Call Sign Extortion 17 (17 page)

Pay close attention to the navigator's testimony regarding directions. He said because “we're down here south of the HLZ,” in other words the AC-130 was spotting the HLZ (acronym for helicopter landing zone) from an aerial position almost over the landing zone, but just south of it.

Compare that with the AC-130 commander's testimony on directions, found at page 40 of Exhibit 5:

 

AC-130 Commander:
And they're changing their run-­in heading it sounded like, they are coming from the Northwest now and so there was that delay and then we heard the one-­minute out call, put the burn on. Shortly after the burn came on we saw—I saw three RPG shots, kind of just ripple— one, two, three—coming from the south to the north, I was in the southern part of the orbit and I saw, what I saw was either the first or second one make an initial hit, and just a massive explosion, and it just seemed to be stationary and it just dropped.

 

A couple of relevant points from this portion of the AC-130 pilot's testimony: First, Extortion 17 was coming, that is converging on the landing zone, from the northwest. Because the gunship was converging from the south, the gunship was firing down its light beam at a slightly different angle from the helicopter's approach.

Because the chopper and gunship were approaching the landing zone from slightly different angles, the plane from the south, the chopper from the northwest, the gunship's navigator assumed that the light did not clip the helicopter.

Maybe the light did not clip the chopper. Maybe it did.

Again, it doesn't matter, because the target stage was painted with the AC-130's powerful light. This long illumination gave the Taliban time to know where to stand and shoot.

To better understand where the AC-130 was flying in relation to the landing zone, turn to Exhibit 83 of the Colt Report, the transcript of the second day of testimony from the AC-130 gunship. Exhibit 40 included the first day of testimony of the AC-130 crew, conducted August 18, 2011, and Exhibit 83 was the continuation of that testimony, taken on August 19, 2011.

In his opening statement on August 19, at page 3 of Exhibit 83, the AC-130 aircraft commander explained that the gunship was actually flying in a tight, circling pattern over the landing zone.

 

AIRCRAFT COMMANDER:
[I was] the aircraft commander on that night. We were on (the) southern part of the orbit, and we were essentially [performing a] 1.5 nautical mile radius wheel, counter clockwise around the helicopter landing zone (HLZ) at the point when I saw the rocket propelled grenade (RPG). Now the helo was calling one-­minute out and we set up a contract to put down our burn, which is actually just a football (field) size flash light, infrared flashlight that you can see on NVGs.

 

So the AC-130 was basically flying a tight, counterclockwise orbit around the landing zone, with a radius of only 1.5 nautical miles, shining down its burn on the landing zone. The aircraft commander noted that the burn could be seen with NVGs, or night vision goggles.

Remember, the Taliban would need NVGs (night vision goggles) for the ultraviolet burn from the AC-130 to have been a fatally defective mistake. Without NVGs, the ultraviolet burn would have been invisible to the naked eye.

But did the Taliban have access to NVGs? The next chapter examines that question.

Chapter 28

Taliban Access to NVGs and Other Weapons

Did the Taliban have access to night vision goggles (NVGs) that would have enabled them to see the ultraviolet burn being fired down by the AC-130 gunship?

Yes. Of course they did.

This leads to the next question: Where did the Taliban get NVGs?

Pakistan.

The
Express Tribune
is the major English-­language newspaper published in Pakistan, and it is affiliated with the
International New York Times
, the global edition of the
New York Times.

On June 15, 2011, less than sixty days before the Extortion 17 shoot-­down, the
Express Tribune
ran an article entitled “Welcome to the ‘American Market'— On sale: Night-­vision goggles, RPGs.”
That article, authored by Pakistani reporter Nadir Hassan, revealed the extent of the arms market in Pakistan, where American weaponry was sold, often stolen from neighboring Afghanistan, not just in the city of Peshawar, but in several cities through Pakistan.

Consider the following excerpts from the
Express Tribune
's article.

 

PESHAWAR: For people who openly sell night-­vision goggles, grenades and even the occasional RPG, the dealers at the American Market in Peshawar are remarkably reluctant to talk about their clientele. . . .

Most of the arms here will end up with the Taliban. Some people come to buy these weapons for themselves but mostly they are bought by militants,” he [the laptop dealer] says.

He explains that the area has come to be known as the American Market because it sells US goods that have either been stolen and transported from Afghanistan or captured from NATO trucks being transported from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

The laptop dealer says the American Market is only the third largest of its kind in Pakistan, and similar markets in Bara, Jamrud and Dara Adam Khel offer a greater variety of weapons, although he adds that there has been an army clampdown in Dara Adam Khel.

Despite the abundance of arms available in these markets, this is only the tip of the iceberg for the Taliban.

“The Taliban are the United Nations of weaponry,” says Lee Wollonsky, an arms-­smuggling expert who has worked with various think-­tanks in the US.

 

The article verified that US weapons, including NVGs, were plentiful to the Taliban, and that a good portion of those weapons came through Pakistan. But perhaps the most sobering and indeed chilling excerpt revealed in the article was the very last paragraph.

