Brad Taylor's Blog, page 5

In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man…

Living in Charleston, South Carolina can be a little funny at times.  Today was supposed to be “Snowmageddon”, with a light dusting of the fluffy stuff and the commensurate shutting down of any and all services.  My kids left school early, and we all waited.  By nine pm it hadn’t hit and I had to take the dog for a walk.

As I turned the corner of our street, the rain/sleet finally began to fall, and the weather snapped my memory to times that I had once hated, but now cherish.

Nowadays people talk about veterans with combat in mind, and they have every reason to do so, but I’m not sure the average civilian understands how hard a military life actually is.  Yeah, combat is hard and scary, but when I walked my dog tonight I didn’t think about the assault I did on Christmas day in Iraq, even though the temperature was about the same.  I was brought back to a training mission I’d done eighteen years before.

It was in Hunter Liggett, California, and I wasn’t even in charge.  I was an observer/grader for a scout platoon, and we’d run up against a river.  The temperature was about forty degrees, and I was praying the scout element would choose not to cross.  I would hammer them in their evaluation, but I was praying all the same.  They chose to cross, and we built a bunch of poncho rafts.

That sentence doesn’t really convey what happened.  We built a conglomeration of makeshift rafts and swam across a river in forty-degree weather.  For no other reason than the “enemy” was on the other side and the platoon owed it to their higher command to report.

That night was quite possibly the most miserable of my entire life.  I curled up soaking wet in forty-degree weather and sucked it up.  Because that’s what was expected of me.  What was expected of every single one of the so-called grunts of America.

Special Operations are the heroes after 9/11, and deservedly so given what they’ve done, but I think the average grunt is getting short shrift.  There are movies and stories about the vaunted SOF folks, but having accomplished what I have, I wonder if America understands what the average grunt has done.  World War II had The Band of Brothers.  This war is no different.

During my career I have had a multitude of things branded into my soul, and make no mistake, the majority was from my time in Special Operations, but tonight, walking my dog, I didn’t think about Special Forces.  As the rain turned to sleet and I wondered what the hell I was thinking by leaving my house, a second memory hit me.  I was walking up a mountain called Site Alpha as a straight-leg infantryman.  A battalion movement that was designed to crush us, with everyone carrying everything they owned on their back.  Some carried more than others.

I was a Platoon Leader, so I only had my rucksack and weapon.  As we went up, the lines got blurred, and men got mixed up.  It became a slog for survival.

I overtook the mortar platoon and saw a man on his knees.  He had his rucksack just like mine, but strapped to it was a mortar base-plate for a 60MM mortar.

He was done.

I knelt next to him and said, “Give me the plate.”

He said, “No.  It’s mine.  I can make it.”

There was no way that was true.  He weighed about a hundred and five.  I ordered him to give me the plate.  He did so.  I strapped it to my ruck and stood up.  At that moment, I knew I had made a mistake.

There was no way I was going to make it to the top of Site Alpha with this thing on my back.  I was astounded that anyone in leadership expected a human to carry such a thing.  I staggered forward under will alone, now convinced I’d be one of the men carted off by the medevac vehicles.  I trudged upward, grunting and ashamed, now getting passed by the men in my platoon.

I would fail.

Eventually, I bent over, heaving and sweating, wondering what I should do.  Not wanting to show weakness, but knowing that’s what I held.  A man tapped me on the shoulder.  I looked up and saw the Mortar Platoon Sergeant.  He said, “Give me the plate.”

I did so without question, and he began moving up the mountain as if he had nothing on his back.  I say that again – he took the weight and began walking as if it was nothing.  We eventually reached the top and the battalion took a rest break.  I crashed on the ground, knowing I should have been checking on my men.  I took a pull from my canteen and saw a man above me.

It was the platoon sergeant.  He said, “You’re a good man.  I appreciate it.”

He walked away without another word.  I got off my lazy ass and began checking my men.

I’ve done a lot of high-speed, top-secret things, but the truth of the matter is that every soldier I’ve served with has been something special.  More so than the average “vet in trouble” news story will tell you.  I’ve seen the “lowest” that America has, the guy who joined to “stay out of jail” (a myth) or just to get college money, and that guy is pretty damn good.  Maybe the best we have to offer.

I’ve done more in my career than I ever expected, and served with the absolute tip of the spear, but I still have a soft spot for the average grunt.  I see the stories about SEALs and other SOF, but at the end of the day, the truth of the matter is that the Band of Brothers is alive and well, and we’d all do well to remember that.

No Al Qaida in Benghazi? Someone’s drinking the Kool-aid…

The New York Times presented a lengthy report on the Benghazi attack in its Sunday edition (12/29), and one of its central tenants was that the attackers had no connection to al Qaeda.  Specifically, there was “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.”  I was flabbergasted.  No evidence?  And not “any role”?  Seriously?  Pretty strong, quantifiable words.  I could live with “not a preponderance of evidence leading to the conclusion that al Qaeda senior leadership directed the attack.” Or, “little evidence to support that the attack was committed by al Qaeda members from outside of Libya.”  But NO evidence?  And NO role from al Qaeda?  At all?  I wondered how that could be, since even a cursory study of Benghazi would turn up a Library of Congress report written one month before the attack.  The title?  Al Qaeda in Libya: A Profile. 

Beyond the fact that the researchers for the Library of Congress report found plenty of evidence that Ansar al Sharia (the group that perpetrated the attack and that the NYT’s calls a “local militia”) had/has ties to Al Qaeda, the report alone is evidence.  In addition, we recently caught a core al Qaeda member in Tripoli (strangely, as reported by the New York Times), who was sent specifically to develop al Qaeda networks throughout the country.  Even the NYT itself has reported on al Qaeda connections in the Benghazi attack in the past.  How then did this reporter miss all of this?  On the surface, it appears because he relied exclusively on “eye-witness accounts” and “people with direct knowledge”.  So if they said they weren’t al Qaeda, then they weren’t al Qaeda.  Simple.  I mean, really, after we ripped the last AQ member off the streets of Tripoli, why on earth would they want to hide an al Qaeda link?  Surely the’d brag about it to a NYT reporter, right?  They wouldn’t want to keep the affiliation secret, like the Library of Congress report found (Understand, this report was written one month before the attack, and thus has no partisan leanings about what ultimately occurred – unlike the NYT story).  Some excerpts:

Ansar al-Sharia, led by Sufian Ben Qhumu, a former Guantanamo detainee, has increasingly embodied al-Qaeda’s presence in Libya, as indicated by its active social-media propaganda, extremist discourse, and hatred of the West, especially the United States.


 AQSL in Pakistan dispatched trusted senior operatives as emissaries and leaders who could supervise building a network. Al-Qaeda has established a core network in Libya, but it remains clandestine and refrains from using the al-Qaeda name.


The al-Qaeda clandestine network is currently in an expansion phase, running training camps and media campaigns on social-media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube. However, it will likely continue to mask its presence under the umbrella of the Libyan Salafist movement, with which it shares a radical ideology and a general intent to implement sharia in Libya and elsewhere.

When it fit his narrative, the NYT reporter relied exclusively on interviews of those theoretically involved in the attack as proof-positive that what they said was the rock bottom truth – but when the interview was off-narrative, it was “bizarre” to the reporter, as when “Other Benghazi Islamists insist, bizarrely and without evidence, that they suspect the C.I.A. killed the ambassador.”

Bizarrely and without evidence.  Exactly what I would say about the NYT piece given what I know about al Qaeda – and therein lies the rub.  How you define al Qaeda is at the crux of the debate.  The NYT reporter went on Meet the Press to discuss the story, and when pressed, stated that if one meant al Qaeda as “Founded by bin Laden and run by Zawahiri”, then no, there was no AQ involvement.  The problem with this is that the NYT is using a nation-state construct to define a sub-state threat.  In effect, using old analog definitions to describe a digital phenomenon.

In the reporter’s eyes, al Qaeda is restricted to a core group of people who fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan and is currently struggling to survive in the mountains of Pakistan.  Other individuals and groups, no matter how much they wish to become al Qaeda, will never be so without this core bestowing the mantle upon them, much like citizenship.

For a nation-state construct, this definition is correct.  A person in Nigeria cannot wake up tomorrow and say, “I’m a citizen of the United States” and expect to garner any of the privileges that would bestow.  But that isn’t how al Qaeda functions.  It isn’t a nation-state, and a person in Nigeria could very well wake up tomorrow and say, “I’m a member of al Qaeda” – and he would be.  Al Qaeda itself has repeatedly stressed it is the Muslim Ummah’s duty to attack the west, and anyone who did so is welcome in its arms.  There are plenty of examples of terrorist groups that existed before bin Laden entered the world stage, and who now follow the al Qaeda mantle—most notably al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.  That group started out as the GSPC, an Islamic group fighting to overthrow the government of Algeria – much like Ansar al Sharia in modern day Libya.  In 2006, the GSPC changed its name and is now known as an al Qaeda affiliate, and would be with or without the core group in Pakistan bestowing any legitimacy upon them.  In fact, the reverse is what usually occurs.  A group calls itself al Qaeda, and if they become effective, the core group then acknowledges them, as is what happened with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Flying an American flag does not make you a U.S. citizen, but flying the black flag of Al Qaeda most certainly bestows affiliation with that group whether the core group acknowledges you or not – and there were a multitude of AQ black flags flying in Benghazi after Qaddafi fell.

