The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

by Seth Harp

Trump, whose only qualification to be president was his unerring ability to channel the darkest currents of the American id, had surrounded himself on the campaign trail with some of the craziest people in the special operations community, including Stanley McChrystal’s deputy Michael Flynn, who would later pledge allegiance to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and Jerry Boykin, a holy-rolling former commander of Delta Force who had been reprimanded by the Pentagon for describing the GWOT as a Christian war against the armies of Satan. Believing, absurdly, that the military had been made to fight with one hand tied behind its back, Trump loosened the already flexible rules of engagement applicable to special operators and firmly closed the spigot on the meager drip of information dribbled out to the media. The White House announced that the Pentagon would no longer disclose any information at all on the “capabilities, force numbers, locations, or movement of forces in or out of Syria.” The picture, already blurry, went completely black. Under Obama, assassinations had been authorized only where the target was found to pose a specific threat to Americans. Fuzzy as it was, Trump dropped even that requirement, dramatically increased drone strikes, and delegated authority over strategic decisions to officers in the field, some of whom had no business making such momentous calls. The pace of bombing increased by 50 percent in Iraq, where a strike on a building in Mosul killed hundre...

*hundreds of people*. everywhere, over and over.