 

Ultimately, though, the greatest provider—though inadvertently—of weaponry to the Taliban based in Afghanistan may be its greatest target: the US. As the laptop dealer at the American Market in Peshawar says, “The US gives weapons to people in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and they just go and sell it to people here who then sell it to the Taliban.”

 

Remember that this article was written in June of 2011, less than two months before the shoot-­down. Recall also the testimony from Exhibit 89 from military intelligence officials that more than one hundred Taliban insurgents had been moved into the Tangi Valley for the purpose of shooting down a Coalition helicopter.

To think that those insurgents would not bring NVGs to accomplish the task would be quite absurd.

After all, American helicopters fly at night.

Chapter 29

A Point-­Blank Shot: Clues from Exhibit 60

The Executive Summary of the Colt Report grossly exaggerated the distance between the helicopter (Extortion 17) and the Taliban insurgent who fired the RPG that brought the chopper down, noting that a “previously undetected group of suspected Taliban fighters fired two or three RPGs in rapid succession from the tower of a two-story mud brick building approximately 220 meters south of the CH-47D.”

Aside from the fact that 220 meters (720 feet) is outside the effective range of the RPG weapon that brought the chopper down
, a fact also proven by internal evidence in the Colt Report, it can be mathematically proven from evidence presented by the Combat Assessment Team investigating the shoot-­down that the “distance-­to-­shooter” as set forth in the Executive Summary was wrong.

Why do this? Why grossly exaggerate the distance-­to-­shooter?

Here's why.

If it can be shown that the shot was fired from a much longer distance away, outside the landing zone, this takes the heat off the military and off the Obama Administration for its foolish rules of engagement that prevented pre-­assault fire in the landing zone to begin with. In other words, they can say, “Hey, the shot didn't even come from anywhere near the landing zone, so our decision not to pour pre-­assault fire into the landing zone didn't have any effect on the shoot-­down.” In other words, they could plausibly say that “the shoot-­down had nothing to do with the rules of engagement.”

That argument, however, is malarkey, and the internal evidence, which the military probably did not expect to be leaked out so quickly, proved it.

One of the most crucial exhibits from the Colt Report was Exhibit 60. This was the report of the Joint Combat Assessment Team (JCAT) at Bagram Air Base. It should be noted that at the time of the release of the Executive Summary, which established the military/government narrative of “don't look at us, we did nothing wrong,” it's doubtful that either Brigadier General Colt, or General Mattis, or CENTCOM, or the Obama Administration counted on the JCAT report or sworn testimonies within the investigation ever seeing the light of day.

Look at the role of the Joint Combat Assessment team, as defined at page 2 of Exhibit 60:

 

The Joint Combat Assessment Team (JCAT) investigates battle damage and shoot-­downs to determine the threat weapon system used in the attack and the enemy TTP employed, enabling the commander to determine the best counter-­tactics to defeat the threat. Additionally JCAT cooperates with the acquisition and test community, and the Survivability Information Analysis Center to share lessons learned, archive survivability data, and reduce future aircraft vulnerabilities.

 

Thus, it was JCAT's job to examine forensic evidence from the crash, including the rotary blades to determine the angle-­of-­strike, analyze the statements of witnesses and chemical evidence where available, and serve as the one unit on the ground physically sifting through the wreckage and having scientific tests run on fragments of the aircraft to piece together what happened. Their job was to report back with a no-­holds-­barred, no-­bull assessment of what went wrong, given whatever evidence they compiled.

This does not mean that they were privy to everything. There is no evidence, for example, that they were privy to knowledge about the Joint “Lima Bravo” unit that arrived at 3:04 a.m. (more on that in a later chapter), moments after the shoot-­down, nor is there any evidence that they knew anything about the seven mysterious Afghans who illegally entered the aircraft prior to takeoff. They did, however, sift through the aircraft wreckage for structural, engineering, chemical, and electrical forensic evidence regarding the shoot-­down. The helicopter, after being shot down,
was cut up, put on trucks, and physically removed, piece-­by-­piece from the shoot-­down site, and taken to the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the JCAT unit did most of its work.

While Exhibit 60 still did not include any clues as to the identity of the seven mysterious Afghan invaders, it did prove some crucial forensics information and was frank in its assessment at times.

The JCAT report covered altitude, speed, the weapon used to bring down the chopper, and point of origin of the attack. All JCAT-­compiled evidence suggested that Extortion 17 was about to land when it was shot down.

At page 6, and this evidence is crucial, the report noted that the chopper was between 100 and 150 feet above the ground, and that it had slowed its air speed to “less than 50 knots.” Converted to miles-­per-­hour, 50 knots is approximately 57 miles per hour. Less than 50 knots could be 40 knots. It could be 30 knots. It could be 10 knots.

It should be noted that the evidence at page 6, noting air speed to “less than 50 knots” is even slower than the estimate, previously referred to at page 52 of Exhibit 53, where one of the Apache pilots testified in the transcript that the chopper had slowed her airspeed to “80 knots or less.”

It's possible that the Apache pilot's moment-­in-­time observation of “80 knots or less” may have occurred seconds before the chopper continued her deceleration to “50 knots or less.”