And that is where the NYT article falls short.  It neither understands nor explains asymmetric threats, and falls back on what it does understand: an archaic nation-state construct.  To use the reporter’s definition, there is no al Qaeda in Iraq or Syria, despite the massive reporting that proves otherwise.  And where, a year after the Benghazi attack, are these non-al Qaeda fighters getting trained?  In Benghazi, facilitated by Ansar al Sharia.  But that doesn’t indicate any connection between that “local” militia group and any trans-national jihadist organizations because Zawahiri didn’t direct the action.

The NYT would say there was no al Qaeda involvement in the slaughtering of the British soldier by two maniacal Nigerians, and by their definition they would be correct.  The group “founded by bin Laden and lead by Zawahiri” did not order the attack, but one of the murderers stated in open court, “Al-Qaeda, I consider to be mujahideen. I love them, they’re my brothers.”  Does that imply an al Qaeda connection?  Even if he’s never met another al Qaeda member?  Yes, it does.  It’s the digital age, and they are exactly the disciples al Qaeda wants.

Remember Jim Jones?  The cult leader who had his entire merry band drink poisoned Kool-Aid, spawning the saying that anyone who mindlessly believed something despite evidence to the contrary was “drinking the Kool-aid”?  Say we brought him forward to modern day, and instead of being restricted to his sermons, his reach limited by his personal presence, he was now online spreading his vision.  Ultimately, he conducts the same acts as before, and hundreds in Guyana drink his poisoned Kool-Aid, only this time seven people in Detroit are also found dead, having drunk poisoned Kool-Aid.  On their computers the police find a plethora of propaganda from Jones, then the ultimate command to kill themselves.  The seven have never met another member of the cult, have never been to South America, and have never heard Jim Jones’ voice.  Are they members of the cult?  The NYT, using their nation-state construct, would say no, they’re not.

Much like their assertion of no al Qaeda connection in the Benghazi attack, I’d say they’re drinking some purple Kool-Aid.

 

All Snowden wants for Christmas is Amnesty. He’s asking Santa for the Wrong Thing.

Last Sunday on Sixty Minutes, the lead NSA investigator — tasked with determining how much damage Edward Snowden has done to national security — floated the idea of giving him amnesty to entice him to return to the U.S. and bring back everything he stole.  The head of the NSA, General Alexander, was not of the same mind. He compared Snowden to a hostage taker that kills ten people then asks for amnesty if he’ll release the rest.  I agree with Alexander, but not for the reasons he stated.  Snowden doesn’t need amnesty.  What he needs is a set of press credentials.

Think about it:  this release of top secret information required two parties.  One to steal it, and one to report it.  Glenn Greenwald is on the record saying he was working with Snowden before Snowden began working for the NSA (then, when he realized that statement could potentially get him in trouble by taking him out of the vaunted “journalist” circle and placing him in the less sexy “co-conspirator” circle, he backpedaled).  Snowden has stated that the only reason he took the job was to steal secrets.  Both worked together to harm our national security, yet one became an international fugitive and the other an Internet darling.  What’s the difference?  Press credentials.

What Snowden should have done was build up his cover before he started.   I remember the breathless revelations that occurred in the seventies and eighties when a reporter went “undercover” to get a scoop at a business or organization, then outed himself and began shoving a microphone in everyone’s face.  Snowden should have done the same thing, because apparently being a reporter means you can do whatever the hell you want, harm anyone you see fit, and generally get away with murder simply because you can claim the mantle of journalist.  Why is it the government keeps debating Snowden’s fate, yet the mouthpiece of his leak is untouched?  Hard to believe, but claiming to be a journalist gives Glenn Greenwald complete immunity even though he was/is instrumental in the stealing of secrets.

The New York Times has reported that the NSA may never know how much information Snowden stole, and yet there’s one way to at least neck down the size.  Ask Greenwald to show what he has.  The NSA is combing through its databases and painstakingly piecing together what Snowden might have stolen, and Glenn Greenwald is sitting there with – according to him – the entire trove of Snowden data.  Glenn Greenwald, amazingly enough, is an American citizen.  He claims that he has the United States’ best interests at heart, and that he has all of Snowden’s data.  Given that both of those statements are absolute bullshit, he does have upwards of 1.7 million documents, and he shouldn’t mind the US looking at it.  I mean, what harm would that bring to him?  Why would he refuse to let the NSA see what he has?  Is it because it would damage his ability to titillate and shock with future revelations?  Is that what trumps national security in his mind?  One thing is for sure:  it would clearly show his true colors, because I guarantee if the US asked to see – not take, just see – the data in order to prepare against the damage the leaks will have to national security, Glenn Greenwald would say no.  His newspaper already did.  When the UK asked to see the data just to determine the damage, instead of letting that happen The Guardian destroyed its trove of documents.  Yes, that’s right.  They destroyed it instead of letting its own government take a look, knowing they could always count on ol’ Glenn to give them another copy.  Does that sound like anyone in this sordid affair gives a tinker’s damn about damage to national security?

I’ve blogged about it before, but clearly the modern journalist has no quantifiable left and right limits on integrity or honesty.  Glenn Greenwald can repeatedly report falsehoods about the NSA, like his initial story on PRISM, which was pretty much proved to be bullshit within forty-eight hours, or his habit of printing half the story and conveniently leaving out the other half that provided much needed context.  When called out on it by a privacy lawyer, he whips up his Internet trolls and attacks the messenger, which apparently is his method of operation as reported by news outlets that have worked with him.  And yet everyone takes what he says at face value as being true.  By contrast, 60 minutes gives the NSA a chance to rebut the story and is immediately trashed as being a sycophant of the government and a pack of liars.

It used to be that a journalist was unbiased and set out to report the truth of what he found.  In today’s cable world, that’s ridiculous.  Every news outlet reports with a slant, but few bend so far over that they reach the horizontal position like Glenn Greenwald.  He’s hated the United States since he went through puberty, and has had an agenda since he learned to type.  He genuinely wants to harm national interests and has overtly threatened to do so, against both the United States and England, yet he gets a complete pass.  Oh, and for those that still think Snowden is a “Whistleblower” looking out for the average US citizen, he’s just offered to tell Brazil everything he knows about our intelligence operations in exchange for asylum.  What’s that got to do with the fourth amendment?

Snowden should have learned a thing or two from working with Greenwald.  If he had claimed to be a journalist, he wouldn’t have had to leave Hawaii.  Instead of amnesty, he should be asking Santa for a set of back-dated press credentials.

The Libyan Conundrum Part V: The Enemy Has a Vote

Well, it looks like this administration is finally realizing that just proclaiming victory doesn’t make it so.  Before we went into Libya, I blogged that it would devolve into a mess without a heavy stability and support operation (SASO) on our part, and that the administration was rightfully hesitant to conduct a no-fly zone due to these realities.  The administration then ignored my prescient blog and went ahead with “leading from behind”, with President Obama proclaiming No Boots on the Ground in Libya.  We applied our air power, Ghaddafi fell, and we stuck to our guns.  No boots on the ground.  No helping to restore a functioning government.  No follow-through on the vacuum we’d created.  We just sat back and watched the country fall into chaos, ultimately resulting in the Benghazi debacle. 

This wishful operational framework dovetailed nicely with the administration’s national security team’s new strategic guidance, which could be summed up as, “We don’t like SASO, so we won’t do SASO”.  At the time I said this was ridiculous.  Like the administration saying, “We ended the war in Iraq”, just saying the words doesn’t make it so, and we’re apparently starting to understand that fact.

Recently, the Department of Defense stated they were preparing plans to train thousands of Libyan conventional and special operations troops over the span of years in an effort to stabilize the disaster that is Libya.  Does this mean the administration lied?  No.  We’re going to do the training in Bulgaria, flying the Libyans there on a rotational basis.

On the surface, I’m okay with the training because of the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you buy it, but it aggravates me that we got ourselves in this mess to begin with.  Since we were so short-sighted on the repercussions of felling Ghaddafi – this after watching Iraq fall apart – we now have to attempt to prevent the spread of chaos in north Africa (See MALI) by training security forces in Bulgaria.  Why can’t we do it in Libya, you ask?  Because the place is such a mess it isn’t safe.  We gave that a try, and a militia force came in and stole all of our weapons, NODS and vehicles.  Seriously.  It would require more security forces than trainers due to the chaos.

What really chaps my ass is the fact that the department of defense is being eviscerated by budget cuts, with all services hysterical about the drop in readiness due to a lack of money for training – leaving the Army with only two brigades combat ready – and yet we now have to use that limited budget to train up someone else’s army because we naively believed we could pound our chest and win a “bloodless” war.

