From the LA Times:
The Secret War
Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is
dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert operations
By William M. Arkin
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly
for Opinion. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
October 27 2002
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. -- In what may well be the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era, the Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the "axis of evil."
The increasingly dominant role of the military, Pentagon officials say, reflects frustration at the highest levels of government with the performance of the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and much of the burgeoning homeland security apparatus. It also reflects the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror.
Insulated from outside pressures, armed with matchless weapons and technology, trained to operate below the shadow line, the Pentagon's black world of classified operations holds out the hope of swift, decisive action in a struggle against terrorism that often looks more like a family feud than a war.
Coupled with the enormous effort being made throughout the government to improve and link information networks and databases, covert anti-terror operations promise to put better information in the hands of streamlined military teams that can identify, monitor and neutralize terrorist threats.
"Prevention and preemption are ... the only defense against terrorism," Rumsfeld said in May. "Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us."
The new apparatus for covert operations and the growing government secrecy associated with the war on terrorism reflect the way the Bush administration's most senior officials see today's world:
First, they see fighting terrorism and its challenge to U.S. interests and values as the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War crusade against communism. Second, they believe the magnitude of the threat requires, and thus justifies, aggressive new "off-the-books" tactics.
In their understandable frustration over continued atrocities such as the recent Bali attack, however, U.S. officials might keep two points in mind.
Though covert action can bring quick results, because it is isolated from the normal review processes it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger problems. Also, the Pentagon is every bit as capable as the civilian side of the government when it comes to creating organization charts and bureaucracy that stifle creative thinking and timely action.
The development of the Pentagon's covert counter-terror capability has its roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The Army created a highly compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence independent of the rest of the U.S. intelligence community and follow through with covert military action.
Known as the Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, when it was established in 1981, this unit fought in drug wars and counter-terror operations from the Middle East to South America. It built a reputation for daring, flexibility and a degree of lawlessness.
In May 1982, Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci called the ISA "uncoordinated and uncontrolled." Though its freelance tendencies were curbed, the ISA continued to operate under different guises through the ill-starred U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1992 and was reportedly active in the hunt for Bosnian Serbs suspected of war crimes.
Today, the ISA operates under the code name Gray Fox. In addition to covert operations, it provides the war on terrorism with the kind of so-called "close-in" signals monitoring -- including the interception of cell phone conversations -- that helped bring down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Gray Fox's low-profile eavesdropping planes also fly without military markings. Working closely with Special Forces and the CIA, Gray Fox also places operatives inside hostile territory.
In and around Afghanistan, Gray Fox was part of a secret sphere that included the CIA's paramilitary Special Activities Division and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command.
These commands and "white" Special Forces like the Green Berets, as well as Air Force combat controllers and commandos of eight different nations report to a mind-boggling array of new command cells and coordination units set up after Sept. 11.
An Army brigadier general commands the Joint Interagency Task Force at Bagram air base north of Kabul to coordinate CIA, Defense Department and coalition forces in Afghanistan. A new Campaign Support Group has been established at Ft. Bragg, N.C. The Special Operations Joint Interagency Collaboration Center has been created in Tampa, Fla.
In Europe, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group handles information-sharing and logistical support with NATO. Hawaii's Pacific Command stood up a Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorist Group this summer.
Meantime, old commands are being morphed into new ones for the covert war. The two Joint Interagency Task Forces in the United States previously devoted to fighting drugs now have the war on terrorism as their highest priority.
The epicenter of the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Special Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Its two-star commander, Army Maj. Gen. Dell L. Dailey, who spent much of the Afghan war in Oman, has no public biography.
Among Dailey's assets is a fleet of aircraft specially equipped for secret operations -- conventional and covert military planes and helicopters, and even former Soviet helicopters. The bulk of those craft, including the reconfigured Russian choppers, fly from airfields in Uzbekistan and from two Pakistani air bases, Shahbaz and Shamsi.
The Air Force and the CIA collect additional intelligence from unmanned Predator and Global Hawk drones. They also have low-profile reconnaissance assets that look like transport planes and operate under such code names as ARL-Low, Keen Sage, Scathe View and Senior Scout.
Not to be left out, the Navy's Gray Star spy vessel, reminiscent of the old Pueblo, captured by North Korea in 1968, now sweeps up sophisticated -- and obscure -- "measurements and signatures intelligence" to monitor the ballistic missile capabilities of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Even with all this, the Pentagon wants to expand covert capabilities.
Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies, postures and organization."
The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.
Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.
Such tactics would hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk," the briefing paper declares.
