Shades of right wing death squads, Gulf of Tonkin, and Abu Ghraib.
Note too that the religious nutcase Lt. Gen. Boykin is a Rumsfeld
key deputy in the command chain for commando ops.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_factTHE COMING WARS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
New Yorker Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31
Posted 2005-01-17
<snip>
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off
the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under
current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized
by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House
intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of
scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying
and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon
doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the
former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call
it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their
view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell
the cincs”—the regional American military
commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did
not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
<snip>
“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities
would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said
Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National
Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to
understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the
political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites
as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a
modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who
is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at
the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes
place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States
and a rallying around the regime.”
<snip>
The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert
operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s
a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point
graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the
mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all
such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military
says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions
under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the
President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the
battlefield.”’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith
added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a
covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration
has taken a much more aggressive stance.”
<snip>
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what
it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which
can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you
remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the
former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the
military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early
nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he
said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we
want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former
military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando
capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad
boys.”
<snip>
-----
Definitely recommended reading from the man who broke the Abu Ghraib
scandal wide open. This material deserves to be more widely known.
(on edit, the title, per moderator request. Old title was "Bush Planning Large Scale Covert Military Activities that may be Illegal".)
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