The capstone quote of the Libyan debacle comes from Admiral McRaven, the head of SOCOM.  Speaking on Saturday at a national defense forum, he openly stated that there’s some risk of Islamic extremists slipping into the mix and getting trained.  Huh.  Seems like someone was warning about that before we initiated hostilities in Libya in the first place.  Oh yeah, IT WAS ME.  How can the entire national security team know less than one retired lieutenant colonel?  It sickens me.

I hope all of the people demanding the fall of President Assad in Syria in one breath, but proclaiming “No boots on the ground” with their second breath, are taking notice (yes, I’m talking to you John McCain and Lindsey Graham).  Just because you wish it so doesn’t make it so, and the enemy has a vote.

What’s up with the Benghazi Four?

Immediately after the raids in Somalia and Libya, lawmakers began throwing barbs about Benghazi, saying, “If we could capture al-Ruqai in Tripoli, why can’t we get the guys that killed our ambassador in Benghazi?”  Initially, I said nothing because I actually thought we were going to get them.  That the Tripoli hit was just the first one in Libya, and Ambassador Stevens’ killers were about to have their head on a spike.

Well, it’s been a week, and I’m fairly sure the window of opportunity has passed.  The people responsible for Benghazi have heard all about our raids and have raised security to such a degree that we couldn’t get them now without a full-scale invasion, starting with a shock and awe air campaign.  It honestly puzzles me.  Why on earth did we not get those guys when we had the chance?

Some in the administration have said that Benghazi isn’t Tripoli, and that the security situation there is markedly different, so much so that our law enforcement is prevented from going there.  Yea, I agree, it’s different.  But that doesn’t answer the question.  Do they mean that it’s so bad in Benghazi that we’re afraid of a “Blackhawk down” incident, with a bloodbath and U.S. casualties?  If so, I’m flattered at the welfare shown Army Special Operations Forces.  Obviously we’re not cannon fodder like the Navy, because the SEALs were thrown into the teeth of Al Shabaab and, after a firefight, were forced to retreat without accomplishing their mission.  Clearly no one feared a “Mark V down” scenario, and make no mistake, the SEALs knew what they were up against.  They didn’t hit the beach and say, “Holy Shit…Where did all of these bad guys come from?  Intel said it was a resort town full of French sunbathers.”  No, they knew the enemy disposition and had the violence of action, but somewhere they lost the speed and surprise component.  No biggie.  It happens.  After all, the last time they visited this place, it was to slaughter an entire contingent of bad guys and rescue two hostages.  The time before that was to kill Saleh Nabhan, another ringleader of the 1998 embassy bombings.  The SEALs and SOCOM knew the enemy disposition, and still chose to assault, so that can’t be a reason for ignoring Benghazi.  We’ve already shown a willingness to go into the teeth for a capture mission.

Maybe it’s because al-Ruqai was indicted by the FBI, and thus we had a legal foundation.  But so are at least four of the Benghazi attackers, so that can’t be it.

Maybe it was a lack of intelligence.  We knew where al-Ruqai was, so we got him, and we don’t know where the Benghazi four are located.  I’d believe that, except the guy the FBI considers the mastermind of the Benghazi attack, Ahmed Khattala, held three different interviews for the press, including Fox News, CBS and CNN.  They had no trouble finding him, so surely with our omnipotent NSA and other collection platforms, we could too.  Lack of intelligence just doesn’t hold water.  In fact, given that three separate American news crews were able to penetrate Benghazi to interview Khattala, I’d say the security situation wasn’t much of a factor either.

Maybe we just didn’t want to upset the new Libyan government.  After all, Khattala is a Libyan citizen.  But so was al-Ruqai, and we clearly didn’t seem to care about ruffling any Libyan feathers there.  In fact, there’s some reporting to indicate that the Libyans have already given us tacit permission to go in and snag those guys, so that can’t be it.

Others have said that al-Ruqai was the bigger fish, as he was an operational planner for al Qaida and was cementing networks in the newly formed, fragile state of Libya.  I’ll agree, but how does that square with the Somalia hit?  The guy they were after was the mastermind of the Kenyan mall attack.  So in the greater scheme of things it was more important to go after him – merely weeks later – for an attack against Kenya than it was to go after the men responsible for killing our diplomatic mission – over a year later?  That makes no sense at all.

Al-Ruqai may have been more important strategically, but he certainly wasn’t more important politically, and this isn’t a zero sum game.  You didn’t have to hit one and lose the other.  You could have hit both, like I assumed would happen.  In fact, it would have been much, much simpler to hit two targets in the same country than it was to hit two targets separated across a continent (which, by the way, is pretty remarkable.  No other country on the planet could do what we did that night, and America should be justifiably proud).  Because you gain synergies with the local nature of the targets, you wouldn’t be forced to duplicate QRF, air cover, medevac, and etcetera.  So why didn’t we?

Honestly, reading the facts as reported in the press, it makes no sense to me.  Some will claim it’s because this administration is cowardly, but that doesn’t bear up given the targets we did hit.  The administration gave authorization to attempt a kill/capture mission by a strongpoint assault in Somalia, and authorization for a daylight snatch in Tripoli.  Both very risky, and certainly not cowardly.  Others will come up with some conspiracy theory that we’re in cahoots with the militias in Benghazi or the U.S. had Ambassador Stevens murdered, and capturing Khattala would reveal one or both.  I won’t even bother with those.

The answer could simply be tactical. Perhaps we did intend two simultaneous hits, but the second one aborted for some reason.  Maybe a helo malfunctioned.  Maybe the intel for the target didn’t pan out on that specific mission profile, forcing a rollover that never went because after al-Ruqai was taken, Khattala went to ground.

Or maybe we were tracking both and then picked up intel that al-Ruqai was leaving.  Maybe we got an intercept that said, “I’m sick of this city living.  Headed to northern Mali to see my brothers in AQIM.”  Maybe it forced our hand, either take him now, knowing Khattala would hide, or let him go and miss the chance at a big fish.  Dilemmas like that happen all the time.  They aren’t pretty, but then again, neither is war.

But that still doesn’t explain why we jumped like a bird on a June bug for the Somalia target, hitting it within weeks of the Nairobi attack, but have waited over a year to do anything about Benghazi.  I’m sure I’ll be kindly reminded that it took over ten years to get bin Laden, and that I myself have posted blogs during the hunt, explaining how hard such operational targeting is.  That’s true, but that’s all predicated on intelligence – or the lack thereof.  We have the intelligence to hit Khattala.  I guarantee it.  If three news networks can find and interview him, I have no doubt that we have a fairly robust pattern of life on his daily routine.  Hell, it’s not like he’s working very hard to hide, hanging out in swanky luxury hotels and granting interviews.  So what have we been waiting for?  What’s holding us back?

Perhaps the lack of intelligence isn’t where he’s located, but whether he can be proven guilty.  Because the administration is hell-bent on trying all terrorists like domestic criminals, Khattala would be granted the rights of a United States citizen if captured.  Maybe the administration hasn’t pulled the trigger because they know that if they bring him to trial they can’t win.  We know the FBI can’t get into Benghazi, either because the Libyans won’t let them or because it’s just too dangerous, so perhaps they don’t have a very solid case.  The administration was/is under pressure to produce results, and that pressure was directly transferred to the FBI.  Maybe, in an effort to show progress, they took what little they had, threw it against the wall, and indicted four people.

It toned down the partisan rhetoric in the short term, but when the intelligence community or DOD came forward with a target package, saying they could get Khattala, a dilemma was presented: If he was snatched and brought to trial, he’d be found not guilty by lack of evidence.  Now THAT would be embarrassing, and given the tepid conviction of the last terrorist brought to trial (acquitted on more than 280 charges, including murder), it is a real possibility, so the authority to launch is never given.

Maybe I’m wrong, but after analyzing all available facts, I’m unable come up with any other logical reason why we haven’t snatched any of the Benghazi four.  It’s not a question of can’t.  It’s a question of won’t.

The Syrian Conundrum Part II: From Russia With Love

What a clown-fest.  I’ve wanted to update my latest Syria blog, but one bizarre thing after another kept occurring.  First, Secretary of State Kerry gave an impassioned speech on why we should immediately strike Assad, and, as I said in my last blog, I agreed with him (yes, that’s past tense).  Instead of using his legal powers as president to strike, as Kerry implied would happen, President Obama backed up and asked congress for permission.  Secretary Kerry, in an odd choice of words, scared the pants off of Assad by saying the strike would be “unbelievably small” and wouldn’t be targeted at Assad or designed to alter the balance of power.  President Obama immediately followed that up with the statement “We don’t do pinpricks” – leaving me to believe that a pinprick is NOT unbelievably small.  Finally, someone asked Secretary Kerry what it would take for the US to not strike Syria.  He said that Assad must turn over all of his chemical weapons to an international force – then said that would never happen.  Immediately, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, stepped up and said that’s a great idea.  Syria followed suit by saying they would do it.  Kerry slapped his forehead in aggravation.

