Source-Rolling Stone.com/The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon does'nt want you to see.
Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?" Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort" – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We've decided to publish it in full; it's well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report's damning opening lines: "Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan." Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is "open source" – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. "If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes," Davis writes. "It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II."
According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he'd been up to. Evidently Davis's truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for "possible security violations," according to NBC News.
Although Davis's critics have tried to brush off his claims as merely the opinions of a "reservist," – as Max Boot put it – his report is full of insight, analysis, and hard data that back up each one of his claims. He details the gross failure of training the Afghan Army, the military's blurring of the lines between public affairs and "information operations" (meaning, essentially, propaganda), and the Pentagon's manipulation of the U.S. media. (He expertly contrasts senior military officials public statements with the actual reality on the ground.) Davis concludes: "It is my recommendation that the United States Congress – the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in particular – should conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the various charges of deception or dishonesty in this report and hold broad hearings as well," he writes. "These hearings need to include the very senior generals and former generals whom I refer to in this report so they can be given every chance to publicly give their version of events." In other words, put the generals under oath, and then see what story they tell.
Michael Hastings is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and author of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan.
_____
Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?" Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort" – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We've decided to publish it in full; it's well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report's damning opening lines: "Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan." Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is "open source" – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. "If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes," Davis writes. "It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II."
According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he'd been up to. Evidently Davis's truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for "possible security violations," according to NBC News.
Although Davis's critics have tried to brush off his claims as merely the opinions of a "reservist," – as Max Boot put it – his report is full of insight, analysis, and hard data that back up each one of his claims. He details the gross failure of training the Afghan Army, the military's blurring of the lines between public affairs and "information operations" (meaning, essentially, propaganda), and the Pentagon's manipulation of the U.S. media. (He expertly contrasts senior military officials public statements with the actual reality on the ground.) Davis concludes: "It is my recommendation that the United States Congress – the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in particular – should conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the various charges of deception or dishonesty in this report and hold broad hearings as well," he writes. "These hearings need to include the very senior generals and former generals whom I refer to in this report so they can be given every chance to publicly give their version of events." In other words, put the generals under oath, and then see what story they tell.
Michael Hastings is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and author of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan.
_____
Source-Wired.com/How the Pentagons Top Killers became Spies.
How The Pentagon’s Top Killers Became (Unaccountable) Spies
By Spencer Ackerman
February 13, 2012 | 6:35 am |
Follow @attackerman
This is what people think of when they imagine the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC — the secretive, über-elite military unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The leader of a JSOC unit in Iraq, known as K-Bar, gets shot in the chest by insurgents. K-Bar waves away his medic until he finishes killing his assailants. His reward? Leading JSOC’s operations in Afghanistan.
Ludicrous acts of superhuman bravado are part of JSOC’s myth and mystique. That mystique is hard to penetrate: JSOC is so secretive that it instructs its members not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. But a new book reveals that killing might not even be the most important thing JSOC does.
Marc Ambinder, a former reporter for The Atlantic and National Journal, goes deep inside JSOC to reveal that it has become perhaps the government’s most effective intelligence agency. Unassuming office buildings around the Washington area and beyond have become unlabeled spy centers that process untold volumes of information extracted from JSOC’s hunting missions, with such a rapid analytic turnaround time that the “shooters” of the unit can quickly begin planning their next kills. In fact, Ambinder reports in The Command, his just-published eBook, the integration of tactical spying within JSOC is so thorough that it’s hard to distinguish “shooters” from analysts.
Yet JSOC operates with practically no accountability. In Iraq, it ran a torture chamber at a place called Camp Nama — until its leader, Stanley McChrystal and his intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, cleaned it up. (There’s a debate in military circles about whether McChrystal or his friend and successor, Adm. William McRaven deserve credit for JSOC’s resurgence; but Ambinder’s reporting suggests Flynn is the real father of the modern JSOC.) The unit is supposed to answer to the chain of command, but it advised President Obama not to ask which Navy SEAL actually killed Osama bin Laden — and then wouldn’t tell Obama’s chief of staff, who ignored the advice. Even while the CIA works intimately with JSOC, it whispers to reporters, self-interestedly, that the unit is out of control.
But JSOC has the biggest trump card of all to play, institutionally: it works. Killing bin Laden was just the culmination of a furious, decade-long pace of lethal operations, involving hundreds of Afghanistan night raids in a single year; what Ambinder describes as a “free hand” in Somalia, including last month’s dramatic hostage rescue; and unseen counterterrorism mission from Pakistan to, of all places, Peru. JSOC is so busy its leadership thinks it’s exhausted, and prominent analysts claim it needs to step up its game to prevent nuclear terrorism.
Danger Room spoke with Ambinder about JSOC’s successes — and the implications for the secretive organization’s expanded reach into the spy world, especially as it becomes the lead force waging America’s Shadow Wars.
Danger Room: How did JSOC become an intelligence agency?
Marc Ambinder: It was born of necessity. As the insurgency in Iraq became too much for commanders to bear, there was a scramble to figure out how to get tactical intelligence out of anyone they captured. And it seemed like the military’s first response, generally, to use a broad over generalization, for the important people, we’ll rough them up. At least they’ll say something, and that’ll give us something tactical. But obviously it didn’t work very well, it’s immoral. They hadn’t really figured out beforehand that [Iraq] would require a lot of tactical intelligence. All the intelligence planning that went on for the Iraq war was strategic.
