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In the early hours of 2 May 2011, a team of 79 American special-operation forces belonging to the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 flew two helicopters at low altitude across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, avoiding Pakistani radar as they landed in a compound inhabited by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Minutes later, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. was dead, and the SEALs were airborne once again. That evening, U.S. President Barack Obama confirmed in televised remarks that bin Laden was dead and that no Americans had been harmed in the operation. In its 2 May 2011 reporting of the raid, The New York Times stated that the Obama administration disclosed that SEALs and CIA operatives had taken part in the raid: That same day, the Washington Post specifically identified the SEAL team that carried out the raid: The next day, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the 2011 Atlantic Council Awards Dinner, which was that year honoring among others Admiral James G. Stavridis, then-Supreme Allied Commander for NATO. In Biden’s speech, he acknowledged the bin Laden raid in two instances, mentioning — as did The New York Times the day before — that Navy SEALs and the CIA were involved: These statements have been used to suggest that Biden put Seal Team 6 in danger, and that he may have even been responsible for the death of several SEAL Team 6 members in a raid that occurred three months later — a claim popularized by Boston-area radio personality Jeffrey T. Kuhner. Writing an opinion/analysis piece for the Washington Times in June 2013, he described Biden’s speech this way: Readers who had actually seen Biden’s speech would likely be confused by this interpretation. In his speech, Biden at no point mentioned SEAL Team 6, the names of any SEALs involved in the raid, or any other information that had not been publicaly reported the day before. We asked Stavridis if he felt Biden's words put the lives of people who conducted the raid at risk. By email, he told us that he and another military figure in attendance did not then, and do not now, believe Biden put lives at risk: Despite these realities, the claim that Biden released actionable, identifying information about the unit that carried out the bin Laden raid has metastasized into something even more inflammatory. Kuhner, in his Washington Times piece, suggested that Biden intentionally placed SEAL Team 6 in danger, and that this action was responsible for the death of Americans involved in a later 6 August 2011 mission that took the lives of 15 SEAL Team 6 operators and 15 other American service members: Kuhner made no effort in that story or in any subsequent reporting that repeats his claims to explain how Biden’s disclosure that Navy SEALs were involved in the 1 May 2011 bin Laden raid would have tipped off the Taliban to the fact that the SEALs — specifically SEAL Team 6 — would be conducting an operation in Afghanistan on 6 August 2011. Instead, Kuhner relies on innuendo and a misrepresentation of Biden’s remarks to make that point. This poorly reasoned innuendo, though it may be lacking in basis, apparently is re-emerging as a smear against Biden now that he has declared his candidacy for president in the 2020 election. In point of fact, the claim that Biden publicly revealed the identity of the special-operations unit responsible for bin Laden’s killing is demonstrably false. He did not identify the unit involved in the attack. He did, however, acknowledge the involvement of Navy SEALs more generally. This fact had been widely reported before Biden made his remarks.
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