organization:joint special operations command

  • Why Afghanistan? Fighting a War for the War System Itself
    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40916-why-afghanistan-fighting-a-war-for-the-war-system-itself

    The linkage between warlord militia abuses and the cooperation of much of the rural population with the Taliban has long been accepted by the US command in Afghanistan. But the war has continued, because it serves powerful interests that have nothing to do with Afghanistan itself: the careers of the US officers who serve there; the bureaucratic stakes of the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA in their huge programs and facilities in the country; the political cost of admitting that it was a futile effort from the start. Plus, the Pentagon and the CIA are determined to hold on to Afghan airstrips they use to carry out drone war in Pakistan for as long as possible.

    Thus Afghanistan, the first of the United States’ permanent wars, is in many ways the model for all the others that have followed — wars that have no other purpose than to serve the US war system itself.

    #etats-unis #profits #guerre

  • Report: Deadly drone strike in Yemen failed to comply with Obama’s rules to protect civilians - The Washington Post

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-deadly-drone-strike-in-yemen-failed-to-comply-with-obamas-rules-to-protect-civilians/2014/02/19/46bc68f2-997d-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html?hpid=z1

    A U.S. drone strike in December that killed at least a dozen people in Yemen failed to comply with rules imposed by President Obama last year to protect civilians, according to an investigation by a human rights organization released Thursday.

    The report by Human Rights Watch concluded that the strike, which was carried out by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, targeted a line of vehicles that were part of a wedding procession, and that evidence indicates “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.”

    #drones

  • The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program
    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role

    According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (#JSOC) who also worked with the #NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial #metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the #CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the #mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

    The #drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

    His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents previously provided by whistleblower Edward #Snowden. It is also supported by a former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly involved in #Iraq, #Afghanistan and #Yemen.

    (...)

    One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different #SIM_cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.

    Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”

    As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.

    “Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very shady.”

    (...)

    What’s more, he adds, the NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata.

    “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones , in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

    #métadonnées

    • En 2011 #Gareth_Porter avait déjà dit l’essentiel
      http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3588:how-mcchrystal-and-petraeus-built-an-indiscriminate-killing-machine

      Although the raids have undoubtedly killed a large number of Taliban commanders and fighters, it is now clear that they also killed and incarcerated thousands of #innocent civilians. The failure to discriminate between combatants and civilians flows directly from a targeting methodology that is incapable of such discrimination.

      (...)

      ... McChrystal’s operation relied on far more mundane technologies than Woodward’s sensational language suggested. In a new book, “Task Force Black,” by Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor at BBC’s “Newsnight,” reveals that McChrystal’s command gathered intelligence on al-Qaeda and Mahdi Army personnel from three well-known technologies: 24-hour surveillance by drone aircraft, monitoring of mobile phone traffic and pinpointing the physical location of the phones from their signals.

      (...)

      Targeting Phone Numbers, Not People

      #victimes_civiles

  • #Film « Dirty wars » by Jeremy #Scahill

    Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill travels to #Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other countries where the United States has taken military action. In Afghanistan, he investigates the United States military and government cover-up of the deaths of five civilians, including two pregnant women killed by US soldiers from the #Joint_Special_Operations_Command. He also investigates the U.S. assassination of an American citizen named #Anwar_al-Awlaki. The documentary also shares testimonies from #CIA agents, Special Forces operators, military generals, and warlords backed by United States.[3]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Wars

    #Yémen #Somalie #USA #États-Unis #drone #guerre #conflit

  • Pepe Escobar nous explique sur Russia Today comment interpréter les déclarations d’Obama sur le transfert des assassinats ciblés par drone de la CIA vers le Pentagone afin den accroître la transparence et le contrôle par le Congrès. Le tout, présenté par Obama, comme une manière de se démarquer de la Guerre globale contre le Terrorisme des néo-conservateurs.
    Un rappel des déclarations d’abord : http://news.yahoo.com/obama-talks-drones-increase-transparency-pentagon-lead-011607130.html

    L’analyse d’Escobar :
    http://rt.com/op-edge/us-pentagon-cia-war-742
    Obama nous joue du pipeau :

    The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the Pentagon – which would then be in charge of the ’Drone Wars’ - is bound to remain secret.
    And the Pentagon is not exactly yearning to retouch its definition of a “militant”, a prime candidate to be ’target-assassinated’; “any military-aged male in a strike zone”. “Muslim” male, it goes without saying.
    Obama’s rhetoric is one thing. His administration’s ’Drone Wars’ are another thing entirely.
    The President now insists GWOT is no longer a “boundless global war”.
    That’s rhetoric. For the Pentagon, the “entire globe is a battlefield”.

