UK special forces injured in ‘top secret’ Yemen campaign

Middle Eastern Monitor

At least five British Special Forces commandos have been wounded in gun battles as part of a top-secret UK military campaign in Yemen. The troops are all said to be members of the Special Boat Service (SBS), the Royal Navy’s equivalent of the British Army’s SAS, which recruits mainly from the Royal Marines. The SBS specialises in “mounting clandestine operations against targets at sea, in rivers or harbours and against occupied coastlines”, says the Armed Forces website.

As the UK Government welcomes the Saudi Crown Prince’s first official visit to London, Save the Children has unveiled a life-size statue of a child outside Parliament. The bronze-like statue is a reminder of the dangers that Yemeni children face every day and the risks of British-made bombs fuelling the violence [Save The Children]

The men, who are understood to be now recovering in the UK, were injured during a “top-secret” military campaign, according to the Mail on Sunday. They were treated for leg and arm wounds following battles in the Saada area of northern Yemen, where up to 30 British troops are based.

The Mail on Sunday also revealed how RAF engineers sent to Saudi Arabia to repair the kingdom’s fleet of military aircrafts narrowly escaped death last week. Iranian-backed rebels are reported to have launched a “suicide drone” strike on the King Khalid airbase, where they are maintaining Tornado jets used to bomb civilian areas in Yemen.

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The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

Comment: This is an interesting article from last year that touches on the known, official nature of Artificial Intelligence and its dangers. It's very much the tip of a very large iceberg and although a welcome cautionary tale, it doesn't even touch on the deeper dangers away from commerical and consumer applications.

When we factor in the inevitable black projects combined with energy directed weaponry and mass mind control then it opens up a Pandora's Box that is highly secretive and well away from any kind of public oversight, including the normal parameters of State control. This is indeed an area that is up and running. 

We have no idea how far this technology has come in corralling the mass mind but given the probability that such a box of tricks is deeply seductive to the psychopathic mind presently dominating the corridors of power, it is more than probable that experimentation has been undertaken in concert with, and as an outgrowth of MK ULTRA and other programs which were never dismantled but merely outsourced, DARPA being the public hub of these "creative" endeavours.

Much more research is needed, not least some whistleblowers. However, for obvious reasons, such people are extremely aware that to come forward about these black ops means  they effectively paint a target on their backs and become the next line in experimentation. This has likely happened many times.

Who would want to willingly place themselves in that particular line of fire?  Hence the in-built protection that such projects are afforded.  

And when engineeers still don't really understand how some aspects of AI works then we really have a recipe for a technology that can grow it's own consciousness and thus be out of the control of human rules.  

Please read my Technocracy series for further information.

-----------------------

Will Knight
MIT Tech Review

Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it.
 
Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it’s also a bit unsettling, since it isn’t completely clear how the car makes its decisions. Information from the vehicle’s sensors goes straight into a huge network of artificial neurons that process the data and then deliver the commands required to operate the steering wheel, the brakes, and other systems. The result seems to match the responses you’d expect from a human driver. But what if one day it did something unexpected—crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why. The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. And you can’t ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.

The mysterious mind of this vehicle points to a looming issue with artificial intelligence. The car’s underlying AI technology, known as deep learning, has proved very powerful at solving problems in recent years, and it has been widely deployed for tasks like image captioning, voice recognition, and language translation. There is now hope that the same techniques will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries.

But this won’t happen—or shouldn’t happen—unless we find ways of making techniques like deep learning more understandable to their creators and accountable to their users. Otherwise it will be hard to predict when failures might occur—and it’s inevitable they will. That’s one reason Nvidia’s car is still experimental.

Already, mathematical models are being used to help determine who makes parole, who’s approved for a loan, and who gets hired for a job. If you could get access to these mathematical models, it would be possible to understand their reasoning. But banks, the military, employers, and others are now turning their attention to more complex machine-learning approaches that could make automated decision-making altogether inscrutable. Deep learning, the most common of these approaches, represents a fundamentally different way to program computers. “It is a problem that is already relevant, and it’s going to be much more relevant in the future,” says Tommi Jaakkola, a professor at MIT who works on applications of machine learning. “Whether it’s an investment decision, a medical decision, or maybe a military decision, you don’t want to just rely on a ‘black box’ method.”

There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach. This might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.