I’ll get to Putin’s offer in a second, but first I’d like to discuss the potential strike.  In an earlier blog I stated that I would support a strike in retaliation for Assad’s use of chemical weapons because we needed to deter both his future use as well as reinforce our credibility with other despots around the world.  I still believe that doctrine, but unfortunately, the time to successfully execute has passed.

Coercive diplomacy requires two things:  The capacity to strike what the opposition holds dear, and the will to use that capacity.  Both of these have to be known and believed by the opposition.  In other words, the enemy has to believe that we will attack, and that we have the ability to cause pain.  We’ve lost that edge in Syria.

If Obama had struck immediately (well, relatively quickly, without a bunch of public dithering), it would have sent a clear signal.  Instead, by back-pedaling from his very own red line and asking congress for permission – only to have congress get pounded by constituents against a strike – he’s sent the very opposite message than what he wanted.  Instead of sending a signal of strength, he sent one of weakness; precisely showing that neither the president nor the U.S. government has the will to strike, and no military option will alter that at this stage. Everyone from North Korea to Iran now believes they can escalate with abandon because we’ll signal long before we strike with massive hand wringing and debate.  Hitting Syria at this stage to deter future chemical weapons usage is an utter waste of time.  Like reprimanding a dog three days after he urinates on the carpet.

On top of this, as stated above, coercive diplomacy requires the threat of force to be applied to something the opposition holds dear.  In Syria’s case, the only thing Assad holds dear is himself.  By publicly stating that we will not do anything that would cause his fall, we’ve defanged ANY coercive elements of our strategy.  To be clear, even if we struck in a timeline that showed resolve, I do not think we should have targeted Assad (as I said in a previous blog), but telling your missiles what to hit and telling the opposition what you WON’T hit are two different things.  There was no reason for Assad to know we didn’t have him on the target deck.  Let him sweat, and after the strike, think he’d escaped by the skin of his teeth.

To juxtapose the Syrian strike fiasco, one only need to look at Operation Eldorado Canyon.  In 1986, Libya’s Qaddafi blew up a Berlin discotheque frequented by American servicemen, killing several.  Ten days later, President Reagan destroyed five targets in Libya in a joint Air Force/Navy strike package.  The first time the American public heard about it was when President Reagan gave a statement from the oval office, explaining what he had done and why, while the smoke was clearing and some of the strike package was still in the air returning to base. There was not a country on earth that didn’t believe Reagan would strike again if United States’ interests were attacked.

Well, thank goodness that whole debate is a moot point now, because Assad is going to give all of his chemical weapons up in a deal brokered by that peacenik Vladimir Putin.  Being the statesman that he is, Putin lectured us on our use of force in an OP-ED in the New York Times, saying that violence doesn’t solve anything.  Well, unless you don’t count getting elected to be president of Russia.

This is the same guy who executed a false-flag operation against his own people, conducting four terrorist strikes in Moscow, then blaming them on the Chechens, stirring up enough Russian nationalism to get him elected, then proceeding to go to war in Chechnya.  Under his direction, the Russian army leveled the capital city of Grozny, pounding it with artillery and airstrikes, killing anything that moved – civilian or otherwise.  In 2003, the United Nations declared Grozny the most destroyed city on earth.  All under the peaceful leadership of that prior KGB man, Vladimir Putin.  He takes affront at American exceptionalism, but his history is much closer to Assad the elder’s bloody reign, with Grozny a close reflection of the destruction of the city of Hama in 1982 (with deaths of upward of 20,000 civilians), than it is to any civilized society.  You can rest assured whatever he’s planning with Syria, it has absolutely nothing to do with any humanitarian notions.

Even if the deal is cynical, is it something we should consider?  Yes, by all means we should consider it, but realistically, there’s little chance Assad is going to give up his chemical weapons – especially as a result of our pathetic wafflely-diplomacy.  Think about it – do we honestly believe that Assad has all of the sudden decided to turn over his best strategic asset because we threatened him with an “unbelievably small” tactical strike that will – by our own words – not harm his hold on power at all?  Especially when every other country on earth has backed away from doing anything about his chemical weapons usage?  At the end of the day, he slaughtered over a thousand people and all he got for his trouble was Britain saying they didn’t give a shit and the US saying we’ll have to quibble for a while before blowing up a bunch of things that don’t matter to him.  That’s what has him ready to throw in the towel?  Really?

If anything, Assad has looked at the past and realized one of the few things keeping him in power are precisely his chemical weapons.  One of the primary – and smart – reasons we haven’t conducted “regime change” with him like we did with Qaddafi is because we’re afraid of those weapons ending up with a bunch of fanatical jihadists.  If he relinquishes his weapons, he loses that edge, and as I said before, his survival is the only thing he holds dear.  In fact, I’m sure he’s looking at recent past history.  Under President Bush, we convinced Qaddafi to give up all of his WMD capability, verified by international inspectors.  Fast forward ten years, and President Obama is launching airstrikes to remove him, regardless of the jihadist rebels and regional chaos that would follow his fall.  Assad knows full well that if Qaddafi had kept his WMD, there would never have been any NATO airstrikes because the west would have feared the consequences.  With the WMD out of play, the west could pretend to be humanitarian by dismantling Qaddafi’s regime, and then allow the country to fall into chaos without worrying about the aftermath.  After all, it’s way, way over there and not something that can affect us.  Throw WMD in the mix though, and we’d spend a little more time debating the outcome before slinging missiles.

No, if Assad’s learned anything, it’s keeping his weapons (and using them), only garners a potential pinprick, but giving them up guarantees his eventual fall.

On the other hand, talking about giving them up gets him the best of both worlds.  If the U.S. was reluctant to strike before, it will never hit him if he’s promising to remove all of his WMD.  All he has to do is stretch out the time – and that’s something he’s doing beautifully.  For anyone out there who thinks the international community will “step in” if he doesn’t pony up the goods, Assad has a little bit of history to fall back on.  His staunch ally in his fight is Hezbollah, a terrorist group from the border state of Lebanon.  That country went through a traumatic fifteen-year civil war (in case you think Syria will be over swiftly), and at the end of it, a UN resolution was made for the disarming of all militias.   Everyone did so, except for one: Hezbollah.  Today, Hezbollah is better armed than the Lebanese Armed Forces, and has no intention of giving up their weapons.  Has the world community stepped in to enforce the resolution?  Hell no.  Instead, they’ve turned a blind eye to Hezbollah traveling to Syria and fighting for Assad.  So what makes anyone think that Assad hasn’t learned a lesson from that?  He’s a survivor, and the precedent has been set.

As for Russia, all Putin wants is to poke the United States in the eye, and this they’ve gleefully done with Snowden and now Syria.  Russia wants to return to the days when the USSR was the other 800-pound gorilla.  A time when what they said mattered on the world stage.  Luckily for Putin, Obama’s doing his best to get him there.

Given that it’s ludicrous for us to believe Assad will give up his chemical weapons in good faith, do I think we should pursue the Russia/Syria initiative?  By all means, if it keeps this administration from flinging useless tomahawk missiles around – or worse – conducting regime change in Syria without a moments thought to what will follow, like we did in Libya.

If that’s my option, I hope we pursue this for as long as it takes – and it will take forever, trust me.

 

The Syrian Conundrum

Syria is all over the news lately, and much like Libya before it, I haven’t heard a lot of talk focused on the correct issues.  Most of the discussion centers around attaining UN or congressional approval, what the U.S. will strike, proof Assad is a crazy man, or the timing.  Then, in the middle of this week, the UK decided they weren’t going to play.  The administration’s response to this news provided the first solid words of sanity after more than two years of misguided foreign policy adventures.  National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said, “President Obama’s decision making will be guided by what is in the best interests of the United States.”

Yes.  That’s the responsible route.  The only problem is that the administration is not making a case for what, exactly, that means.  They’re just words on a page.  A sound bite designed to sound presidential.  All discussion is predicated on proving that Assad used nerve agent, followed by options for retaliation.  Not one word has been directed at whether retaliating is in the best interests of the United States or not – and that should be the driving force behind any application of military power.  Since we completely ignored this fundamental truth when we attacked Libya and removed Ghadaffi (When the administration says they aren’t out to “remove Assad”, don’t believe it.  They said this exact same thing in Libya…), I expect no different from the administration in Syria.  Therefore, I’ll take a stab at it to clear the air.  Just what is in our national interest in Syria?

In my opinion, it’s four-fold, and I’ve numbered them by priority (highest to lowest):

1.  Prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

2.  Prevent regional destabilization.

3.  Preserve the United States’ credibility and legitimacy

4.  Promote the United States’ ideals of democracy and humanitarianism.

Obviously, there could be a hundred other priorities, but these are the ones I believe are most important (notice there’s nothing about oil on this list).  Using this list as an optic, we should then look at our various options for Syria and determine which, if any, will further the goal of each.  Only then should we begin looking at covert or overt military operations and target lists.  Analyzing this any other way is having the tail wag the dog, with the U.S. striking just because we can.  Sort of like blowing up an aspirin factory in Sudan.

