The Hero Navy Seal Smells Fishy To Me

I'm re-blogging this from the Daily Mail. Something doesn't seem right about this guy. I'm not sure what or why but it all seems a little too "cute" and convenient. He had to of been given permission from very high up to talk about this mission. I'm not buying it.

EXCLUSIVE: SEAL Rob O'Neill under fire from his home state Congressman for breaching 'national security' - and faces new claims he is lying by saying he killed Osama bin Laden

• MailOnline revealed that O'Neill is 'The Shooter' and the man who will be interviewed next week publicly discussing the death of bin Laden 
• His account says that he rushed into bin Laden's room and shot him in the head, killing him dead  
• But other SEALs today said his version is untrue and that he is not the man who killed 9/11's evil mastermind
• His hometown Congressman is ex-SEAL who told MailOnline special forces missions must 'remain secret' in rebuke to O'Neill 
• SEAL commanders have written angry letter freezing him out of Special Forces circles for going public 
• Donated his SEAL uniform to 9/11 museum where it is now on display

Navy SEAL Rob O'Neill today faced fresh criticism and accusations of lying from his former comrades over his decision to publicly call himself the man who killed Osama bin Laden.

The newly elected Congressman from Montana - himself a former member of SEAL Team 6 – hit out at the ex-serviceman, telling MailOnline in an exclusive interview no details of special operations actions should ever be revealed.

‘Sensitive operations should remain secret,’ said Ryan Zinke, who is due to take his place in the House of Representatives in Washington in January.

‘It should be known as an operation conducted by US Special Forces and never disclosed what was involved,’ added Zinke, a Republican who won Montana’s sole seat in the House by 15 percentage points on Tuesday. 

It is not known if the two men know each other directly, but their service as SEALs overlapped.

O’Neill, 38, who grew up in Butte, Montana, now lives in Virginia. He is due to appear in a two-part documentary on Fox News next week, detailing his part in the killing of bin Laden.

MailOnline exclusive disclosed his identity this week ahead of the broadcast.

O’Neill has already described the night of May 2, 2011 in an interview with Sharon Stone’s ex-husband Phil Bronstein that appeared in Esquire magazine in February 2013. But his name was not revealed at that time and he was referred to only as ‘the Shooter.’

 The specifics of operations are a matter of national security and should remain that way

Ryan Zinke Congressman for O'Neill's home state of Montana and former SEAL commander

Now his identity has become public, military leaders and fellow SEALs are lining up to discredit his version of events.

A former SEAL Team 6 commander told the New York Times O’Neill only fired ‘insurance shots’ into bin Laden’s twitching body after the terror leader had already been mortally shot by an unidentified SEAL who is still in the service. 

That hero is described as the ’point man’ who led the SEALs up the stairs in bin Laden’s compound to the bedroom where he was hiding.

Another Team 6 member also disputed O’Neill’s version, saying the 'point man' had wounded bin Laden with a shot to the side, and then grabbed the women in the room for fear they were wearing explosives. O’Neill, he said, had then finished Osama off.

And Reuters quoted an unidentified source close to a SEAL Team 6 member as saying the fatal shot was fired by one of two other men who entered the room before O'Neill. 

But O’Neill told Bronstein last year: ‘I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he's going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.’

One SEAL source told MailOnline: 'The real shooter would never discuss it publicly.

'Members of SEAL Team Six haven’t discussed it publicly so there’s a reasonable chance he’s not being truthful.

'There is no way O’Neill could really prove it was he who took the fatal shot on Osama bin Laden unless his comrades all attested to it.

'But again, the code of secrecy with these special operators would preclude that.'

A second source told MailOnline that other SEALs are expected to speak out anonymously against O'Neill.

When another SEAL, Matt Bissonette, went public, the then-head of U.S. Special Operations personally asked members of SEAL Team Six whether his account was accurate.

Bissonette has since been forced to give up $4.5 million he made from his book ‘No Easy Day’ to the federal government. He is now suing his lawyer Kevin Podlaski for $8 million for giving him bad advice, by allegedly saying he did not need to submit the book to the Department of Defense for vetting.

Although it is not known if a similar operation is planned against O’Neill, a SEAL Team Six 'operator' spoke to CNN in March 2013 to contradict the version of events O'Neill had then given anonymously to Esquire magazine.

And on October 31 the SEALs’ top commander Rear Adm. Brian Losey and the senior enlisted member Michael Magarachi wrote to present and former SEALs warning them of speaking out on details of top-secret missions.

IN HIS OWN WORDS... ROB O'NEILL TELLS HOW HE KILLED BIN LADEN 

'I rolled past him into the room, just inside the doorway

'There was bin Laden, standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.'

