MOVING TARGETS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.
The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers—again, in secret—when full-field operations begin. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. “No one wants to talk about this,” an Israeli official told me. “It’s incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-Israeli coöperation” on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical—or politically effective—way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and reliable information there.
Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing a new source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on. A former C.I.A. station chief described the strategy in simple terms: “U.S. shooters and Iraqi intelligence.” He added, “There are Iraqis in the intelligence business who have a better idea, and we’re tapping into them. We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the insurgents—“out.” more...
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/031215fa_factIsrael trains US assassination squads in Iraq
Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday December 9, 2003
The Guardian
Israeli advisers are helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, US intelligence and military sources said yesterday.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has sent urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of US special forces, and according to two sources, Israeli military "consultants" have also visited Iraq.
US forces in Iraq's Sunni triangle have already begun to use tactics that echo Israeli operations in the occupied territories, sealing off centres of resistance with razor wire and razing buildings from where attacks have been launched against US troops.
But the secret war in Iraq is about to get much tougher, in the hope of suppressing the Ba'athist-led insurgency ahead of next November's presidential elections. More...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1102940,00.htmlFour Characters in Search of a Prosecutor: Miller, Boykin, Cambone and Feith
The Gitmo Documents
By LILA RAJIVA
A year of stonewalling a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the Associated Press and now the Pentagon releases documents (Friday, March 3, 2006) with the names of hundreds of detainees held at Guantanamo.
The more than five thousand pages give us a flavor of the eclectic--ragtag, might be a better word--mix of prisoners in the Cuban camp and the equally varied treatment they received. The British Guardian-- from a keen sense of fair play, one supposes--devotes a column to telling us that after all, yes, there were two young boys who actually had a good time of it-- said good time running to movies, books, and soccer games. That wipes the slate clean on Abu Ghraib, see?
It would be interesting to know more about those two .... and about the many more boys who didn't exactly get such Eagle Scout treatment, but what we'd really like to know is why we get a breathless column devoted to this reassuring anomaly but no one sees fit to give equal time to any of the three hundred other prisoners who testify to goings on a tad less pleasant.
The hitherto nameless three hundred turn into recognizable characters in these new documents. There are goat herds and shopkeepers; there is the Taliban cook carrying a radio and hand grenades, the Iraqi millionaire who worked for MI5--only they deny it--and the Afghan farmer clinging to his rifle and his frontier freedom like a Montana militiaman cornered by the Feds. There are the metals cages made from discarded shipping containers --six by six, exposed to sun and rain--in which the prisoners were caged 24/7 and let out, shackled, only to use the toilet. There were the regular and severe punishments doled out for infractions as senseless as having an extra cup in the cage. MORE...
http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva03102006.html
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