This book is written by one of the best
investigative journalists working today, Jeremy Scahill. Scahill proves
that investigative journalism is the best kind worth doing. He covered
the rise of the mercenaries in Blackwater and the privatization of war in an
earlier book. This book fits into that one, covering Afghanistan and Iraq
but widening the focus to Yemen
and Somalia.
Blackwater, after all, was another off-the-books covert operation working hand
in hand with the CIA and others. He did
much of the research in person, visiting all these countries. The focus in this
book is on the rise of the secretive JSOC – “Joint Special Operations Command”
– variously described as a ‘death star,’ ‘Murder Inc.,’ a ‘global death squad’
– in effect secretive U.S.
military assassination and kidnapping teams. It is the revival of the
Phoenix program from the Vietnam war and the Contra, Salvadorean and Guatemalan
death squads of Central America, but blown up to a global dimension, run
directly by the American President as his own Praetorian Guard. No need to hide behind surrogates anymore.
Weaving in and out of the narrative
is the personal and political story of American Anwar Awlaki, who was assassinated
by an Obama drone in Yemen
after being radicalized by the American wars in the Middle
East. His 16-year old American-born son met the same fate 20
days later. It goes into detail on familiar military ‘heroes’ like John Brennan,
Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and relatively unknown ones like Admiral
William McRaven, who served both Bush and Obama in both overt and covert ways,
all up to their eyeballs in the dirty war.
THE NEVER-ENDING ‘WAR’ ON TERROR
There is no doubt from this book
that there is almost perfect continuity between Bush and Obama in their
application of ‘dirty war’ anti-terrorism methods. In Scahill’s careful
recounting, JSOC was created by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld after 9/11 – and
it is now their continuing gift to the Obama administration. The sub-head of the book – ‘the world is a
battlefield’ – hints at how the ‘war’ pursued by the U.S. has now morphed into a borderless,
timeless, unsupervised and lawless rampage across the planet. Many
witnesses testify that Obama has actually gone beyond some methods used by Bush. However, for Democratic Party tribal partisans,
as long as the label is ‘Democrat,’ the practice is good. They really are a mirror reflection of the
Republican tribalists.
BLOWBACK
Another term this book fleshes out
is ‘blowback’ – something we have run into before, but now applied to Somalia and Yemen. Without the U.S.
support for, first the criminal warlords of Somalia, then the invasion of
Somalia by Ethiopia, then the inept Somalia government propped up by African
‘peacekeepers’ – there would be no strong “El Shabab” in Somalia, allied with
Al Qaeda (“AQ”). In Yemen,
the U.S. has backed a wily
dictator, President Ali Saleh, for many years, who lies and covers for the U.S. in order
to gain funding and military aid. After
the Arab ‘spring” launched protests in Yemen
against Saleh, weapons given to his government by the U.S. were used
against protesters. In exchange he has allowed
U.S.
cruise missiles, drones and ‘boots on the ground’ carte blanche, killing
innocents and AQ at will. This has lead to alliances between AQ and various large Yemeni tribes. When the jihadis can dress their
reactionary religion in nationalist cover, they can attract masses to their side,
and this is what has happened in both Somalia
and Yemen. Not to mention Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Scahill covers a JSOC war crime in Yemen, the bombing of the village of al Majalah
by cruise missiles, which killed 41 people, only 5 of which were AQ, 14 women
and 21 children. Another group of
pro-government Yemeni officials going to negotiate with AQ were blown up in
their jeeps by JSOC, due to ‘bad’ intel.
He also covers another war crime in Afghanistan, a raid on a house
having a party in the town of Gardez, also done by JSOC, which killed 5 people,
including 3 women, some pregnant. These
people were supporters of the Afghan government. The gruesome fact that emerged from this
action was that the special ops shooters dug their bullets out of the women’s
bodies with knives. Either by being fed
fake intelligence or bad intelligence, these ‘surgical’ strikes are anything
but. ‘Surgical strikes’ are another
myth. In Yemen, of 250 killed by JSOC
strikes, only 40 are AQ, according to Yemeni sources. A heroic Yemeni journalist, Abdullah Shaye,
covered these stories, and was ordered arrested and incarcerated by the U.S. The Yemeni government obliged. Shaye is still in jail.
You have to wonder, as many have, why a tiny group like Al Qaeda has become the be-all and end-all of foreign policy – unless there is an ulterior motive. Which of course there is.
LIES
Scahill shows how the government,
the military and their stenographers in the media will outright lie, distort or
fabricate stories that justify whatever they are doing - on a regular
basis. Any of us who protested the
Vietnam war know this already, but for a younger generation being lied to
constantly is a newish treat. There are
no verifiable facts – just the admonition to ‘trust us.’ John Brennan’s preposterous story about the
raid on Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad was a great example, alleging bin Laden
was armed and hid behind a woman as a shield.
