Political Report # 1433 Secret US Intelligence Files Provide History's Verdict on Argentina's Dirty War

Political Report # 1433 Secret US Intelligence Files Provide History's Verdict on Argentina's Dirty War by  Peter Kornbluh, The Nation

Recently declassified documents constitute a gruesome and sadistic catalog of state terrorism. When Ambassador Héctor Hidalgo Solá was abducted off a busy Buenos Aires street on July 18, 1977, his family had lit tle idea what had happened to him. Unlike many of the estimated 30,000 Argentine desaparecidos—the people disappeared by agents of the country’s military dictatorship—Hidalgo Solá was not a liberal, a leftist, or an armed militant opposed to the regime. He was, in fact, the military government’s appointed diplomatic representative to Venezuela. In that capacity, however, Hidalgo Solá opened his embassy doors to prominent exiles, including labor leaders, politicians, and relatives of the disappeared seeking answers on the fate of their loved ones. When Emilio Mignone, whose daughter was one of the victims, met with Hidalgo Solá in Caracas, the ambassador told him he would go to Buenos Aires to persuade the military government to change its repressive policies. If he tried that, Mignone warned him that they would kill him. This past spring, nearly 42 years after Hidalgo Solá’s disappearance, the Trump administration declassified some 47,000 pages of secret US intelligence files on the “Dirty War” that Argentina’s military government waged against its own people. More than 7,000 CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and National Security Council (NSC) records—now posted on a specially created US government website at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—shed considerable light on the state of terror that existed in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, when the military held power. The detailed documents provide extensive new evidence on the infrastructure of repression, Argentina’s role in the international terrorism campaign known as Operation Condor, and most important, the fate of hundreds of desaparecidos who were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—among them Hidalgo Solá. “Suspicion will fall on military hardliners who were upset last year when Hidalgo Solá received at his embassy a labor leader ousted after the March 24, 1976 coup,” states one secret intelligence assessment filed just eight days after the ambassador disappeared. FBI sources believed he had been eliminated because the military suspected him of providing passports to exiled opponents of the regime in Venezuela, according to another report. “Hidalgo Solá was kidnapped and assassinated by a special group which has worked for the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE),” asserts a secret CIA intelligence cable, which identified the agents responsible and provided an address for the secret torture center where he was allegedly held. On April 12, these documents were included in the thousands of declassified records formally turned over to Argentina during an official presentation at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Along with Argentine diplomats and US officials, several family members of victims attended the solemn ceremony. Among them was the ambassador’s granddaughter Azul Hidalgo Solá. “DECLASSIFICATION DIPLOMACY” The Argentina Declassification Project, as it is officially known in US government circles, is one of those rare cases in which Donald Trump completed rather than reversed a policy initiated by his predecessor. When Fernando Cutz, then the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs, briefed the new president in preparation for the April 2017 state visit of Argentine President Mauricio Macri, he explained to Trump that Macri personally requested the special declassification when Obama visited Buenos Aires a year earlier. Trump had personal ties to Macri: Decades before, they bar-hopped together while their fathers negotiated real estate deals in New York; more recently, the Trump Organization sought Macri’s assistance in its plans to construct a Trump Tower in Buenos Aires. “It helped to be able to present the project as a Macri ask rather than an Obama initiative,” Cutz recalled. The real genesis of the Argentina Declassification Project, however, started with a presidential scheduling faux pas. In the spring of 2016, the Obama administration arranged a historic two-day trip for the president to Havana and, from there, a three-day trip to Argentina. The timing of the high-profile state visits was determined, in part, by the fact that it was spring break for Obama’s two daughters, and he wanted them to vacation in Cuba as well as in Patagonia in southern Argentina. But the White House announcement that the US president would be in Buenos Aires on March 24, 2016—by coincidence the 40th anniversary of the bloody military takeover—sparked an outcry from human rights groups in Argentina. The United States was still viewed, in the words of Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, as “an accomplice of coups d’état in this region.” Massive protests, with banners declaring “Day of Memory: Obama Get Out,” were threatened. In meetings with Macri, human rights activists, led by the famed Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, demanded that he ask Obama to declassify intelligence records that might help them to locate their missing sons and daughters, and even the