AP stands by its story about anti-Bush SEAL

[SR-25]

ELECTION 2004
AP stands by its story
about anti-Bush SEAL
Man with Muslim name doesn't come up on search of elite sailors

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: September 13, 2004
4:06 p.m. Eastern


By Ron Strom
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

An Associated Press reporter is standing by his story that describes an anti-Bush veteran as a former Navy SEAL in the face of questions about whether or not the man was in fact a member of the elite unit.

The reporter, Elliott Minor says the Albany, Ga., man, Ahmad Majied, doesn't show up on lists of former SEALs because he changed his name when he converted to Islam after leaving the Navy.

In a story reporting the reactions of U.S. military personnel and veterans to allegations that President Bush failed to perform to National Guard standards, Minor quotes several current and former military men. Here is an excerpt from the AP story:


Ahmad Majied of Albany says the latest allegations about Bush's military record are more troubling to him than allegations about service honors leveled at Democratic challenger Kerry.
Majied, a Democrat from Albany who served 30 years in the Navy, including five years as a SEAL in Vietnam, said the memos support his belief that Bush was a "playboy" during his service years.

"He had enough money to get what he wanted," Majied said. "I think his main concern was not to go to Southeast Asia. I bet he never dreamed it would come back to haunt him."

After reading the account, Travis McGee, a poster on FreeRepublic.com, contacted an organization called AuthentiSEAL, which researches claims by people posing as Navy SEALs, to see if Majied indeed had been a SEAL. According to his post, McGee received a response from Gregory Platt, an investigator with the group, saying the name Ahmad Majied does not come up on a search of former SEALs.

McGee says he became suspicious of the claim when he read that Majied had been in Vietnam for five years.

"When this fake SEAL's claim of spending five years in Vietnam was pointed out to me, I knew he couldn't be for real," he writes at Free Republic. "SEALs deployed to VN for six month tours, so 'five years in Vietnam' seemed highly improbable. I knew lots of multiple tour 'real deal Vietnam SEALs' during my peacetime duty in the teams in the 1980s, and I never heard of this guy.

"This only took a couple of minutes time for 'amateurs' on Free Republic to check out. The 'professional' journalists at the AP must have been to busy to do this basic checking."

In an interview with WorldNetDaily, however, Minor says he has no reason to disbelieve Majied's story.

"I really trust this guy," he said. "I believe he's a real straight shooter."

Minor says Majied didn't give him his previous name, "and I didn't press the matter."

The vet has received "nasty calls" since the issue has been publiclized, Minor says, adding, "This is a very peaceful guy. … There's a peace about his voice."

Minor says Majied homeschools his seven children. "These are really upstanding people," he told WND.

The AP reporter addressed McGee's criticism of spending five months in Vietnam, saying Majied told him he was based in the Philippines and would go to Vietnam for short stints and then return to the islands.

"Altogether it was probably five years [in Vietnam]," Minor said.

Minor spoke to Majied this afternoon to try to verify the issue, and he said the veteran has refused to speak to other media about the issue.

He said of the Majieds: "I've met them around town, and they're just nice people. … I just really think a lot of him."

Internet bloggers challenging the claims of mainstream media outlets has become more prevalent recently. It was on the Net where the first questions were raised about National Guard memos CBS News claims show that Bush's former commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, was resisting pressure from his superior, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, to "sugarcoat" Bush's officer evaluation files.

Document experts and amateur sleuths began questioning the memos' authenticity within hours after they were published on the Internet, citing typographical and formatting issues that suggest they were created by a modern-day word processor rather than a Vietnam War-era typewriter.

Despite the irregularities of the memos and the fact that a source CBS used to prove its case is saying the documents are forgeries, network anchor Dan Rather stands by the story he presented on "60 Minutes II" last week.

[USMCRET6391]

I am really confused as to why this is news worthy. I some how doubt that all service men and women (past and present) are voting for Bush, for a variety of reasons. He earned the right to back whoever he wants to for whatever reason he wants to. It's called Democracy.

[Field_Sailor]

Yes but, He should be lying about being a SEAL. And besides it's the AP, they report on everything, as miniscule as the wind direction.