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Secretive CIA Syria program details exposed by murder of 3 Green Berets at Jordanian air base

Zero Hedge

"The Jordanian government had a strong incentive to gloss over the murders of the three Green Berets. Likewise, the CIA was scared of potential blowback and the exposing of their covert program," says investigative journalist Jack Murphy, himself an Army special forces veteran.

A premeditated green-on-blue attack in Jordan outside of King Faisal Air Base (at al-Jafr in Southern Jordan) late last year resulted in the deaths of three elite US Green Berets in what the media initially dubbed a mere unfortunate gate incident and what the Jordanian government dismissed as a "a tragic accident devoid of any terrorist motives". But the whole event and subsequent attempts at cover-up just as Obama was leaving office enraged both the families of the slain and the US special forces community; and it further threatened to blow wide open the CIA's illegal Syrian regime change operation, called Timber Sycamore, which involved American special ops soldiers being tasked with training so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels in Jordan and Turkey as part of an inter-agency program.

As details of the court case involving the shooter continue to emerge this week, the media continues to misreport the true nature of the what the US special forces personnel were doing in Jordan in the first place, and how a CIA secret program put them at risk.

On Monday (July 17) a Jordanian military court sentenced the attacker, a Jordanian soldier named Marik al-Tuwayha, to life in prison with hard labor for the premeditated murder of Staff Sgt. Matthew C. Lewellen, 27, of Kirksville, Missouri; Staff Sgt. Kevin J. McEnroe, 30, of Tucson, Arizona; and Staff Sgt. James F. Moriarty, 27, of Kerrville, Texas. In Jordan a "life sentence" can mean the possibility of being set free after serving 20 years for good behavior.

Last November the three Green Berets were entering King Faisal Air Base assigned as part of the CIA's 'Timber Sycamore' training. According to court testimony as well as evidence collected by the Pentagon, a soldier in the US-allied Jordanian Army opened fire as the Green Berets' convoy was stopped in front of the base. The Jordanian guard fired for six minutes, reloading multiple rifle magazines. The Jordanian government and media attempted to paint a picture that the approaching US convoy charged the gate and neglected protocol, and that the guard thought he was acting in self defense (a claim later retracted by Jordan). But initially suppressed surveillance footage captured the entire event, and confirms a methodical and willed attack as the Americans yelled in English and in Arabic, "We're Americans! We're friendly!" (the Jordanian military court refused to show the footage). As Foreign Affairs reported, "they were hunted down and executed at close range." A fourth US soldier was able to wound the shooter, bringing the attack to an end.  

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The U.S. Army Says It Doesn’t Know What It Did with $1 Billion in Weapons

Anti-Media


Iraq — According to a government audit from 2016, through shoddy record-keeping, the United States Army has lost track of $1 billion worth of military material sent to Iraq. The equipment, intended to aid Iraqi forces, is part of the Iraq Train and Equip Fund, a program born out of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“This audit provides a worrying insight into the U.S. Army’s flawed — and potentially dangerous — system for controlling millions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers to a hugely volatile region,” said Patrick Wilcken of Amnesty International in a statement.

The audit, conducted by the Department of Defense, found that hundreds of mortar rounds and Humvee armored vehicles and tens of thousands of assault rifles were unaccounted for.  This latest audit echoes findings from a 2015 audit.

Highlighting the fact that the Middle East is — as the Washington Post puts it, “awash in U.S. weapons and equipment” — Wilcken says the audit brings to mind a troubling pattern that seems to plague the United States military:

“It makes for especially sobering reading given the long history of leakage of US arms to multiple armed groups committing atrocities in Iraq, including the armed group calling itself the Islamic State.”

Congress initially allocated $1.6 billion for the Iraq Train and Equip Fund. The 2017 NDAA is set to give the program an additional $920 million. For Wilcken, this latest audit should be a reminder to governments of the consequences of their current approach to the Middle East:

“This should be an urgent wake-up call for the US, and all countries supplying arms to Iraq, to urgently shore up checks and controls. Sending millions of dollars’ worth of arms into a black hole and hoping for the best is not a viable counter-terrorism strategy; it is just reckless.”

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$10 Trillion Missing from Pentagon and No One — Not Even the DoD — Knows Where It Is

Clare Bernish 
The Free Thought Project

Over a mere two decades, the Pentagon lost track of a mind-numbing $10 trillion — that’s trillion, with a fat, taxpayer-funded “T” — and no one, not even the Department of Defense, really knows where it went or on what it was spent.

