U.S. Special Operations forces are not required to vet for past human rights violations by the foreign troops they arm and train as surrogates, newly disclosed documents show.
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Proxy forces are an increasingly important part of American foreign policy. Over the past decade, the United States has increasingly relied on supporting or deputizing local partner forces in places like Niger and Somalia, moving away from deploying large numbers of American ground troops as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The disclosures underscored a need for tighter rules on proxy forces, Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, argued. “We need to make sure that we are not training abusive units to become even more lethal and fueling the conflict and violence that we’re aiming to solve ,” she said. “And that starts with universal human rights vetting.”
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“It’s very helpful now to have these internal policies in hand that definitively show that human rights vetting is not required,” Ms.[Katherine Yon] Ebright[, a counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school] said. “It’s been frustrating, the more you know about this, because of those mixed messages and the opacity.”
The Pentagon keeps secret much about its proxy force operations.
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The directives also describe the vetting that allied partners must undergo before American taxpayers pay their salaries and put weapons and specialized military equipment, like night-vision goggles, in their hands. […] But the purpose of this vetting is to detect counterintelligence risks and potential threats to American forces. The directive does not mention violations of human rights — such as rape, torture or extrajudicial killings.
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The Leahy Law, named after former Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, bans security assistance to units of foreign militaries or other security forces that have a history of gross violations of human rights. (The law does not cover nonstate forces, like a tribal militia.)
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But in a memo that year signed by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and obtained by The Times separately from the information act lawsuit, the Pentagon declared that the Leahy Law did not apply to counterterrorism surrogates.
The memo said that enabling proxy forces to help Special Forces counterterrorism operations is “not assistance” to the foreigners. This purported distinction — that building up proxy forces so they can assist the United States in pursuing its objectives is legally different from assisting foreign partners in building up their own security abilities — is disputed.
A critic of that theory is Sarah Harrison, who worked as a Pentagon lawyer from 2017 to 2021 and is now at the International Crisis Group, where she has called for requiring human rights vetting of surrogate forces. She argued that the Pentagon’s narrow interpretation of the Leahy Law is “a dishonest reading of the plain text and intention of Congress.”