[USMCRET6391]

Originally Posted by field_sailor

Yes but, He should be lying about being a SEAL. And besides it's the AP, they report on everything, as miniscule as the wind direction.

mea culpa, I missed the part about the 5 years in Nam.....guess I'd better check the ol bi foculs

[Grimmy]

Stand by for alot of this sort of stuff in the next month. The liberal left has never been honorable by any stretch of that term and will be sinking to new lowest of lows during the final runup to elections.

Be prepaired for a deluge of fakes, forgeries, frauds and liers posing as military veterans in order to influence the sheeple that the Dems so rely upon to maintain their power at any cost.

[USMC Chuter]

5 years as a SEAL in Vietnam? Hell, I call bullshit and wasn't even born yet..

[trident86]

THE POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: THE SEAL TRACKERS by John S (john at leanwrite dot com) September 13, 2004


It really just started with a hunch. Among the news stories that I perused
online on September 11, one stood out....a feature article from the AP's Elliott Minor interviewing active duty and former military personnel about President Bush's Air National Guard military records. The story took many different headlines, but a fairly common one was similar to what appeared on Yahoo News, "U.S. Servicemen React to Bush Guard Memos." Media outlets as large as ABC News and USA Today placed the story on their sites, and as I write this, Google News reports 121 articles going by that headline, from media across the United States and the world.

Much of the article was fairly neutral in tone, but one section near the end caught my attention:

Ahmad Majied of Albany says the latest allegations about Bush's military record are more troubling to him than allegations about service honors leveled at Democratic challenger Kerry.

Majied, a Democrat from Albany who served 30 years in the Navy, including five years as a SEAL in Vietnam, said the memos support his belief that Bush was a "playboy" during his service years.

"He had enough money to get what he wanted," Majied said. "I think his main concern was not to go to Southeast Asia. I bet he never dreamed it would come back to haunt him."

It was an odd section in many respects....it was the only quote in the article specifically anti-Bush, and Mr. Majied seemed an unlikely candidate for a US Navy SEAL....while I've only had the privilege of talking to a few of the real operators, none of my past reading would indicate to me there's a great many Democrat-leaning SEALs with Arabic names, and especially with
experience in Vietnam. I thought it might be interesting to learn more
about Mr. Majied's background.

The first place I turned was a leading web site for SEAL verification,
Authentiseals.org. This site had helped me out a great deal several years
ago while investigating another person online who claimed to have been a SEAL, and maintains a "Wall of Shame", showing hundreds of people who have
been caught lying about their SEAL background. When I plugged Mr. Majied's
name into their form at 4:00 PM on the 11th, I received a form-letter email back within a half-hour:

Thanks for checking with us - we greatly appreciate your interest in upholding the honor of the US Navy SEAL Teams, and your search for the TRUTH. Your sniffer is working "GREAT"!

If the name you provided was "spelled accurately", we do NOT have a listing for anyone named "Majied" in our entire database of slightly more than 10,000 names.

Unless he has undertaken the unlikely action of a full legal name change since his claimed service with the SEAL Teams, I can state conclusively that the man NEVER completed SEAL training, and thus he is not now, nor was he ever a Navy SEAL. While there are other training steps that must be completed on the path to becoming a SEAL, BUD/S training is the first and most vital, and that training course is totally unclassified. Without having first completed BUD/S training, a man cannot go on to become a SEAL. There are definitely secret SEAL missions, but despite anything the man might have said, there are NO secret SEALs.

I then began to look in the Albany, NY white pages, looking for an Ahmad
Majied in order to talk to him. No luck. I spent the next day trying to
decide what to do. It didn't seem fair or professional to write an article
attacking this man, when it was entirely possible that he COULD have changed his name, or was misquoted.

Authentiseals responded to an inquiry that they would not add his name to the Wall of Shame based on just a news article, for those specific reasons,
and suggested that I do more research. I first emailed the author of the
AP article, Elliott Minor, told him what I had learned, and asked him how he
had determined Mr. Majied was indeed a SEAL. I also CC'd a reporter from
Albany, NY who was credited at the end of the article, and who I assumed had contributed to the interview with Mr. Majied.

