Umm. The BBC sucks in it's reporting. We didn't fake the rescue. Here are some reasons why we couldn't have.
American troops use three main infantry weapons.
First, there is the M16A2, a modern derivative of the old Vietnam era M16.
Secondly, there is the M4 carbine, a shortened version of the M16, often used by special forces troops.
Third, there is the Minimi Light Machine Gun.
None of these weapons can be converted from firing blanks to live, or back again, in a speedy manner.
Blank ammunition, when fired in these three weapons, is not powerful enough to force the weapons mechanism through its full cycle of operations. Because there is no live projectile, the build up of gas in the barrel is much less. When the weapon fires, there is no way that the mechanism will re-cock and chamber a fresh round. . .
American troops would be put in an awkward situation. Suppose, in the midst of this staged event, some Iraqi troops or Fedayeen irregulars appeared? How would they defend themselves? Clearly, converting the weapons from blank to live, in the heat of a battle, would be disastrous. It would take, at best, 2-3 minutes to remove a BFA, then vital more seconds in order to replace the belt or magazine of blank ammunition with live. In the dark, it would be very easy to get the blank and live rounds mixed up, too.
It is very hard to imagine how any Special Forces soldiers would agree to enter a combat zone with their weapons primed for blank ammunition.
Things are looking bad for the BBC’s story, but it gets worse. Much worse.
The BFA is large and brightly coloured. It’s a safety feature; a visible way of proving in training that no one is pointing live ammunition at you by mistake.
I don’t have the video footage of the rescue to hand, but I do recall seeing it. I didn’t see any weapons sporting BFAs.
Furthermore, fired blank shell casings look very different to live ones. Blank shell casings have a crimped end to them that is still clearly visible after the round is fired and discarded. So if the BBC wants to prove its story, it can visit the scene of the rescue and produce some discarded blank shell casings. Unless, it wants us to believe that the American troops picked them all up. In the dark. Behind enemy lines. In a war zone.
So how do blank rounds work in the movies? Well, the weapons used are not real. They are specially produced replicas, often based on the mechanism of a real weapon, with the barrel partially sealed. They cannot fire live ammunition under any circumstances whatsoever. This is how film makers create realistic scenes of automatic firing without attaching a BFA to the end of the weapon.
Clearly, no one will be carrying that sort of a ‘weapon’ into a combat area.
“This is just poor reporting,” Hunt maintained on the May 16 Fox & Friends, “there’s nobody, no military former or current that they bothered to talk to.” Hunt asserted that “there were 25 to 30 guys, armed, both fedayeen and army, Iraqi military outside and inside the hospital.”
But the Toronto Star and the BBC to run it without even checking -- I mean they didn’t even check any military sources, and this is, unfortunately comes out the same time that the New York Times has their yellow journalism. This is just poor reporting. There’s nobody, no military former or current that they bothered to talk to, but if they had-”
Hill: “You’re absolutely right. I’m looking at it, there’s not one attribution to U.S.”
Hunt: “Our guys wound up killing about ten fedayeen outside the hospital and a few inside, armed Iraqis. Jessica was terribly brutalized as we’ll all find out later, but to suggest that we just did a raid/we didn’t have to, is flat wrong and very poor journalism. It didn’t happen that way.”
Brian Kilmeade: “Colonel there’s no way to say it -- I mean that’s really insulting especially to a military guy like yourself, to find out that people would question the courage and veracity of military people in action, all the way up to the highest levels.”
Hunt: “You come to kind of expect it of the BBC. They don’t even show the BBC on their own ships at war anymore. They did this in Bosnia to us. If you catch us making a mistake, that’s fair. You know and we all make bad decisions. To put it out this way, as if we didn’t do the raid, we did it just for publicity, they don’t even know the difference between a television camera crew, and that was a combat camera, there was a military camera crew that we used for pictures, for our own use, for our own after action reviews, our own see how we did type of stuff. That wasn’t a Hollywood production.”
Hill: “In theater, would U.S. military soldiers ever use blanks?”
Hunt: “Ha! No. Excuse me, I’m going to go in at night, into the bad guy’s country, you know what I’m so good-”
Kilmeade: “Ambush alley.”
Hunt: “I’m going to use paint guns. I’m going to use paint guns. I’m going to use blanks. I mean come on.”
Doocy: “Right exactly, they almost make it sound like Barney Fife from the ‘Andy Griffith Show’ where he’s got the one bullet in his shirt pocket.”
Hunt: “Exactly.”
Doocy: “You know, ‘If you see any bad guys, just pull that out and put it in your rifle.”
Hunt: “These are, the guys who did this, I mean the marines cordoned it off, we have these great Rangers and SEALS do the operations, they never use blanks, even on the training ranges. I mean, in combat? That’s how ludicrous these two stories....It's almost too easy to beat them up. They absolutely never had any military sources or even bothered to check.”