So there was a huge need for it. Also, there was the timing of it. JSOC was in charge of finding and interrogating high value targets in Iraq. They had just launched internal investigation inside the command into what happened at Camp Nama. There was a lot of sensitivity to the interrogation techniques that were used there. There are different accounts as to how precisely this sort of investigative police directive doctrines became embedded in the minds of the elite, tier-one warriors. But most people give credit to the J2 [intelligence chief] at the time, Gen. Mike Flynn. As he describes it, he would observe your average JSOC operation and you would see insurgents, or whomever, rounded up, put in the same room, with all the stuff they had in their hands, all the pocket litter, would be separated and just kept in a trash bag. And it was brought back to one of the other bases for processing. That was way too inefficient and way too slow for the operational tempo of the insurgents. In his mind, Flynn envisioned the insurgency to be this ever-expanding spider’s web, and the U.S. military would be like this tiny mouse, clawing at one end of it. And you needed to speed up.
DR: How complicit was JSOC in torture?
MA: I would say JSOC was moderately complicit. The number of actual interrogators and tier-one operators who actually participated in torture was very small. Less than 50. But the number of people who knew about it, even in a closed culture like JSOC, had to be much larger. And one of the big questions that still hangs over the head of Gen. McChrystal, who’s otherwise widely admired for turning JSOC around and moving it away from these [torture] techniques, is that it took him seemingly a long time when he took over the command to get his arms around how the command’s interrogation practices were actually working. There’s a legitimate and still open question of how much he knew, and what did about it.
I was able to learn that he did initiate an internal investigation that resulted in about 30 people being disciplined, with some of them kicked out of the military or transferred to other units. Because it’s a secret organization for most part the results of the investigations remain secret. JSOC prefers to keep its record of accountability in-house. But if you look at the time line, and look at what’s public — the torture report from the Senate intelligence committee blacked out all the references to JSOC. Quite clear that even on a senior level, task force commanders in Iraq knew what was going on.
DR: So they torture people until Flynn figures out there’s a better way to get intelligence?
MA: I know that sounds like a neat narrative, and this is a complicated story. But in essence, that is what happened. While you have to say the command was complicit in the rough, bad stuff early on, they figured out what was happening, and they figured out a much better, humane and more effective way of doing it. Then they proselytize it, and make sure rest of the military knows they’re doing it that way. You can’t ever erase the stain of torture, but this command deserves credit for figuring out what to do about it, and how to meet the need for intelligence without roughing people up, and how to get inside the decision loops of the insurgents.
DR: What were some of the intelligence tactics that JSOC would use?
MA: Some of the tactics were as simple as equipping your tier-one operators — i.e., a Delta Force shooter or a SEAL Team Six demolition expert, the elite of the elite — with a camera. Instead of rounding up insurgents, bringing them to one area of a house, they’d have pictures of them exactly where they are, and take pictures what they have on them exactly. They’d keep them with their pocket litter until they were processed. And they’d send pictures back in real time to an intelligence fusion center. The main one in Iraq was in Balad but there were others. And you’d have analyst who could use many of various databases that JSOC had access to, and many that JSOC was building. The common metaphor was that you’re building the airplane as it’s taking off. You built all these databases for intelligence and had secret biometrics processes. There were teams of U.S. intelligence officers who were trying to get as many fingerprints, DNA samples and so forth of anyone in Baghdad as they could. The analysts would be able to create link analysis charts from them.
If you captured Abu So-and-So, you’d be able to say within a minute, “Hey, I know your uncle is this person, who we really want to get to. If you can tell me where this person is right now, we’ll give you a break and even let you go.” And often, that would be what Abu So-and-So would do, because it would be in his best interest. Within maybe 20 minutes, JSOC could launch a second raid targeting the uncle of Abu So-and-So.
At a ground level, those kind of techniques, by 2007-8, were used not just by the elite special operations forces, but also the so-called white special operations forces — Green Berets and other Navy SEAL elements, as well as conventional human intelligence brigades that were attached to combat units.
DR: Is JSOC now the tactical intelligence agency of choice for the U.S. government?
MA: Not only are they the tactical intel of choice, they also have the operational capacity to act on that intelligence. So they generate intelligence, they analyze it, and they act on it, all in one package.
DR: What does that mean for holding JSOC accountable? This is an extraordinarily secretive military unit.
MA: There are a lot of buried caches in West Virginia and Virginia of JSOC documents. I only say that with some exaggeration. This is obviously a command that had to be secret when it was stood up in part because secrecy is the coin of realm when doing one-off special operations. The problem generally here is that by law, JSOC can’t really collect strategic intelligence or intelligence for its own sake, depending on where they are. In the war zone, in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s different; they can collect and use intelligence there. But they also operate outside of designated war zones in North Africa, in South America, in Asia, and they use these intelligence collection techniques there as well.
It’s under the rubric of what they call “Operational Preparation of the Environment.” Which is to say, any time there’s JSOC operation, you don’t want them to fly in blind, so you have to collect some intelligence. But in practice they really stretch that definition. Elements of JSOC run their own human intelligence sources. I didn’t put this in the book, but I had one former senior JSOC operator describing to me a very elaborate JSOC operation in Beirut where a dozen more human sources were recruited to steal a variety of documents, relating to international narcotics trafficking. Which sounds great, until you remember that it’s not law enforcement officers or the CIA doing it, but the U.S. military doing it.
There are legal restrictions on what the CIA can do in terms of covert operations. There has to be a finding, the president has to notify at least the “Gang of Eight” [leaders of the intelligence oversight committees] in Congress. JSOC doesn’t have to do any of that. There is very little accountability for their actions. What’s weird is that many in congress who’d be very sensitive to CIA operations almost treat JSOC as an entity that doesn’t have to submit to oversight. It’s almost like this is the president’s private army, we’ll let the president do what he needs to do. As long as you don’t get in trouble, we’re not gonna ask too many questions.
