{"id":31888,"date":"2012-09-04T23:07:45","date_gmt":"2012-09-05T03:07:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=31888"},"modified":"2012-09-04T23:14:16","modified_gmt":"2012-09-05T03:14:16","slug":"no-easy-day-a-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=31888","title":{"rendered":"No Easy Day; a book review"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t able to get to Charlotte this week like I’d promised, so that gave me all day to read pseudonymous Mark Owens’ book “No Easy Day” which went on sale today (thank you, Kindle). I was going to wait to write it about in the morning, but the government is trying to keep us from reading it<\/a> by claiming there’s classified information in the book. <\/p>\n

A few years ago, they prevented some of us from writing about the Wikileaks documents by claiming they were still considered classified and threatening some of us with administrative action if we wrote about them. So this is me getting ahead of the government.<\/p>\n

I didn’t see anything in the book that could be considered classified information. All of the operational stuff you could pick up reading any of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six novels. Generally, everything that Mr. Owens writes about the actual raid has been in the general press. The only thing that hasn’t been in the media is the anticlimactic final moments of Osama bin Laden – but certainly nothing about that could be classified.<\/p>\n

If you’ve ever read “The Black Banners”, it still contains the places where the CIA redacted potentially embarrassing information about the investigations by the FBI into the lapses of judgement by people working for the CIA – things that would place the blame for 9-11 squarely on the CIA’s political games.I think those are the types of things that the White House wants redacted from Owens’ book. <\/p>\n

Like after the raid, the SEALs secretly meet President Obama and the Vice-President at Fort Campbell and Owens says he doesn’t remember anything about the speech because it was typically political in nature and Owens makes fun of Joe Biden’s lame jokes and calls him the “crazy uncle at Christmas time”.<\/p>\n

Owens also pokes fun at the “good idea fairy” who suggested that they take bullhorns on the raid for crowd control, and a flashing police light to put on one of bin Laden’s vehicles to make the neighbors think that there was police activity at the compound and not a raid. Because, you know, flashing lights would distract most Pakistanis from the orbiting helicopters, the explosions and automatic gunfire.<\/p>\n

He also jokes with some of his team mates about how the president will end up taking credit for the raid, saying they’ll get him reelected. Yeah, I guess that will never happen<\/a>, though.<\/p>\n

All-in-all it was a very good read. I couldn’t put it down all day. I’ve told people that I’m giving Owens the benefit of the doubt that he wouldn’t release anything that would hurt his friends and team mates without the book being cleared by the White House and DoD, and I think my trust was well-placed in this case.<\/p>\n

All of us have wanted to set stories straight, that’s what this blog is all about and I think Mr. Owens did a fine job. I urge you to read the book before you pass judgement on him. He claims at the end of the book that all of the profits he earns are going to charity, so claims that he’s out to make a fortune from his service are wrong, at least by all appearances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t able to get to Charlotte this week like I’d promised, so that gave me … No Easy Day; a book review<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}