I’m going to dissect these one at a time, and understand that I’m focused purely on US interests, regardless of how unpalatable the solution.  Emotion does not factor into my calculus.

1.   Prevent the proliferation of WMD

The administration is frothing at the mouth about Assad having used chemical weapons on the Syrian people, discussing military strikes to coerce him into not employing them again, however, the greatest threat is if those stockpiles are taken out of Syria.  If that happens, make no mistake, no amount of bluster or military deterrence will prevent a jihadist from using them against our allies or us.  It will be devastating, which is why this should be the number one priority for the United States.  So, how do we do that?  Basically, there are two options:

A.   Overthrow Assad and take control of the weapons stockpiles.  This option will entail a massive boots-on-the-ground effort to secure each stockpile and render it safe.  It cannot be done from the air, and there is a risk that in the ensuing rush to secure them, we would still lose some amount of chemical weapons to rebel forces.

B.   Allow Assad to win.  This is pretty simple.  With Assad in power, the weapons remain under his control.  After the dust has settled, begin to bring pressure on him to have them destroyed, just like the U.S accomplished successfully with Libya (before we decided we’d rather just get rid of Ghadaffi).

Bottom line:  this choice is relatively easy, in my opinion.  In order to ensure our greatest national interest with the least amount of sacrifice, we should do nothing.  Let Iran, Hezbollah and Russia secure Assad from falling.  Yes, I know it’s a repulsive thought, but not nearly as repulsive as the same type of chemical attack videos coming out of Syria springing forth from small-town America.  Understand, I’m not saying help him win.  I’m saying let him win.  After our track record of propping up dictators in the Middle East, from ousting Mosaddegh in favor of the Shah in Iran to turning a blind eye to Mubarak’s abuses in Egypt, we in no way want to look like we’re siding with Assad.  But that’s an easy fix.  He’s got enough friends with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.  Let them be the bad guys.

2.   Prevent the destabilization of the region

Two years ago, the quickest way to ensure this would have been to support the moderate, indigenous rebellion with lethal and non-lethal aid, helping them to overthrow Assad.  That option is now out the window since the majority of fighters are Islamic radicals with trans-national ties to other terrorist groups.  They are literally a bunch of thugs who eat the organs of regime soldiers they’ve just killed and behead civilians, whose bodies are then fed to the dogs, simply because they’re Christians.  To put it bluntly, allowing Assad to be overthrown by this bunch will almost guarantee destabilization.  First, since there is no overarching governance able to take over after Assad is gone, there will be massive bloodshed as the various militias now turn on each other in a fight for supremacy.  All who say we should target Assad and “support the moderates” don’t have a clue what it would entail to engender success – namely boots on the ground in a massive stability and support operation – and we in no way are willing to commit to such a sacrifice.  Hell, this administration doesn’t even understand that it IS a sacrifice that must be conducted.  To them, it’s simply an option.

When confronted with the accusation that this is looking like Bush’s run-up to Iraq, the administration bristled and stated in no uncertain terms that they had no intention of getting into a messy quagmire, and that is precisely why they “ended the war.  Period.”  Funny, I think someone forgot to tell the Iraqis that the war was over.  Statements like this scare me, as it shows a complete and fundamental lack of understanding on what is required to secure our national interests after conducting a counter leadership campaign.  Saying that we ended the war in Iraq simply by leaving is the same as a man standing in the rain, then, upon growing tired of getting wet, comes inside and announces, “I made it stop raining.”   We did the same thing in Libya, getting rid of Ghadaffi and “supporting the moderates” by doing nothing once he was gone, and all that got us was Benghazi.  The French got it a little worse.  They had to invade Mali, fighting to prevent the overthrow of the government from the Jihadists who left Libya, armed with Ghaddafi’s weapons.

Eventually, left to their own devices (since there’s no way we will intervene), the new government of Syria will be an Islamic one, which, if not outright terrorist, will have overt sympathy for al Nusra Front, Al Qaida in Iraq, and a host of other terrorist groups.  My prediction is that the first destabilizing event will be the slow boil in Iraq turning into a cauldron as AQ begins to attack with the cross-border support of Syria, now in the hands of Sunni Islamists.  The Shiite Iraqi government, of course, will fight to stop this, and if they aren’t in the pocket of Iran today, they will be tomorrow as they turn to that regime for help (since there’s no way on earth we’ll ever re-enter Iraq).  On top of this, the Islamist Syrian regime will begin to make trouble in Lebanon, which Hezbollah, of course, will fight.

I could go on and on, discussing the influx of refugees to Jordon, Turkey and Lebanon, the support for Hamas against Israel, or the wild-card of the Kurds using the fallout to attempt an independence movement spanning Turkey, Iraq and Syria, but the bottom line is that having this group of rabble rousers topple Assad will virtually guarantee a bad outcome for the United States and a destabilization of the region, with concrete impacts to our homeland from the breeding ground of terrorist training which would likely occur.  Hell, the head of the FBI thinks that’s already happening.  His biggest worry about Syria is that Americans are going over there and fighting, learning a thing or two, then coming back here and becoming “home grown” terrorists.  At this stage, arming the rebels is outright delusional, even if it’s just the moderate fighters.  For one, the moderates will not be a power after Assad is gone, so arming them is tantamount to arming the terrorists.  For another, there are already reports that the moderates are selling what we give them outright to the terrorists. 

Once again, letting Assad win would be the better option, as distasteful as that might be.  People use Iraq as an illustration of what not to do, but the administration believes the lesson learned is to overthrow the regime and then run, staying far away from the fallout regardless of the repercussions, and this is wrong.  The true lesson is not to overthrow the regime at ALL unless you’re prepared for the sacrifice of nation-building that follows.  And, as shown in Libya, we aren’t willing to do that.

3.   Preserve the United States’ credibility and legitimacy

This one is a little sticky, mainly because Obama has already uttered all of his statements about “red lines”, and it appears pretty clear that Assad has decided to ignore them and use chemical weapons on civilians.   Unfortunately, words have meaning, and we’re pretty much boxed into a corner with respect to our credibility because of what he said.  Make no mistake, Iran and North Korea are watching closely, and they will draw lessons from the rhetoric (this link from STRATFOR is probably one of the best articles I’ve read about the situation).  Do nothing, especially if it looks like others have talked you out of it – IE Britain not becoming part of a coalition, or Iran barking about retaliation – and it will engender massive problems down the road.  Remember, the number one national interest is the prevention of the proliferation of WMD, and that also applies to Iran.  Coincidentally, we also have a “red line” in Iran as it applies to their nuclear ambitions, and make no mistake, this rhetoric in Syria is being analyzed by the Mullahs.  In short, we could be pushed into military action in Iran precisely because they don’t believe we’ll use military action and will ignore our so-called “red line”.  Or worse, we just sputter, and Iran builds a successful nuclear device.

On top of this, our legitimacy in the region will be hammered if we don’t react.  Already at a low point, doing nothing after the heinous slaughter of innocent civilians by chemical munitions will sink us even further.  People talk about the death that has already occurred and that an additional thousand isn’t that big of a deal, but they are wrong.  WMD and chemical munitions are different, on a whole different scale of destruction, and by doing nothing we’re basically saying we have no issue with its use, which will embolden other despots around the world.

Because of all of this, there will have to be a military strike against Syria.  Unfortunately, it’ll have to be something that’s strong enough to show we mean business about chemical munitions, but not so strong that it alters the balance of power vis a vis Assad and the rebels/terrorists.  Just hitting an aspirin factory won’t cut it, but targeting Assad himself would be going too far.

4.   Promote United States’ ideals of democracy and humanitarianism

This will always be in our national interest, and is precisely why Senator McCain is routinely screaming for action.  In his mind, this is priority one, and takes precedence over any other national interest – IE, stopping the slaughter of innocents is worth the proliferation of WMD.  Not in my mind.  Not by a long shot.  In fact, as I’ve shown in the second priority, there’s more to stopping the slaughter than simply arming the rebels or conducting a no-fly zone.  That may help oust Assad quickly, but it will also engender follow-on chaos and death.  I’m really unclear why McCain and others are all fired up about the long-term death and destruction in Syria, especially when juxtaposed against other parts of the world.  Sudan has had a legitimate genocide for over a decade, with the leader of that country – Omar al Bashir – having been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, and we’ve never lifted a finger to stop that.  The president of Sudan is an indicted war criminal, and McCain has never preached about military intervention in that country, even though there are much fewer potentially adverse repercussions.  Makes me scratch my head, but for Syria, in the end, promotion of US ideals doesn’t necessarily mean arming a bunch of terrorist thugs.  Two years ago, I might have stood by him, but times change.  The best way to handle this now is to continue and expand non-lethal aid in the form of food, medical supplies, etc., to help the people affected by the fighting, but not to help the fighters.