On Sunday evening, I realized a mistake in my thinking....the AP story was datelined Albany, Georgia, not Albany, New York, although it stated at the
end that a reporter from Albany, NY had helped write it. Feeling
astoundingly stupid, and embarrassed that I had been looking in the wrong location, I now found a phone listing for Ahmad Majied in fairly short
order. It was late Sunday night, however, and I didn't want to call him at
that hour. Now that I knew where he was from, though, a Google search
located a newsletter from the Torpedoman's Association in which Mr. Majied is listed as a new member in the November 2003 issue. It also gave a rank (MACM - E-9 Master Chief Petty Officer) and the years 1963-1966, when he was presumably on the USS Diodon.

This morning, I perused this USS Diodon web site again and found a brand new post in their Guest Book listing the URL of a message board thread on Freerepublic.com, which asked the same questions I had of Mr. Majied's
authenticity. Ah-hah! I was stunned when I found more than 400 entries
in this message thread....including one (#180) that outlined what I had been hoping to do...talk to Mr. Majied. It was stamped Sunday the 12th at 2:05 PM PDT by "elfman":

Okay, I took the “outrageous” step of calling Ahmad Majied. He was there.
Sounded like a nice old guy.

I explained that I read a story from AP that quoted him. He acknowledged it right away. I said that I followed an internet discussion group that was questioning his membership in the Seals, that there was an organization that kept records of that kind of thing and that there was no record of his membership, and some speculated that he had a name change since them.

He said that he did have a name change since then, but was not willing to get involved. I tried to talk him into giving me his former name, but he was unwilling.

I asked specifically if he was a Seal and he said, “yes”. I asked if he went through Seal school, and his answer was in the affirmative, but vague. I mentioned that people were suggesting that he wasn’t a Seal, and brought up the “wall of shame” of people pretending to be Seals. He said, “I seriously doubt that I’ll be up on that.” He said he wasn’t worried about that.

He kept a good humor about him, but wanted to end the call. I mentioned that some people were saying that it was not possible to spend 5 years as a Seal in Vietnam. He said that he was misquoted there, that he did spend five years there, but not back to back. He said that “In fact, I spent more than five years total there”. I said, “but not all 5 years as a Seal?” He laughed and said, “No, not all 5 years.”

He said that he was a retired Master Chief Petty Officer.

He repeated several times that he didn’t want to get involved in this dispute “for obvious reasons”. And then he said, “I don’t know how I allowed myself to be quoted” or pulled into this by the guy that contacted him.

He really wanted out. I had to have mercy on him and let him go. I told him that because of the story others would call. He laughed and said he knows how to end a conversation. We said goodbye.

I was thrilled. Elfman had asked a lot of the same questions I had wanted to, and if there was ever any need for an example of the power of the
Internet in gathering like minds and effort together, this was it. Reading
the rest of the posts, I found a great deal of useful information about SEALs in Vietnam, the Navy's ratings system, and other items of interest for
someone researching this situation. The Internet has made fact-checking
tremendously easy, and I was very much humbled that not only was I not the only one looking into this, but was actually quite a bit back on the learning curve.....the folks on that board are sharp, and on top of the news.

I sent another email, this time to Russ Bynum of the AP, who was also
credited on the original story. At the same time, I called Mr. Majied to
talk to him myself. As many later Freerepublic.com posters found when they
did the same, I got Mr. Majied's answering machine. I left a message and
asked if he could get back to me. To follow up my email to Russ Bynum, I
called the Savannah, GA number for the AP and left a message on his voicemail, essentially asking him to read my email and respond with any information he could help with.

This afternoon, I received emails back from both Russ Bynum and Elliott
Minor. Both were helpful and professional about the matter. Because I
haven't heard back from either of them at the time of writing this, I don't
feel I can honestly quote either's email. But after responding to them, I
decided to give Mr. Majied another call. At about 6:05 PM ET, he answered.

We spoke for about 10 minutes, and like Elfman, I got the feeling he was a
'nice old guy.' He said that he wished he never gave the interview for the
story; "The worst thing I could have done was make the comments." He's
received many, many phone calls about it, and expressed a strong desire for
them to end. I told him that I wanted to try to help them end, and what
would be useful towards that would be more information about his service
record. He told me that he retired in 1988 after 30 years in the Navy as a
Master Chief Petty Officer. I asked him if he was a US Navy SEAL. He
said no, but that he worked with SEALs. I was floored, and asked him to
repeat what he said. He said it again....he was not a SEAL, but worked
with them. I asked him if he had ever completed BUD/S. He said no; he was
not trained as a SEAL. When I asked in what capacity he worked with the
SEALs, he told me that he served as part of an amphibious ready group.
While friendly, he obviously didn't want to have a long conversation with me, so since I had heard the most important information already, I thanked him for his time and asked if it would be OK to relay our conversation on my site, and direct people to it in order to get the story out about his background. His response was "That would be fine."

