How many helicopters and of what kind would it take to evacuate 22 people/bodies plus the SEALs and pilots? Certainly more than a single remaining Blackhawk.
I wonder if the inadvertent tweeter might have been hearing the support copters coming in after the initial raid to pick up the prisoners/crew and that the explosions were also after the fact--the post-raid destruction of the downed helicopter.
I suspect that as the story is progressively refined, we'll learn that rather than being a flawless triumph, the actual reason for success was the depth of backup planning and redundant systems.
Obama himself asked them to have a backup plan: [blah blah url]
Do you really think that the US Navy Seals don't bother to think "Hey maybe we should have a backup plan for this hugely important and very risky mission" unless the President comes up with the idea?
The linked article does smell a bit like the President trying to insert himself into the story.
You are forgetting Eagle Claw, and the fiasco at Desert One.
Look, neither of us can prove our claims, since we weren't there. But I have read several news reports along these lines, that Obama pushed for more redundancy.
One might ask: why didn't the SEALs think of it? The answer can be (and here again, this is pure speculation just like yours) that the SEALs wanted the smallest possible contingent, to avoid being detected (2 helis are less likely to be detected as 4) and risking the Pakistanis' ire. But at some level, diplomatic considerations creep in; and Obama could have said (or thought) "I'll take care of the fallout; but I want you guys to be double-extra safe".
While it is easy to dismiss this news report as you did, I don't think that is the case here.
For example: in the photograph released by the WH (where everyone is huddled, watching the monitor), Obama is in a corner, and the military guy is centre stage. Don't you think if Obama was so self-promoting as you claim he is, that he would have maneuvered into a better shot? Maybe placed himself front-and-center, to show he's "in command" ??
In comparison: do you remember how Bush flew a jet onto the carrier, "Mission Accomplished" ? That is self-promotion.
The President might have known something the Seals didn't about the possibility of resistance from the Pakistani military. Other folks pointed out that forty minutes was plenty of time for Pakistan to scramble jets, etc., and much has been made of the precarious nature of power in the Pakistani military. Perhaps Obama had intelligence that the incursion might provoke a group of Pakistani military officers to defy their government's orders and launch an armed response, possibly because of the location of the strike, or possibly as a prelude to a coup. He wouldn't necessarily have shared that with the SEAL team, he would have just told them to be prepared to "fight their way out" if necessary.
Perhaps this, perhaps that, or perhaps like any other politician Obama pushes himself into the limelight when things go well and blames someone else when things go badly. I don't hold it too far against him because it's what all politicians do, but I reserve the right to call him out on it too.
* Perhaps Obama had intelligence that the incursion might provoke a group of Pakistani military officers to defy their government's orders and launch an armed response, possibly because of the location of the strike, or possibly as a prelude to a coup. He wouldn't necessarily have shared that with the SEAL team, he would have just told them to be prepared to "fight their way out" if necessary.*
The operation was under the direct control of the CIA, and I think we can assume the CIA has just as much intelligence knowledge as the White House does.
And now personally, if I had reason to believe that men under my command were likely to be entering into actual hostile contact with the military of the sixth largest country in the world (and a nuclear power to boot) then I'd probably actually have shared that information with them. They're big boys, they can handle it, and if they see the Pakistani Army showing up then they need to know whether they're allowed to shoot.
And now personally, if I had reason to believe that men under my command were likely to be entering into actual hostile contact with the military of the sixth largest country in the world (and a nuclear power to boot) then I'd probably actually have shared that information with them.
When he (purportedly) said "fight your way out," who else could he have been talking about fighting? I think it's safe to assume they got a lot more specific than speculating about fighting undefined hypothetical resistance that might happen to materialize outside this compound in the middle of Pakistan.
"The President might have known something the Seals didn't about the possibility of resistance from the Pakistani military...The President might have known something the Seals didn't about the possibility of resistance from the Pakistani military."
If the president knew such critical information and didn't share it up-front with the operators planning the mission, that's a big fail on his part. Given the sensitivity of this operation, if he didn't trust the people involved with all of the critical information about the situation, he shouldn't have trusted them to execute the mission, either. I can see how he might not want to share the details about which generals were in league with who, but that doesn't preclude the pre-planning intel brief from including a warning that the Pakistani military might interfere with the operation. There is absolutely no excuse for the operators to not have such critical information before they start planning their mission, rather than "Oops, we forgot to mention..." after they have already built a plan.