In the end, without a comprehensive analysis of what’s in our national interest, any military action will have unintended or counterproductive repercussions.  It’s really easy to stand in a global crowd and spout proclamations that “Assad should go”, but without analyzing the future impact, it’s foolish to engender that result.  We pursued that in Libya and no good resulted.  As I’ve shown above, Assad’s fall is the last thing we should want right now, given we have no stomach whatsoever for a stability and support operation following that action – by the administration’s own words. 

It’s also precisely because words have meaning that I’ll support a limited strike against Syria.  Aggravating, yes, but necessary given that Assad has decided to flaunt international prohibitions against chemical weapons and Obama has put our credibility on the line regarding such use.

That credibility may be needed very soon with Iran.

Remember the Messenger When Reading the Message

Intrepid warrior of transparency, Glenn Greenwald, leaked another classified NSA program, and as he has with just about all of his reporting, he expands a single tidbit of information into some global leviathan.  In this case, Xkeyscore can apparently see EVERYTHING anyone does on the Internet anywhere on the globe, in real time.  Yes, the NSA is worse than a corrupt intelligence organization.  It’s replaced God.

Reporting on special operations and intelligence activities has taken the tone of a salacious gossip column typically reserved for the National Enquirer.  All that’s necessary is a single fact, and the rest can be extrapolated into something guaranteed to sell papers. For instance, if I were a journalist, I could write an expose revealing that Glenn Greenwald is a homosexual child predator pedophile.  All I would need is a single detail to extrapolate.  In this case, Greenwald is in fact a homosexual, but he is not a pedophile.  Homosexuality has absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia – let me be perfectly clear on that point – but there are plenty of people who would make such a leap and believe that it does.  This phobia would allow someone to write such a story and leverage that fear, very much like the leaps being made with Greenwald’s reporting of the NSA.  Program “A” exists, therefore problem “B” exists.  Since it’s secret, the reader is forced to assume that the journalist is reporting truth, and thus the innocuous fact has become some cancerous growth.  After all, the journalist doesn’t have an agenda, right?

Unfortunately, I can’t respond to any of the accusations about Xkeyscore because I’m not read on to the program, but I think it would be instructive to deconstruct a news article that I am read on to, just to show how such reporting can be skewed with a string of single facts.

A couple of months ago, Business Insider wrote an article entitled, “US Special Ops Have Become Much Much Scarier Since 9/11”.  The entire piece is about the Joint Special Operations Command, an organization I served within for close to a decade during the exact time the article discusses.  Like I suspect about the NSA reporting, it’s so full of inaccuracies it makes me wonder how the journalist was allowed to print it.  But then I remembered, since it’s all classified, nobody will refute it, so the journalist gets a pass.  At the risk of becoming Snowden, I’ll give it a try.

Right off the bat, the article states that JSOC grew from 2,000 operators to 25,000 after 9/11.  I’m not going to give out real JSOC numbers, because they’re classified, but 25,000 is absolutely ridiculous.  The entire force of SOCOM, including three Ranger Battalions, eleven SEAL teams, two MARSOC battalions, six Special Forces Groups, and the entire panoply of both fixed and rotary wing aircraft, to include all maintenance and servicing support, is only 66K.  And that’s with JSOC included.  So JSOC accounts for almost half of the number of the entire United States Special Operations Command?  Really?

On a lighter note, according to the article, JSOC operators are known in the “covert ops community” as “Ninjas”.  I have no idea what the “covert ops community” is, and I have never, ever, ever heard a single person in uniform call anyone associated with JSOC a “Ninja”.  I’ve never even heard my daughter say that.

The article goes on to say that Rumsfeld and Cheney launched a multi-year effort carving JSOC away from the conventional command so that it could operate unilaterally, as a “global killing machine”.  This assertion is made in numerous other news reports, and shows a complete lack of understanding of how the military chain of command functions under Title 10, United States Code.  JSOC is a part of SOCOM, and follows a chain of command.  I have been in a multitude of different operations, from overt hostilities to more clandestine endeavors throughout the spectrum of conflict, both before 9/11 and after, and during all of that time, I never deployed without going through the chain of command.  Never.  It was a laborious process involving country clearances, deployment orders, and message traffic to a bazillion people explaining what I was doing and why.  I wish we had been “carved from the broader chain of command”, but it just isn’t true.

The article pounds this point home by stating that JSOC was “unrestrained and unaccountable to anyone except [Rumsfeld], Cheney, and the president”, and that Vice President Cheney began to make repeated trips to JSOC headquarters to give “direct action orders”.  I honestly don’t know where this “Cheney” connection is coming from, because Seymour Hersh reports the same thing, but I never saw or heard of Dick Cheney visiting JSOC the entire time I was there, and make no mistake, if the Vice President of the United States had shown up, I would have known.  We routinely did cheetah flips for mere ambassadors and general officers.  At any rate, if he was going to HQ to give “action orders”, he was going to the wrong spot, because the commanding general, from 9/11 until about 2010 was deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan.  The VP would have been giving orders to a radio operator.  This whole concept is just puzzling to me.  At the end of the day, JSOC is a military organization that operates under Title 10.  It’s not the Taskforce.

A good example of extrapolation for dramatic affect, AKA the Snowden/Greenwald revelations, is the article’s discussion of “black sites”.  According to Business Insider, JSOC ran an “Interrogation Program” parallel to the CIA “Black Sites”, that would provide the administration more “flexibility” and less “oversight”.  Here, they’re taking one fact and turning it into something different, exactly the same as the NSA reporting.  Did JSOC interrogate detainees captured on the battlefield?  Of course.  So did/does every other tactical organization.  Information is perishable, and waiting four days to talk to a detainee is not the way to gather actionable intelligence, so he is initially interrogated at a temporary holding facility.  JSOC had one.  So did every battalion of the 82nd Airborne.  When the 82nd caught a bad guy in Fallujah, there had to be some method of handling him before he was transferred to a permanent facility.  The same was true of JSOC.  It was not an “interrogation program”.  It was simply a function of the battlefield.  By comparing it to the CIA’s rendition operations, the reader is left to assume that JSOC has a string of secret prisons around the globe, when that isn’t remotely true.  This same technique is used in almost all the NSA reporting I’ve seen.

From here, the article goes off the rails, claiming that JSOC trained Iraqi death squads, that JSOC hired contract killers from Blackwater for “covert operations” in Pakistan, and even has a CIA veteran named Vincent Cannistraro claiming that JSOC had gone “wild” and had killed targets in foreign countries who were innocent.

A.  Training of foreign SOF is a core Special Forces task, as in US Army Special Forces.  That’s what they do.  It is not a core JSOC task, but since JSOC has Special Forces members, I guess it’s okay for the journalist to extrapolate that they trained foreign forces.  The fact is that JSOC didn’t train any Iraqi SOF forces the entire time they were in Iraq, death squads or otherwise.  We had our hands full doing our mission.

B.  The United States Government would never hire out missions of national importance to an independent business, especially one that involved a cross-border raid into another sovereign country.  It makes for good fiction and action movie fodder, but it just doesn’t happen.  Contractors do exist (google “Snowden”), but they are always in a supporting role (google “Snowden”).  Notice I say US Government and not JSOC.  That’s because it’s the US Government that would have the ability to do what the article claims.  JSOC does not have the funding or authority to hire a bunch of mercenaries on its own.  And why would they need to anyway?  I mean, really, they have 25,000 operators.  Surely they could break ten or so free to invade Pakistan – like they did for Bin Laden.  I have no idea where this Blackwater/Pakistan fantasy came from, but I suspect it was something along the lines of Blackwater being hired to provide security for a convoy that accidentally crossed the border, which was then extrapolated into “Blackwater conducts covert action in Pakistan”.

C.  I can’t prove a negative, so there’s no way to show we didn’t kill a bunch of innocents in foreign lands, but I can say I’ve never heard of Vincent Cannistraro, and if he had anything to do with JSOC, not only would I have heard of him, I would have known him.  He’s just one of many “experts” talking about something he heard in the bathroom from some guy who knows the girlfriend of a SEAL.  Like I said about Seymour Hersh’s fantastic statements in another blog, other than allegations, there’s no proof that any of this occurred.  You’d think there’d be something.  In 2010 a leader of Hamas was killed in Dubai, most likely by Mossad.  That one targeted killing made world-wide news for weeks.  If these allegations are true, where are all of the dead guys killed by the JSOC “assassination” teams?  Why hasn’t there been a single story on a killing – anywhere?  Especially if it’s still ongoing?

Most of the Business Insider article is taken from a book (which I won’t name because I don’t want to promote its falsehoods) so the reasons behind the exaggerations are apparent.  The author wants to make money, and Business Insider took him at his word.  In Glenn Greenwald’s case, I believe the purpose is a little more nefarious.  He has admitted that he began working with Snowden before Snowden sought a position with Booz Allen, and Snowden himself has admitted that the only reason he took the job was to steal secrets.  You do the math.  Greenwald is not an unbiased journalist, but a person with an axe to grind.  He despises the intelligence community and will do anything to see it fail, and I’d ask you to remember that when reading anything he puts out.  I’m not read in to Xkeyscore anymore than you or Greenwald are, and I can’t say for sure if it’s nefarious or not.  I do, however, understand that propaganda is not solely reserved to governments, and I have seen on numerous occasions – beyond what I just relayed – how the press can mangle stories related to the intelligence community.