You don’t want the command to brief members of Congress before every operation. On other hand, regular briefings every three months might give some sense of the military intelligence collection that goes on. And when you collect intelligence, it’s not just satellites that’s listen to conversation. You’re making in a lot of cases very difficult, grey, moral choices like the CIA does all the time. There’s an argument to be made — incidentally, it’s one that Republican [Rep.] Mike Rogers, the head of the House intelligence committee agrees with — for more regular briefings from JSOC, to get a more granular sense of how JSOC uses and distributes the money it’s given for intelligence gathering. He understands that a lot of vital strategic intelligence isn’t being collected by CIA, it’s being collected by JSOC, in pursuit of legitimate objectives without oversight.
DR: Does JSOC need to get better at preventing nuclear terrorism, as some critics you cite allege? You wrote a piece recently that discussed U.S. planning to seize loose Pakistani nukes. Won’t it be JSOC that does that?
MA: Adm. Eric Olson, the former commander of [U.S. Special Operations Command], has begun to express that worry publicly. JSOC has become the world’s premiere counterterrorism force, but other skills have atrophied, and that includes the ability to secure nuclear weapons. The command is aware of that. They will tell you that they still have the same number of people trained to do counterproliferation work. But you can argue that over the past ten years that the amount of counterproliferation work needs to be done, or the level of threat from nuclear proliferation has increased or is rising to the level that requires JSOC to reorient its focus. One argument is that JSOC should be used for special missions, not your average Army Ranger door-knock operation. That’s something Gen. McChrystal came to believe, something I believe Adm. McRaven also agrees with. So I think you’ll see over the next couple years the command reorient itself around counterproliferation.
DR: What does that mean in practice? JSOC is going to swoop into former Soviet states and snatch nuclear material?
MA: They have done that. In practice, though, the real secret of the Pakistan nuclear question is that there’s no way that there are enough trained American — or American and British and Israeli — soldiers to go into Pakistan and seize their nuclear arsenal and render it safe. There’s just no way. It would take an entire army of people who were extremely well trained to do that. But the concern is that, in general, you have proliferation concerns and you have forces that haven’t trained to confront them in a way that they should.
DR: What was JSOC doing in Peru?
MA: My understanding is that they were pursuing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah elements that were laundering money and using Peru as a base of operations for that type of activity throughout South America. Technically JSOC was attached to the embassy through the cover of one of these Defense Intelligence Agency programs. There were [bureaucratic] outposts that Donald Rumsfeld created to expand JSOC’s footprint across the world.
DR: Should we expect to see JSOC become a global strike force, rather than one that operates at the periphery of the war on terror?
MA: Yes. McRaven has not told me this directly, but I believe he wants to turn JSOC into the non-missile equivalent of Prompt Global Strike. If there’s an acute problem somewhere in the world, not just a bunch of people with guns can be there, but an entire integrated military operation can be transported there as a package, with all the branches — communications, intelligence, everything — devoted to the problem and can fix the problem. One gets the sense that the way the administration is budgeting for defense that they agree.
The phrase that’s used all the time is “creating lilypads” across the world, from which you can hop into hot zones if necessary. It’s a way to cope with the reduction in conventional forces. The idea is that elite forces are force multipliers. If you look at the way the command is structured now, with the number of command posts they have throughout the world, it’s hard to see them as anything but a Prompt Global Strike capacity absent active wars. And very soon they’ll have a larger presence in Afghanistan. But absent Iraq, absent Afghanistan over the next couple years, that’s what it’s gonna be. And their focus will be on counter-proliferation, counter-cyber — that’s a word we haven’t really heard before; JSOC is building a cyber capacity — counternarcotics.
I think one of big challenges will be to figure out how you create legal framework for that that allows for a prompt response that at the same time assures accountability. And I would hope members of Congress are thinking about that.
How The Pentagon’s Top Killers Became (Unaccountable) Spies
By Spencer Ackerman
February 13, 2012 | 6:35 am |
Follow @attackerman
This is what people think of when they imagine the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC — the secretive, über-elite military unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The leader of a JSOC unit in Iraq, known as K-Bar, gets shot in the chest by insurgents. K-Bar waves away his medic until he finishes killing his assailants. His reward? Leading JSOC’s operations in Afghanistan.
Ludicrous acts of superhuman bravado are part of JSOC’s myth and mystique. That mystique is hard to penetrate: JSOC is so secretive that it instructs its members not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. But a new book reveals that killing might not even be the most important thing JSOC does.
Marc Ambinder, a former reporter for The Atlantic and National Journal, goes deep inside JSOC to reveal that it has become perhaps the government’s most effective intelligence agency. Unassuming office buildings around the Washington area and beyond have become unlabeled spy centers that process untold volumes of information extracted from JSOC’s hunting missions, with such a rapid analytic turnaround time that the “shooters” of the unit can quickly begin planning their next kills. In fact, Ambinder reports in The Command, his just-published eBook, the integration of tactical spying within JSOC is so thorough that it’s hard to distinguish “shooters” from analysts.
Yet JSOC operates with practically no accountability. In Iraq, it ran a torture chamber at a place called Camp Nama — until its leader, Stanley McChrystal and his intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, cleaned it up. (There’s a debate in military circles about whether McChrystal or his friend and successor, Adm. William McRaven deserve credit for JSOC’s resurgence; but Ambinder’s reporting suggests Flynn is the real father of the modern JSOC.) The unit is supposed to answer to the chain of command, but it advised President Obama not to ask which Navy SEAL actually killed Osama bin Laden — and then wouldn’t tell Obama’s chief of staff, who ignored the advice. Even while the CIA works intimately with JSOC, it whispers to reporters, self-interestedly, that the unit is out of control.
