Debuting on Hulu today, Veterans Day, is the ABC News-produced documentary 3212 Un-Redacted.
The film centers on a military operation in 2017 that resulted in the deaths of four U.S. Special Forces soldiers, killed in an ambush by ISIS fighters near Tongo Tongo, Niger, and the Pentagon cover-up afterward.
The investigations into the operation resulted in the families of the fallen — Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, Sgt. 1st Class Jeremiah Johnson, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black and Sgt. LaDavid Johnson — being lied to to protect senior military members.
“The conclusion of the first major investigation by United States Africa Command, which oversees operations on the continent, was that this team [3212] had embarked on a rogue mission which was intended to capture or kill a senior ISIS commander,” says ABC News’ James Gordon Meek, one of the film’s producers. “They said that these men were — again, most of them were Green Berets — ‘poorly trained and ill-prepared, and did not have basic soldiers skills to engage in such an operation.'”
“What they didn’t tell [the families] was the involvement of CIA, which was part of the mission,” Meek continues. “And most importantly, they didn’t tell them that the ground commander, Capt. Mike Perozeni, had actually pushed back on the missions that he was supposedly ‘going rogue; to carry out… [H]e made repeated calls and texts to his superiors, saying, ‘This is a bad idea…'”
Those who survived were investigated, and their reputations sullied.
Meek says releasing the film today is a reminder of the importance of Veterans Day, and its focus on those who fought, and who made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation.
“As Congressman Mike Waltz says in the film, there’s no exception. The family should always be told the full truth, and they were not in this case,” Meek adds.
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
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