In practice, high-level leaders often get much less resolution in their intel than those below them: they need to know the big picture, not necessarily all of the little details. I somehow doubt that the President was micromanaging the planning process and intel dissemination in this way. I think that a far more likely scenario is that two or more plans were developed and presented to the President and his national security team, with the strengths and weaknesses of each plan. For example:
Plan A: Minimum number of helicopters. Reduces our exposure and the chances of detection, but sharply limits our options for dealing with contingencies.
Plan B: Back-up helicopters loiter a few miles from the target area. Increases our footprint and the chances of detection, but gives us far better options for dealing with contingencies.
I could easily see how the reality was that the President said, "Let's go with plan B: I want you guys to have the backup if you need it," which then went through the "telephone game" and ended up being reported as "President Saves the Day by Reminding SEALs to Bring Spare Helicopter."
Telling them they need a plan to fight their way out IS sharing that information. Who else would oppose them but the Pakistani military?
The SEALs don't need to know the political details. They just need a heads-up: "Hey guys, you need to be aware that because of the political situation in Pakistan, you might end up fighting the Pakistani military as well Bin Laden's personal security. Let me lay out the nature of the resistance you might face."
Those concerns could easily have been raised so late (ten days before the raid) because the President himself didn't have it earlier.
My point is that it should be shared before the planning process starts, not after the plan is complete.
As for the idea that such information would be late-breaking, I find that to be incredibly implausible for the CIA's analysis of the mood of a nation's leadership to swing wildly in such a short amount of time.
Ultimately, I don't think that such a decision would have been based on a single element like, "The Pakistani military might interfere." I think that hugh3 had it right: there is no way that the SEALs wouldn't have built significant redundancy into their plan from the very beginning. His Simpsons analogy is spot-on: the President telling the SEALs how to plan a military mission is like a spectator telling a pro athlete how to make the next play.
Was anyone else surprised by the length of time the SEALs spent on the ground?? 40 minutes seems like a long time for highly trained and rehersed professionals to go room to room in a moderate sized villa. 40 minutes is enough time for local police to show up, military aircraft to be scrambled....in short 40 minutes is a long time to have an operation go FUBAR.
I wonder if it was supposed to be a much quicker operation but they had to wait for the backup transport to arrive after the crash???
Right. I imagine under 10 minutes of 'initial action', another 10 of securing the building completely from all side, and the other 20 minutes just picking up what they needed and searching.
What's amazing to me, especially after seeing these few photos of wreckage, is that everybody inside got away alive, according to the Pentagon. Intuitively, I've always thought that any helicopter crash = death sentence. Clearly, that's not true.
Odds are the helicopter hit a tail rotor on a fence or some such thing, and had a relatively uneventful landing, even though it was too damaged to be used for extraction.
Helicopters can quite easily land if they lose power, etc., through a process called autorotation.
It was the explosive charges that were set and detonated before the team left that did the vast majority of the damage.
I landed my AH-64 Longbow using autorotation many times in the late-90s Janes simulator. I really wish somebody would come out with a good battle helicopter sim again.
Interesting story of the two Aérospatiale Lama world records:
"On 21 June 1972 a Lama with a single pilot (Jean Boulet) aboard established a helicopter absolute altitude record of 12,442 m (40,814 ft), immediately followed by an inadvertent record for the longest ever autorotation when the engine flamed out at the peak altitude of the flight."
(from wikipedia)
Always reminds me of the saying: "there are no good helicopter pilots, there are only old helicopter pilots".
There is a "dead man's curve". If you're low enough, you can survive a pure drop. If you have enough forward speed, you can turn that into lift. If you're high enough, you can get enough rotor speed to turn that into enough lift to slow down the drop. But there are areas in the height/velocity equation where you probably die.
It didn't crash persay. It had problems generating lift and the pilot had to land it during the raid. The military then destroyed it into into the current state you see now. Usually they do this to prevent people from reverse engineering the technology and stealing it.
Yeah, helicopter crashes are generally not fatal. Shock absorbing seats, an airframe that's designed to absorb impact energy, plus the autorotating main rotor that slows down the descent like a whirlybird toy. Some of Kamov helicopters, as mentioned, feature ejection seats. What's interesting is that explosively-ejected rotor blades. The blades have enough rotational inertia to intercept the crew's ejection path if they were just released at the hub.
I always thought the opposite...since you can't eject from a helicopter, I always thought (and pretty sure I've been told) they are built to maximize survivability during a crash. There were survivors to both downed black hawk in Mogadishu.