But JSOC has the biggest trump card of all to play, institutionally: it works. Killing bin Laden was just the culmination of a furious, decade-long pace of lethal operations, involving hundreds of Afghanistan night raids in a single year; what Ambinder describes as a “free hand” in Somalia, including last month’s dramatic hostage rescue; and unseen counterterrorism mission from Pakistan to, of all places, Peru. JSOC is so busy its leadership thinks it’s exhausted, and prominent analysts claim it needs to step up its game to prevent nuclear terrorism.
Danger Room spoke with Ambinder about JSOC’s successes — and the implications for the secretive organization’s expanded reach into the spy world, especially as it becomes the lead force waging America’s Shadow Wars.
Danger Room: How did JSOC become an intelligence agency?
Marc Ambinder: It was born of necessity. As the insurgency in Iraq became too much for commanders to bear, there was a scramble to figure out how to get tactical intelligence out of anyone they captured. And it seemed like the military’s first response, generally, to use a broad over generalization, for the important people, we’ll rough them up. At least they’ll say something, and that’ll give us something tactical. But obviously it didn’t work very well, it’s immoral. They hadn’t really figured out beforehand that [Iraq] would require a lot of tactical intelligence. All the intelligence planning that went on for the Iraq war was strategic.
So there was a huge need for it. Also, there was the timing of it. JSOC was in charge of finding and interrogating high value targets in Iraq. They had just launched internal investigation inside the command into what happened at Camp Nama. There was a lot of sensitivity to the interrogation techniques that were used there. There are different accounts as to how precisely this sort of investigative police directive doctrines became embedded in the minds of the elite, tier-one warriors. But most people give credit to the J2 [intelligence chief] at the time, Gen. Mike Flynn. As he describes it, he would observe your average JSOC operation and you would see insurgents, or whomever, rounded up, put in the same room, with all the stuff they had in their hands, all the pocket litter, would be separated and just kept in a trash bag. And it was brought back to one of the other bases for processing. That was way too inefficient and way too slow for the operational tempo of the insurgents. In his mind, Flynn envisioned the insurgency to be this ever-expanding spider’s web, and the U.S. military would be like this tiny mouse, clawing at one end of it. And you needed to speed up.
DR: How complicit was JSOC in torture?
MA: I would say JSOC was moderately complicit. The number of actual interrogators and tier-one operators who actually participated in torture was very small. Less than 50. But the number of people who knew about it, even in a closed culture like JSOC, had to be much larger. And one of the big questions that still hangs over the head of Gen. McChrystal, who’s otherwise widely admired for turning JSOC around and moving it away from these [torture] techniques, is that it took him seemingly a long time when he took over the command to get his arms around how the command’s interrogation practices were actually working. There’s a legitimate and still open question of how much he knew, and what did about it.
I was able to learn that he did initiate an internal investigation that resulted in about 30 people being disciplined, with some of them kicked out of the military or transferred to other units. Because it’s a secret organization for most part the results of the investigations remain secret. JSOC prefers to keep its record of accountability in-house. But if you look at the time line, and look at what’s public — the torture report from the Senate intelligence committee blacked out all the references to JSOC. Quite clear that even on a senior level, task force commanders in Iraq knew what was going on.
DR: So they torture people until Flynn figures out there’s a better way to get intelligence?
MA: I know that sounds like a neat narrative, and this is a complicated story. But in essence, that is what happened. While you have to say the command was complicit in the rough, bad stuff early on, they figured out what was happening, and they figured out a much better, humane and more effective way of doing it. Then they proselytize it, and make sure rest of the military knows they’re doing it that way. You can’t ever erase the stain of torture, but this command deserves credit for figuring out what to do about it, and how to meet the need for intelligence without roughing people up, and how to get inside the decision loops of the insurgents.
DR: What were some of the intelligence tactics that JSOC would use?
MA: Some of the tactics were as simple as equipping your tier-one operators — i.e., a Delta Force shooter or a SEAL Team Six demolition expert, the elite of the elite — with a camera. Instead of rounding up insurgents, bringing them to one area of a house, they’d have pictures of them exactly where they are, and take pictures what they have on them exactly. They’d keep them with their pocket litter until they were processed. And they’d send pictures back in real time to an intelligence fusion center. The main one in Iraq was in Balad but there were others. And you’d have analyst who could use many of various databases that JSOC had access to, and many that JSOC was building. The common metaphor was that you’re building the airplane as it’s taking off. You built all these databases for intelligence and had secret biometrics processes. There were teams of U.S. intelligence officers who were trying to get as many fingerprints, DNA samples and so forth of anyone in Baghdad as they could. The analysts would be able to create link analysis charts from them.
If you captured Abu So-and-So, you’d be able to say within a minute, “Hey, I know your uncle is this person, who we really want to get to. If you can tell me where this person is right now, we’ll give you a break and even let you go.” And often, that would be what Abu So-and-So would do, because it would be in his best interest. Within maybe 20 minutes, JSOC could launch a second raid targeting the uncle of Abu So-and-So.
At a ground level, those kind of techniques, by 2007-8, were used not just by the elite special operations forces, but also the so-called white special operations forces — Green Berets and other Navy SEAL elements, as well as conventional human intelligence brigades that were attached to combat units.
DR: Is JSOC now the tactical intelligence agency of choice for the U.S. government?
MA: Not only are they the tactical intel of choice, they also have the operational capacity to act on that intelligence. So they generate intelligence, they analyze it, and they act on it, all in one package.
DR: What does that mean for holding JSOC accountable? This is an extraordinarily secretive military unit.
