Michael Kelley @ Business Insider:
After Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration began waging a global war on terrorism both openly and on the “dark side.”
The full scale of the shadow war is just coming out now, as detailed in “Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield” by investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Scahill.
Directed by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the White House expanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into a global capturing and killing machine.
JSOC, which includes troops from a variety of America’s best units, grew from fewer than 2,000 troops before 9/11 to as many as 25,000 today.
While most of their missions remain classified, JSOC operators have been used far more aggressively in the past decade than ever before.
“Their real days of glory … really only started after 9/11,” Colonel Walter Patrick Lang, who spent much of his career in covert operations, told Scahill. “They didn’t do a lot of fighting before that.”
Known within the covert ops community as ninjas or “snake eaters,” JSOC operators train to track a target, fix his position, and then finish him off without being detected.
“They’re the ace in the hole,” General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Clinton, told Scahill. “If you need someone that can sky dive from thirty miles away, go down the chimney of a castle, and blow it up from the inside — those are the guys you want to call on.”
The command was “created in secrecy to perform operations that were kept hidden to virtually all other entities of military and governments,” Scahill writes, and the White House took full advantage of that.
From “Dirty Wars“:
It was the beginning of what would be a multiyear project by Rumsfeld and Cheney to separate this small, elite, surgical unit from the broader chain of command and transform it into a global killing machine.
What they developed looked like a paramilitary CIA, according to Scahill’s reporting.
By late 2002 JSOC operators were discreetly based in Qatar and Kenya for potential missions in Yemen and Somalia. It developed an in-house signals intelligence unit, known as the Activity, and Rumsfeld created a JSOC human intelligence collection operation, called the Strategic Support Branch, that mirrored the capabilities of the CIA.