Even though audits of all federal agencies became mandatory in 1996, the Pentagon has apparently made itself an exception, and — fully 20 years later — stands obstinately orotund in never having complied.

Because, as defense officials insist — summoning their best impudent adolescent — an audit would take too long and, unironically, cost too much.

“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” Rafael DeGennaro, director of Audit the Pentagon, told the Guardian recently. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”

Worse, President Trump’s newly-proposed budget seeks to toss an additional $54 billion into the evidently bottomless pit that is the U.S. military  — more for interventionist policy, more for resource-plundering, more for proxy fighting, and, of course, more for jets and drones to drop more bombs suspiciously often on civilians.

Maybe.

Because, without the mandated audit, the DoD could be purchasing damned near anything, at any cost, and use, or give, it — to anyone, for any reason.

Officials with the Government Accountability Office and Office of the Inspector General have catalogued egregious financial disparities at the Pentagon for years — yet the Defense Department grouses the cost and energy necessary to perform an audit in compliance with the law makes it untenable.

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Mercenary Group “Blackwater” Receives $204m Government Contract

Daily Beast 

A mercenary air force that became a symbol of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is back in action—this time in Central Africa, supporting a shadowy American U.S. Special Forces commando operation targeting the Lord’s Resistance Army. 

In late January, a source on the ground in Central African Republic spotted a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter with the registry number N408RC carrying American Special Forces troops. The LRA, a cultish band of thieves and rapists led by warlord Joseph Kony, is most active in the forested region where Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo meet.

In 2010, President Barack Obama deployed around 100 Green Berets and other personnel to Central Africa to help local forces hunt down Kony and the LRA. Seven years later, Operation Observant Compass continues, mostly unnoticed by the press. The Pentagon asked Congress for $23 million to extend the operation through 2017.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the Sikorsky helicopter that The Daily Beast’s source observed in Central African Republic belongs to Illinois-based EP Aviation, LLC. 

EP Aviation was once a subsidiary of Academi, the Virginia-based company that was formerly known as Blackwater. The “EP” stands for “Erik Prince,” Blackwater’s founder and the younger brother of billionaire U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

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“The Black Budget.” This Is What The ‘Secret Government’ Doesn’t Want You To Know

Collective Evolution

 

Countless amounts of academics, presidents and other politicians have told humanity that a secret government is really pulling the strings when it comes to who holds the balance of power on our planet. Multiple studies have emerged showing that a very small group of people and the corporations they run basically have control over all of the worlds resources. According to the estimates of some, the US government alone classifies up to 500 million pages of documents every single year, for the purpose of protecting ‘national security.’ Our world is drenched in secrecy, and it’s reached a point where we don’t really know what’s happening on our planet. Our main source of information is corporate media, this is a big problem.

Who were these politicians? Senator Daniel K. Inouye,  the highest ranking Asian-American politician in United States history, serving the democratic party from 1963 until his death in 2012, stressed the fact that “there exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself (source)

Decades ago, the very first British MP wrote that “the world is government by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” (Coningsby, Book 4, Chap. 15.) – Page 131

The 26th U.S. president, Theodor Roosevelt made a hard-hitting statement about the secret government, revealing that “behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.  (source)

To see some more, similar quotes, you can refer to THIS article.

The National Endowment for Democracy: Not National and Not for Democracy

Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook

Using a front to hide illegal or immoral activities has been a feature of human criminality since the beginning of human civilization itself. Facades, both ideological and economical, have helped criminal enterprises conceal the true nature of their activities for centuries.

In ages past, organized religion would often take systems of legitimate philosophy and spirituality, and transform them into a means of organizing the masses for the benefit of an elite few, often those heading empires, kingdoms, or nation-states. More recently, patriotism and now the notion of “democracy” have been used successfully by similar cadres of special interests to conceal their self-serving agendas behind notions likely to recruit support from large segments of a population that would otherwise be disinterested.

There is no example of this more transparent than that of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to its own website, it claims:

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,200 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.

“The growth and strengthening  of democratic institutions around the world” sounds noble enough. One would expect, then, that the NED would be led by a collection of some of the most notable activists involved in the empowerment of “the people.” Instead, upon NED’s board of directors, we find people representing corporate-financier interests notorious for instead, exploiting and subjugating “the people.”