MA: There are a lot of buried caches in West Virginia and Virginia of JSOC documents. I only say that with some exaggeration. This is obviously a command that had to be secret when it was stood up in part because secrecy is the coin of realm when doing one-off special operations. The problem generally here is that by law, JSOC can’t really collect strategic intelligence or intelligence for its own sake, depending on where they are. In the war zone, in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s different; they can collect and use intelligence there. But they also operate outside of designated war zones in North Africa, in South America, in Asia, and they use these intelligence collection techniques there as well.
It’s under the rubric of what they call “Operational Preparation of the Environment.” Which is to say, any time there’s JSOC operation, you don’t want them to fly in blind, so you have to collect some intelligence. But in practice they really stretch that definition. Elements of JSOC run their own human intelligence sources. I didn’t put this in the book, but I had one former senior JSOC operator describing to me a very elaborate JSOC operation in Beirut where a dozen more human sources were recruited to steal a variety of documents, relating to international narcotics trafficking. Which sounds great, until you remember that it’s not law enforcement officers or the CIA doing it, but the U.S. military doing it.
There are legal restrictions on what the CIA can do in terms of covert operations. There has to be a finding, the president has to notify at least the “Gang of Eight” [leaders of the intelligence oversight committees] in Congress. JSOC doesn’t have to do any of that. There is very little accountability for their actions. What’s weird is that many in congress who’d be very sensitive to CIA operations almost treat JSOC as an entity that doesn’t have to submit to oversight. It’s almost like this is the president’s private army, we’ll let the president do what he needs to do. As long as you don’t get in trouble, we’re not gonna ask too many questions.
You don’t want the command to brief members of Congress before every operation. On other hand, regular briefings every three months might give some sense of the military intelligence collection that goes on. And when you collect intelligence, it’s not just satellites that’s listen to conversation. You’re making in a lot of cases very difficult, grey, moral choices like the CIA does all the time. There’s an argument to be made — incidentally, it’s one that Republican [Rep.] Mike Rogers, the head of the House intelligence committee agrees with — for more regular briefings from JSOC, to get a more granular sense of how JSOC uses and distributes the money it’s given for intelligence gathering. He understands that a lot of vital strategic intelligence isn’t being collected by CIA, it’s being collected by JSOC, in pursuit of legitimate objectives without oversight.
DR: Does JSOC need to get better at preventing nuclear terrorism, as some critics you cite allege? You wrote a piece recently that discussed U.S. planning to seize loose Pakistani nukes. Won’t it be JSOC that does that?
MA: Adm. Eric Olson, the former commander of [U.S. Special Operations Command], has begun to express that worry publicly. JSOC has become the world’s premiere counterterrorism force, but other skills have atrophied, and that includes the ability to secure nuclear weapons. The command is aware of that. They will tell you that they still have the same number of people trained to do counterproliferation work. But you can argue that over the past ten years that the amount of counterproliferation work needs to be done, or the level of threat from nuclear proliferation has increased or is rising to the level that requires JSOC to reorient its focus. One argument is that JSOC should be used for special missions, not your average Army Ranger door-knock operation. That’s something Gen. McChrystal came to believe, something I believe Adm. McRaven also agrees with. So I think you’ll see over the next couple years the command reorient itself around counterproliferation.
DR: What does that mean in practice? JSOC is going to swoop into former Soviet states and snatch nuclear material?
MA: They have done that. In practice, though, the real secret of the Pakistan nuclear question is that there’s no way that there are enough trained American — or American and British and Israeli — soldiers to go into Pakistan and seize their nuclear arsenal and render it safe. There’s just no way. It would take an entire army of people who were extremely well trained to do that. But the concern is that, in general, you have proliferation concerns and you have forces that haven’t trained to confront them in a way that they should.
DR: What was JSOC doing in Peru?
MA: My understanding is that they were pursuing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah elements that were laundering money and using Peru as a base of operations for that type of activity throughout South America. Technically JSOC was attached to the embassy through the cover of one of these Defense Intelligence Agency programs. There were [bureaucratic] outposts that Donald Rumsfeld created to expand JSOC’s footprint across the world.
DR: Should we expect to see JSOC become a global strike force, rather than one that operates at the periphery of the war on terror?
MA: Yes. McRaven has not told me this directly, but I believe he wants to turn JSOC into the non-missile equivalent of Prompt Global Strike. If there’s an acute problem somewhere in the world, not just a bunch of people with guns can be there, but an entire integrated military operation can be transported there as a package, with all the branches — communications, intelligence, everything — devoted to the problem and can fix the problem. One gets the sense that the way the administration is budgeting for defense that they agree.
The phrase that’s used all the time is “creating lilypads” across the world, from which you can hop into hot zones if necessary. It’s a way to cope with the reduction in conventional forces. The idea is that elite forces are force multipliers. If you look at the way the command is structured now, with the number of command posts they have throughout the world, it’s hard to see them as anything but a Prompt Global Strike capacity absent active wars. And very soon they’ll have a larger presence in Afghanistan. But absent Iraq, absent Afghanistan over the next couple years, that’s what it’s gonna be. And their focus will be on counter-proliferation, counter-cyber — that’s a word we haven’t really heard before; JSOC is building a cyber capacity — counternarcotics.
I think one of big challenges will be to figure out how you create legal framework for that that allows for a prompt response that at the same time assures accountability. And I would hope members of Congress are thinking about that.
Source-Wired.com/Americas Shadow War in East Africa
______
THE STORY OF SAM BROWN-BURNING MAN
______
THE STORY OF SAM BROWN-BURNING MAN
On his first tour of duty in Afghanistan, Sam Brown was set on fire by an improvised explosive device. He survived, only to find himself, like thousands of other vets, doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. Even hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, and little hope.