O'Neill said that bin Laden looked confused and 'taller' than he had expected. 

The SEAL feared the woman was wearing a suicide vest. 

The terror leader was standing up, and O'Neill said he saw a gun, the AK-47 which bin Laden was known to have, on a shelf.

'I need to havea head shot so he won't have a chance to clack himself off,' he said,

'In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he's going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place.'

The three shots killed bin Laden and O'Neill could see his 'brains' through the wound.

Bin Laden's wife was screaming and O'Neill realised that a child was present too - bin Laden's youngest son.

The point man - the still nameless SEAL  - then entered the room and zip-tied the two women he had already grabbed.

The entire episode was over in 15 seconds. 

As told to Phil Bronstein in Esquire magazine 

‘We will actively seek judicial consequences for members who wilfully violate the law, and place our Teammates, our Families, and potential future operations at risk,’ the two men wrote.

O'Neill told the Washington Post that he had decided to reveal his identity after addressing relatives of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks at the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York before it was officially opened.

He decided to tell the relatives about his actions. 'The families told me it helped bring them some closure,' he told the Post.

O’Neill donated his SEAL uniform to the museum's collection after the meeting, which was arranged by Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives for New York. 

Maloney described O’Neill as ‘Maloney praised O’Neill as ‘a great American hero and a fine, articulate gentleman who has been very careful to always praise his team for the success of this mission.’

'He insisted on doing this anonymously to honor his unit, however the incredible interest in this story made this difficult,' she told the Post.

'I represent thousands of individuals whose lives were forever scarred by the tragedy of September 11, and Mr. O’Neill’s private words to the families who lost loved ones brought a remarkable comfort to them,’ Maloney added.

O’Neill himself spoke in Maryville, Tennessee, on Thursday night at Blount County’s Best of Blount Awards. ‘I've been busy preparing this speech today. I've had my phone and computer off. Anything interesting on the Internet?’ he joked at the start of his speech.

He did not mention Osama bin Laden or the raid on his compound in his speech, but he talked about how difficult it was leaving his family, knowing there was a good chance he would never see them again. He said he had to leave his daughter’s birthday party to go on the mission to rescue American seamen who had been kidnapped off Somalia.

‘There's a huge difference between kissing your kid goodnight and kissing your kid goodbye. My kid is 10 years old and in her lifetime I've kissed her goodbye 11 different times,’ he said according to WBIR-TV in Knoxville. 

But he has been heavily criticized for speaking out.

O'Neill grew up in Butte, Montana, a former copper mining boomtown that has now fallen on hard times.

O'Neill has said the basic reason he became a SEAL was a teenage romance gone wrong. At 19 he went to a Navy recruiter's office in an attempt to get over his lost love.

But his father gave a different story in his exclusive interview with MailOnline. 'We were going hunting and a friend asked us to take a guy who was a Navy SEAL with us,' said Tom O'Neill, 65. 'We were expecting someone who was 6 ft. 8 in. who could lift a house with his bare hands, but he was this normal guy. And Rob said if this guy could be a SEAL, then so could he.' 

In total he was deployed on more than a dozen tours of duty in active combat, in four different warzones, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the course of those tours he undertook more than 400 separate combat missions. 

He was decorated 52 times, leaving as senior chief petty officer. His decorations include two Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars with Valor, a Joint Service Commendation Medal with Valor, three Presidential Unit citations, and two Navy/Marine Corps Commendations with Valor. 

Silver Stars, the military's third highest honor, are awarded for extraordinary gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States. 

Bronze Stars with Valor are awarded for merit, signifying a heroic act and direct participation in combat operations. 

It is the fourth-highest combat award of the U.S. Armed Forces and the ninth highest military award overall. 

Joint Service Commendation Medals are given for senior service on a joint military staff and is the most senior of the commendation medals.

Details of three of his missions have been turned into Hollywood action hits.  

He was the lead jumper on the Maersk Alabama, the ship taken over by Somali pirates, whose rescue turned into the Oscar-winning movie Captain Phillips.

He helped save SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the one man who lived to tell of a failed mission to capture a Taliban leader in Afghanistan. That made it to the big screen as 'Lone Survivor.'

And then there was 'Zero Dark Thirty,' the Oscar-nominated story of bin Laden's killing.

But deciding to speak publicly may surprise some. In the Esquire interview his wife spoke about her concerns over a retaliatory attack.

'Personally I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,' his wife said in 2013. 

At the time the couple were estranged. Their marital status is now unclear.

'We're actually looking into changing my name,' his wife.

'Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other.'