Tuesday 25 May 2010

New US Military Strategy Revealed

The war against Iran has now begun.

Covert operations on the ground have commenced.

I anticipate an attack with a combined US-Israeli combined air task force taking off from via Diego Garcia within three to 6 months.

The fact that Diego Garcia is British territory means we will be particpating in the war itself, indirectly.

Possibly as late as late November this year.





http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/05/obama-gives-commanders-wide-berth-for-secret-warfare/57202/


Obama Gives Commanders Wide Berth For Secret Warfare

May 25 2010, 8:08 AM ET | Comment
Last summer, the White House authorized a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries and giving the military's combatant commanders significant new authority to conduct unconventional warfare.

The New York Times reported on one major operational plan, which authorizes intelligence gathering and reconnaissance activities in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia. A Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, was signed on September 30, 2009, by CENTCOM commander in chief David Petraeus. It was marked "LIMDIS" -- as in "limited distribution," and hard copies were delivered to about 30 people.

The Times did not report its original classified codename, "Avocado." The name has since been changed.

Other "ex-ords" signed by combatant commanders include provisions for secret American bases and operations in countries like Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and in the Dagestan region of the North Caucuses. In the latter space, U.S. soldiers were tasked with tracking down members of identified separatist groups with loose ties to Al Qaeda. One of those groups was responsible for the March 31 bombings in Kizlyar, according to American intelligence officials.

The Obama administration had been reluctant to allow such an expansion of nontraditional military activities in countries where the U.S. formally has no presence. That practice was unfavorably associated with the Bush-Cheney administration's disregard for international norms.

But political imperatives, the threat of terrorism, and the knowledge of what the U.S. military can accomplish if its strings are cut away has slowly changed the minds of some of Obama's senior advisers. It is helpful that Congress has generally given the military a wide berth to conduct activities that intelligence agency paramilitaries would find objectionable.

The authorization to write the orders allow combatant commanders to put together task forces for almost any purpose, and draw from almost any existing military unit. JUWTFs are not classified and are in regular use. But until last summer, they tended to be formed for temporary and limited purposes. Even during the Bush administration, the military did not insert American personnel into Iran, which is what the Avocado execute order now permits.

Not surprisingly, the larger counter-terrorism task forces tend to be full of operators from the clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as well as contractors from companies like L3. But JSOC is not the executive authority for these missions, as one might suspect. Rather, the commanders, like CENTCOM's Petraeus, have direct authority.

Military commanders began to circulate drafts of the secret orders in the summer of 2009, a few months after U.S. Navy SEALS rescued sailors aboard the hijacked marine vessel the Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia.

At the time, news reports suggested that the SEALS were mobilized from a base in the United States. But that was false. The SEALS, part of the fabled DevGru special mission unit, or SEAL Team Six, were 45 minutes away at an operational base in Manda Bay, a resort beach town in Kenya.

That operation, and the delay in standing up the SEALS, laid the groundwork, officials said, for a series of meetings involving senior counter-terrorism and intelligence officials, about the possibility for a coordinated worldwide unleashing of U.S. military assets.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, at the time the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised President Obama to allow combatant commanders more latitude to combat terrorism using task forces. Coming from McChrystal, it was a surprising endorsement of a policy that would shift responsibility for unconventional warfare from JSOC, which he had commanded, to the combatant commanders.

In September, two task forces of American commandos surveilled and killed two top Al Qaeda operatives in Somalia, even though they had the opportunity to capture and imprison the two men. The authority to execute the terrorists was given to the commander of one of the squadrons. A task force operating in Yemen has helped Yemeni forces kill terrorism suspects, but it has also carried out unilateral operations.

The intelligence community, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency vets the lists of targets and decides who needs to be captured for the purposes of intelligence collection, or who can be killed. The National Security Staff is notified about the eventual final status of the terrorists, and it can overrule the decisions of the intelligence agencies.

There was little opposition to the expansion from the CIA's leadership, which was content to handle its traditional portfolio without having to resort to the type of paramilitary activities that, when revealed, invited intense scrutiny from Congress and the public. One exception is the CIA's Predator Drone program, which an official called a "stealth, but not denied capability." There are a few others.

By contrast, there has been almost no investigation of JSOC's activities during the Bush administration, and there is little oversight of the activities of the terrorism task forces that operate worldwide.

The Times reported that all operations are run by the National Security Staff, though it is not clear how many officials there are aware of the specific details.

"They naively think that because [Obama] told them to do it and to be responsible that they are not going to be unchecked," a military officer in contact with the National Security Staff said. "The real headline is that Petraeus is doing his own thing."

It is unusual for a combatant commander to be given the ability to ask civilians to collect intelligence in countries like Iran. It is not clear under what legal authority he can do so. The CIA's National Resources Division regularly keeps touch with academics and business people who travel to hostile countries, and occasionally requests from them specific tasks. The Department of Defense, at Petreaus's request, set up a parallel organization called the Civillian Expeditionary Workforce that hires non-soldiers and non-contractors for temporary military-type tasks using detainee interrogations.