Then his doctors told him about an experimental treatment, a painkilling video game supposedly more effective than morphine. If successful, it would deliver Brown from his living hell into a strange new world—a digital winter wonderland
BY JAY KIRKPHOTOGRAPHS BY ETHAN LEVITAS
February 2012
At will and sometimes against his will, Sam Brown can return in his mind to that hour in the Kandahar desert when he knelt at the edge of a blast crater and raised his flaming arms to the Afghanistan sky. He'd already run through the macabre slapstick routine of a man on fire, trying to put himself out by rolling on the ground. He'd resorted to pelting his face with fistfuls of sand. That failing, he'd run in helpless circles. Finally he'd dropped to his knees, lifted his arms, and screamed Jesus, save me. Each scream drew fire deeper into his lungs. Behind him his Humvee was a twisted inferno. Bullets whizzed around him. His men were scattering, taking cover, moving dreamily in clouds of so-called moondust, that weird powdery talc, which hung in the air and gave the soldiers the appearance of snowmen. It was going on dusk, and in the fading light the enemy gunfire blazed behind the walls of the village.
Only the day before, Brown's brother, Daniel, had told him, in a phone call, You're invincible, they can't kill you. Best he could remember, he'd always felt invincible. Pretty much right up to the instant they rolled over the IED, he had remained the same man he'd been at West Point. That is, he was a man whose life still had meaning. Every action had been meant to hone him for the glory of battle. Even as varsity stroke, in command of a shell on the rowing team, out on the water every morning at dawn, the sun dripping off his oars, his arms burning as he counted off the strokes, welcoming the pain into his body, bronzed, sculpted, almost too good-looking, he sought hard perfection in himself and those around him.
A diligent cadet who would spend the whole of an afternoon in the library reading about ancient Greek wars in Herodotus, immersed in the virtual reality of history, yearning for his own chance to test his mettle—but that was before eight brain-dead weeks of providing security for the construction of a new FOB in the middle of nowhere, watching bulldozers push sand, anxious for anything to break up the tedium, anything. When he was told his platoon would have to help provide security for a convoy coming through his sector on its way to a hydroelectric dam out in Helmand—delivering turbines, on a hearts-and-minds mission—he was all for the diversion, almost ecstatic when the call came from First Platoon reporting they'd been ambushed and needed backup. Brown had responded immediately. He was on the radio to his lead vehicle when he saw the bright flash. His body went inert as the Humvee lifted into the air. How he escaped from the wreck he couldn't recall.
Kneeling there, on fire, he'd resigned himself to death. All he'd wanted to know was how long? How long would he have to burn? How many more torturous fractions of a second would he have to remain alive?
His gunner, Jensen, had come to his rescue, extinguishing the fire with sand, helping him to his feet. Running for cover, Brown had kept his arms held out in front of him, as if he were carrying an infant that he did not know what to do with. The sleeves of his uniform were burned off, with patches of the desert camo fused to his skin, and the visible bits of his own flesh either meat-raw or charred black. It felt as though his gloves—made of thick leather and fire-retardant Nomex—were somehow cooking his hands.
Crouching behind a wall, he turned to the private beside him and said, "Take my gloves off."
The private hesitated, but then took hold of the glove and started pulling. "Sir," he said, "it's not coming off."
"Take the glove off," First Lieutenant Brown said.
The soldier grimaced but put his strength into it, and the glove came off, and with it, Brown's flesh. They all looked at the glove on the ground and then at his hand. Or tried not to look.
Brown extended the other hand. "This one."
It was dark before vehicles from the other platoon managed to reach them. In the back of a Humvee, Brown watched the hot .50-cal brass shells raining down from the turret. After a few moments, he could hear the battle fading behind, and then they were out bumping across the poppy fields. At one point, Brown caught a glimpse of himself in the side mirror. His hair was ash. His nostrils were black. His face was unrecognizable.
Before the Humvee reached the appointed helicopter landing zone, whatever Brown had been running on was gone. After helping him out of the Humvee and onto a stretcher, Brown's men had wrapped gauze around his eyes to protect them from the flying dust the helicopter would kick up, and when they saw that he was having difficulty breathing, they began to sedate him in preparation to intubate. His arms were too badly burned, so they had to run the IV through his sternum. By the time they heard the Black Hawk and saw its search beam twitching over the poppy fields, the giant blades shredding the dark, the morphine had begun to find its way.
···
Hunter Hoffman hadn't set out to help burn patients. As a cognitive psychologist—who had gotten his start back in the '80s conducting experiments at Princeton to test the mind's ability to discern between real and false memories—he had begun experimenting with virtual reality as a treatment for arachnophobes. Using a VR game he'd designed called SpiderWorld (see box), he had helped a number of individuals so crippled by fear that they had to seal up their windows to sleep. Outfitted with virtual-reality goggles, the patient began at the far end of a virtual kitchen, opposite the counter, upon which was a small, barely visible spider. Once the fight-or-flight response had subsided, the patient could inch closer until he could stand being close enough to see the spider's reflection in the toaster's chrome finish. Hoffman had created a world that people could enter, reemerging with their nightmares erased. It was an artificial world with the power to transform meaning itself in the so-often-insufferable sphere known as the real.
One day in 1994, a colleague of Hoffman's told him he'd been observing patients at a burn center using hypnosis to control pain. His colleague wasn't exactly sure how the treatment worked, but he thought it had something to do with distraction.
"Distraction?" Hoffman said. "I'll show you distraction," and he showed his friend SpiderWorld.
Not long after, Hoffman went to meet the hypnotist himself, who agreed VR sounded like a pretty good idea. On the very first
burn patient they tried, SpiderWorld worked. He simply forgot to think about his pain. Still, stoves and toasters didn't seem right, considering—kind of cruel, really. So Hoffman hired a world builder to make something else, something colder, fireproof.