It's also possible that eyeball estimations of speed may not have been critically accurate.

Nevertheless, whether we go with “80 knots or less” from Exhibit 53, or the “50 knots or less” estimate, the somewhat common phrases among the two estimates are the phrases “or less” and “less than,” making it apparent that the aircraft during this timeframe was flying at a relative slow rate of speed and was probably decelerating.

The report did not say how much slower than fifty knots Extortion 17 was flying, but we know that it was slower than 57 miles an hour at this point. Even given the fastest estimate within the “less than 50 knots” estimate, the chopper was flying slower than most cars travel on interstate highways.

In another part of the report at page 60, the JCAT team reported that Extortion 17 was 50 meters (54 yards) from FA site (Final Approach Site). This down-­and-­distance finding is crucial in understanding why the RPG was fired when it was.

Go back to the testimony on the size of the spotlight being shot down on the landing zone. Remember that General Colt asked the Apache crews about the size of the ground area being illuminated: “And how big is the box when they are doing that?”

The co-­pilot of the second Apache replied “A football field.” And then the pilot of Gun 1, the first Apache, chimed in. “I would say 500 meters or so. It's pretty big.” And the navigator of the AC-130 said, at page 48 of Exhibit 40, “Our burn is probably roughly the equivalent to the size of a football field.”

Do the math. A football field is 100 yards. Based on this, if a player were to stand on the 50-yard-­line of a 100-yard football field (the midpoint), he would be 50 yards from one end zone, and 50 yards from the other end zone.

Likewise, if the Taliban insurgent was standing at the midpoint of the landing zone, right in the very center of the burn being flashed down by the AC-130, that means he would have to walk at least 50 yards in either direction to walk out from under the spotlight.

At the time it was struck, the chopper was 54 yards from the midpoint landing zone. That's an approximation, of course, and the estimate might be slightly off either way by a few yards.

That means the chopper, at 54 yards out, if that estimate were exactly correct, would be 4 yards from entering the perimeter of the spotlight being shone down from the AC-130.

Of course if the calculation is repeated with the second co-­pilot's estimate about the size of the burn zone, at 500 meters (546 yards divided by 2 = 273 yards from center point of landing zone) that means the chopper was now clearly inside the landing zone and under the bright infrared spotlight being beamed down.

But based on the 54-yard estimate, and given approximately 50 yards of light to the center point of the landing zone, the evidence suggested that Extortion 17 was probably just breaking into the spotlight at the
time the RPG was fired. This explains why the RPG was fired when it was fired. The chopper had just broken into the lights, and the Taliban insurgent started firing away the second it became visible, which would have been at least 50–54 yards from the center of the spotted landing zone.

Now a Chinook doesn't have a tail rotor blade like most helicopters. Instead, it has twin main rotor blades, one in the front and one in the back. Looking at the Chinook from above, it is easy to see that there are three rotor blades in the front, all conjoined at a fixed, spinning axis, like a three-­bladed fan, and the same is true for the back.

So from the top, the blade configurations, in both the front and back of the big helicopter, look almost like a “Peace” symbol, as can be seen in this diagram of the rotor blade configuration system of the Chinook.

That means the chopper, at the instant of its demise, was going very low, and very slow. Reports show that the second rocket-­propelled grenade struck the black rotary blade of the helicopter, a blade that is about 30 feet long.

The wingspan of each blade system is about sixty feet across the swirling circle, and the distance from the front tip of the front blade to the back tip of the back blade is about one hundred feet.

This means that if the Taliban was shooting with a RPG, and no one in the military has claimed that anything but an RPG was used, the terrorist was firing at a target of 99 feet long (front blade-­tip to back blade-­tip) and 60 feet wide (side blade-­tip to side blade-­tip).

If the shooter was up-­close to the target, say at point-­blank range, that's a pretty good-­size target. But if he backed off a half-­mile or more, hitting 99 feet by 60 feet would have become more like hitting a needle in a haystack.

The fatal shot that brought down the chopper struck in the back blades and blew up, destabilizing the aircraft, breaking her apart into three parts, sending it quickly to the ground below. The diagram below, showing the angle at which the RPG struck the back rotor blade of the chopper, was taken from page 14 of the JCAT report (Exhibit 60 of Colt Report). The JCAT was able to determine this angle because they examined the blade and ran tests on it.

Now just how close was the Taliban attacker to Extortion 17? Imagine being up in the air, looking straight at the front of the helicopter, and it's approaching at eye level at the time it's struck by the fatal RPG.

Calculation with Chopper 100 Feet Above Ground When Struck

Remember that the JCAT report (Exhibit 60, page 6 of the Colt Report) estimated that at this point the chopper was, when struck by the RPG, between 100 and 150 feet above the ground.

The blades in this diagram are 60 feet from left to right. If you double the blade length, it becomes 120 feet. To get an idea for the approximate distance the attacker was from the helicopter, and for greater simplicity of calculation, assume the arrow was striking the blade at 100 feet off the ground.

Here, apply some simple geometric principles, using the Pythagorean theorem to get some ballpark estimates.

Take a look at the right triangle shown below.