Speaker A
[Music] [Music] [Applause] This is Carrie Cassidy from Project Camelot. I'm here with Bill Wood. He's going to be talking about his experiences as part of a special unit, a SEAL unit in Iraq and other places around the globe as part of the American military. Some of this testimony may be considered to be in violation of his National Security oath, but we are going to be trying to stay within the parameters of that. He is going to first of all speak on the subject of a disclaimer in regard to a project that he is using this for on a personal level. Hi. I just want to disclose to everybody that I am writing a fictional book about this interview and the things that I discuss in this interview. The reason for this interview is for purposes of marketing that book, and that book, of course, is fictional. Okay, great. And so at this point, we are going to start in the beginning, and I'd like you to talk about why you came and contacted me and what group or groups you, in a certain sense, represent if you want to use it sort of loosely in that term. Okay. Basically, I don't really have any group that I represent. However, there are many, many people, both former and current military, that have a huge amount of concern over what the members of the military know to be what's really going on in the Middle East and places that we are occupying currently outside of this country. Those concerns have grown more and more throughout the years, and it's to the point where a lot of these current and former military members speak. The best description of these military members would be oathkeepers. An oathkeeper is somebody who basically focuses primarily on the oath that they took when they joined the service and not so much what they're ordered to keep secret or to tell is secret, as opposed to what is in the best interest of the Constitution and the country. Okay. Let's also say that there's a purpose behind this that has to do with the NDA. The main purpose for this interview was the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act. The individuals that I speak with on a regular basis have grown a consensus that this is the end of the erosion of our constitutional rights. It pretty clearly spells out in a lot of paperwork that America has been declared a war zone and American citizens are subject to arrest and detainment outside of the constitutional protections of trial by jury, the right to an attorney, the right to being charged with a crime even is stripped away in that bill. I don't believe most of the American public has been properly informed via the media, so we're trying to get the message out and get some support in the fact that we cannot continue to allow the progressive erosion of the constitutional rights and expect to have our rights ever be taken seriously at some point. Okay. So at this point, Bill, when you approached me, I really had no idea what this was going to be about, and it was quite surprising that you had the kind of disclosures that you have and some of the background that you have. So what I'd like to do is go back through your testimony because at the time I didn't have a camera, and I do want to say that we're in a public place here, but we are forced to be in this kind of a public place for a number of reasons that I can't explain on camera. But take it from me, there's a purpose for this. At this moment, I'd like you to start from the beginning the way you did with me, and eventually I want to work our way to some of the more, what you might call, top secret disclosures that happen later on. Some of the experiences you're going to be relating at this time may not be considered quite as risque or damaging to the US military as might otherwise have been perceived back in those days. Back in those days, you had a very special clearance, and so I would like you to talk as much about that clearance in setting up, you know, setting the stage for the story as possible. Okay. So in June of '91, I joined the US Navy, and I was less than a year into my Navy experience in training in Fire Controlman A school when I was approached to take part in a special team. At the time, I wasn't really told that much about it other than it was secret. But from my background and my family involvement in the military, I was excited to take the opportunity. Shortly after that, I was reassigned to San Diego, California, and was assigned to a ship that was being built. That gave me a lot of time to go to schools, which comes in handy at this point because very quickly after that, I was taken to this special training school and found out the details, the details of which were the basic sense is that I would be controlling Tomahawk cruise missiles and using specialized equipment that nobody really knew about in order to fly those missiles from when they come over the horizon to line of sight of the target and to drive the missile directly into the target and be able to verify prior to the targeting of any kind of building or designation that it is the target that we are looking for. Then it is approached, and the Tomahawk missiles are used against it effectively, and then we also do bomb damage assessment after that. Okay. But the reason you got involved in all of this is because the Americans found, was it during the first Iraq war, that their Tomahawk missiles were going off target? There was a problem with Tomahawk missiles in the first Persian Gulf War. If anybody can remember the baby food factory incident, when buildings tend to look alike, they have trouble. The Tomahawk missiles have trouble telling which one's which. The problem that they had, or that they found they had, was that it made the missiles only about 70% accurate, and that was a big problem because we ended up blowing up buildings that the Iraqis would then put on the TV and say they're blowing up baby food factories, and that tended to negatively affect us on the news. So we had to come up with a solution to that problem. Okay. So they brought you, or people like you, on board. Can you explain why you were selected? The primary reason I was selected was, A, because of my background. I came from a military family, and B, because of my qualifying scores during training. I found out later that they selected the people who knew absolutely everything about everything and were very good at taking tests and very good at solving problems, which is what it eventually came down to. It was after that that I found out that I not only scored very high on the test, I got a perfect score on the test, which is one of the main reasons I was approached and the others in my group were approached. Okay. So what kind of a test was it though? Does it test your intelligence? Does it test your, I don't know, is there a physical test as well? The test, the original test, was the ASVAB test, and that is just a standard military test that tests many aspects of how intelligent you are, how you process problem solving, how you approach different situations, and ultimately how much knowledge you have on many, many diverse subjects. When it comes down to it, it's an overblown IQ test and relates mostly to your cognitive reasoning skills. All right. And was there a physical test as well? No, physical testing wasn't necessary for this project. Intelligence was more important. They later proved that the physical portion, they could fix. Making somebody smarter is very difficult to do. Okay. Right here, I know that this is kind of going way ahead, but at a certain point you were trained and selected. Also, you found out later because of your psychic ability, is that right? I guess the proper term...