By Rachel Maddow interviews Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
Courtesy of "Information Clearing House"
"We're killing the wrong people and we're killing the wrong people in the wrong countries"
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, was chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell. He says he heard “echoes” of the program from US ambassadors abroad, who informed him that clandestine military teams were being dispatched to their countries.
“It’s laughable [the idea] that the CIA has never lied to Congress,” Wilkerson quipped. “They lie to Congress on a routine basis,” said Wilkerson. Historically, it’s presidents that take the fall when the CIA lies to Congress. Wilkerson says it’s unprecedented for a vice president to fill that role as Cheney appears to have done.
This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast July 14, 2009.
CIA Was a Long Way From Jason Bourne
The agency tried to assemble a team of anti-terrorist assassins. But officials could not solve logistical problems, including how to get close to targets while keeping U.S. involvement secret.
By Greg Miller
July 16, 2009
But details that spilled out this week about a real CIA assassination program indicate that when the plotting is being done by spies instead of screenwriters, the obstacles are not so easy to surmount.
According to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, the CIA spent seven years trying to assemble teams capable of killing the world's most wanted terrorists but could never find a formula that worked.
The struggles came during a period in which the agency had been given unprecedented authority and resources, and a cause -- responding to the Sept. 11 attacks -- with broad public support.
But officials could not solve daunting logistical problems, including how to get teams close to their targets while keeping U.S. involvement secret and being able to extract them safely if they succeeded in killing a terrorist.
In interviews, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the aim of the effort was broader than has been described in newspaper accounts this week.
In particular, officials said, ambitions for the program expanded to include creating teams that were made up not only of CIA personnel but counterparts from other countries, presumably Pakistan; and to be capable not just of killing high-value targets but also executing raids and other operations to gather evidence and intelligence that might lead to elusive Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.
Former officials said support for the program persisted in recent years largely because it could compensate for a crucial shortcoming in the ongoing campaign of Predator strikes. The drones had emerged as a potent weapon against Al Qaeda in Pakistan but had failed to bring the agency closer to Bin Laden.
"The bottom line is that you've still got No. 1 and No. 2 out there," one former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said. "If all you do is blow stuff up and burn stuff up, you never get information that could lead you to the prize."
As a result, CIA leaders continued to pursue the idea of elite paramilitary teams that could mount lethal operations on short notice but also quietly capture lower-ranking Al Qaeda members and raid sites struck by Predator missiles to gather any intelligence material left behind.
"If I can just get in there and get information off the ground, I might find one piece of information that's going to lead me to the prize," the former official said.
The broader dimensions of the program may account for why some lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have been critical of CIA Director Leon E. Panetta's decision last month to kill it.
House Democrats, angry that the program was kept secret from Congress, at least partially at the urging of former Vice President Dick Cheney, have threatened an investigation.
Lawmakers on Wednesday continued sparring over Cheney's role and whether Congress had been properly briefed.
The CIA said the program was never of substantial value to U.S. efforts.
"The program [Panetta] killed was never fully operational and never took a single terrorist off the battlefield," said George Little, a CIA spokesman. "We've had a string of successes against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and that program didn't contribute to any of them."
The broader objectives of the program may also help to explain why top counter-terrorism officials saw a need for the CIA to develop its own elite paramilitary teams, rather than relying on U.S. military special operations troops deployed across Afghanistan.
Former intelligence officials said there were intermittent discussions about having special operations troops assigned to the CIA as part of the program, but it was not clear how far those plans progressed.
A second former official with extensive knowledge of the CIA effort said it was seen as crucial that the units reside within the CIA so that the U.S. government would be able to deny involvement if a team were exposed or captured.
Special operations forces routinely carry out clandestine missions, but unlike their CIA counterparts they operate with the expectation that their ties to the U.S. government will not be denied if the mission breaks down.
"Keeping activities like this secret is the biggest challenge," said the second former U.S. intelligence official.
The vulnerability of being far removed from U.S. protection was seen as another major barrier to the success of the program.
Even if an assassination team were deployed and succeeded in killing a senior Al Qaeda figure, "what happens to the shooter?" said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official. "We don't send people on suicide missions. I'm sure they were troubled by how to get the guy out of there."
In its initial conception, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA program was seen mainly as an effort to assemble teams capable of carrying out targeted killings. But officials have said that it went through multiple "iterations."
Most recently, the program's focus had shifted toward intelligence collection, officials said, the latest in a series of efforts toward the end of the George W. Bush administration to find Bin Laden.
In that respect, some officials thought the program could replicate on a small scale the successful formula that the U.S. military had employed as part of the "surge" in Iraq, carrying out raids, exploiting the information gathered, and launching follow-up operations in swift succession.
However, different objectives brought different challenges, officials said, including how to get the right mix of personnel that could operate in the badlands of Pakistan without being captured or exposed.