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Empire on steroids: The expansion of U.S. secret wars in Africa

Justin Yun
Chimes

The secret expansion of U.S. military bases and special operations in Africa has initiated a new and lightweight style of warfare and welcomes the next phase of American military imperialism. Unlike the highly publicized U.S. military "pivot to Asia," the proliferation of drones, special ops, mercenary spies, classified bases, proxy fighters and cyber warfare constitute what the journalist Nick Turse calls a "new light-footprint Obama doctrine" that "seems to be making war an ever more attractive and seemingly easy option."

A New Style of Fighting

On any day, elite U.S. forces conduct covert missions in an estimated 70 to 90 countries. According to Turse, special forces have been sent to an unprecedented 147 countries — 75 percent of the world's nations last year alone. This is a 145 percent increase from the rate of operations conducted under the Bush administration.

Wars conventionally fought by large infantry forces and full-scale invasions of foreign countries have made way for a new style of fighting — one that has become increasingly dependent on special forces, drones and private defense contractors. Because of the confidential nature of special ops, the Pentagon can essentially keep foreign military involvement secret from the American public. The U.S. has always had troops in Africa since the Cold War but the rate of its expansion dangerously indicates a lack of public accountability.

A Naive Claim

The shadow wars in Africa are now fought by members of the U.S. Special Operations Command and JSOC — a clandestine organization that carries out kill/capture missions. JSOC has been called "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine" by counterinsurgency advisor John Nagl and many have described it as the president's "private assassination squad." The group reports directly to the White House. It is the military's secret military.

The notion the U.S. would someday pull its troops out of the Middle East is a rather naive claim considering the fact we have nothing short of a permanent war economy. From main operating bases that house thousands of soldiers to single airstrips used by the C.I.A. to taxi their blacked-out turboprops, the U.S. continues to maintain over 800 to 1,000 bases around the world — making us the most expansive military empire in history. Nobody really knows the exact figure — not even the military experts. The late scholar Chalmers Johnson wrote in his book, "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" on how the Pentagon and an uncontrollable military-industrial complex have turned the U.S. into "a new kind of military empire — a consumerist Sparta." Chalmers declares, "Another crucial characteristic that distinguished the American empire from empires of the past is that bases are not needed to fight wars but are instead pure manifestations of militarism and imperialism."

Global Instability

Military expansion does not make us safe since it cultivates global instability. The uncontrollable growth into Africa has resulted in the funding and training of proxy armies with atrocious human-rights records and has attracted mercenaries such as Erik Prince — founder of the infamous Blackwater private army hired by the D.O.D to provide security to high-level diplomats during the Iraq war.

With military presence in 53 of 54 of Africa's nations, the American empire has emerged to pick up where the former European colonial powers have left off. 

Captured ISIL leaders in Iraq confess to receiving US intelligence support - Iraqi military commander: 'We saw US coalition jets transporting terrorists'

Sott.net via FARS News Agency 

Spokesman of Iraq's Kata'ib Hezbollah (Hezbollah Battalions) popular forces Jafar al-Hosseini disclosing that captured ISIL leaders have acknowledged receiving logistical backup and intelligence support from the US.

"As the ISIL commanders captured in Iraqi popular forces' recent military operations have confessed, the US supports for the terrorist groups are not limited to the dispatch of logistical support," Al-Hosseini told FNA on Sunday.
  He reiterated that the US has provided the ISIL with intelligence about the Iraqi forces' positions and targets.

"ISIL commanders trusted the US officials who had assured them that the Iraqi forces would not attack Fallujah because the US had urged the Iraqi government to prevent the popular forces from entering Fallujah and raid Beiji instead; hence the terrorists left Fallujah for Beiji to stay on the alert in there," Al-Hosseini added.

Al-Hosseini had also stated on Wednesday that his forces plan to win back the city of Ramadi only after expelling the American forces from Anbar province. 

"Our forces have two operations underway; first seizing Ramadi from ISIL and second keeping away the American forces from Anbar province," al-Hosseini told FNA.

He underlined that preventing the US forces from getting close to Anbar province will expedite operations for winning back the province, specially after the military operations in Salahuddin province that led to the liberation of the city of Beiji.