Never to be outdone in proposing hardware solutions, the Air Force is designing its own Global Response Task Force to fight the war on terrorism. The all-seeing, all-bombing Air Force envisions unmanned A-X aircraft capable of long-range, nighttime gunship operations and an M-X covert transport, as well as hypersonic and space-based conventional weapons capable of delivering a "worldwide attack within an hour."
Who says the arms race is over? Rumsfeld's science board warns against overemphasis on equipment even as it recommends more. Washington is well on its way to an arms race with itself.
And for those who worry that all these secret operations and aggressive new doctrines will turn the United States into the world's policeman, there is a ray of hope.
Rumsfeld is now the field marshal of the war on terrorism, but the Pentagon is also creating new layers of bureaucracy that may save it from itself. Not to mention the rest of us.
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin27oct27001451,0,7355676.story
From Counterpunch:
Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Provoke Terrorist Attacks
by Chris Floyd
November 1, 2002
FROM: http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html
This age: layers of lime harden in the sick son's blood... There's
nowhere to run from the tyrant-epoch... Who else will you kill?
Who else glorify? What other lies will you invent?
- Osip Mandelshtam, "1 January 1924"
**********************
This column stands foursquare with the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld,
U.S. Secretary of Defense, when he warns that there will be
more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization
at large. We know, as does the Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld,
U.S. Secretary of Defense, that this statement is an incontrovertible
fact, a matter of scientific certainty. And how can we and the
Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, be so
sure that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American
people and civilization at large?
Because these attacks will be instigated at the order of the
Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense.
This astonishing admission was buried deep in a story which was
itself submerged by mounds of gray newsprint and glossy underwear
ads in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times. There--in an article
by military analyst (and Washington Post Columnist) William Arkin,
detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed
by the former Nixon bureaucrat now lording it over the Pentagon--came
the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a super-Intelligence
Support Activity" that will "bring together CIA and military
covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and
deception."
According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his
Defense Science Board, the new organization--the "Proactive,
Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)"--will carry out secret missions
designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking
them into committing violent acts which would then expose them
to "counterattack" by U.S. forces.
In other words--and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly,
so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan--the
United States government is planning to use "cover and deception"
and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist
attacks on innocent people. Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld,
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected
regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of
innocent people--your family, your friends, your lovers, you--in
order to further their geopolitical ambitions.
For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring
them to justice--a laudable goal in itself, although the Rumsfeld
way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy.
(Or should we use the Regime's own preferred terminology and
just call it "evil"?) No, it seems the Pee-Twos have bigger fish
to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action--by killing
their family members? luring them with loot? fueling them with
drugs? plying them with jihad propaganda? messing with their
mamas? or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups
then plan and direct the attacks themselves?--they can then take
measures against the "states/sub-state actors accountable" for
"harboring" the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures
exactly? Well, the classified Pentagon program puts it this way:
"Their sovereignty will be at risk."
The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the Regime hankers
to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base
to the Empire's burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent
malcontents, stir 'em with a stick, and presto: instant "justification"
for whatever level of intervention/conquest/rapine you might
desire. And what if the territory you fancy doesn't actually
harbor any convenient marauders to use for fun and profit? Well,
surely a God-like "super-Intelligence Support Activity" is capable
of creation ex nihilo, yes?
The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political,
financial and ideological gain does have historical roots (besides
al Qaeda, the Stern Gang, the SA, the SS, the KGB, the IRA, the
UDF, Eta, Hamas, Shining Path and countless other upholders of
Bushian morality, decency and freedom). We refer of course to
Operations Northwoods, oft mentioned in these pages: the plan
that America's top military brass presented to President John
Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign--complete
with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans--to
provide "justification" for an invasion of Cuba, the Mafia/Corporate
fiefdom which had recently been lost to Castro.
Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later.
Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but on a far grander
scale, with resources at his disposal undreamed of by those brass
of yore, with no counterbalancing global rival to restrain him--and
with an ignorant, corrupt president who has shown himself all
too eager to embrace any means whatsoever that will augment the
wealth and power of his own narrow, undemocratic, elitist clique.
There is prestuplyeniye here, transgression, a stepping-over--deliberately,
with open eyes, with forethought, planning, and conscious will--of
lines that should never be crossed. Acting in deadly symbiosis
with rage-maddened killers, God-crazed ranters and those supreme
"sub-state actors," the mafias, Bush and his cohorts are plunging
the world into an abyss, an endless night of black ops, retribution,
blowback, deceit, of murder and terror--wholesale, retail, state-sponsored,
privatized; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the
perversion of all that's best in us, of all that we've won from
the bestiality of our primal nature, all that we've raised above
the mindless ravening urges and impulses still boiling in the
mud of our monkey brains.
It's not a fight for freedom; it's a retreat into darkness.
And the day will be a long time coming.
**********************
Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular
contributor to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
