordered the ill-­fated mission. Here’s that exchange:
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    BG Colt: At 2130 Zulu, the IRF was directed to infill by whom?
    JSOTF J3: Sir, Task Force Commander was the guy that controlled the immediate reaction force. We actually have—discussing it before; there’ve been reports about the ground force commander, asking for the immediate reaction force to handle, to interdict those orders. Actually, it was from Task Force. They recommended to call over to the ground force commander and said, “Hey, we have got the immediate reaction force that we can employ against this thing, and that’s where it came from.”
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    There is no way to know if the Task Force commander allowed the seven mysterious Afghans on board, because the Afghans have their own commander.
    After the Joint Special Operations Task Force commander cut off his subordinate’s testimony midstream, the subject of the investigation changed to testimony about how the bodies were extracted from the crash site. Nothing else was mentioned about the unidentified Afghans, of any substance, in the entire 1,250-page report—not even a peep. Nor is there any suggestion in the Colt Report’s recommendation or in General Mattis’s final conclusions that the military did anything wrong in the deaths of thirty Americans.
    Why not?
    Why no attempt to at least identify these guys? Why conduct days of investigation on flight approach, rescue operations, ground movement of enemy forces, and gloss over the identity of seven unidentified intruders on the aircraft?
    It’s as if the unidentified Afghan infiltrators were the big pink elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
    Why is this question significant?
    The answer has to do with the concept of “Green-­on-­Blue” violence.

Chapter 12
    â€œGreen-­on-­Blue” Violence: “Friendly” Afghans Killing Americans
    The phrase “Green on Blue” refers to the dangerously widespread practice of Afghan forces masquerading as American allies, yet then shooting Coalition elements in the back and subversively cooperating with the Taliban. The Colt Report’s failure to even address the potential security concerns the Afghan “Mystery Seven” might have presented was nothing less than shocking.
    Why won’t the military deal with the question of their identity? Why ignore this inexcusable breach of security in the Colt Report as if it’s a nonissue?
    The failure to address the identity of the “Mystery Seven,” and the apparent cremation of their bodies so as to destroy DNA evidence, was one of the linchpin failures in this investigation that points to a cover-­up. This failure is so important that