Iraqi officials have on different occasions blasted the US and its allies for supplying the ISIL in Syria with arms and ammunition under the pretext of fighting the Takfiri terrorist group.

Earlier this month, the Iraqi army and volunteer forces discovered US-made military hardware and ammunition, including anti-armor missiles, in terrorists' positions and trenches captured during the operations in the Fallujah region in Al-Anbar province.

The Iraqi forces found a huge volume of advanced TOW-II missiles from the Takfiri terrorists in al-Karama city of Fallujah. 

The missiles were brand new and the ISIL had transferred them to Fallujah to use them against the Iraqi army's armored units.

On October 10, the Iraqi forces discovered US-made military hardware and ammunition from terrorists in Beiji.

"The military hardware and weapons had been airdropped by the US-led warplanes and choppers for the ISIL in the nearby areas of Beiji," military sources told FNA.

In February, an Iraqi provincial official lashed out at the western countries and their regional allies for supporting Takfiri terrorists in Iraq, revealing that the US airplanes still continue to airdrop weapons and foodstuff for the ISIL terrorists. 

"The US planes have dropped weapons for the ISIL terrorists in the areas under ISIL control and even in those areas that have been recently liberated from the ISIL control to encourage the terrorists to return to those places," Coordinator of Iraqi popular forces Jafar al-Jaberi told FNA.

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'Structural failure'? Western propaganda rag creates narrative on the Russian A321 plane crash

Clive Irving
The Daily Beast

The jet split in two near the tail, which could mean a "tailstrike" in 2001 was never truly fixed.

The suddenness of what happened to the Russian-operated jet that crashed in the Sinai is highly unusual. According to reports the pilot had reported a technical problem and a diversion to the nearest airport. But the problem was apparently so severe that his plan was overtaken by events and the airplane literally fell out of the sky from its cruise altitude of 31,000 feet.

In theory the Sinai is dangerous air space. Much of the Sinai is a closed military zone where the Egyptian army has frequent skirmishes with Islamic terrorist groups. There have been claims by a jihadist group linked to ISIS that it brought down the flight, but the airplane's altitude put it well beyond the range of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, or MANPADS, the only relevant weapon fielded by such groups, and first pictures of the wreckage offer no evidence of a missile strike.

Instead investigators will treat as much more credible the possibility of a sudden structural failure. The Airbus A321 was 18 years old, but with a modern airplane like this and regular maintenance that is not in itself a cause for concern.

What does, however, jump out from this particular airplane's record is an accident that it suffered on November 16, 2001 while landing at Cairo (while owned and operated by Middle East Airlines). As it touched down the nose was pointing at too high an angle and the tail hit the tarmac - heavily enough to cause substantial damage.

Tail strikes like this are not uncommon. The airplane was repaired and would have been rigorously inspected then and during subsequent maintenance checks. Nonetheless investigators who will soon have access to the Airbus's flight data recorder will take a hard look at what is called the rear pressure bulkhead, a critical seal in the cabin's pressurization system. Images from the wreckage in the Sinai show parts of the tail and rear fuselage near the site of this bulkhead lying clear of the rest of the debris, suggesting a possible break-up in flight.

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All theater? Obama-Netanyahu 'fallout' planned in 2009

Tony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer Report

In a 2009 US policy paper published by the corporate-financier funded Brookings Institution, it was made clear that the US was determined to provoke Iran into a conflict and effect regime change at any cost - up to and including an outright military invasion and occupation of Iran with US troops.

However, before it came to that, the Brookings Institution's policymakers explored other options including fomenting US-backed political unrest coupled with covert, violent force, the use of US State Department listed foreign terrorist organizations to carry out assassinations and attacks within Iran, and limited airstrikes carried out by either the US or Israel, or both.

In retropspect, 6 years on, all of these tricks have not only been attempted to one degree or another in Iran, but have been demonstrably employed in neighboring Syria to diminish its strength - which according to Brookings - is a necessary prerequisite before waging war on Iran.

And of particular interest - considering what appears to be a growing diplomatic row between the United States and Israel - is just how precisely the US planned to covertly back what would be made to appear as a "unilateral" Israeli first strike on Iran - an attack that appears to be in the process of being justified through a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign now unfolding.  

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, Secret Wars and Black Ops Blowback

 Tom Dispatch.com

[For Tom Engelhardt's commentary on Nick Turse's article below, go to the above link]

[...]