Former officials declined to say whether the CIA had ever held discussions with Pakistan about setting up hybrid teams with members of the Pakistani military or its main spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence. But one former official said that few officials thought the initiative could succeed solely with U.S. personnel.
"If you're born in Kansas, you're always from Kansas," the former official said. "I don't care you long you grow your beard, you're still from Kansas."
The CIA has sought to carry out assassinations at various times in its history, most notably during the 1960s when it launched a series of botched attempts to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
The agency has traditionally had paramilitary capabilities as part of its Special Activities Division, which swelled in size after the Sept. 11 attacks and is made up mainly of former members of U.S. military special operations forces.
But carrying out close-range killings "is something they don't really have a capacity for," said a former senior CIA official. "There really isn't Jason Bourne walking around doing stuff like this. The paramilitary guys are mostly retired forces; they're more for training and working with the Kurds (an ethnic group in northern Iraq) and things like that."
The commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks cited a series of botched attempts to kill Bin Laden in the late 1990s. The CIA's struggles with the secret program show that "the practical obstacles of setting this up are formidable," said Philip Zelikow, who was staff director of the commission.
Citing the contrast with depictions in Hollywood, Zelikow said the agency's efforts served as "one of the more spectacular demonstrations of the real world versus the imagined world of government omnipotence."
greg.miller@latimes.com
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Manhunt in Iraq: Israel Trains U.S. Assassination Squads
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reveals how a new Special Forces group assembled to “neutralize” Iraqi resistance is working with Israeli commandoes to train in assassination and other tactics – comparable to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. One of the key planners is Lt Gen. William Boykin who declared that Bush was not elected but appointed by God.
12/09/03
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“The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.
“The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls ‘Manhunts’ — a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.
“One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq.”
- Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New Yorker. His latest piece is titled "Manhunt in Iraq"
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, call 1 (800) 881-2359.
Israel Trains US Assassination Squads in IraqBy Julian Borger in Washington
December 09, 2009
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"
Israeli advisers are helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, US intelligence and military sources said yesterday.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has sent urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of US special forces, and according to two sources, Israeli military "consultants" have also visited Iraq.
US forces in Iraq's Sunni triangle have already begun to use tactics that echo Israeli operations in the occupied territories, sealing off centres of resistance with razor wire and razing buildings from where attacks have been launched against US troops.
But the secret war in Iraq is about to get much tougher, in the hope of suppressing the Ba'athist-led insurgency ahead of next November's presidential elections.
US special forces teams are already behind the lines inside Syria attempting to kill foreign jihadists before they cross the border, and a group focused on the "neutralisation" of guerrilla leaders is being set up, according to sources familiar with the operations.
"This is basically an assassination programme. That is what is being conceptualised here. This is a hunter-killer team," said a former senior US intelligence official, who added that he feared the new tactics and enhanced cooperation with Israel would only inflame a volatile situation in the Middle East.
"It is bonkers, insane. Here we are - we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world, and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."
"They are being trained by Israelis in Fort Bragg," a well-informed intelligence source in Washington said.
"Some Israelis went to Iraq as well, not to do training, but for providing consultations."
The consultants' visit to Iraq was confirmed by another US source who was in contact with American officials there.
The Pentagon did not return calls seeking comment, but a military planner, Brigadier General Michael Vane, mentioned the cooperation with Israel in a letter to Army magazine in July about the Iraq counter-insurgency campaign.
"We recently travelled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas," wrote General Vane, deputy chief of staff at the army's training and doctrine command.
An Israeli official said the IDF regularly shared its experience in the West Bank and Gaza with the US armed forces, but said he could not comment about cooperation in Iraq.
"When we do activities, the US military attaches in Tel Aviv are interested. I assume it's the same as the British. That's the way allies work. The special forces come to our people and say, do debrief on an operation we have done," the official said.
"Does it affect Iraq? It's not in our interest or the American interest or in anyone's interest to go into that. It would just fit in with jihadist prejudices."
Colonel Ralph Peters, a former army intelligence officer and a critic of Pentagon policy in Iraq, said yesterday there was nothing wrong with learning lessons wherever possible.
"When we turn to anyone for insights, it doesn't mean we blindly accept it," Col Peters said. "But I think what you're seeing is a new realism. The American tendency is to try to win all the hearts and minds. In Iraq, there are just some hearts and minds you can't win. Within the bounds of human rights, if you do make an example of certain villages it gets the attention of the others, and attacks have gone down in the area."
The new counter-insurgency unit made up of elite troops being put together in the Pentagon is called Task Force 121, New Yorker magazine reported in yesterday's edition.
One of the planners behind the offensive is a highly controversial figure, whose role is likely to inflame Muslim opinion: Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin.
In October, there were calls for his resignation after he told a church congregation in Oregon that the US was at war with Satan, who "wants to destroy us as a Christian army".
"He's been promoted a rank above his abilities," he said. "Some generals are pretty good on battlefield but are disastrous nearer the source of power."
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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