SALON

Wednesday, Aug 22, 2012 1:30 AM UTC

Special operators to anti-Obama groups: zip it

By

Topics: From the Wires,

WASHINGTON (AP) — A group of retired special operations and CIA officers who claim President Barack Obama revealed secret missions and turned the killing of Osama bin Laden into a campaign centerpiece are coming under criticism from some of their own.

Some special operations officers say the activist veterans are breaking a sacred military creed: respect for the commander in chief.

“This is an unprofessional, shameful action on the part of the operators that appear in the video, period,” U.S. Army Special Forces Maj. Fernando Lujan wrote on his Facebook page, to a chorus of approval from colleagues.

A Green Beret who returned last year from Afghanistan, Lujan says that attaching the title of special operator with any political campaign is “in violation of everything we’ve been taught, and the opposite of what we should be doing, which is being quiet professionals.”

On its website, the group called Special Ops OPSEC, short for operational security, says that Obama has taken too much personal credit for the Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden and hasn’t recognized sufficiently the SEALs who actually carried out the raid. The group also claims that the Obama White House released classified details of the raid for the making of a Hollywood film, a claim that has not been proven.

“This is not to criticize the president personally, and the president himself,” the group’s founder, former Navy SEAL Scott Taylor, said in an interview Tuesday. “But at the same time, we feel he is ultimately responsible for cracking down on these leaks.”

Known officially as a Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, the group is listed as a social welfare organization, which allows it to receive unlimited financial contributions without disclosing the donors. Its identified members have Republican ties.

The group is one of a handful of groups of special operations veterans formed in the past few months that criticize the president.

Special Ops OPSEC’s 20-minute video selectively edits the speech Obama delivered after the bin Laden raid, deleting the times he thanked the intelligence and military teams for the operation, and ending on reverberating repletion of his phrase “I directed.”

Taylor says the president’s use of the word “I” overshadowed his few lines thanking the team.

“Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden,” Navy SEAL Ben Smith says in the video. “The work that the American military has done killed bin Laden.”

The head of U.S. Special Operations Command sees it differently.

“Make no mistake about it, it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden for this operation, that made the hard decisions,” the leader of the raid, Adm. Bill McRaven, said at this summer’s Aspen Security Forum.

“I don’t take these folks too seriously,” President Barack Obama told the newspaper The Virginian-Pilot on Monday. “One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary.” Special Ops OPSEC member ret. Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, who appears in the group’s film, has publicly questioned Obama’s birth in Hawaii.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., compared the group’s campaign to the “Swift Boat” attacks that questioned his service during the Vietnam War. Though later discredited, the claims were partially blamed for unseating his 2004 presidential campaign.

“I honor and appreciate the service of my fellow veterans, but a false attack is a false attack — no matter who’s making it,” Kerry said in a statement Monday.

Transcripts of interviews obtained by Judicial Watch showed minimal information was revealed to the Hollywood filmmakers, but Taylor believes that battlefield procedures may have been exposed as a result of briefings to both the filmmakers and the media.

A similar group, Special Operations for America, openly advocates “for the election of Mitt Romney and like-minded candidates.” Registered as a super PAC, the group is run by former Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke, a Montana state senator who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in the Republican primary.

“They have a good point. I wish there was better OPSEC (operational security), and fewer leaks,” said retired Navy SEAL Capt. Rick Woolard, who commanded several SEAL units. “But I would prefer that SEALs and other special operators would sit down and shut the hell up.”

___

Online:

http://www.opsecteam.org/index.html

More Kimberly Dozier.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations