There is no way suspended NBC News anchorman Brian Williams was telling the truth about being embedded with a
SEAL Team Six mission, a former member told CNN Sunday.
“What Brian Williams is saying, none of it can be true,” former SEAL Team Six member Don Mann told
"Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter. "For a reporter to be embedded with SEAL Team Six or any Tier One unit — that just doesn’t happen.
The objective for any such unit is to conceal its activities and mission, said Mann, and "the last thing in the world we would want is a reporter sitting in a helicopter embedded in one of these units.”
Williams told late night talk show host David Letterman in 2012 that he flew to Baghdad with SEAL Team Six, describing that he was told not to make eye contact with them or talk with them.
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He later claimed he got a piece of fuselage from a helicopter downed during the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which Mann also said could not be possible.
For a SEAL Team Six member to have retrieved a piece of a downed helicopter would have entailed too much risk during the heat of battle, he pointed pointed
“In the midst of all that a SEAL would have to go back in and grab a piece of that tail,” Mann told Stelter. "There’s no way in the world that would happen. It would be criminal.”
There have been a few cases in which members gave souvenirs to presidents or CIA directors, but reporters would not get one, said Mann.
“A reporter’s objective is in contrast to the military’s,” Mann said. “A reporter wants to expose everything that we’re trying to conceal.”
Mann's statements were similar to those of another former SEAL, Brandon Webb, who told
The Huffington Post that Williams' story sounded "completely preposterous" because the SEAL community has a "healthy dislike" to embedded journalists.
Further U.S. Special Operations Command Spokesman Ken McGraw said that the military does not "embed journalists with this or an other unit that conducts counter-terrorism missions."
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