And that’s a press that I believe has nothing but good intentions.  I cannot fathom how bad the reporting gets from a man with an agenda.

WikiLeaks: The Definition of Irony

What follows is a little bit of a rant, so bear with me as I clear my head.  As Edward Snowden’s prospects for escape dwindle, since country after country has denied him asylum, he is now beginning to cry like a petulant child through WikiLeaks.  Using a logic train that is about as convoluted as possible (Waaaa….Obama’s picking on me!), it reminded me of Wikileaks’ own twisted version of what’s just.  Like Snowden, it appears to consist only of crimes they commit against others.  Someone using anything resembling its own tactics against them is inherently evil.

Honestly, I love it when that little weasel Julian Assange talks to the press.  With his sallow white hair and pallid complexion, he rails against perceived injustices in the world, which more and more are injustices that apparently revolve around him and not the world at large.  In his mind, he’s the only person who has the right to collect, expose, or “bring justice”.  Anyone else doing the same thing to him or his organization is simply part of the malevolent forces from the Empire – and for some reason, a lot of people seem to agree.  For them, he can do no wrong.  For me, I’d like a little rationality with my protests.

If only Assange had studied a basic course in critical thinking instead of working as a sexual predator, he’d see that a plethora of his statements are logical fallacy 101.  In fact, the definition of irony.  I thought I’d highlight a few here:

1.  I mentioned this particular hypocrisy in an earlier blog, when Assange first fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain.  His legal team at the time was worried that the UK would storm the embassy to remove him (just to be clear: so he could be extradited to Sweden for rape.  This has nothing to do with WikiLeaks or the US).  In an effort to prevent that, the legal team stated:  “I hope that the UK authorities are sensible enough not to enter the embassy without permission, which would risk upsetting diplomatic relations all over the world.”  Seriously?  Wikileaks actually had the cajones to say that action would upset diplomatic relations around the world.  With a straight face.  If there has been one single event that has upset diplomatic relations around the world in the last thirty years, it’s the actions of Wikileaks, and now they’re worried about diplomatic relations?

2.  More recently, Assange appeared on This Week and talked about his man-crush, Edward Snowden, someone who’s finally gotten him back in the news (Assange must have punched a wall when he heard about the Snowden leaks to “mainstream press”, but he immediately went into high gear to insert himself into the situation.) “He is a hero,” Assange said. “He has told the people of the world and the United States that there is mass unlawful interception of their communications.”  Huh?  Isn’t that exactly what Wikileaks did with Bradley Manning’s data?  A “mass unlawful interception of communications” – namely classified correspondence between diplomatic posts?  Why does Assange think this is wrong now?  I guess it’s only okay to “intercept mass communication” when it’s done under the banner of WikiLeaks.  Anything else is heinous. In his mind, our elected representative democracy shouldn’t have the ability or authority to decide what is in the collective best interest for the national security of 300 million people, targeting foreign terrorists and foreign threats, and despite the fact that there was a healthy debate before it was implemented.  Never mind the fact that Snowden never even said ANYONE was looking at any communications of US citizens.  In Assange’s mind, he, a single vain man who cares more about his own TV appearances and avoiding rape charges—and isn’t an American citizen – should without question have that same ability.  Yeah, Assange’s little golden halo is pretty much bullshit.

3.  It came out recently that Wikileaks had a mole.  A teenager who had been working with the FBI, basically spilling his guts about WikiLeaks’ operations.  The revelations have caused a plethora of responses from Wikileaks denouncing the teenager and his operations (which begs the question: Why does WikiLeaks get to operate in secret?  If you’re all about transparency, then open up the vaults.  Why should the FBI have to find a mole?).  In a WikiLeaks statement he was called a, “troubled young man” who “did manage several minor tasks for the organization as one of hundreds of volunteers all over the world.”  Wow.  Sounds a lot like Bradley Manning.  I guess it’s okay for WikiLeaks to court Manning online like a predatory child molester, but heinous for the FBI to accept information from someone inside the organization that was freely given.  Someone they’ll now attack as “psychologically tormented”, “off”, and “coerced”, much like every US politician running for office does against the opposition.  Funny how quickly the vaunted vanguard of freedom and tolerance resorts to guttersnipe ad hominem attacks like a backwoods segregationist candidate from 1950.  If this is the “new world”, I don’t see a lot of difference from the political machine Assange so despises.  Just a lot of selfishness.

At the end of the day, Julian Assange, as Ecuador learned, is nothing but a fame hog, who, much like he leveraged Manning before, is now using Snowden to get in the media to buoy his own ego and denounce our way of life.  Anything he can do he will do to stay on the radar screen, to include spouting whatever logical fallacy he finds convenient to prove his point.  Why on earth I’d care about what this Australian citizen thinks about my country is beyond me, but apparently there are plenty of people who think he’s a hero.  Hero of what?  Hypocrisy?

Yeah, I’d say he’s a Super Hero in that department.

PRISM revealed: Do you feel safer?

The press has been salivating over the NSA’s “PRISM” program for days, and honestly, I’m a bit perplexed.  What’s the big deal?  You mean we’re actively attempting to use the Internet to ferret out terrorist’s plans?  Holy Shit!  Stop the presses!

Why is this so shocking?  Does the United States public actually want our intelligence community to remain in the 1970s?  Maybe sit in a back room playing gin rummy, praying someone walks through the door with the diabolical plan in his grip?  I think not.

What’s shocking to me is that once again a major news outlet decided to publish a classified program resulting in serious harm to United States’ national security. The bigger outrage should be that they did so for no other reason than to sell papers.

Ask the average American, “Do you think our government should read the email of terrorists to prevent attacks?” and, outside of some whackos that don’t have a stake in the fight, the answer will be a resounding “Yes”.  That’s exactly the purpose of PRISM.  How did the press think this would happen?  Do they believe that the terrorists only use domain names like “Jihad.net” or “Infidelkiller.com?”  No.  They use Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo.  They talk on Skype and post videos to YouTube.  The U.S. intelligence community would be irresponsible if it ignored this fact.

The inference from the Washington Post article is that the NSA is sucking up domestic emails willy-nilly on a fishing expedition and now can “watch your ideas form as you type.”  That the NSA is actually reading everything you have ever thought.  That works out well for selling newspapers, but there is no proof of this.  Yes, there is a potential for abuse, something that is scary and worth a look, but that potential existed way before the Internet or PRISM.  Right now, your local police department has the ability to listen in on your phone calls.  To “tap your phone” in Hollywood parlance.  Are you concerned about this?  Do you whisper in code on every phone call?  No?  Why not?  The potential is there, after all.  Don’t you worry about your Sherriff’s department reading your drunken texts?

You don’t worry because there’s a system in place to prevent that from happening.  Someone has to convince a judge that you’re a drug dealer or member of the mafia before he or she will sign off on a warrant to invade your privacy.  Exactly like PRISM.

When an expert mentions this fact in an interview, defending the program, the press immediately returns with, “We can’t depend on the goodwill of the government.  Just look at the IRS to prove that.”  And they’d be absolutely correct, with a critical distinction:  The IRS operated without checks in place.  The PRISM revelation and the IRS scandal are completely different.  One, to make the stories analogous, instead of the IRS report being about a selective targeting of conservative groups for political purposes, the headline would read, “The IRS has procedures in place to review non-profit applications.”  That, of course, wouldn’t be news.  The story was that it had used those review procedures to abuse its power.   Yet the prism “revelations” from the Washington Post are exactly that: “NSA has procedures in place to track terrorists on the Internet.”  There is no report of abuse.  Just the existence of a program.

This brings up the second reason the two stories are not the same:  The IRS operates in a vacuum, its only oversight an internal panel, basically left to its own devices.  The NSA, on the other hand, like the intelligence community writ large, has massive oversight precisely to prevent the very abuses people are worried will happen.  PRISM, like every other sensitive intelligence operation, is briefed to both the house and senate intelligence committees on a regular basis.  This isn’t done out of goodwill, it’s done as a matter of law, and lying to the committee will put you in jail.  Rand Paul is currently going berserk (ever notice how it’s always the representative that’s NOT read on to a program that stands up shouting?) ranting about the encroachment on the fourth amendment without any evidence that it’s occurred, while the chairman of the house intelligence committee, Rep. Mike Rogers – no Obama supporter to be sure – stated unequivocally that the program not only followed all constitutional provisions but also stopped at least one terrorist attack on U.S. soil.  Yet for some reason we all choose to believe the press and the man ranting, instead of the person who is actually read on to the program’s strictures to prevent abuse.

