Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill

Author:Jeremy Scahill [Scahill, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781568587271
Publisher: Nation Books

BY MID-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations Forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries. SOCOM had about 4,000 people deployed around the world in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan. “The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them,” the Washington Post reported at the time. “Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.”

John Brennan laid out the new counterterrorism vision under the Obama administration: We “will not merely respond after the fact” to terrorist attacks. We will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates wherever they plot and train. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”

Well-placed special operations sources told me that among the countries where JSOC teams had been deployed under the Obama administration were: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Baluchistan) and the Philippines. These teams also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC was also supporting US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. But the two greatest priorities outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan were Yemen and Somalia. “In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions,” a Special Operations source told me in 2010.

One senior military official told the Washington Post that the Obama administration had given the green light for “things that the previous administration did not.” Special Operations commanders, the paper reported, had more direct communication with the White House than they did under Bush. “We have a lot more access,” a military official told the paper. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.” Under Obama, Hunter told me, JSOC was able to hit “harder, faster, quicker, with the full support of the White House.”

While the Obama administration ratcheted up its drone strikes and targeted killing campaign, al Qaeda affiliates were growing stronger, emboldened in part by the US escalation. Although the Obama administration boasted that it had al Qaeda on the ropes, its global assassination program was becoming a recruitment device for the very forces the United States claimed to be destroying.

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