Later, after Hoffman became director of the Virtual Reality Analgesia Research Center at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory, or HITLab, he had some remarkable success. Using $35,000 goggles—the sort of hardware ordinarily used for training fighter pilots—researchers obtained drops in pain ratings by 30 to 50 percent.
If distraction was the key, why not just use over-the-counter video games for a fraction of the cost? To answer that question, Hoffman had run a control experiment. In his first case study, he had a teenager with a severe flash burn play Nintendo Mario Kart while having five staples removed from a skin graft. The data showed that in terms of reducing pain, anxiety about pain, and time spent thinking about pain, playing Nintendo Mario Kart compared poorly to SpiderWorld. The reason VR was so much more effective than a regular video game came down to a quality called "presence"—that sense of being immersed inside an artificial world.
In 2006, Hoffman presented his findings at a DoD conference on combat-casualty care. The most prominent image Hoffman had played on the screen had been a giant digital snowman, somewhat menacing in mien. Yet it was hard for all the high brass in the room to ignore the two 3-D brain scans comparing activity in the region of the mind known as the pain matrix. In the scan of a patient who had received only conventional opioids during wound care, the matrix was lit up like a cortical pool of lava. The other brain—the brain on VR—was a cooling star. "According to our results," Hoffman said, "VR not only reduces pain perception; it changes the way the brain processes pain signals." A day or so after the conference, he got a call from Colonel John Holcomb, commander of the army's Institute of Surgical Research, or ISR, at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
ISR was a unit born during World War II, in part out of the need to find better ways to treat thermal injuries, in anticipation of the waves of atomic-burn casualties that many reasonable, if gloomy, individuals regarded as inevitable. Ironically, sixty years later, those new techniques were being used more than ever, in response not to the most sophisticated weapons on earth but to the most crudely effective. An approximate 70 percent of injuries and deaths of U.S. troops this decade have involved an IED.
"Hoffman, we need VR," Colonel Holcomb said when he called. "Make it happen. Get it over here."
···
When a man's body explodes in flame, the most visible devastation—the charring, the suppuration, the phantasmagoric melting—takes place on the surface, but the worst damage, the most dangerous and permanent damage, takes place invisibly, under the skin. In the crucible of fire, the body undergoes such a rapid metamorphosis that Major Christopher Maani, chief of anesthesiology at ISR's burn center, likes to compare the physical changes to a kind of satanic fast-forward pregnancy.
"With pregnancy, you have nine months to see how that change is going to happen. You've got swelling, you've got stretching, you've got hormonal changes. With a burn victim, that evolution is so quick. You go from being perfectly where you were five minutes ago, to five minutes after the injury you've got leaking capillary membranes, you've got burn shock, your heart is acting differently, your kidneys are acting differently, your airways are starting to swell. Your mucosae are taking on fluid, so sometimes you get even total body swelling, or anasarca." In anasarca, the body balloons until it looks as if it's going to explode.
Then his doctors told him about an experimental treatment, a painkilling video game supposedly more effective than morphine. If successful, it would deliver Brown from his living hell into a strange new world—a digital winter wonderland
BY JAY KIRKPHOTOGRAPHS BY ETHAN LEVITAS
February 2012
At will and sometimes against his will, Sam Brown can return in his mind to that hour in the Kandahar desert when he knelt at the edge of a blast crater and raised his flaming arms to the Afghanistan sky. He'd already run through the macabre slapstick routine of a man on fire, trying to put himself out by rolling on the ground. He'd resorted to pelting his face with fistfuls of sand. That failing, he'd run in helpless circles. Finally he'd dropped to his knees, lifted his arms, and screamed Jesus, save me. Each scream drew fire deeper into his lungs. Behind him his Humvee was a twisted inferno. Bullets whizzed around him. His men were scattering, taking cover, moving dreamily in clouds of so-called moondust, that weird powdery talc, which hung in the air and gave the soldiers the appearance of snowmen. It was going on dusk, and in the fading light the enemy gunfire blazed behind the walls of the village.
Only the day before, Brown's brother, Daniel, had told him, in a phone call, You're invincible, they can't kill you. Best he could remember, he'd always felt invincible. Pretty much right up to the instant they rolled over the IED, he had remained the same man he'd been at West Point. That is, he was a man whose life still had meaning. Every action had been meant to hone him for the glory of battle. Even as varsity stroke, in command of a shell on the rowing team, out on the water every morning at dawn, the sun dripping off his oars, his arms burning as he counted off the strokes, welcoming the pain into his body, bronzed, sculpted, almost too good-looking, he sought hard perfection in himself and those around him.
A diligent cadet who would spend the whole of an afternoon in the library reading about ancient Greek wars in Herodotus, immersed in the virtual reality of history, yearning for his own chance to test his mettle—but that was before eight brain-dead weeks of providing security for the construction of a new FOB in the middle of nowhere, watching bulldozers push sand, anxious for anything to break up the tedium, anything. When he was told his platoon would have to help provide security for a convoy coming through his sector on its way to a hydroelectric dam out in Helmand—delivering turbines, on a hearts-and-minds mission—he was all for the diversion, almost ecstatic when the call came from First Platoon reporting they'd been ambushed and needed backup. Brown had responded immediately. He was on the radio to his lead vehicle when he saw the bright flash. His body went inert as the Humvee lifted into the air. How he escaped from the wreck he couldn't recall.
Kneeling there, on fire, he'd resigned himself to death. All he'd wanted to know was how long? How long would he have to burn? How many more torturous fractions of a second would he have to remain alive?