grandchildren who had been born in secret detention centers and then adopted by military families after their mothers were executed. To redress this serious affront to the victims’ families, the White House and the Macri government orchestrated a round of what I call “declassification diplomacy”—the use of secret US documents to advance bilateral relations. On the morning of March 24, Obama and Macri visited the Parque de la Memoria (Remembrance Park) in Buenos Aires to pay their respects to the victims of the Dirty War. “Today, in response to a request from President Macri, and to continue helping the families of the victims find some of the truth and justice they deserve, I can announce that the United States government will declassify even more documents from that period, including, for the first time, military and intelligence records,” Obama stated in a poignant speech. “I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty and transparency.” In June 2016, the White House issued a “tasker” to all US national security agencies; titled “Argentina Declassification Project,” it mandated an 18-month file search and review of relevant records. “The Administration continues to support efforts to clarify the facts surrounding human rights abuses, acts of terrorism, and political violence in Argentina during the ‘Dirty War’ period from 1975 through 1984,” the directive stated, and it called on the national security agencies “to prioritize support for this effort.” According to John Fitzpatrick, who directed the NSC’s Office of Records Access and Information Security Management at the time, almost 400 archivists, analysts, Freedom of Information Act officers, and records managers drawn from 16 different government agencies participated in finding and processing the documents, expending more than 30,000 work hours to complete the project. Before Obama left office, his administration released the first two tranches of records. And during an April 2017 summit, Trump handed Macri a pen drive containing the third tranche. Predictably, Trump marked the final release of these documents in April by proclaiming it the biggest ever. “The release of records,” Trump wrote in a letter to Macri, “constitutes the largest declassification of United States Government records directly to a foreign government in history.” NAMING NAMES When intelligence documents are declassified, they’re usually replete with heavy redactions—swaths of information blacked out in the name of national security or to protect covert “sources and methods.” But because of the meticulous quality control exercised by an unheralded NSC records manager named John Powers, the released CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency records on Argentina are far less censored than previous special declassifications. This unique transparency has rendered them far more valuable to historians, as well as to the legal investigators who continue to prosecute these crimes against humanity. As a collection, the documents constitute a gruesome and sadistic catalog of state terrorism. For example, one CIA cable reports that several months after the 1976 coup, federal police rounded up and murdered 30 militants en masse and then scattered their body parts—through the use of dynamite—in an open field “as a warning to leftist extremists.” Another FBI report provides details of how security forces intercepted and stole a funeral hearse carrying the remains of Marcos Osatinsky, a leader of a leftist guerrilla group called the Montoneros, “to prevent the body from being subjected to an autopsy, which would have clearly shown he had been tortured.” At least two dozen FBI and CIA cables record a SIDE operation to kidnap, torture, and execute two Cuban Embassy officers suspected of aiding militants in Argentina. After the Cubans were murdered, according to one FBI report marked “secret/eyes only,” “their bodies were cemented into one large storage drum and thrown into the Rio Lujan” near Buenos Aires. One State Department cable describes how security agents detained and tortured a wheelchair-bound psychologist for the purpose of gaining information about one of her patients. Torture was routine, reported Patricia Derian, then the assistant secretary of state for human rights, after a fact-finding trip to Argentina. “The electric ‘picana,’ something like a supercharged cattle prod, is still apparently a favorite tool, as is the ‘submarine’ treatment (immersion of the head in a tub of water, urine, excrement, blood, or a combination of these),” she said in a declassified summary of abuses. “There is no longer any doubt that Argentina has the worst human rights record in South America.” Of course, details about such atrocities have been in the public domain for years, as surviving victims have stepped forward and hundreds of human rights trials in Argentina have presented evidence and testimony. But in a break from the strictures of secrecy, many of the recently declassified documents go beyond a description of the human rights violations and identify the violators. “These documents name names. They name the names of the perpetrators and the names of their victims,” observes my colleague Carlos Osorio, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, who provided extensive expertise and support to the Argentina Declassification Project. “And because they name those names, they provide a level of truth and accountability that many other declassification projects have failed