The families of three fallen Navy SEAL Team VI members say President Obama and Vice President Biden are culpable for the deaths of their sons for publicly identifying the unit that killed Osama Bin Laden and pursuing policies that coddle Muslims and put our own troops at a tactical disadvantage.
SEAL Team VI carried out the daring raid in Pakistan in early May 2011. Three months later, three members of the unit were among 38 killed in a Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Twenty-five of the dead were special operations forces. Larry Klayman is founder of Freedom Watch and is the attorney representing three of the families who lost their sons. He says the Obama administration carelessly and illegally revealed the role of SEAL Team VI shortly after announcing the successful mission to kill Bin Laden.
“Shortly after that successful raid on Bin Laden, the president – through the vice president for political purposes – released the name of SEAL Team VI. That’s classified information that even (then) Defense Secretary Robert Gateswas critical of that. So that was like putting a target on the backs of the sons of my clients,” said Klayman, who says the helicopter may have been infiltrated by the Taliban before the crash because the Afghans on board were last-minute changes from the names on the original flight manifest.
Klayman says Vice President Biden deserves special blame for these deaths.
“Biden did something which was more than irresponsible. He served on foreign relations committees, intelligence committees. He knew or should have known what he was doing. He should be held accountable. Frankly, he should even be held criminally accountable for doing that,” said Klayman.
In addition to the identification of the the team, Klayman says the Obama administration is culpable for these deaths due to a policy of coddling Muslims and putting tremendous restrictions on U.S. forces.
“This president has set a tone that Muslim outreach…is more important than protecting the lives of our servicemen and that’s crept into the military brass to the point where they can’t engage in preemptive fire,. They can’t engage in return fire until they’re fired upon once. They’re sent into battle without adequate equipment,” said Klayman.
Perhaps the greatest insult to the families was at the funeral for their sons in Afghanistan. The military refused to allow a Christian minister or chaplain at the service and instead brought in a Muslim cleric who proceeded to slander the fallen.
“For some bizarre reason, probably this Muslim outreach again of Barack Obama, they had a Muslim cleric give a prayer. Why the heck you would have a Muslim prayer and the servicemen are Christian is beyond imagination. So it has to come from the top down. And this cleric then proceeded in Arabic. No one understood it at the time, but we have a video of it and it was translated by certified translators. It proceeded to damn my clients’ sons, and others who died, as infidels and that they should go to Hell under Allah, the Muslim god,” said Klayman.
“That’s unbelievable. We’ve never even gotten an apology from the military that they did that,” said Klayman, who is demanding a congressional investigation and says an announcement of litigation will be coming soon.
“This is a major scandal. This is as big if not bigger than Benghazi because it concerns all of the military,” said Klayman. “The mid-level military brass are not serving the interests of the brave fighting men that serve behind them. But the problem is that the tone and substance of these policies come from Barack Obama himself.”
