The Throwdown: How Special Operators Cover Up Murder
Across two decades of war, elite troops concealed unlawful killings behind “throwdowns” and silence, a practice America’s allies have now investigated, but Washington refuses to face.
When Green Berets left the wire during the war in Afghanistan, some carried a second weapon—not to use in battle, but to stage one afterward.
The AK-47s and other Kalashnikov-style weapons they brought with them were “throwdowns,” props dropped beside the bodies of unarmed civilians to avoid questions after a killing. Within elite units like the Green Berets, the “throwdown” became part of a quiet culture of silence and deceit, stagecraft that turned a killing into a story the command would accept.
The use of “throwdowns” by Green Berets was revealed in “America’s Vigilantes,” a five-part investigation published this week in The New York Times Magazine into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by U.S. Army Special Forces. The grim, four-year investigation by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matthieu Aikins found that Green Berets had other methods of covering up detainee killings: nine were buried on a remote Special Forces base. In another part of the country, one was unearthed, dismembered, and burned.
The investigation, one of the most detailed examinations of U.S. Special Forces conduct in Afghanistan, found that commanders overlooked evidence of one of the largest known cases of unlawful killing by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the cases Aikins examined represent only a fraction of a much larger pattern, one that America’s closest allies have been forced to confront while the United States has looked the other way.
In 2020, a landmark Australian inquiry led by Major General Paul Brereton documented the “routine” and “widespread” use of throwdowns by special forces in Afghanistan. The inquiry found that easily concealed items—pistols, hand-held radios, weapons magazines, and grenades—were planted on bodies to portray victims as legitimate targets.
“This practice probably originated for the less egregious though still dishonest purpose of avoiding scrutiny where a person who was legitimately engaged turned out not to be armed,” Brereton wrote. “But it evolved to be used for the purpose of concealing deliberate unlawful killings.”
The inquiry revealed that throwdowns were used to cover up “blooding,” a practice in which junior soldiers were required by patrol commanders to execute prisoners to achieve their first kill. “‘Throwdowns’ would be placed with the body, and a ‘cover story’ was created for the purposes of operational reporting and to deflect scrutiny,” Brereton wrote. “This was reinforced with a code of silence.”
The Brereton inquiry, which took four years to complete, recommended that 19 soldiers be referred for criminal investigation over the murder of 39 prisoners and civilians, and the cruel treatment of two others. To date, one former Australian Special Air Service Regiment trooper has been ordered to stand trial for the 2012 shooting of an Afghan villager caught on a helmet cam. Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, sued journalists for defamation and lost after a judge found it more likely than not that he had murdered unarmed Afghan prisoners.
Australia’s reckoning was triggered by a 2016 report by Samantha Crompvoets, a military sociologist who first documented the toxic culture inside special operations units. One anonymous witness told Crompvoets, “We had new guys doing stuff [unsanctioned kills] to try and get a name for themselves, to try to be in the ‘in’ group; to prove they could be trusted.”
According to Crompvoets’s report, members of the Special Air Service Regiment stopped two 14-year-old boys they suspected of being Taliban sympathizers. After searching them, the soldiers slit their throats. The rest of the patrol was then ordered to “clean up the mess” by finding others to help dispose of the bodies, which were eventually bagged and dumped in a nearby river.
Throwdowns surfaced again in a separate inquiry into war crimes committed in Afghanistan by UK Special Forces. Evidence submitted to the inquiry earlier this year revealed that planted weapons were used to conceal a standard practice by the British Special Air Service of killing “all fighting-age males” on target, regardless of whether they posed a threat or were armed. “Photos would be taken of the deceased alongside weapons that the ‘fighting-age male’ may not have had in their position when they were killed,” a whistleblower reported.
According to the whistleblower, a planted weapon used to stage a justified killing was colloquially known as a “Mr. Wolf”—an apparent reference to the film Pulp Fiction, where Harvey Keitel’s character introduces himself as he arrives to help dispose of a dead body: “I’m Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”
As in Australia, the throwdowns concealed bigger crimes. Former members of UK Special Forces broke their silence earlier this year and told BBC Panorama that they witnessed members of the vaunted Special Air Service murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children. SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another, with one member killing dozens in a six-month deployment. One witness who served with the SAS said that killing could become “addictive” and that some members of the elite regiment were “intoxicated by that feeling” in Afghanistan.
The judge-led UK public inquiry, which is looking into possible war crimes committed in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013, remains ongoing.
No such reckoning has taken place in the United States. To date, there has been no comprehensive inquiry into war crimes by U.S. special operations units, despite repeated reports of beatings and sometimes gruesome killings by Navy SEALs, Delta Force operators, and others. These include the practice of “canoeing”—shooting an enemy combatant at close range in the forehead, splitting the skull open. SEALs and Delta operators wore hatchets into battle and used them to desecrate bodies, as chronicled by journalist Matthew Cole, who has reported extensively on the Navy SEALs, in his book, Code Over Country.
This failure to investigate was no accident. As Matthieu Aikins writes in The New York Times Magazine, what was happening inside Army Special Operations Command was “more complex and also more alarming” than a simple cover-up. It was a self-reinforcing system in which loyalty, secrecy, and flawed investigations gave everyone a moral alibi and let them “take part with a clean conscience.”
A few days after President Biden was inaugurated in 2021, the Pentagon ordered a probe of possible war crimes that The New York Times predicted, perhaps too hopefully, would send “seismic repercussions through the special operations community.” The Pentagon inspector general’s report, released quietly later that year, didn’t examine any specific killings or battlefield conduct. Instead, it reviewed whether Special Operations Command and Central Command had the right paperwork and procedures for reporting possible law-of-war violations and made some minor administrative recommendations. No one was held accountable. No charges were filed.
In cases where special operations troops were charged with war crimes, President Trump and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have come down firmly on the side of the accused. In 2019, at the urging of Hegseth, a former Fox News host, Trump pardoned two Army officers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan and restored the rank of a Navy SEAL platoon commander who was demoted for actions in Iraq.
Addressing the nation’s top military commanders on Tuesday, Hegseth announced the “liberation” of America’s warriors, freeing them to go forth and kill. “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” he said. “Just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for war fighters.”
The contrast is stark. While Australia and Britain investigate and prosecute their war criminals, the United States has done neither. The sheer number of criminal and unethical acts helped entrench a culture of impunity within the U.S. special operations community. Each new case added to a web of shared secrets, where exposing one crime risked unraveling many others. The trust and loyalty that make these units effective in combat also became their shield against scrutiny. When everyone has dirt on everyone else, no one can stop the cycle of misconduct.
Until the United States follows its allies in confronting this record, the cycle will continue. The next generation of special operators is already inheriting the same culture of impunity that has protected war criminals for more than two decades.