Πηγή: Republic Magazine
By William Grigg
05 September 2011
“We’re the dark matter,” an unidentified Navy SEAL told Dana Priest and William Arkin of theWashington Post, referring to the
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). “We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.”
Historian Nick Turse, who has spent years investigating covert military operations, describes JSOC as “a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal `kill/capture’ campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA director David Petraeus, calls `an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.’”
Since the 9-11 attacks ten years ago, JSOC’s ranks have grown from about 1,800 troops to roughly 25,000, according to Priest and Arkin. Although it grew out of Delta Force with the encouragement of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the force bears the unmistakable imprint of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who directed counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeking to “slip out of the grip” of the Washington bureaucracy – and, significantly, the leash of congressional oversight and accountability – McChrystal improvised a joint operations matrix that includes every acronym in the military and Homeland Security lexicon – CIA, NSA, FBI, and other three-letter agencies familiar only to the initiated.
Priest and Arkin write that McChrystal “also began salting every national security agency in Washington with his top commandos. In all, he deployed 75 officers to Washington agencies and 100 more around the world.” In addition, JSOC personnel have been assigned “a bigger role in nonmilitary assignments … including tracing the flow of money from international banks to finance terrorist networks….” They are also involved in “psychological operations” — that is, official propaganda campaigns that are also referred to as “military information operations.”
JSOC officers deployed to U.S. embassies overseas are concealed within civilian agencies. In combat they do not wear rank insignia or carry identification. Interestingly, personnel operating in this fashion meet the definition of “unlawful combatants” as expressed in Supreme Court rulings (such as the 1942 case Ex Parte Quirin, dealing with Nazi saboteurs captured in the United States) and executive branch policy decisions made during the Bush administration.
As investigative reporter John Grant pointed out in>CounterPunch, the purpose of discarding identifying documents and rank insignia is to “avoid accountability” — that is, for the military officials and policymakers whose orders they are implementing. Significantly, JSOC is organized in a cellular structure very similar to the one employed by terrorists and insurgents: By being compartmentalized in this way, those who are captured can only compromise one or two of their comrades, while protecting those in leadership echelons.
McChrystal, characterized by several analysts as displaying quasi-sociopathic traits, authorized JSOC cadres to conduct brutal interrogations that included practices that can only be described as torture. Among the facilities used by JSOC for that purpose is the notorious Camp NAMA (Nasty Ass Military Area) in Iraq, where torture was officially sanctioned and carefully concealed, according to a detailed investigative report by>Esquiremagazine. Military interrogators at Camp NAMA wore civilian clothes with no rank and used cover names. In addition, the task force itself would frequently change its official designation. Grant notes that “McChrystal bragged to his teams at Camp NAMA (Nasty Ass Military Area) that the Red Cross would never visit their compound, which it never did, despite a number of accusations of torture.”
Between 2004 and 2007, 64 soldiers attached to McChrystal’s JSOC command were disciplined for abuse of detainees. Captain Carolyn Wood, an operations officer with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, filed a sworn affidavit in 2004 testifying of the existence of a document called TF-121 IROE, which supposedly authorized JSOC’s Task Force 121 to employ abusive methods of interrogation. Despite demands by Congressional investigators and several activist groups, the Pentagon refused to release that document. This meant that JSOC’s compartmentalized scheme worked perfectly: A handful of underlings suffered trivial sanctions, and their superiors – all the way up to Gen. McChrystal and his patrons, Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney – were protected.
According to military affairs analyst James Petras, “McChrystal’s rise to leadership [was] marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions…. The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance.”
One example of JSOC’s handiwork was March 15 , 2006 slaughter of an Iraqi family in a village called Ishaqi.
A diplomatic cable unearthed by the WikiLeaks whistleblower group describes how a “Multinational Force” (MNF) unleashed a 25-minute fusillade of small arms fire that was followed by an air strike that demolished the house. Ten unarmed civilians – including five small children were massacred in the assault. An autopsy conducted days after the assault found that the victims – including a five-month-old infant – were shot in the head.
This is just a snapshot of the JSOC’s global killing apparatus at work, according to Nick Turse: “In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of
high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once `special’ for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.”
With America on what amounts to a permanent war footing, that “industrial-strength killing machine” is the refined essence of the government that presumes to rule us.
A diplomatic cable unearthed by the WikiLeaks whistleblower group describes how a “Multinational Force” (MNF) unleashed a 25-minute fusillade of small arms fire that was followed by an air strike that demolished the house. Ten unarmed civilians – including five small children were massacred in the assault. An autopsy conducted days after the assault found that the victims – including a five-month-old infant – were shot in the head.
This is just a snapshot of the JSOC’s global killing apparatus at work, according to Nick Turse: “In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of
high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once `special’ for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.”
With America on what amounts to a permanent war footing, that “industrial-strength killing machine” is the refined essence of the government that presumes to rule us.
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