Bin Laden: did the Navy Seals have cameras mounted on their helmets?

Yes they did. It was said somewhere in the reports that the president and his team watched the raid live (after some transmission errors).

The Freedom of Information Act can be ignored in some situations I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know what they are. I know a lot of times information that is released by the act is censored to the point of being pretty much useless.

The pictures will come out some day, guaranteed. Whether this president or the next or someone else in the government decides to release them, or whether they’re leaked from one of the likely ever-growing list of locations/hard-drives/etc that they are stored on. They’ll come out eventually.

Everyone needs to get over all the “nicities” of legality and such. This was a special circumstance which demanded extreme caution, and the urban warfare triumverate of speed, surprise, and violence of action. If things about this order to terminate with extreme prejudice bother you, I suggest you focus your attention on something less stressful, like saving the whales or something.

Where does it say in the Freedom of Information Act that the public has a right to see this stuff? Not a snarky question, I honestly don’t know. I’d love to be pointed toward the appropriate wording in the document.

@JilltheTooth

All they need to do to avoid disclosure under the FIA is classify any photos as vital to national security.

@CaptainHarley Yeah, I get that, I was just wondering if there was anything in the FOI act that provided for it in case they weren’t classified. Which I personally think they should be.

@JilltheTooth

As I understand the Act, anything which ISN’T classified is fair game for disclosure.

And there are other exemptions to the FOIA that this could fall under. @JilltheTooth, here is a Wiki link to The Freedom of Information Act.(United_States)

Whether this falls under one of the exemptions or not, if one of those SEALs were you, your spouse, or your child, would you want video clips released that might divulge their identity to the world? I certainly wouldn’t, at least not at this point.

They probably did yes. I like to think of it as a fly on the wall game show hybrid. “Osama, come on down & get your head blown clean off.

Thanks, @Pied_Pfeffer , I’d found all that, but the wading through it was a bit daunting for my “I was up late last night” morning brain. I guess I was hoping you guys could do my homework for my lazy assed self. ;-)

There was a picture showing Obama and his advisers watching the action in real time. There were probably cameras everywhere. As to the “Freedom of Information Act” it is standard practice to redact almost all facts out of the documents released. Maybe in 10 years or so, small parts of the videos will be released but I doubt anything pertinent will be released or leaked in our lifetimes. I don’t care if you are 13, you still won’t live to see it.

This whole mission stinks…now they are saying 25 minutes of the mission transmission went dark. What next?

@Cruiser They just lost the live feed going to the president. All that means is for 25 minutes, of an hours long operation, they lost the transmission that was being beamed thousands of miles across the planet (likely via satellite) to a screen in the white house. They were still in communication with their handlers on whatever battleship deployed them, and radio contact all the way back to the president was still intact.

Considering I lose cell phone reception when I walk to a specific corner of my apartment, I don’t find that hard to believe

The FOIA probably does not cover this. We don’t get to see live feed from drone strikes or special forces raids of Taliban suspects.

I also heard that there were 20 minutes out of contact with the SEALs, and/or there were multiple avenues of contact. I doubt they had live access to videofeeds in the compound. Those helmet cameras would also need to have pretty powerful transmitters; probably too bulky for an assault squad.

They did have at least one Predator flying over the area. That is probably where they got the live video for the President etc. I agree that transmitters for any video feeds on the SEALs probably would have been to weak to be useful. And I am sure the SEALs would have known how to make them malfunction when they didn’t want what they were doing recorded.

There were probably multiple live feeds. It’s also not clear where exactly the other SEALs were hanging out. NYT reports that ~70 SEALs were sent into Pakistan, but only 2 dozen took part in the raid.

Assuming NYT is correct, it would be typical for them to either establish a perimeter, or barring that, be in helicopters, ready to to deploy in case the fire team could not extract by helicopter and had to fight their way out of the compound.

There were also reports of a power outage in the area, at the time of the raid. So the other SEALs may have been snippin’ some wires…

Save the Whales! Save the Whales! I agree with @CaptainHarley

I heard they did and I think the footage would be very useful in training for future operations.

Of course – and The Prez was conferencing with the CIA director who watched it live.

Footage will leak soon enough.

ya I’m guessing the need for the number of SEALs there was that the government didn’t want another Mogadishu