'Black Hawk Down' Was Set to Blame Clinton for 9/11

Ottomaton · Dec 30, 2001

Originally posted by HayesStreet
Ottoman, what do you expect the US military to say? "Yeah, we got suckered in and stomped on." While there were intial reports of an 'intelligence leak,' it was pretty much whitewashed by the military, CIA, and Congress. Which would make sense since we looked like fools and its better to say 'they got lucky' than to say 'they outfoxed us.' And per Aidid being all shook up, he had upwards of 10,000 militiamen, I seriously doubt he was concerned with losing 500. Especially when he had just scored a massive PR coup against the US.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I also am not so naive as to believe that the government won't cover up something as embarrassing as an intelligence led sucker punch.
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Franks, however, was in no way in charge of these forces. When he was in Somalia, he was in charge of UNITAF, the UN task force, but was not there at the time. He also had some really scathing things to say about the operation as a whole. Here are the questions leading up to the quote I previously printed. Tell me if it seems to you like he's trying to 'cover up':

What was your opinion when you heard that they were going to bring the Task Force Rangers in to try and capture Aidid?

I thought that was a mistake. I thought that if we were going to get into the business of moving a force in there like that, to begin to hunt down Aidid, we were at war. We were now in a country where we had defined an enemy and we were fighting and we were going to be involved in taking casualties and killing Somalis. In the end you look at what national interests are involved, whether we should be involved in this sort of thing, whether in the end this was going to be productive and help our humanitarian or peacekeeping [activities]. I didn't see it, and I thought that that was a mistake. I think we had crossed the line when we got into that. I also think that the capability we had in there with Task Force Ranger -- very elite, highly trained, obviously very brave and courageous soldiers -- I think that was the wrong kind of mission [for them] to be there in the long term. It was it was a misuse of an asset that's very valuable and very capable and very well trained.

This opinion was shared by the top people in the military; Colonel Powell wasn't keen on bringing in the Rangers and expressed that concern. General Hoar didn't believe that the Rangers could capture Aidid; he gave a one in four chance that they would find him. Why is it that the Rangers are brought in despite the fact that at the top level there's so much concern?

[At that point], I had left UNITAF and I was onto other things, and I wasn't to come back until after the battle in Mogadishu in October '93, so I was not involved in that whole decision making process. I was watching it from outside, and, again, couldn't understand it. As a matter of fact, my reaction was that the worst thing that could happen is that they capture Aidid, that would have turned the worst thing because he could have become a martyr, he could have become a symbol, and all of Mogadishu could have erupted and it could have been into something much worse. Actually having captured Aidid could have been a worse situation than killing him or not capturing him in the long run, and caused a lot more casualties and a lot more fighting.

I talked to Aidid at length personally about the day of the battle in Mogadishu and the tactics involved. I was [an] interviewer, [and] I was interested [in hearing] from his side. I was on the ground and had talked to General Garrison and his forces about what had happened, and of course we were about getting the prisoners out, but I took the opportunity to ask Aidid what had happened that day and how he had organized himself for this. He said, "We had watched those men at the airfield," -- he called them "those dangerous men at the airfield" -- and how they operated and he made the determination that the helicopters were the vulnerability, or the center of gravity, and so when they held a meeting he put people on the roofs of the houses around the meeting place with the machine guns and rocket launchers and they were to concentrate all their fire on the helicopters. He really believed if he shot a helicopter down, that would cause them to gather round the helicopters, they could fix them and pin them in one area. The reaction force, he said, always came out of the airfield -- in our day in UNITAF we had a number of reaction forces come from different ways, but he said unlike those days the reaction force always came out of the airfield -- "so we watched where the reaction forces came from [and] we put in an ambush, and it was only activated when we held meetings, so it would engage the reaction force or slow it down or stop it," which I think happened that day. He had designed a set of tactics that ended up working, unfortunately. Though I think that operation would have been a success and the Rangers would have been out of there had the helicopter not been hit right toward the end; it would have been a tremendously quick in-and-out operation. [I think it was a combination of a] little bit of bad luck in [Aidid's] favor, and what I think might have been some pretty astute tactical decisions by General Aidid and his militia.

How effective do you think the military intelligence was?

There were some aspects of our intelligence that was extremely good. I think our street intelligence was good. In the UNITAF phase we had counterintelligence teams on the ground. The human intelligence was developed in a very short period of time, turned out to be very good, and what we were receiving from that kind of street level tactical intelligence was extremely valuable. Some of the access that we had in there operationally -- I mean our ability to look and listen and take pictures -- was very helpful; aerial photography of these authorized weapon storage sites [so that we could] count weapons and everything, make sure they were there, was all very helpful. I think [what we lacked was] probably the ability to penetrate the faction leaders and truly understand what they were up to, or maybe [the ability to] understand the culture, the clan association affiliation, the power of the faction leaders, and maybe understanding some of the infrastructure, too. We did very well at the tactical level, we did very well at the operational level, but that other aspect of it, we maybe lacked at times and [that] maybe led to things like not understanding where a particular individual was, or who he was, or what his relationship was, and maybe caused mistargeting in some cases by those that were after Aidid or his lieutenants.
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HayesStreet · Dec 30, 2001

Originally posted by Ottomaton

Franks, however, was in no way in charge of these forces. When he was in Somalia, he was in charge of UNITAF, the UN task force, but was not there at the time. He also had some really scathing things to say about the operation as a whole. Here are the questions leading up to the quote I previously printed. Tell me if it seems to you like he's trying to 'cover up':

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Yeah, that's pretty convincing... "When I WAS IN CHARGE, we had great intel and the situation was totally in control. When I left, the situation got totally screwed up. But oh one more thing, it wasn't the military's fault, cause we didn't want to do any of that stuff." That's a really good rebuttal. He removes any blame from the military. "No way we could've been suckered." Remember, even before you posted this I said it was much better for the military and intelligence communities to say "They got lucky" rather than "we got taken." What did Franks say? "Aidid got lucky."

BTW: His intel assessment (when you take out his own self serving assessment of intel while HE was in charge) goes right along with what I've been saying. The normal technical intel was good as usual. The human intel was crap.

AND, his recount of Aidid's preparations (We knew when they were coming - we always watched the spec ops guys) (we put RPGs for the choppers on the roofs during meetings) goes right along with what I'm saying. AND if they had fed our Somali intel assets bad intel, do you think he would reveal that to Franks?

Then take into account the CIA senior man, who clearly believed they were fed the info to sucker them into an ambush, and its lights out. Add the fact the CIA station chief's #2 was fed info that led him to be ambushed shortly before that, and add that to the testimony from Franks quoting Aidid talking about ambushing the troops they were watching at the airport...you're in denial if you don't at least think its 50/50 that the intel was bad.

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