The Russian Ka-50 Black Shark attack helicopter has an ejection seat for the pilot. According to Wikipedia, the rotor blades and canopy are blown away by explosive charges before the ejection seat is triggered.
Nope, it doesn't. The Ka-50 is the only production helicopter to be equipped with an ejection seat.
Part of the reason other attack helicopters don't have them is that ejection seats in helicopters add complexity and weight for not that much of an increase in survivability, considering the usual flight profiles that these helicopters fly.
It makes more sense to focus on improving the survivability of crashes through measures such as collapsing seats and landing gear designed to absorb impact forces. With these types of improvements the crew of modern helicopters can survive even severe accidents without serious injury.
From what I've read, there wasn't a "crash", per se. There was a mechanical failure that was serious enough to require an emergency landing. The pilot landed the helicopter and then the team destroyed it. The wreckage that we see is the result of the team destroying the helicopter, not of the landing itself.
Given the number of remains, it appears to be trivial. If it wasn't they'd clean them up not just blow them up.
They'd blow it up in a hostile country such as Serbia where the remains of F-117 were transported to China afterward and the present Chinese stealth technology is a result of reverse engineering of those remains. F-117 was 20 years old in 1999 - and if this helicopter was so new and so secret that nobody has seen it before, they'd go pick it up as Pakistan is a "friendly" state.
It's just a standard transport helicopter (like MH-60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_UH-60_Black_Hawk) modified for special forces to have less of a radar cross-section. For example, they put rotor screws under a plate.
It's not so important for a helicopter to be stealth - if the pilot has NVG, it can fly during the day right over the trees, and few radars can pick it up, unless it accidentally flies over (in the radius of about 8km) of a mobile surface-to-air missile launcher. And they know where these are: JSTARS tells them where the sources of radiation are, and they set their path around those. They also avoided all towns where someone would detect them based on noise and make a phone call, or, god forbid, tweet.
The hub looks to serve the same purpose as the ducting around the tail rotor in the canceled Comanche project. It serves to reduce interaction between the main rotor and the tail rotor, thereby reducing the amount of noise the helicopter makes.
I don't know anything about aviation..but I did see a show years ago about a new prototype US helicopter...and the first image on Wired, to me, 100% reminded me of it. Googling, I'm sure what I'm talking about is the RAH-66 Comanche.
The angles on the tail roter look similar however according to reports the downed helicopter was carrying half of a 25 man seal team so it had to be something bigger if the government was telling the truth.
I'm not saying it's a Comanche..just saying there are similarities (to me) and it might provide a starting point to see what/where the upgrades modifications came from.
It looks like he didn't live tweet the insertion operation so much as the cleanup operation (backup helicopter, destruction of helicopter, etc.) The explosion he heard was almost certainly the destruction of the downed helicopter, which would have occurred after the backup helicopter had arrived. The backup helicopters were seemingly of a different type.
Stealth is all relative. There's no stealth technology that renders you completely undetectable, just technologies that decrease the effective range of particular forms of detection.
For example, if a normal Blackhawk can be heard approaching from a distance of x miles, while one of these modified helicopters can only be heard from a distance of x-c miles, then the enemy has that much less warning to respond to your approach.
More likely Radar and IR stealth than silenced. It was the trip in from Afghanistan they concealed. By the time they were over Abbottabad it was too late to do anything about it.
That's also where (as I understand it) they did all the DNA testing and so forth. The final stage in which the body was flown to the aircraft carrier was just for disposal (a decision I think was sensible -- rather than allowing "the body" to become a rallying issue for terrorists it's better just to dump it in the sea before anyone knows you've got it).
Stealth jets are generally quiet on the approach and noisy as hell once leaving as they direct the vast majority of the sound rear-wards. Once they've dropped their bomb or showed up on the scene there's no hiding them, so why try?
It's eerie how quietly a stealth jet can creep up, and crazy how loud they are when going away, an effect obvious at air-shows with stealth-modified aircraft.
It's incredible that I tried to search the type of helicopter used via Google without success. All results where about the crash not the type of helicopter.
That crash landing might have been caused by a phenomenon known as “settling with power,” which occurs when a helicopter descends too quickly because its rotors cannot get the lift required from the turbulent air of their own downwash. “It’s hard to settle with power in a Black Hawk, but then again, if they were using one of these [low-observable helicopters], working at max gross weight, it’s certainly plausible that they could have because they would have been flying so heavy,” the retired special operations aviator said, noting that low-observable modifications added “several hundred pounds” to the weight of the MH-60, which already weighs about 500 to 1000 pounds more than a regular UH-60 Black Hawk.
