Danger Room Debunks ‘SEAL Target Geronimo’
Wired’s Danger Room has published 2 articles debunking the new book about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, SEAL Target Geronimo by Chuck Pfarrer.
White House Kept Super-Stealthy Copter from Bin Laden Raid, Book Claims by David Axe:
…there are good reasons to doubt Pfarrer. The author insists his book is based on interviews with SEALs who were on the bin Laden raid. But the Pentagon claims no SEALs spoke to Pfarrer. And some of the technical specs Pfarrer cites for the stealth choppers seem implausible. Leaving aside the author’s exaggeration of the helicopters’ ability to evade detection — no rotorcraft with big, spinning blades is ‘invisible to radar’ — he describes the Stealth Hawk as carrying 20 people in the cabin. That’s unlikely, considering the added weight of the stealth modifications.
Finally, this niggling detail: Pfarrer has C-5s delivering the high-tech copters to the NATO airfield at Jalalabad. But the runway at that facility is probably too short and narrow for the giant C-5, America’s biggest airlifter. In December, the Air Force announced the first landing of the much smaller C-17 at Jalalabad. If a C-17 touching down warrants a press release, you can safely bet no C-5s are paying visits — whether or not they’re carrying secret helicopters.
Don’t Believe the WMD Hype in ‘SEAL Target Geronimo’ by US Army officer Kris Alexander:
To read SEAL Target Geronimo is to get sucked into a vortex of WMD insanity. Pfarrer says that Saddam Hussein had dangerous, active chemical, biological and nuclear programs up until the day of his downfall. Worse, those weapons made it into the hands of Osama himself. Why didn’t you know about it? Because craven politicians and the lying media hid the truth about what U.S. military weapons experts uncovered.
…I was one of those military experts in Iraq. I learned the full, underwhelming truth about Saddam’s programs because I was there to help the Iraqis settle the issue once and for all. And SEAL Target Geronimo’s claims are the literary equivalent of a smoking gun that could have been a mushroom cloud — a paranoid, evidence-free fantasy, fueled by ignorance.
SEAL [Target] Geronimo is probably going to be a big seller. Pfarrer’s creds as a former SEAL will lead unsuspecting readers to interpret the book as the inside truth. It seems that nightmarish fantasies about Iraqi weapons of doom will outlast the war they inspired.