to achieve.” Moreover, hundreds of reports by FBI agent Robert Scherrer, who consistently provided the most detailed intelligence on the operations and abuses of the Argentine security forces, contain the unredacted identities of his confidential sources, thereby providing a master list of the individuals who witnessed, knew about, or were directly involved in the apparatus of repression. Although many of his sources are now deceased, the uncensored records will allow human rights investigators to pinpoint who inside the Argentine military, intelligence, and police were privy to details about specific atrocities—information that will advance a number of ongoing human rights investigations. CONDOR 1 Based in Buenos Aires, Scherrer became the lead FBI investigator of the September 21, 1976, car-bomb assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague Ronni Moffitt at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. Scherrer’s famous “Chilbom” report was the first—and for years the only—partially declassified document that mentioned Operation Condor, identifying it as a “recently established [organization] between cooperating intelligence services in South America.” The intelligence Scherrer gathered suggested that the Letelier-Moffitt assassination was a possible “third phase” of the Condor mission spearheaded by Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile and his secret police, the DINA. Scherrer’s Chilbom cable has now been declassified completely unredacted, and the identity of his source has been revealed as an Argentine Army intelligence operative involved in death squad efforts in Europe. “Source is Dr. Arturo Horacio Poire,” the document states, “who is a member of the Argentine special group, which will possibly participate in the third phase of ‘Operation Condor.’” The identification of the source has opened the door to renewed investigation into Condor’s efforts to extend its repression abroad. But the unredacted version of Scherrer’s cable is only one of dozens of exceptionally detailed FBI and CIA records on Operation Condor found in the Argentina collection. They provide a far more comprehensive history of Condor’s infrastructure and operational capacity than was previously known. Among the substantive new revelations: § Argentina—not Pinochet’s Chile, which came up with the idea of a Murder Inc. in the Southern Cone—was designated Condor 1. Declassified CIA records make it clear that the numerical call signs for member nations were alphabetical: Argentina was Condor 1; Bolivia, Condor 2; Chile, Condor 3; Paraguay, Condor 4; Uruguay, Condor 5; etc. These designations were used in encrypted communications among the Condor nations. § Argentina hosted the operational headquarters for a special Condor program code-named Teseo—Spanish for Theseus, the mythical Greek king who slew the fearsome Minotaur and other foes of the social order—whose mission was “to liquidate selected individuals” abroad. Secret CIA cables describe Teseo as “a unit established by the Condor cooperative organization of South American intelligence services to conduct physical attacks against subversive targets,” first in Paris and then in other European cities. § In September 1976, the Condor nations signed an agreement, titled “Teseo Regulation, Operations Center,” to ratify their cooperation in planning, financing, logistics, communications, and “selection of targets.” The CIA obtained a copy of the accord, which describes, in banal detail, how each intelligence service would contribute to the international assassination program. The operations center would be staffed by “permanent representatives from each participating service.” Their daily work schedule would run from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm and from 2:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Each country would make a contribution of $10,000 for operational expenses, with monthly dues of $200 paid “prior to the 30th of each month.” Assassination teams dispatched to Europe would be made up of four individuals, “with a female eventually being included”—presumably to help provide cover for the mission. “Operational costs abroad are estimated at $3,500 per person for ten days,” the agreement stated, “with an additional $1,000 the first time out for clothing allowance.” Under the key section titled “Execution of the Target,” the accord stated that the operational teams would “(A) Intercept the Target, (B) Carry out the operation, and (C) Escape.” § CIA officials viewed these Condor murder plots as a potential scandal for the agency and proactively moved to thwart them in Europe. “The plans of these countries to undertake offensive action outside of their own jurisdictions poses new problems for the Agency,” wrote Ray Warren, the head of the Latin America division, sounding the alarm to the CIA’s acting deputy director in late July 1976. “Every precaution must be taken to ensure that the Agency is not wrongfully accused of being party to this type of activity.” A month later, Warren again warned his superiors of the “adverse political ramifications for the Agency should ‘Condor’ engage in assassinations and other flagrant violations of human rights.” But he also reported on the “action” that CIA agents were taking to “preempt” those ramifications “should the ‘Condor’ countries proceed with the European aspect of their plans.” That section of Warren’s memorandum is still redacted. But another declassified document