Victory Point - Ed Darack [88]
Kinser shook his head in acknowledgment, then requested permission from Wood to do his own, on-site BDA, after Task Force Brown Chinooks pulled the beleaguered special operations soldiers off the mountain. He found a slew of dead farm animals and nine dead civilians, but nothing to indicate that any of Shah’s men had been there; although he did find evidence, in the form of written notes, that illegal RPGs and PK machine guns had been kept and sold at the house. The lieutenant stared at the destruction before him, the stench of rotting flesh wafting around him, and shook his head at what he felt to be rank overreaction—and once again, very, very questionable intel.
In fact, Shah and his men had been nowhere near Chichal, or anywhere else on Sawtalo Sar by the first of July, having fled into Pakistan days before the GBU-38s careened into the stone walls of the home. The terrorist, looking to propagandize his way up the ladder of global extremism, clearly looked to follow in the publicity-through-powerfully-shocking-imagery vein of the 1993 extremist attack of U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia, where dead U.S. servicemen were videotaped being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. During the ambush of the four SEALs, Shah had with him not one, but two videographers. Once in the Peshawar region of Pakistan, most likely at the Shamshatoo camp, Shah edited and distributed footage of one tape, but essentially shelved the second tape he had in his possession, although a few copies slipped into the hands of U.S. intelligence (he possibly withheld the second tape because his image could clearly be seen on certain sequences). The distributed video, with the al-Qaeda-linked “As-Sahab Media” logo superimposed on the lower right side of the clip, shows a shot of the early-afternoon firefight after a computer-animated introduction depicting the destruction of the United States of America and a graphic of Koranic verse. As the videographer descends into the densely treed northeast gulch, the sounds of a heated firefight resonate in the background audio. Three of Shah’s men, but not Shah himself, then approach the bodies of the fallen SEALs in a clip apparently spliced onto the first part of the footage. The clip shows Shah’s execrable henchmen stealing the boots and wristwatches off the dead Americans. The final portion of the ambush video shows the gear that Shah was able to pillage from the recon team, including four helmets; three M4s; stacks of magazines and M203 40 mm grenade rounds; spotting scopes, including a high-power Leupold scope; laser rangefinders; night-vision gear; the MBITR; binoculars; and fragmentation, smoke, and incendiary grenades. Shah even got the team’s Panasonic Toughbook laptop, which can be seen to have taken a round to its upper screen. The video then shows a technician pulling the hard drive from the Toughbook, installing it into another machine, and booting the drive. He then downloads maps of the U.S. embassy in Kabul as well as a U.S. military paper on the ACM’s tactics, techniques, and procedures, one among a host of sensitive information kept on the computer.
The second video shows Shah himself descending into the gulch with two of his men (in addition to the videographer). The audio pops with loud 7.62 rounds rifling downrange from AK-47s, then rattles with short, controlled bursts of automatic 5.56 mm rounds sent back by the SEALs. The terrorist, clad in traditional Pashtun clothes, including a Pakol hat, is carrying his PK machine gun and speaking into his ICOM radio, and one of the two men at his side is clearly a designated RPG gunner—undoubtedly the man who would shoot down the MH- 47 a few hours after the footage of their descent was shot (the second video included time code, and showed a time of 1:57:02 in the afternoon of the twenty-eighth at the beginning of the sequence,