Given the level of skill, training and experience a pilot would need to be allowed to fly that thing, and after rehearsing the raid in a life size replica of the compound - I think it's unlikely.
Even doing a PPL you learn about the effects of vortexes, wind shear, turbine wash etc. And these guys have many, many, many orders of magnitude more training than that.
More likely some combination of weight, altitude, excess speed... but I guess we'll never know.
Apart from the obvious, such as landing under fire, dealing with the effects of the other helicopter in a confined area, or simply pilot fatigue after the fast, low flight to get to the compound, it could be some freak effect like that.
Flying deep into Pakistan undetected and landing in Bin Ladin's backyard is a hell of a trick, no ordinary pilot could do that.
There's also Loss of Tail Rotor Effectiveness[1] (LTE), caused by the tail rotor entering a vortex ring in much the same way the main rotor is affected in settling with power. LTE will cause a helicopter to yaw sharply in a direction opposite the main rotor's rotation.
The position of the wreck, with the tail broken over a wall, makes me think there might have been a yaw problem. Or they might have been in a high hover, had a problem, and hit the wall on the way down.
The layout of the compound definitely had some design or goal to it. To my eye I couldn't tell what the effect was--religious was my first guess, but what you're saying makes sense. After all, he was 1800 yards from the Pakistan ~WestPoint. Coincidences of that magnitude don't occur flippantly.
I can't say why it was downvoted, but my reaction to your comment was that it was completely off-topic to the post you replied to: the parent post was talking about vortex rings off the wall and your post speculated about architecture. Also, you made strong claims with no evidence (religious motivation for the walls); the stronger the claim, the more support it needs.
Please reread the comment "To my eye I couldn't tell what the effect was--religious was my first guess, but what you're saying makes sense."
Which is pretty inconsistent from what you said "made strong claims with no evidence (religious motivation for the walls); the stronger the claim, the more support it needs."
I made no claim whatsoever, I divulged my first guess/naive speculation and said at first glance from my uninformed perspective I did not know exactly what the intentions were behind the architecture, but that I thought maybe it had to do with religion--him being a religious extremist.
I replied to the parent comment because I thought maybe the architecture was designed with the goal of producing vortex rings--making it harder for a helicopter to allow to allow people to repel.
You're also a hypocrite considering the comment you made previous to the one I'm replying "This is kind of off-topic, but I've always wondered...:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515028
How is that any different than what I did, if not worse?
Sometimes HN is just looking to be overly critical and point out flaws that only exist if you obsess over being pedantic.
Because you are making a couple leaps of logic. The compound definitely has a purpose to its shape? Maybe that is just the shape of the property they could buy. My property is kind of a trapezoid instead of a rectangle, thats just the way I bought it. And I highly doubt the walls were made to create vortex rings in helicopters. More plausible explanations are preventing people from seeing the inhabitants and slowing down ground based assault. I'm sure Osama knew that SOF can fast rope in on the inside of the walls, but the wall makes them either come up and breach (giving the defenders more time to react) or forces the SOF to drop in from a helicopter right over the property which gives the defenders an oppurtunity to shoot down the helicopter with small arms fire or an RPG. Not to mention the courtyard is overlooked by a 2 story building that makes it a shooting gallery. Those are far more likely reasons for the design than thinking Osama fired up some CFD program and designed his stone walls to mess with the rotors of a helicopter.
So you have never speculated on something which there is no definitive answer for?
I said yes there was some purpose behind the shape, look at it, and like you said, it could be just the plot that was available, but... like I said the very first comment it was a "guess" so it's really not a leap of logic and my point was he had a hard to breach compound located conveniently near a military base--a highly suspicious coincidence."Those are far more likely reasons for the design than thinking Osama fired up some CFD program and designed his stone walls to mess with the rotors of a helicopter" Strawman much? Did Osama fly the planes into the World Trade Center? No. My point was the Pakistan military could have provided the safe-house. I never said I knew whether the walls were designed to make vortex rings, or conceal OBL, or make it harder to breach by a commando team, or if it was religious--but clearly it's not a randomly designed shape.
My point is people, like yourself and prewett, get off on down-voting people, arguing over some minutia in an attempt to achieve a superiority high, and wasting everyone's time arguing about some inconsequential aspect of their comment. I never said all along I was certain I said it was a "guess" so please spare me your smug high and mightiness about "making a couple leaps of logic."