based on Warren’s memo and other CIA records—a top-secret sensitive Senate report on Condor researched and written by Senate legal counsel Michael J. Glennon—was released unredacted. “The CIA warned the governments of the countries in which the assassinations were likely to occur—France and Portugal—which in turn warned possible targets,” states that uncensored report. “The plot was foiled.” As revealed in these records, the CIA’s ability to countermand Condor’s murderous missions in Europe renews questions about its failure to detect and deter a similar mission in downtown Washington—the September 1976 car bombing that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt. Until now, “Operation Condor has been somewhat of a deadly mystery,” says investigative journalist John Dinges, who is using the declassified records to revise his pioneering book The Condor Years. “For decades, both the CIA and FBI kept us in the dark about what they knew and when they knew it.” But with the newly released documents, “that central question can be answered, and it’s embarrassing for the US government,” Dinges concludes. “There was an intimate liaison with Condor officials and ample early intelligence of Condor plans that could have prevented the assassination in Washington.” THE CONTRIBUTION OF DECLASSIFICATION Like so many records in the Argentina Declassification Project, the Condor papers provide names, dates, meeting places, and vivid descriptions of the clandestine programs undertaken by the intelligence and security services of the Southern Cone. This trove of new evidence will assist human rights investigators in the former Condor countries who are continuing to pursue the state-sponsored crimes of terrorism committed during the era of military rule. Indeed, since the documents were released in April, teams of Argentine officials have been assessing them for their evidentiary value in human rights prosecutions. In mid-September, according to Argentine Embassy officials, the country’s justice ministry transmitted a set of inquiries and requests for clarification to Washington. US officials who worked on the declassification project are currently addressing those questions. The documents are “already contributing to ongoing cases that are both in the investigative and trial phases,” according to a statement from the Office of the Public Prosecutor in Argentina provided to The Nation. They have revealed “new data on how institutions [of repression] functioned under the dictatorship” as well as “data on the responsibility of officials who participated in massive human rights violations.” Human rights organizations, as well as the families of victims for whom the documents can provide a sad but poignant closure, are also reviewing these materials. Much of Argentina’s archives of repression has been disappeared—burned, buried, or perhaps thrown into the ocean—as were so many victims. “In a number of cases,” as Carlos Osorio told the audience at the April 12 release of the records, “these documents will provide those families with the only evidence they have ever had on the fate of their loved ones.” The family members of Héctor Hidalgo Solá are among those reviewing the records. “The declassification process and results have been an emotional journey,” affirmed Azul Hidalgo Solá, who never had a chance to know her grandfather. But “the documents have helped me construct a full narrative of my family’s history.” Original article can be found (here). URL:      Click here for article

Political Report # 1385 George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family. How wrong he was

By Ariel Dorfman The Guardian

As the world says goodbye to George HW Bush, I am tempted to add my own personal memories to the mix, and illuminate perhaps his legacy by recounting the two intense nights that my wife and I spent in close proximity to the former president at the end of October 2001. It was at the Park Hyatt hotel in Sydney, where I had been invited to deliver the Centennial Lecture celebrating the Federation of Australia. The day after our arrival, the hotel manager - a corpulent, affable man of Spanish extraction - asked us if we wouldn’t mind exchanging our suite, only for the next two days, he said, for another one, just as nice, he promised, elsewhere on the premises. Having already unpacked, and enjoying the most spectacular view of the bay and the Opera House, it wasn’t hard to respond that we had no intention of moving. Was there any reason for such an unexpected request? The manager could not elaborate further, “due to reasons of security”. Though he would honor our wishes, he regretted that our dinner reservation for that evening had been cancelled, as the dining room would be closed for a restricted event. On our way back to the hotel, Angélica and I could not contain our insane glee at depriving Bush of our room. For once, we chortled, we had bested one of the big fish who are used to seeing their every wish granted. Our antipathy towards this particular big fish ran deep: those deplorable years as Reagan’s vice-president, his racist campaign against Michael Dukakis, his invasion of Panama, his appointment of Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, his sabotage of global initiatives to reverse catastrophic climate change, the disastrous Nafta treaty, the vetoing of civil rights legislation, the presidential pardon of the neo-con Elliott Abrams, and, of course, Bush’s mawkish “thousand points of light”.