Or the quickly-undermined government story that the attack in Benghazi was due to a protest over a film. Witness the present absence of facts related to the proposed bombing of Syria. As John Kerry has morphed from a winter
soldier to a summer war-monger and Barack Obama has morphed from a
constitutional lawyer and ‘community activist’ to someone who ignores the poor
and rides roughshod over the Constitution – so too this is the story of former
progressives who drink the cool-aid, and promote the Bushite military
reactionaries like Petraeus and McChrystal. Just as a good chunk of the Bush economic team
was absorbed into the Obama administration.
Scahill recounts the story of one liberal ‘lawyer,’ a former civil libertarian, who read a concoction of straight-out lies
about Awlaki and decided Awlaki deserved to die. No checking at all.
Drink up, everyone.
Scahill has a section on Raymond
Davis, former Green Beret, working under a CIA cover, who Scahill and others have
identified as probably a U.S. JSOC asset.
He shot two Pakistani ISI agents in the back in Pakistan, then was released after
the payment of ‘blood money.’
Revealingly, Sharia law allows money to be paid as penance instead of any
punishment, a practice called ‘diyyat’. As Scahill
says, ‘this diyyat provision is much loved by the rich and powerful in Muslim
societies where it is in force; it literally allows them to get away with
murder.’ In this case, Davis was removed from a Pakistani jail after
relatives were forced to agree to a diyyat payment.
Petraeus and McChrystal fell, not because of their support of torture, massive collateral damage to civilians, illegal detentions or unconstitutionally killing of Americans – but because one was bad-mouthing his boss and got caught by Rolling Stone – and the other was found with his pants down. This is the pathetic state of American politics. And perhaps the American people.
THE DEATH SQUAD
At the center of this story is JSOC,
which under Obama has become the leading edge of our counter-terrorism
and war policies. When Obama says there
are no ‘boots on the ground’ he’s lying, because special ops forces drop into many
countries in the world, uninvited and unknown.
Scahill and later Wikileaks proved this in the instance of Pakistan, where the U.S. government denied having
‘boots on the ground.’ It was revealed
that special forces and Blackwater were carrying out raids with the Pakistani
military. Scahill published his story in
the Nation after he was threatened by the U.S. military. They told him he
would be ‘on thin ice’ if he wrote the story.
Remember, the whole world is a battlefield. Who are they kidding?
Some of JSOCs intelligence for ‘kill’ lists is based on weak or second-hand reports, not even verified by their own intelligence organization, just that of Afghan, Pakistani, Yemeni or Somali sources that might have their own axe to grind. As one military person put it, to get on the list you only need ‘hearsay.’ And after you’ve killed the top people on the kill list, then they add more, so the list always grows. That is the nature of the beast, which leads to mid-level, low-level and ‘associated’ persons suddenly becoming targets of liquidation. Any military-age male, in fact. After all, you can’t declare success and go home. JSOC has their own ‘intelligence assets’ and also secret detention facilities that are off-limits to almost everyone, including the Red Cross and Congress. One, the “Hole” in Mogadishu; one at Balad air-force base in Afghanistan and the most notorious, Camp NAMA, formerly in Iraq. In these sites they practiced and still practice illegal torture. JSOC is directly controlled through the Pentagon by the President, so it serves as his own private military arm. Congress is kept in the dark about its operations, so it has no civilian oversight except one person, who doesn't seem to be doing a good job of it.
SYRIA
The real conundrum for JSOC will be
how they operate in Syria. U.S.
special forces are on the ground there, aiding the “Free Syrian Army,” yet many
of the fighters against Assad are now al Qaeda Sunni jihadis, many backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, interested in killing
Shiites. Does JSOC go in and kill them
or … wait until Assad is overthrown? They are actually thinking the bombing of Syria will be directed at them as well. How
about Libya,
where the same thing happened – where our great allies in the fight against
Gaddafi were jihadis. JSOC won’t know
who to kill, or when. All that results
is not ‘freedom’ but chaos and shattered states. Another 1,500 civilians will die just in a U.S. bombing campaign. It is like trying to kill cancer with a baseball bat.
MISSION CREEP
Drone strikes, suspension of the
writ of habeas corpus, the ‘state secrets’ privilege, assassination at will,
accusations of ‘terrorism,’ almost unlimited and secret detentions, lack of
oversight, the fake category of ‘unlawful combatant,’ and the killing of U.S.
citizens without due process have now been institutionalized by both corporate
Parties and the U.S. state and ‘legal’ system.
These accompany the Snowden revelations that the U.S. NSA is engaged in total
surveillance of the internet, with the close collaboration of major technology
corporations. Without sharp opposition
to these policies, some of these methods will be and are being used
within the U.S., not just
against alleged foreign ‘terrorists,’ but against people in the U.S.
At this point, the CIA and JSOC fiercely compete over who can kill the most. CIA controls the drone program while JSOC has their own Seals, Rangers & Green Berets, along with Tomahawks, to do their killing. The CIA has even weakened its own intelligence-gathering facilities in order to focus on military action. After reading this book, you begin to realize, as reactionary and bloody-minded as AQ is, their greatest recruiting agents are the invasions, drones, bases, ‘boots’ and bombs of the U.S. colossus.
(Other books reviewed on this topic,
below: “Islamophobia” and “The Terror Factory.")
And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
September 7, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment