Bush WH cooked-up 'secret order' allowing military ops into 15 to 20 countries

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November 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — {snip}

According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.

It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”

The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/washington/10military.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print


Pakistan says U.S. bombing raids against al-Qaeda hampered their own anti-terrorist efforts

November 10, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan is succeeding in its fight against Islamic extremists close to the border with Afghanistan, even though the campaign is being hampered by U.S. missile strikes in the region, the country's president said Monday.

Asif Ali Zardari told The Associated Press in an interview he expects U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to take a "new look" at Pakistan's objections to the missile attacks on suspected al-Qaida and Taliban targets, but that did not know if Obama would halt them.

Since August, the United States is believed to have launched at least 18 missile strikes on militant targets from unmanned drones believed launched from neighboring Afghanistan.

The attacks have killed some militants, but many of the dead have been civilians, Pakistani officials say. U.S. military Gen. David Petraeus said last week that the missile strikes had killed three top extremists leaders.

Pakistani leaders have condemned the strikes.

"We feel that the strikes are an intrusion on our sovereignty which are not appreciated by the people at large, and the first aspect of this war is to win the hearts and mind of the people," Zardari said.

read: http://kdrv.com/news/international/story-62269

[ensho]

1. Obama should get our 'death squads' out of Pakistan

actually they are General Petraeus's death squads. that's his specialty, death squads. he used/uses them in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.


see this article:

http://counterpunch.com/lee11102008.html

-snip-

The traditional preoccupation of the military, killing people and blowing stuff up, is recast as “targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously”. It makes military operations sound more like policework than fighting, and only one of six equally important ingredients in the appetizing and nutritionally well-balanced COIN salad.

This sort of verbiage is important.In the United States, there is a powerful compulsion to shoehorn warmaking into the ranks of admirable activities conducted by good people with fine minds. General Petraeus fulfills an important need, especially for the responsible-liberal quadrant of the commentariat and the incoming Obama administration which, I imagine, will be staffed by Ivy League intellectuals and not be chock-a-block with blood and thunder military types.

For the United States to put up with occupations and COIN/pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that may go on for more than a decade, the public needs to believe that the occupation is some kind of combination of FDR’s New Deal and the superhero Justice League, using American know-how and values to continually improve the economic and security well-being of the peoples in our care. However, in real life, occupation and counter-insurgency are a nasty, degrading, and bloody business. Commanders in a hostile land far from home, intent on protecting their own forces, aren’t always using a surgical scalpel to extract the tumor of insurgency. Sometimes the meat axe is swung indiscriminately, slaughtering patient and bystanders alike. And the proper description of “targeted kinetic activity” is, perhaps, “death squad”.
-snip-
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torture chambers, death squads - our name won't be clean until these are eliminated.