Political Report # 1384 George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment-and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World

By Greg Grandin The Nation

Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted, depicting it as heroism. George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. His WASP awkwardness, his famous syntactical struggles-described in obituaries as an ah-shucks genuineness, a goofy, “irreducible niceness”-was symptomatic of an Establishment in crisis. Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic, notes the nostalgia of the encomiums. The public apparently yearns for a time when politics were less coarse, when the country’s clubby elites were well-bred, well-voweled (compare the pleasantly rolling i’s and o’s found in the Harrimans and Roosevelts with the guttural u of today’s ruling clan), and well-mannered, their grasping and groping kept out of the press, for the most part. What Foer doesn’t mention, and what is perhaps the single most important through-line in Bush’s life, is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world’s poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness. Raised in the shadow of legends, of a father (Prescott Bush) and two grandfathers (Samuel Bush and George H. Walker) who helped steer the expansive, epic era of Episcopalian capitalism-when American industry and politics had become interlocked with militarism-George H.W. Bush came into his own during the glory days of covert action in the Third World. This period ran from, say, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran through the Guatemala coup in 1954 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the Bay of Pigs in 1961, until the eve of escalation in Vietnam. Bush would serve for a year as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s, but, as Joseph McBride reported in The Nation in 1988, his involvement with the agency had started much earlier. In November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo to the State Department describing the briefing of “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” on the reaction to the assassination by anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami (it was feared by some that the exiles might take advantage of the chaotic situation by initiating an unauthorized raid against Cuba). McBride also cited a source with close connection to the intelligence community who confirmed that, as McBride put it, “Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.”

Political Report # 1258 A World of Winless War: US Special Ops Forces Deployed to 137 Nations in 2017

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch

The tabs on their shoulders read "Special Forces," "Ranger," "Airborne." And soon their guidon -- the "colors" of Company B, 3rd Battalion of the US Army's 7th Special Forces Group -- would be adorned with the "Bandera de Guerra," a Colombian combat decoration. "Today we commemorate sixteen years of a permanent fight against drugs in a ceremony where all Colombians can recognize the special counternarcotic brigade's hard work against drug trafficking," said Army Colonel Walther Jimenez, the commander of the Colombian military's Special Anti-Drug Brigade, last December. America's most elite troops, the Special Operations forces (SOF), have worked with that Colombian unit since its creation in December 2000. Since 2014, four teams of Special Forces soldiers have intensely monitored the brigade. Now, they were being honored for it. Part of a $10 billion counter-narcotics and counterterrorism program, conceived in the 1990s, special ops efforts in Colombia are a much ballyhooed American success story. A 2015 RAND Corporation study found that the program "represents an enduring SOF partnership effort that managed to help foster a relatively professional and capable special operations force." And for a time, coca production in that country plummeted. Indeed, this was the ultimate promise of America's "Plan Colombia" and efforts that followed from it. "Over the longer haul, we can expect to see more effective drug eradication and increased interdiction of illicit drug shipments," President Bill Clinton predicted in January 2000. Today, however, more than 460,000 acres of the Colombian countryside are blanketed with coca plants, more than during the 1980s heyday of the infamous         cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. US cocaine overdose deaths are also at a 10-year high and first-time cocaine use among young adults has spiked 61% since 2013. "Recent findings suggest that cocaine use may be reemerging as a public health concern in the United States," wrote researchers from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in a study published in December 2016 -- just after the Green Berets attended that ceremony in Colombia. Cocaine, the study's authors write, "may be making a comeback." Colombia is hardly an anomaly when it comes to US special ops deployments -- or the results that flow from them. For all their abilities, tactical skills, training prowess, and battlefield accomplishments, the capacity of US Special Operations forces to achieve decisive and enduring successes -- strategic victories that serve US national interests -- have proved to be exceptionally limited, a reality laid bare from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to the Philippines. The fault for this lies not with the troops themselves, but with a political and military establishment that often appears bereft of strategic vision and hasn't won a major war since the 1940s. Into this breach, elite US forces are deployed again and again. While special ops commanders may raise concerns about the tempo of operations and strains on the force, they have failed to grapple with larger questions about the raison d'être of SOF, while Washington's oversight establishment, notably the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, have consistently failed to so much as ask hard questions about the strategic utility of America's Special Operations forces. Special Ops at War "We operate and fight in every corner of the world," boasts General Raymond Thomas, the chief of US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM). "On a daily basis, we sustain a deployed or forward stationed force of approximately 8,000 across 80-plus countries. They are conducting the entire range of SOF missions in both combat and non-combat situations." Those numbers, however, only hint at the true size and scope of this global special ops effort. Last year, America's most elite forces conducted missions in 138 countries -- roughly 70% of the nations on the planet, according to figures supplied to TomDispatch by US Special Operations Command. Halfway through 2017, US commandos have already been deployed to an astonishing 137 countries, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw. Special Operations Command is tasked with carrying out 12 core missions, ranging from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to hostage rescue and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Counterterrorism -- fighting what the command calls violent extremist organizations (VEOs) -- may, however, be what America's elite forces have become best known for in the post-9/11 era. "The threat posed by VEOs remains the highest priority for USSOCOM in both focus and effort," says Thomas. "Special Operations Forces are the main effort, or major supporting effort for US VEO-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America -- essentially, everywhere Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are to be found..." More special operators are deployed to the Middle East than to any other region. Significant numbers of them are advising Iraqi government forces and Iraqi Kurdish soldiers as well as Kurdish YPG (Popular Protection Unit) fighters and various ethnic Arab forces in Syria, according to Linda Robinson, a senior international policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who spent seven weeks in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries earlier this year. During a visit to Qayyarah, Iraq -- a staging area for the campaign to free Mosul, formerly Iraq's second largest city, from the control of Islamic State fighters -- Robinson "saw a recently installed US military medical unit and its ICU set up in tents on the base." In a type of mission seldom reported on, special ops surgeons, nurses, and other specialists put their skills to work on far-flung battlefields not only to save American lives, but to prop up allied proxy forces that have limited medical capabilities. For example, an Air Force Special Operations Surgical Team recently spent eight weeks deployed at an undisclosed location in the Iraq-Syria theater, treating 750 war-injured patients. Operating out of an abandoned one-story home within earshot of a battlefield, the specially trained airmen worked through a total of 19 mass casualty incidents and more than 400 individual gunshot or blast injuries. When not saving lives in Iraq and Syria, elite US forces are frequently involved in efforts to take them. "US SOF are... being thrust into a new role of coordinating fire support," wrote Robinson. "This fire support is even more important to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a far more lightly armed irregular force which constitutes the major ground force fighting ISIS in Syria." In fact, a video shot earlier this year, analyzed by The Washington Post, shows special operators "acting as an observation element for what appears to be US airstrikes carried out by A-10 ground attack aircraft" to support Syrian Democratic Forces fighting for the town of Shadadi. Africa now ranks second when it comes to the deployment of special operators thanks to the exponential growth in missions there in recent years. Just 3% of US commandos deployed overseas were sent to Africa in 2010. Now that number stands at more than 17%, according to SOCOM data. Last year, US Special Operations forces were deployed to 32 African nations, about 60% of the countries on the continent. As I recently reported at VICE News, at any given time, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special operators are now conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries. In May, for instance, Navy SEALs were engaged in an "advise and assist operation" alongside members of Somalia's army and came under attack. SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other US personnel were injured during a firefight that also, according to AFRICOM spokesperson Robyn Mack, left three al-Shabaab militants dead. US forces are also deployed in Libya to gather intelligence in order to carry out strikes of opportunity against Islamic State forces there. While operations in Central Africa against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal militia that has terrorized the region for decades, wound down recently, a US commando reportedly killed a member of the LRA as recently as April. Spring Training What General Thomas calls "building partner nations' capacity" forms the backbone of the global activities of his command. Day in, day out, America's most elite troops carry out such training missions to sharpen their skills and those of their allies and of proxy forces across the planet. This January, for example, Green Berets and Japanese paratroopers carried out airborne training near Chiba, Japan. February saw Green Berets at Sanaa Training Center in northwest Syria advising recruits for the Manbij Military Council, a female fighting force of Kurds, Arabs, Christians, Turkmen, and Yazidis. In March, snowmobiling Green