    Puisque la guerre contre le terrorisme continue Escobar nous en donne les règles du jeu qui reposent sur une terminologie subtile :

    When the US – or “the West” – kills or ’target-assassinates’ Muslim civilians, that’s never terrorism.
    When Muslims supported by “the West” kill other Muslim civilians – as in Syria – they are not terrorists; they are Reaganesque “freedom fighters”.
    When Muslims kill Western soldiers – as in London – they’re terrorists.
    When Muslims happen to come from regime-changeable Iran and Syria’s government, not to mention Hezbollah, they are by definition terrorists.
    And when Muslims are lingering in Guantanamo just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the US invaded a Muslim country, they remain terrorists – the umpteenth Obama promise to close Guantanamo notwithstanding.

    Et en conclusion les inévitables « blowbacks » qui s’ensuivront et nourissent la logique générale de cette « guerre » :

    The bottom line is that the entire globe will remain a battlefield – a self-fulfilling Pentagon prophecy.
    So many Belmokhtars to fight, so many Syrian jihadis to support, so many “al-Qaeda” to target-assassinate, so many Muslim lone wolves to track.
    Obama’s rhetoric is just a show. GWOT is bound to remain a serpent biting its own tail, eagerly feeding itself till the end of time.

  • History repeats itself with ’war on terror’ – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs
    http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/10/history-repeats-itself-with-war-on-terror

    Par #Remi_Brulin

    More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, we are finally getting a clearer picture of the ways in which the United States is waging what it calls its “war on terrorism.”
    At the center of the government’s strategy has been the decision to shift the focus away from capturing and interrogating alleged terrorist suspects to killing them, with a series of covert wars prosecuted mostly by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command frequently relying on so-called kinetic operations: night raids, “find, fix and finish” operations, cruise missile strikes, and the increasing use of drones.
    Yet these approaches raise not only fundamental legal and moral questions, but also doubts about their long-term strategic effectiveness. And, to a historian, they also carry disturbing echoes of the past.

  • Influential Ex-Aide to Obama Voices Concern on Drone Strikes - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/us/influential-ex-aide-to-obama-voices-concern-on-drone-strikes.html?_r=0

    Sur le tintamarre fait autour du transfert du programme drones de la CIA vers le Pentagone : Pure opération de relations publiques qui, au minimum, ne changera pas grand chose en termes de victimes civiles et donc de transparence.

    Some close observers of the drone program disputed the widely repeated notion that moving it entirely to the Defense Department would necessarily make it more open, particularly if it is to be operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, among the least transparent elements of the military.

    “We know JSOC is far more secretive than the C.I.A., and that Congressional oversight is weaker,” said Naureen Shah, associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at Columbia Law School. She said that while units under the Joint Special Operations Command were accused of serious abuse of prisoners in Iraq, “it never had to face public scrutiny about it in the way the C.I.A. did.”

    #drones #FDG

    • The tip of the spear : US Special Operations Forces- http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/201332811912362162.html

      Le JSOC est aussi la pierre angulaire de la stratégie du "entraînons les sauvages à combattre à notre place et se zigouiller entre eux pour préserver notre « intérêt national »", strategie qui ne peut qu’assurer le délitement du tissu social dans les pays concernés.

      The rise of US Special Operations Forces engaging in kinetic operations and direct action or in using their extensive military, psychological operations and war-fighting skills to train proxy forces in all the places where the US projects its power is alarming.

      The ascendance of an elite clique of ultra-warriors protected by the cloak of secrecy and pushing off responsibility for acts of violence to their proxies and allies, means that the tip of the imperial spear can tear through the social fabric of many a country without associated costs in blood and treasure and hidden from the view of the press and the public.

      And because such special operations do not require the sacrifices of an expansive force, the special operators can largely act without public outrage or demand for accountability. The old/new military philosophy of a light footprint is useful precisely because it allows for the war in the shadows to continue unabated and with impunity.

  • Mali : c’est bien parti pour la « longue guerre », avec essentiellement les Français au sol et les drones étasuniens dans les airs.

    Terror Leader Emerges, Then Vanishes, in Sahara
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578296170934762536.html

    The U.S. is employing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Joint Special Operations Command in a manhunt that underscores how quickly Washington is eyeing an expansion of its counterterrorism actions in northwestern Africa following the gas-plant attack. Senior U.S. officials are pressing to add Mr. Belmokhtar to a list of U.S. targets for capture or killing.

    (...)

    In recent days, France has dispatched attack helicopters and fighter jets on bombing runs, so far without result. The U.S. has sent surveillance planes and is considering a drone base in neighboring Niger.

    Even with its 21st-century hardware and intelligence assistance from the U.S., France is finding it must send in troops.

    “You can’t see anything from the air,” said a French colonel and spokesman at the French air base in Sevare, Mali. “You’ve got to have troops on the ground, with intelligence.”

    #Mali #Africom #Contre-terrorisme #drone #longue-guerre

    A lire en complément d’un précédent post : http://seenthis.net/messages/11126

  • Iran and the I.A.E.A. | Seymour M. Hersh (The New Yorker)
    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/iran-and-the-iaea.html

    I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron,” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site. (...) Source: The New Yorker