White House and Pentagon spokespeople declined to comment.








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15 comments:

Russia Truth said...

US begins massive build up of forces against Iran

Anonymous said...

lee do you think it is time the BNP reduced the membership fee, seeing as online donations now make up a large part of the party income rather than membership and membership is still growing at quite a slow rate and is most prominant in working class area.

wouldnt a drop in price help, with the gold badge raised for those that want to go the extra mile.

the main aim here is to increase members, which in turn increases activists.

we should seriously have a base membership of £15 and scrap the oap stuendent thing as it would be redundant, which would sabe time and money on admin needed to sort through these aplications.

Put it this way, alex jones makes everything for free but gives the option to pay more, he has grown huge using this method, while not free, i do think we need to go for higher numbers that a lower membership fee would bring.


at the moment i do feel the membership fee is too high and we have too few activists.

Time for a change here i think.

Anonymous said...

Ah November....the US elections, what better way for Obama to start a war and get the votes needed to retain a strong Democrat senate.

Rijker said...

Confirmed -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1281387/Revealed-U-S-secret-order-allowing-special-forces-covert-missions-terror-hotspots.html

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads' up, think I'll get a doctors' note cos I don't fancy marching into a radioactive desert.

It's long overdue and with Korea hotting up as well as the 'so-called' War on Drugs in the islands and Latin America, looks like it'll be a bumper year for the corporates for decades to come.

These buggers are more powerful than the NRA and Walmart put together.

Apologies for the light-hearted approach but I would cry otherwise.

Anonymous said...

Funny, The US can assert rights of invasion to Afghanistan, set up hundreds of square miles of border protected by 28 000 troops, invade Iraq, set up secret bases across the world yet this.....
China asserts dominance in their own seas and is seen as being aggressive?
"The commander of US forces in the Pacific has warned that China’s military is more aggressively asserting its territorial claims in regional waters.

"Admiral Robert Willard told the Financial Times: “There has been an assertiveness that has been growing over time, particularly in the South China Sea and in the East China Sea."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a97c53a-681a-11df-a52f-00144feab49a.html

Oddly enough, the American Federal government can seal up the demarcation line in Korea, with barbed wire, mine fields, 28 000 troops, but cannot stop illegal immigrants flooding across the Mexi-Tex border.

It's all about money and power.

extant said...

OLD ISLAMIC STRATEGY-

I was speaking to a man yesterday who owns a corner shop.

He says that as soon as the West attacks Iran he knows and the intelligence services know there will be WW 3.
Also he says ,"there 100's of dirty bombs in Europe waiting to go off.
T we will not survive and it is inevitable it is waiting to happen soon".
I said bollox , I have a pitchfork and lots of Celtic/sax/Anglo and Norse friends :O)

ps, its not the first time, I have had nice people of Pakistani origin tell me this and similar.

T

Anonymous said...

People are waking up to the New World Order, they need a crisis to cement their control grid into place.

Jane said...

The Jews want WW3 and how can anyone doubt Obama's fealty to Israel (the greatest threat to world peace) now?
It's laughable to lose sleep over an Islamic "terrorist" threat when the Zionists have this wholesale worldwide apocalypse planned.

extant said...

Anonymous-
We need a crisis for our people to pull together !
Only when there is open and transparent War declared against us, the masses will assemble as a Brotherhood.
This is not a Guess, it is a definitive fact..

Anonymous said...

Compare and contrast the US invasion of Iraq and coming war in Iran with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. The latter involved a neighbouring state with large German minorities and an unfair border which had given German cities to Poland. The former involves states thousands of miles apart where the US interest is only oil. Both were technichally illegal and the leaders of both nations are guilty of wars of aggression. Bush , Blair and co should hang for their crimes.

BBC man comes out in support of Lee Barnes! said...

Hi Lee, I think you might like to take a look at this link, an ex BBC correspondent appears to agree with you!

http://faustiesblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/ex-bbc-and-itn-correspondent-911-was.html

extant said...

Excellent and of great significance speech by Tyndal

copy and paste please

YouTube - John Tyndall, excerpts from EURO Intl. Conference 2004 -I/II

Anonymous said...

Lee I see the RWB has been cancelled, why would this be?

You were talking about an active community pulling together and here we are with no RWB, probably the biggest example of this action and a great idea by Nick.

So what has happened?

I personally think Nick got sidelined by the EU as I feared, the leader of the party should not be an EU staff member but should instead see a rise in salary, with elected MEPs made to give as much as 60% back to the party to fund party officials wages and general party support.

This means our party s less likely to be corrupted by thoise seeking a honey pot in Europe that at this time serves little interest to the party other than undermining it.

Something needs to be done in this regard.

Anonymous said...

extant said...
Anonymous-
We need a crisis for our people to pull together !
Only when there is open and transparent War declared against us, the masses will assemble as a Brotherhood.
This is not a Guess, it is a definitive fact..

I am ready