The Special Ops Surge
America’s Secret War in 134 Countries
By Nick Turse

They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America.  They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it out with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa.

They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific.  They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia.  All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed -- until now.

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget.  Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally.  This presence -- now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations -- provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world.  By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post.  In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120.  Today, that figure has risen higher still.

In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs.  This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection.  Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.       

Growth Industry

Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era.   SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001.  Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3 billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in supplemental funding).  Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed, too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.

A recent investigation by TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well as press reports, found evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved with the militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012-2013.  For more than a month during the preparation of that article, however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics on the total number of countries to which special operators -- Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, and civil affairs personnel -- were deployed.   “We don’t just keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview once the article had been filed.  “We have to go searching through stuff.  It takes a long time to do that.”  Hours later, just prior to publication, he provided an answer to a question I first asked in November of last year.  “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to 134 countries” during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email.

Globalized Special Ops

Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven explained his vision for special ops globalization.  In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said:

“USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where necessary or appropriate...”

While that “presence” may be small, the reach and influence of those Special Operations forces are another matter.  The 12% jump in national deployments -- from 120 to 134 -- during McRaven’s tenure reflects his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth.  SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments we do know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions being carried out by America’s secret military.

Last April and May, for instance, Special Ops personnel took part in training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.  In June, U.S. Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other allied Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in Aqaba, Jordan.  The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to carry out small unit tactical exercises with local forces.  In August, Green Berets conducted explosives training with Honduran sailors.  In September, according to media reports, U.S. Special Operations forces joined elite troops from the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia -- as well as their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded coun­terterrorism exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java.

In October, elite U.S. troops carried out commando raids in Libya and Somalia, kidnapping a terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in the latter before being driven off under fire.  In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian operations in the Philippines to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The next month, members of the 352nd Special Operations Group conducted a training exercise involving approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded while undertaking an evacuation mission in South Sudan.  Green Berets then rang in the new year with a January 1st combat mission alongside elite Afghan troops in Bahlozi village in Kandahar province.

Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be expansive enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans Regional Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign audiences.”  These would join an existing global network of 10 propaganda websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com, Sabahi which targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com.

SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted effort of the command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway.  “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. -- from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center last year.  Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of departments and agencies where SOCOM is now entrenched at 38.

134 Chances for Blowback

Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as an antiwar candidate, President Obama has proved to be a decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief whose policies have already produced notable instances of what in CIA trade-speak has long been called blowback.  While the Obama administration oversaw a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (negotiated by his predecessor), as well as a drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (after a major military surge in that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the U.S. military presence in Africa, a reinvigoration of efforts in Latin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of yet).

The White House has also overseen an exponential expansion of America’s drone war.  While President Bush launched 51 such strikes, President Obama has presided over 330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.  Last year, alone, the U.S. also engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  Recent revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of U.S. electronic surveillance during the Obama years.  And deep in the shadows, Special Operations forces are now annually deployed to more than double the number of nations as at the end of Bush’s tenure.

In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of U.S. military operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole regions aflame.  More than 10 years after America’s “mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much vaunted surge, the Iraq that America helped make is in flames.  A country with no al-Qaeda presence before the U.S. invasion and a government opposed to America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central government aligned with Iran and two cities flying al-Qaeda flags.

A more recent U.S. military intervention to aid the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw a coup there carried out by a U.S.-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing short of a terror diaspora in the region.

And today South Sudan -- a nation the U.S. shepherded into being, has supported economically and militarily (despite its reliance on child soldiers), and has used as a hush-hush base for Special Operations forces -- is being torn apart by violence and sliding toward civil war.

The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals.  But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road.  As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has noted, the utilization of Special Operations forces during the Obama years has decreased military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,” and set the stage for a war without end.  “In short,” he wrote at TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.”

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences.  New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.  Strangely enough, those at the other primary attack site that day, the Pentagon, seem not to have learned the obvious lessons from this lethal blowback.

Even today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, more than 12 years after the U.S. invaded the former and almost 10 years after it began conducting covert attacks in the latter, the U.S. is still dealing with that Cold War-era fallout: with, for instance, CIA drones conducting missile strikes against an organization (the Haqqani network) that, in the 1980s, the Agency supplied with missiles.

Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.  But if history is any guide, they will be felt -- from Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa, and, perhaps eventually, in the United States as well.

In his blueprint for the future, SOCOM 2020, Admiral McRaven has touted the globalization of U.S. special ops as a means to “project power, promote stability, and prevent conflict.”  Last year, SOCOM may have done just the opposite in 134 places.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, on the BBC and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (just out in paperback).  You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here.

Copyright 2014 Nick Turse

State Dept & Private Corps Funding Stabilization Ops in Syria

Brookings Fellow William McCants, director of the Project on U.S. Relations (PUSR) with the Islamic World in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy (IWSCMEP) [to] examine the role that Gulf charities are playing in fostering sectarian tensions in Syria and then moderate a panel on the sectarian dimension of non-lethal assistance for Syria coming outside the Gulf. - See more at: http://www.occupycorporatism.com/state-dept-private-corps-funding-stabilization-ops-syria/#sthash.UZGbQQB

Occupy Corporatism
Susanne Posel

In 2012, the US State Department created the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) to assist “the Secretary [to] improve the effectiveness and coherence of the US government’s response to overseas crises.”

The CSO “advances U.S. national security by breaking cycles of violent conflict and mitigating crises in priority countries.”

This agency is empowered to “engage in conflict prevention, crisis response and stabilization, aiming to address the underlying causes of destabilizing violence.”

Through the CSO, the US government is able to:

• Have “rapid, locally-grounded conflict analysis in countries”
• Offer “data-driven products on diverse sources, including diplomatic and media reports, polling, local interviews and international expertise, to identify the most important dynamics fueling instability”
• Assist to “develop prioritized strategies that target the causes of instability and address high-risk periods such as elections or political transitions”
• Through strategic schemes, “amplify local initiatives that connect civil society partners, media, community leaders, technical experts, and under-represented groups like women and youth in coalitions that bridge social divides”
• Provide a “networks of experts from sources such as nonprofits, third-country nationals, international partners, think tanks, and state and local officials”
• “Mobilize resources and civilian response mechanisms for conflict prevention and response”
The recent 2013 CSO: One-Year Progress Report (CSOPR) claims that there are “cycles of violence through locally-grounded analysis and operational support in priority areas around the world”.
The imminent focus is to facilitate a “strengthening [of] the unarmed opposition”, the FSA, with the expressed purpose of:
• Building a mass communication network
• Train civilian leadership to ensure the governmental transition

Funding for this invasion by proxy of Syria is provided by the government of the US, Canada and the UK.

Included in this construction is the Office of Syrian Opposition (OSO) that creates networks of journalists, grassroots activists and administrators that “provides insights about events inside Syria, expands assistance networks, and identifies local leaders.”

In October of last year, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that conducting stability operations is the crux and meaning of all military missions as defined by the Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) which lays out the parameters of war, the use of fake revolutions in foreign nations, and the specification of those involved; including private security firms installed to ensure US interests.

James Schear, deputy assistant secretary of defense for partnership strategy and stability operations, explained that the DSG is explicitly directed at “building the security capacity of others.”

Stability operations are defined as “military operations in civilian environments, include many missions, among them peace operations, combating terrorism, counterdrug operations, population security and nation assistance.” However, they are also known as “crisis initiation” in that they are manufactured operations instilled in foreign nations to destabilize those current governments and replace them with a more US-friendly faction.

With regard to Syria, the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a lobby group who actively seek favorable policies directed toward the Free Syrian Army (FSA), have been exposed for using propaganda to sway the public regarding the proxy war “rebels”.

Indeed, Elizabeth O’Bagy, the political director of the US State Department, explained that funding for her operation comes from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), not the federal government.

O’Bagy said that the US State Department has been employing firms such as “ARK [Access Resources Knowledge], Chemonics, Creative [Associates International]—a number of the big contractors” set up the contracts and pay the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF).

The Brookings Institute (BI) hosted “a panel discussion exploring the politicization of non-lethal aid to Syria.

Brookings Fellow William McCants, director of the Project on U.S. Relations (PUSR) with the Islamic World in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy (IWSCMEP) [to] examine the role that Gulf charities are playing in fostering sectarian tensions in Syria and then moderate a panel on the sectarian dimension of non-lethal assistance for Syria coming outside the Gulf.