The father of a SEAL Team 6 member who died in a helicopter crash says the Obama administration lied to him and the other families about the details surrounding the deaths of members of the squad that killed Taliban leader Osama bin Laden.
Billy Vaughn, father of Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn, who was among 30 who died in 2011 when their Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, told J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on
Newsmax TV Wednesday that what the families were initially told about why the helicopter was shot down later turned out to be a lie.
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"When the chopper was shot down, we learned many disturbing things," Vaughn explained.
"We learned that when the shots were fired, when the chopper was down, we did not take out the men who fired the [Rocket Propelled Grenades] because of the rules of engagement," he said. "That's what we were told three times in that debriefing."
However, Rep. Thomas Rooney of Florida, who was Vaughn's congressman at the time, heard a different story when he attended "a classified, high-level military briefing."
"He was told in the debriefing that they did not take them out because of the rules of engagement," but because "they didn't know where the shots came from."
Billy Vaughn said he knew at that point that "what we'd been told" was a lie.
Vaughn said that the other disturbing factor about the death of his son and the other SEAL Team 6 members was that the helicopter they were in was "a 1960-some-odd helicopter, CH-47C retrofitted to D model in the 1980s," which was really "a transport chopper."
"We learned that they had begun to mix Navy SEALs, Army Rangers with general purpose forces, aviation, because we didn't have enough Special Operations to fly our Special Operators on their nighttime assaults," he added. "So we'd begun to mix them."
He said that once he and his wife, Karen, learned that they were lied to, they started "to look at many other things."
The Vaughns wrote an
open letter to Obama that was published on WorldTribune.com, telling the president that he needs to resign in the face of the growing threat of the Islamic State, saying that he is "not up to this job."
He told Newsmax that what the media isn't talking about is the fact that "since President Obama became president, over 80 percent of the deaths in Afghanistan have occurred on his watch."
He said that he and his wife have called on Obama to resign because "the world stage has deteriorated under his watch, and he has stood idly by or drawn a red line in the sand and then not backed it up or armed the enemy.
"Now even it's come out with [James] Foley's beheading that the president . . . knew ahead of time but probably his inaction caused us not to be able to get that guy out," he said.
"Then again, he discloses the Special Operations attempt that was made, compromising our Special Operatives again," he added. "He's done that over and over again.
"It's just one thing after another, and every time he compromises our forces, he also compromises the security of American citizens, and when America is at risk, the world is at risk."
Vaughn contends that when the Vice President Joe Biden outed SEAL Team 6, he put the unit at greater danger by making it a target, something he says his son was aware of and warned them about before he was killed.
"This president has outed our special operators time and time again to tout himself as the national security president when nothing could be further from the truth," he said.
In an interview Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show," Karen Vaughn urged the White House to stop waffling and launch quick and definitive action against ISIS.
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"If you have cancer, you don’t manage cancer, you crush it," she said.
"I'm so sick and tired of these vague terms and this needing somebody else to do something first before this president acts."
Billy Vaughn told Steve Malzberg that Obama "just looks for an excuse not to act … It sounds like he has no soul, he has no passion.
"You can get him excited talking about the minimum wage or talking about the way that somebody's being treated at work, in other words about problems in America, but you cannot get him excited, you cannot get any passion out of this man about threats to our republic."
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