Why don't you try reading a comment in its entirety next time?
2) If you are going to make large jumps of logic like the one you've made, then that's fine. Just spell out what you are saying and why you are saying it because as it stands, I agree that your original comment seems very offtopic.
2. I made no "large jumps of logic" like I said, it was open speculation. Now please get off your high horse and quit repeating things that have already been said--everything you assert in your second point is proving wrong in my previous comment.
Do you not realize you're just discouraging people asking questions? That's essentially what you're advocating.
I did read at first that one second heli evacuated both teams after the first one crashed. But I also later read somewhere else that they dispatched a third heli after the crash?
There were four total, but only two were sent at first with the other two as backup. When one of those went down, one of the backup helicopters was sent in.
The articles I saw indicated there were four choppers total. I'm not sure whether they were right there or just nearby, but the article gave the impression that they were there in case they had to engage the Pakistani Air Force.
Surely if they did need to engage the Pakistani Air Force (and it's claimed that they had Pakistani permission for the raid) they'd want fighter jets, not extra helicopters?
Presumably they had those too, we don't know. It does make quite a bit of sense to have a backup in case something goes wrong, even under the high-stealth circumstances.
Remember that we have no idea what was in those helos, they could've held more SEALs, or sophisticated medical equipment, or even heavy weapons (although if they were also blackhawks that's less likely.)
Oh, certainly. I agree, the extra helicopters would have been kept at a safe distance just in case one or more of the others had a problem. They've obviously learned a lot from Operation Eagle Claw (this is required reading for understanding this raid):
Sorry for being off topic, but I'm really glad none of the troops suffered casualty or injuries. These guys also didn't lose their cool, granted they are the seals bit still.
I don't get why people use short URLs. Yours isn't working already. And I could never know where the link is taking me. Maybe it will take me to your honeypot.
Don't you think that the presence of living witnesses to the attack in Pakistan provides the United States with a lot of incentive to get this story basically correct? There seems to be a certain degree of suspicion about the death of every famous person who has ever died, but I have no reasonable doubt that Bin Laden is dead, and I have no reason to believe that he died at any time other than Sunday 1 May 2011 (United States time zones) when President Obama announced he died.
Now, seriously, I always doubted he would be captured alive. Just imagine how embarrassing would it be all the information about the CIA operations during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan becoming public on a trial. Of course he resisted capture.
Occam's razor, him being dead is probably true. However, I thought about that scenario too. Make his followers think he's dead so he loses his figurehead status, then spend the subsequent years interrogating him.
As for embarrassment, who said he'd ever be put on trial if we had him? If we can hold his followers indefinitely, certainly we could hold him.
It seems so improbable that they shot him if he was unarmed. If people knew he had been captured, securing his release by threatening future terrorist atrocities would become aim #1 for Al Qaeda, would it not?
I don't really get why people think that this is so improbable.
If you were in a dark room and burst in on a trained soldier in a baggy robe, would you wait to see if he had a gun/knife/grenade within range? If he did anything other than lay straight down on the floor with his hands up, it could be perceived as threatening.
I'm not trying to comment on whether that response is ethical, but it seems totally plausible to me.
Exactly. People who think this way are applying the rules of police action to war.
If you're a criminal and the police burst into your house then the police can't (or at least, aren't allowed to) shoot you unless they have damn good reason to believe that their lives are in danger. In a war, though, if you're an enemy combatant then you're fair game unless you're actively surrendering.
There's some gray area between the two, somewhere, but as a general rule if you want to steer clear of the latter category then don't make a video in which you "declare war on the United States" and then start killing people.
We have no idea what rules of engagement (ROE) they were operating under. If the ROE for the mission said, "every adult in the compound is to be considered hostile," then the operators wouldn't wait to confirm if someone was armed or not before shooting.
Not to mention that there were not much information in his possession that isn't in someone else's. If there really were anything that hadn't be told yet about all those "CIA operations", I don't see how his death would prevent their release.
Whether anybody has been listening (yet) is another matter.
What would he gain from releasing such information before capture? BTW, isn't the timing of his capture attempt a bit odd? If we are to believe the US intelligence community was unable to track him down for years while he was hiding in a Pakistani suburb next to a military training facility, wouldn't they look singularly incompetent? I mean, did they really trust the Pakistani on that?
The Navy has photos and video that they have not released, including video of the burial at sea. From what I've read, the photos are quite graphic and so they're waiting to publish them for a bit.
