On May 3, 2011, just two days after the daring U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, Williams said on his NBC News show, “Now, people might be hearing about SEAL Team 6. I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them at the start of the war.”
With this statement Williams asserted that he was embedded with one of the most covert units in the U.S. military and flew with the SEALs into Iraq in March 2003 as the war there began.
When asked about this claim, a Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw told CNN: “We do not embed journalists with that unit or any other unit that conducts counterterrorism missions. Bottom line — no.”
Could Williams have simply hitched a ride into Iraq with SEAL Team 6 outside of the formal embedding process? This seems quite unlikely. A SEAL officer told CNN, “That early in the conflict, there were only missions taking place, not bouncing between outstations.”
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