One thing a lot of people are barking about is the reported proviso that the NSA only needs a fifty-one percent confidence level that a target is foreign before they’ll start raping everything associated.  That, of course, is pretty bold, and if it’s true, I would be the first to stand up and say PRISM should be shut down.  But, unlike apparently everyone else on TV, I don’t read a news report and immediately think it’s gospel.  I’ve seen the inner workings of the beast, along with the reporting of that process, and have shown on a few blogs how misguided the press can be.

At the end of the day, I don’t know anything more about PRISM than you do, other than what the Washington Post has revealed.  But I do know what I’ve dealt with in the past.  A war story might be illuminating here:

A long time ago in a land far, far away, an organization was tracking a terrorist.  It had no locational data, no name, and no photo.  What it had was phone transcripts, which definitely showed this guy was going to kill some people.  Maybe Americans, maybe other people.  The organization locked on to his cell number via the NSA and started to build a picture.  Where was he?  What were his intentions?  Who else was he talking to?

One day, the terrorist called a US phone number, and the NSA quit listening.  The organization screamed at them to continue, but they said they couldn’t listen in on a telephone call to a US citizen.  The organization answered, “He’s probably not a US citizen!  He’s just on a US number!  Come on!”  They said, “You need to prove that to us.”

The organization relinquished and waited on the target to call someone else, outside the US.  They waited for two days and got nothing.  This from a guy who was talking on the phone all the time.  They called their NSA brethren to see if there might be a reporting problem, and it turned out there was.  The NSA said, “You have to prove the target himself isn’t a US citizen or a green card holder before we’ll start listening to that handset again.”

At the time, the organization couldn’t believe it.  The man was actively talking about killing people and because he’d called a US number they were now being frozen out?  On the off chance he was a green card holder?  Really?  It turned out the organization was naïve about the laws of our land.  No matter how they pleaded, the tap was not turned back on.    They were told they had to prove the target wasn’t a green card holder or a US citizen to continue.  Note, they didn’t have to prove by 51% that he was foreign.  They had to prove 100% that he WASN’T a green card holder or US citizen.  No light between the gap, and the NSA wasn’t going to do the work to make that happen.  It was up to the customer.  At the end of the day, because the organization was in a land far removed from the US, and had no identity of the guy other than a kunya, he dropped from collection.  Because he might have been a US green card holder, and the organization had no way to prove differently.  I have no doubt in my mind that the terrorist continued killing people, probably US citizens.  This was before PRISM, but after 9/11, when we were on heady ground about stopping terrorism and the press was screaming daily about the loss of civil liberties.

Given that experience, I have extreme doubts that the NSA is now milking everything I type on the Internet with some weak claim of 51%.  Do they have the capability?  Probably so.  Do they do that?  Not that I’ve ever seen.  I don’t worry about it, and I’m one that should, given what I know.  I don’t worry about it anymore than I worry about storm troopers from a SWAT team crashing my door in just because they can.  Yeah, the capability is there, but I don’t fear it.

The DNI, James Clapper, stated that the Washington Post article had numerous inaccuracies, and, given what I’ve seen, I have no problem believing that.  As I’ve said before, when it comes to national secrets, the press is quick to stir up a controversy for sales, but long on proving those controversies real.  To me, the real story here isn’t that the United States Government is reading the emails of people that are out to kill us, it’s that the press chooses to report the secrets in the first place.

There’s a new term coming in vogue on such reporting.  Before, people like this were called “traitors”.  Then, they became “leakers”.  Now, they’re “whistleblowers”.  That dilutes what’s actually going on.  They ARE traitors.  Serpico, the man who exposed corruption in the NYC police department, is a whistleblower.  The man who leaked our involvement in STUXNET, or the man who talked about our ability to penetrate al Qaeda in Yemen are traitors.  Period.  Saying they’re “whistleblowers”  is like saying a tax increase is “raising revenue”.  They’re all words designed to mask what’s really going on and to give the reporting press the ability to sleep at night.

Make no mistake, the Washington Post looked at what they had and said, “This will sell papers for another year!”  They got the slides, and thought – nay, prayed – that after publication the administration would investigate them for disclosing classified information.  Basically poking the government in the eye after the other leak investigations in an attempt to keep the reporting going.  Giving them more righteous indignation and playing a game with national security in the name of profits.  Never once thinking of how this would harm America.

Nobody in the United States profited from this story, except the Washington Post.  Well, nobody who cares about national security, that is.  There is one group that profited, and they’re here right now.  They’re terrorists that are plotting in our homeland, and now they know our reach.  A guy in a basement, diligently talking to his master, crafting his strike, now changes communications methods on this news report.  Believe me, terrorists do react to what our press puts out.  One only has to look at current news to see that.  Last February the Associated Press found an al Qaeda document in Mali that delineated how to avoid our UAVs.  In the first paragraph the author – a terrorist – discusses the press disclosure of our classified drone bases, saying “My expectations have been assured by the New York Times leakage…”  Way to go, Gray Lady.

Truthfully, if you were going to prove the NSA was sucking up American data without any oversight, you would have to look no further than Boston.  If the PRISM net was so wide and deep, and included so many Americans, how on earth did the Boston bombing occur?  Surely that would have been stopped, given the massive, omnipotent power of the NSA, right?  Maybe it wasn’t caught because those guys were AMERICAN CITIZENS and GREEN CARD HOLDERS.  Maybe, just maybe, we had to do such a giant police investigation precisely because the PRISM restrictions actually worked, protecting the fourth amendment as it was designed.

I’ve railed on this before, but this leak is the capstone for me.  The others were guys talking in backroom bars, giving up secrets in whispered conversation.  The traitor here actually passed top secret information.  A product that in the cold war would have garnered an enormous payout from the USSR.  Traitorous things.  Oh wait, the guy didn’t profit, so we should give him a pass.  Really?  The impact to national security isn’t what the traitor earned from his escapades, it’s what damage he inflicted.  Make no mistake; the Washington Post understood what they were getting.  Here’s a slide from its website.  Take a look at the classification level at the top left  or bottom right of the slide.

 

For those uninitiated, I’ll break it down for you:

Top Secret:  The highest level of classification in the United States Government.

SI: Special Intelligence, reserved for compartmented personnel who have an active need to know.

ORCON:  Originator Controlled.  In other words, you couldn’t even use the information in this brief unless it was cleared by the person who made the brief.  The real world version of “For Your Eyes Only”

NOFORN:  No foreign personnel allowed access to this information.  Oops.  Guess that wasn’t an issue with the Post.

So you get an idea of how classified this briefing was, I’ll juxtapose it.  At one time I was training for the “inevitable” clash between North and South Korea.  The OPLAN for that was called 5027.  Its classification, the total plan for our defense of the Korean Peninsula, was SECRET//REL CAN, UK, ROK, NZ, AUS.  In other words, it was releasable to any country that spoke English as well as South Korea, as long as the person viewing it held a clearance of secret.  Makes sense, but it was/is our defense of the peninsula. A pretty close hold item. PRISM was much higher than that.  Actually one of the highest security classifications I’ve ever seen.  Giving this to the Washington Post is no different than passing OPLAN 5027 to North Korea, or doing a dead drop for the USSR in 1980.  Whoever did it, I hope he burns in hell, and I support any effort to find him, even if it means more papers sold for the Washington Post.

At the end of the day, there is no proof of wrongdoing in the use of PRISM, only a detailed description of an architecture that everyone in America assumes is happening anyway.  The oversight for these programs would boggle the average American’s mind, but ultimately, they’re secret, and so they stir up controversy.  Yes, they have the potential for abuse, but no more so than any other investigative organization in today’s world, from the local cop to the FBI.  If you think PRISM is an outrage, then you should be railing right now about the penetration of Paula Broadwell’s email trail that brought down General Petraeus.  That happened without PRISM.  That happened with a court order requested by the FBI.  That happened just like anything PRISM would do.  The digital world is a reality.  It’s where you communicate, it’s where terrorists communicate, and it’s where we need to focus, but we do that within constitutional constraints.  Unlike the IRS, there’s already an oversight infrastructure in place, and it works.

What sickens me is the loss of confidence in our nation’s defenders by this salacious story.  It doesn’t matter what James Clapper or Mike Rogers say, people will choose to believe the press when that body is routinely so far off from reality it’s disgusting.  I’ve shown in the past how this affects national security, but here, with this “story”, there’s nothing.  A report about an architecture that anyone with a brain would figure was happening anyway, only now it’s been defined.  It’s the difference between knowing an opposing team has created a playbook or actually having the playbook.

The terrorists are thinking human beings and will react accordingly. When the next bomb goes off and people start looking for heads to blame within the intelligence community for “failing to prevent it”, I’d suggest walking over to the Washington Post instead.

They shouldn’t be hard to find.  They’ll be the ones making money reporting on the death and destruction.

UPDATE – JUNE 8

The Director of National Intelligence has released a white paper explaining authorities of PRISM, which pretty much says exactly what I say above with respect to oversight, and restrictions on targeting US citizen’s communication.  You can read it HERE