Call Sign Extortion 17 Read Online Free PDF Page B

experts, conducted a piece-­by-­piece, visual and forensics examination of the shot-­down helicopter. They supplied Colt’s investigation team with their own JCAT report, and their own conclusions about what happened.
    Colt and his team had taken all this into consideration, had interviewed dozens of witnesses under oath, and by September 9, 2011, Colt was ready to report back to General Mattis.
    So on September 9, 2011, Colt signed his Executive Summary to General Mattis, attaching more than one hundred exhibits and enclosures, with his (Colt’s) written thoughts on the reason for the shoot-­down.
    Four days later, on September 13, 2011, General Colt issued his final report, hoping to close the chapter on any questions concerning the shoot-­down of Extortion 17.
    General Mattis’s final report, perhaps not surprisingly, summarily concluded that no one was at fault, that the military made all the correct decisions, and that the shoot-­down of Extortion 17 could not have been prevented.
    Colt’s summary and Mattis’s report and conclusion will be contradicted by internal evidence on multiple fronts. It will be more than a year before all the report’s glaring omissions come to light, in what can be explained only as an attempt by the military to sweep crucial and highly embarrassing information under the rug.
    Aside from the report’s failure to discuss the military’s inexplicable inability to locate or otherwise account for the black box that was supposedly on board the helicopter, the reports ignore an even greater pink elephant in the room: On the night of the shoot-­down, just minutes before Extortion 17 lifted off for the final time, the chopper was boarded by seven unidentified Afghans, in blatant violation of US military procedure and protocol. The Afghans’ names were not on the flight manifest for Extortion 17.
    In an era of disconcerting “Green-­on-­Blue” violence in which Afghan soldiers and security forces, purporting to be US allies, had been shooting Americans in the back for nearly a decade, one would think that the final report on the shoot-­down of Extortion 17 would reveal and address such a big-­time security breach.
    But the report contained no explanation of how the Afghans violated US security procedures to get on the aircraft. There was no mention of their names. There was no assurance that their intentions were not sinister. In fact, not one single word was even mentioned about the incident by either Colt or Mattis.
    On January 11, 2013, some fifteen months after the shoot-­down, a brave and gutsy sergeant major in the US Army alerted Billy and KarenVaughn, parents of SOC Aaron Vaughn, that the Afghans were on the chopper, and that their security breach was a “very big deal.”
    The military’s omission of this crucial breach raised all kinds of unanswered questions, and the military almost got away with covering it up.
    Almost.
    Question Number Two: The Seven Unidentified Afghans
    A second oddity, one of the biggest red flags of the entire mission, and one largely ignored by the press and even the US military itself, also occurred during the boarding process of Extortion 17.
    This question, unless answered, will haunt the mission and will linger throughout the ages.
    As the Navy SEAL team, which included Navy support personnel, rushed to the chopper along with the five-­man Air National Guard crew, seven unidentified members of the Afghan military also boarded the chopper.
    That fact is worth repeating, because it is crucial. Seven unidentified Afghans boarded that chopper. Their names are not known. They have not been identified, and we don’t know what they were up to.
    The identity of the Afghans is one of the great, looming questions unanswered by the military, as if it is of peripheral unimportance. But their identities are vitally important in fully understanding what happened.
    Yet, the fact that