Berets joined local forces for cold-weather military drills in Lapland, Finland. That same month, special operators and more than 3,000 troops from Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom took part in tactical training in Germany. In the waters off Kuwait, special operators joined elite forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council nations in conducting drills simulating a rapid response to the hijacking of an oil tanker. In April, special ops troops traveled to Serbia to train alongside a local special anti-terrorist unit. In May, members of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Iraq carried out training exercises with Iraqi special operations forces near Baghdad. That same month, 7,200 military personnel, including US Air Force Special Tactics airmen, Italian special operations forces, members of host nation Jordan's Special Task Force, and troops from more than a dozen other nations took part in Exercise Eager Lion, practicing everything from assaulting compounds to cyber-defense. For their part, a group of SEALs conducted dive training alongside Greek special operations forces in Souda Bay, Greece, while others joined NATO troops in Germany as part of Exercise Saber Junction 17 for training in land operations, including mock "behind enemy lines missions" in a "simulated European village." #Winning "We have been at the forefront of national security operations for the past three decades, to include continuous combat over the past 15-and-a-half years," SOCOM's Thomas told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities last month. "This historic period has been the backdrop for some of our greatest successes, as well as the source of our greatest challenge, which is the sustained readiness of this magnificent force." Yet, for all their magnificence and all those successes, for all the celebratory ceremonies they've attended, the wars, interventions, and other actions for which they've served as the tip of the American spear have largely foundered, floundered, or failed. After their initial tactical successes in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, America's elite operators became victims of Washington's failure to declare victory and go home. As a result, for the last 15 years, US commandos have been raiding homes, calling in air strikes, training local forces, and waging a relentless battle against a growing list of terror groups in that country. For all their efforts, as well as those of their conventional military brethren and local Afghan allies, the war is now, according to the top US commander in the Middle East, a "stalemate." That's a polite way of saying what a recent report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found: districts that are contested or under "insurgent control or influence" have risen from an already remarkable 28% in 2015 to 40%. The war in Afghanistan began with efforts to capture or kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Having failed in this post-9/11 mission, America's elite forces spun their wheels for the next decade when it came to his fate. Finally, in 2011, Navy SEALs cornered him in his long-time home in Pakistan and gunned him down. Ever since, special operators who carried out the mission and Washington power-players (not to mention Hollywood) have been touting this single tactical success. In an Esquire interview, Robert O'Neill, the SEAL who put two bullets in bin Laden's head, confessed that he joined the Navy due to frustration over an early crush, a puppy-love pique. "That's the reason al-Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my fucking heart." But al-Qaeda was not decimated -- far from it according to Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and the author of Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State. As he recently observed, "Whereas on 9/11 al-Qaeda had a few hundred members, almost all of them based in a single country, today it enjoys multiple safe havens across the world." In fact, he points out, the terror group has gained strength since bin Laden's death. Year after year, US special operators find themselves fighting new waves of militants across multiple continents, including entire terror groups that didn't exist on 9/11. All US forces killed in Afghanistan in 2017 have reportedly died battling an Islamic State franchise, which began operations there just two years ago. The US invasion of Iraq, to take another example, led to the meteoric rise of an al-Qaeda affiliate which, in turn, led the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) -- the elite of America's special ops elite -- to create a veritable manhunting machine designed to kill its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and take down the organization. As with bin Laden, special operators finally did find and eliminate Zarqawi, battering his organization in the process, but it was never wiped out. Left behind were battle-hardened elements that later formed the Islamic State and did what al-Qaeda never could: take and hold huge swaths of territory in two nations. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch grew into a separate force of more than 20,000. In Yemen, after more than a decade of low-profile special ops engagement, that country teeters on the brink of collapse in the face of a US-backed Saudi war there. Continued US special ops missions in that country, recently on the rise, have seemingly done nothing to alter the situation. Similarly, in Somalia in the Horn of Africa, America's elite forces remain embroiled in an endless war against militants. In 2011, President Obama launched Operation Observant Compass, sending Special Operations forces to aid Central African proxies in an effort to capture or kill Joseph Kony and decimate his murderous Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), then estimated to number 150 to 300 armed fighters. After the better part of a decade and nearly $800 million spent, 150 US commandos were withdrawn this spring and US officials attended a ceremony to commemorate the end of the mission. Kony was, however, never captured or killed and the LRA is now estimated to number about 150 to 250 fighters, essentially the same size as when the operation began. This string of futility extends to Asia as well. "US Special Forces have been providing support and assistance in the southern Philippines for many years, at the request of several different Filipino administrations," Emma Nagy, a spokesperson for the US embassy in Manilla, pointed out earlier this month. Indeed, a decade-plus-long special ops effort there has been hailed as a major success. Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, wrote RAND analyst Linda Robinson late last year in the Pentagon journal Prism, "was aimed at enabling the Philippine security forces to combat transnational terrorist groups in the restive southern region of Mindanao." A 2016 RAND report co-authored by Robinson concluded that "the activities of the US SOF enabled the Philippine government to substantially reduce the transnational terrorist threat in the southern Philippines." This May, however, Islamist militants overran Marawi City, a major urban center on Mindanao. They have been holding on to parts of it for weeks despite a determined assault by Filipino troops backed by US Special Operations forces. In the process, large swaths of the city have been reduced to rubble. Running on Empty America's elite forces, General Thomas told members of Congress last month, "are fully committed to winning the current and future fights." In reality, though, from war to war, intervention to intervention, from the Anti-Drug Brigade ceremony in Florencia, Colombia, to the end-of-the-Kony-hunt observance in Obo in the Central African Republic, there is remarkably little evidence that even enduring efforts by Special Operations forces result in strategic victories or improved national security outcomes. And yet, despite such boots-on-the-ground realities, America's special ops forces and their missions only grow. "We are... grateful for the support of Congress for the required resourcing that, in turn, has produced a SOCOM which is relevant to all the current and enduring threats facing the nation," Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. Resourcing has, indeed, been readily available. SOCOM's annual budget has jumped from $3 billion in 2001 to more than $10 billion today. Oversight, however, has been seriously lacking. Not a single member of the House or Senate Armed Services Committees has questioned why, after more than 15 years of constant warfare, winning the "current fight" has proven so elusive. None of them has suggested that "support" from Congress ought to be reconsidered in the face of setbacks from Afghanistan to Iraq, Colombia to Central Africa, Yemen to the southern Philippines. In the waning days of George W. Bush's administration, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed to about 60 nations around the world. By 2011, under President Barack Obama, that number had swelled to 120. During this first half-year of the Trump administration, US commandos have already been sent to 137 countries, with elite troops now enmeshed in conflicts from Africa to Asia. "Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit," Thomas told members of the House Armed Services Committee last month. In fact, current and former members of the command have, for some time, been sounding the alarm about the level of strain on the force. These deployment levels and a lack of meaningful strategic results from them have not, however, led Washington to raise fundamental questions about the ways the US employs its elite forces, much less about SOCOM's raison d'être. "We are a command at war and will remain so for the foreseeable future," SOCOM's Thomas explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Not one member asked why or to what end. Original article can be found here: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176300/

Political Report # 1242 Resurrecting the Unholy Trinity: Torture, Rendition and Indefinite Detention Under Trump

By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their forever wars -- under the banner of a "Global War on Terror" -- they unleashed an unholy trinity of tactics. Torture, rendition, and indefinite detention became the order of the day. After a partial suspension of these policies in the Obama years, they now appear poised for resurrection. For eight years under President Obama, this country's forever wars continued, although his administration retired the expression "war on terror," preferring to describe its war-making more vaguely as an effort to "degrade and destroy" violent jihadists like ISIS. Nevertheless, he made major efforts to suspend Bush-era violations of U.S. and international law, signing executive orders to that effect on the day he took office in 2009.  Executive Order 13491, "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," closed the CIA's secret torture centers -- the "black sites" -- and ended permission for the Agency to use what had euphemistically become known as "enhanced interrogation techniques." On that same day in 2009, Obama issued Executive Order 13492, designed -- unsuccessfully, as it turned out -- to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, the site of apparently endless detention without charges or trials. In 2015, Congress reinforced Obama's first order in a clause for the next year's National Defense Authorization Act that limited permissible interrogation techniques to those described in the U.S. Army Field Manual section on "human intelligence collector operations."