1) That is the tail rotor, not a fuselage...
2) Even if that were the fuselage of a UAV, there wouldn't be anything particularly "oversized" about it. UAVs are pretty big.
3) That is rather matte, not really shiny at all.
Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik said yesterday that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001 and that he was prepared to testify in front of a grand jury (see interview for details http://goo.gl/PaMRa).
Pieczenik is on the Council on Foreign Relations and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. He is a former US Navy Captain, and he went through Harvard Medical School while he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT.
Before I watch any long videos, I would like to know how he explains all the Bin Laden videos released on Al Jazeera?
I remember one specifically which was released to rebut claims of his death several years ago, in which he mentioned recent news to prove that he was, in fact, alive.
I'm not unwilling to believe that the government would lie to us or whatever, but I do require both proof and convincing explanations of any available data to the contrary. Right now, we have lots of confirming evidence and no good explanations of why it was all wrong.
That said, I expect the conspiracy theories to go on for decades. I'm sure there will be TV specials discussing it, just like there are for JFK, the moon landings, Roswell, etc.
It's not good to be dismissing unpopular ideas, a very popular idea before Iraq invasion was ....(you know the story). I'm just saying listening to both sides of the argument before conclusive making up ones mind is a good idea. I have not seen the said video and am not endorsing it, just commenting on the idea of openness, with all due respect. :-)
This particular dumb theory can be easily disproved: if the US government really were involved in some dumb-ass scheme to kill Bin Laden in 2001 and then not bother to tell anyone about it for nearly ten years (even, say, circa 2004 when Mr Bush really would have liked to have that for his re-election campaign) then they'd also be supervillainish enough to kill this guy for talking about it.
Sometimes it's not good to dismiss "unpopular" ideas, but it usually is a good idea to (provisionally) dismiss dumbass ideas which don't appear to make sense and for which there isn't any damn evidence.
Think you missed my point my man, you are talking about analyzing and then dismissing the idea (totally agree and cool), I am speaking of people who dismiss prior to analysis just because the idea is unpopular and not a part of the mainstream ideology. Hope this makes sense.
Well for a start it's not about "ideology". Ideology is about the way the world should be, and it's a matter on which the reasonable people of the world can and should disagree.
The date of bin Laden's death (if indeed he is dead, if indeed he ever existed) is a fact-of-the-matter thing; it's either one way or it's another way, and there shouldn't be much room for reasonable people to disagree at all. Reasonable people may be uncertain on such matters, but they should all share similar degrees of uncertainty.
I am not sure why you insist on missing my point repeatedly when I have clearly stated right from that start that "I have not seen the said video and am not endorsing it". My point was about attitude not the video, again in even simpler language:
Dismiss because everybody says so without giving any thought = Bad.
Dismiss after thinking about it and looking into it = Good.
Ironically, I should dismiss your response because you’re repeatedly beating the same dead horse. ;)
I am happy you finally get what I've been trying to say Mr.3. And no, I'm not getting into it again with you :-) (it's a public forum, look it up). It's not that serious anyway. Happy Cinco! :)
Instead of dismissing one idea or the other, it would be more interesting to ask why someone with Pieczenik's credentials and connections would say that when he did.
Generally speaking, people don't dismiss conspiracy theories merely because they are minority viewpoints. The dismiss conspiracy theories because it is obvious the fail the logic sniff-test.
If you gave equal time to every theory, no matter how basicly logically flawed, you would end up spending all your time just watching poorly edited videos on youtube. Dismissing something as a conspiracy theory isn't closeminded, it's a basic defensive mechanism.
Popular beliefs are barely ever logically qualified by every single person who believes them (most folks are blind followers - they'd rather take your word for it than go through the trouble, I understand), and secondly you are saying that alternate theories fail a test, that is my point, test before disqualifying, don't just disqualify.
Curious to know about your username "burgerbrain"? ;)
I wonder if the inadvertent tweeter might have been hearing the support copters coming in after the initial raid to pick up the prisoners/crew and that the explosions were also after the fact--the post-raid destruction of the downed helicopter.
I suspect that as the story is progressively refined, we'll learn that rather than being a flawless triumph, the actual reason for success was the depth of backup planning and redundant systems.
This will be ultimately be a story that becomes a lesson in how the military learns from its failures (Operation Eagle Claw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw and the Rattle of Mogadishu aka Black Hawk Down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)) rather than from its successes.