---------------

And so you have it.......

Now, what to make of the whole thing? The first lesson to me is that
reading the news has become, with the aid of the Internet, an act that
requires active participation. There's no excuse to be a passive reader or
listener anymore....the blogosphere, search engines, and online communities
have made the talent pool of ideas open to all, and easy to access. While
this particular news item is hardly the story of the century, it's amazing to me that in under 24 hours from the time the story made the AP Wire, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people looking it over, and finding
items that were curious. Pre-Internet, these notions would likely have
languished and amounted to nothing. Today, it's possible to check even
the most obscure story without leaving your chair or changing out of
pajamas. If the printing press, telegraph, radio, television, cable, or
satellite broadened the reach of the mass media, the blogosphere and the Internet are making it deeper and more responsible to the end users, if they choose to use the technology available to them.

The second lesson is that it's hard to get away with falsehoods today. I
don't pretend to know the true story of Mr. Majied's military service, but I do know this....without the Internet, I would never have spoken with him.
Groups like Authentiseals have given even the most elite military unit a publicly-accessible outlet to self-regulate their crowd of alumni, and boards like FreeRepublic have allowed like minds to strategize, look at
stories, and decide courses of action. It's no wonder that many oppressive
regimes curtail the Internet....knowledge is power, but unbridled knowledge
is next to useless. The Internet allows knowledge-seekers to congregate
and correct falsehoods, as even CBS News seems to be discovering. There is still a great distance to go in correcting falsehoods once aired by the mainstream media, however, as even the blogosphere as a collective may have a hard time reaching out to masses who watch or read a mainstream media outlet and little else.

A third lesson is that we all need to be careful with information. Humans
are human. Was the mistake in the AP article the fault of the reporter,
the source, or a miscommunication? It could be any of the above, or any
combination. Because hindsight is always 20-20, it's easy to rush to
assume motives that may or may not have been there in the beginning. In a
quest to know everything, we may forget that no one actually does.

I'm against the idea of investigating Mr. Majied further, and do not plan
to, personally. Without knowing his real name, there's little value or
likely end result in debating what he may or may not have done during his Navy service, although hopefully now we can lay his news quote about being a Navy SEAL to rest.

From the information discovered on the FreeRepublic message boards, he seems to be a leader in the Albany, GA community, and no community can afford to lose any civic leader who is dedicated to improving his region, if that's
what he's done. That said, there are consequences for words and actions,
and if Mr. Majied has misled people for years about his experience as a Navy SEAL, there should be shame in stealing the collective honor of actual SEALs who have lived, fought, and died for this nation. Judging from his comments to me, there seems to be no shortage of people calling to remind him that
claims of being a SEAL come with a burden of responsibility. I hope all
parties involved know their own limits, and their own responsibilities, in this situation.

UPDATE (09/17/2004). Elliott Minor of the AP emailed me today to say that
they were about to issue a correction to the original story. The
correction appeared shortly thereafter.

ALBANY, Ga. (AP) -- In a Sept. 11 story about military retirees' reaction to new documents concerning President Bush's National Guard service, The Associated Press incorrectly identified Ahmad Majied of Albany as a former Navy SEAL. Majied assisted SEAL teams while he was in the Navy, but never was trained as a SEAL. "I should have been more specific," he said Friday.

http://www.leanwrite.com/politics/04...ltrackers.html

[Covertness]

Yeah Trident, I too am grateful for the internet. I am distressed by all the newsmedia reporting "facts" that later turn out to be falsehoods and lies.
I encourage all of you to be informed voters. Do not be led around by the nose by the talking heads on TV.

[USMCRET6391]

Information is the currency of democracy.

Thomas Jefferson

I agree with you covertness. Everyone needs to pay close attention to detail. On the other hand, I am more worried about what the candidates plan for the future, than what they did more than 30 years ago. I don't hide the fact that I support Pres. Bush. I feel that he has done a good job. I base my oppinion on what he has done as CINC, not what him or sen. Kerry did in the 60s.