His gunner, Jensen, had come to his rescue, extinguishing the fire with sand, helping him to his feet. Running for cover, Brown had kept his arms held out in front of him, as if he were carrying an infant that he did not know what to do with. The sleeves of his uniform were burned off, with patches of the desert camo fused to his skin, and the visible bits of his own flesh either meat-raw or charred black. It felt as though his gloves—made of thick leather and fire-retardant Nomex—were somehow cooking his hands.
Crouching behind a wall, he turned to the private beside him and said, "Take my gloves off."
The private hesitated, but then took hold of the glove and started pulling. "Sir," he said, "it's not coming off."
"Take the glove off," First Lieutenant Brown said.
The soldier grimaced but put his strength into it, and the glove came off, and with it, Brown's flesh. They all looked at the glove on the ground and then at his hand. Or tried not to look.
Brown extended the other hand. "This one."
It was dark before vehicles from the other platoon managed to reach them. In the back of a Humvee, Brown watched the hot .50-cal brass shells raining down from the turret. After a few moments, he could hear the battle fading behind, and then they were out bumping across the poppy fields. At one point, Brown caught a glimpse of himself in the side mirror. His hair was ash. His nostrils were black. His face was unrecognizable.
Before the Humvee reached the appointed helicopter landing zone, whatever Brown had been running on was gone. After helping him out of the Humvee and onto a stretcher, Brown's men had wrapped gauze around his eyes to protect them from the flying dust the helicopter would kick up, and when they saw that he was having difficulty breathing, they began to sedate him in preparation to intubate. His arms were too badly burned, so they had to run the IV through his sternum. By the time they heard the Black Hawk and saw its search beam twitching over the poppy fields, the giant blades shredding the dark, the morphine had begun to find its way.
···
Hunter Hoffman hadn't set out to help burn patients. As a cognitive psychologist—who had gotten his start back in the '80s conducting experiments at Princeton to test the mind's ability to discern between real and false memories—he had begun experimenting with virtual reality as a treatment for arachnophobes. Using a VR game he'd designed called SpiderWorld (see box), he had helped a number of individuals so crippled by fear that they had to seal up their windows to sleep. Outfitted with virtual-reality goggles, the patient began at the far end of a virtual kitchen, opposite the counter, upon which was a small, barely visible spider. Once the fight-or-flight response had subsided, the patient could inch closer until he could stand being close enough to see the spider's reflection in the toaster's chrome finish. Hoffman had created a world that people could enter, reemerging with their nightmares erased. It was an artificial world with the power to transform meaning itself in the so-often-insufferable sphere known as the real.
One day in 1994, a colleague of Hoffman's told him he'd been observing patients at a burn center using hypnosis to control pain. His colleague wasn't exactly sure how the treatment worked, but he thought it had something to do with distraction.
"Distraction?" Hoffman said. "I'll show you distraction," and he showed his friend SpiderWorld.
Not long after, Hoffman went to meet the hypnotist himself, who agreed VR sounded like a pretty good idea. On the very first
burn patient they tried, SpiderWorld worked. He simply forgot to think about his pain. Still, stoves and toasters didn't seem right, considering—kind of cruel, really. So Hoffman hired a world builder to make something else, something colder, fireproof.
Later, after Hoffman became director of the Virtual Reality Analgesia Research Center at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory, or HITLab, he had some remarkable success. Using $35,000 goggles—the sort of hardware ordinarily used for training fighter pilots—researchers obtained drops in pain ratings by 30 to 50 percent.
If distraction was the key, why not just use over-the-counter video games for a fraction of the cost? To answer that question, Hoffman had run a control experiment. In his first case study, he had a teenager with a severe flash burn play Nintendo Mario Kart while having five staples removed from a skin graft. The data showed that in terms of reducing pain, anxiety about pain, and time spent thinking about pain, playing Nintendo Mario Kart compared poorly to SpiderWorld. The reason VR was so much more effective than a regular video game came down to a quality called "presence"—that sense of being immersed inside an artificial world.
In 2006, Hoffman presented his findings at a DoD conference on combat-casualty care. The most prominent image Hoffman had played on the screen had been a giant digital snowman, somewhat menacing in mien. Yet it was hard for all the high brass in the room to ignore the two 3-D brain scans comparing activity in the region of the mind known as the pain matrix. In the scan of a patient who had received only conventional opioids during wound care, the matrix was lit up like a cortical pool of lava. The other brain—the brain on VR—was a cooling star. "According to our results," Hoffman said, "VR not only reduces pain perception; it changes the way the brain processes pain signals." A day or so after the conference, he got a call from Colonel John Holcomb, commander of the army's Institute of Surgical Research, or ISR, at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
ISR was a unit born during World War II, in part out of the need to find better ways to treat thermal injuries, in anticipation of the waves of atomic-burn casualties that many reasonable, if gloomy, individuals regarded as inevitable. Ironically, sixty years later, those new techniques were being used more than ever, in response not to the most sophisticated weapons on earth but to the most crudely effective. An approximate 70 percent of injuries and deaths of U.S. troops this decade have involved an IED.
"Hoffman, we need VR," Colonel Holcomb said when he called. "Make it happen. Get it over here."
···
When a man's body explodes in flame, the most visible devastation—the charring, the suppuration, the phantasmagoric melting—takes place on the surface, but the worst damage, the most dangerous and permanent damage, takes place invisibly, under the skin. In the crucible of fire, the body undergoes such a rapid metamorphosis that Major Christopher Maani, chief of anesthesiology at ISR's burn center, likes to compare the physical changes to a kind of satanic fast-forward pregnancy.
"With pregnancy, you have nine months to see how that change is going to happen. You've got swelling, you've got stretching, you've got hormonal changes. With a burn victim, that evolution is so quick. You go from being perfectly where you were five minutes ago, to five minutes after the injury you've got leaking capillary membranes, you've got burn shock, your heart is acting differently, your kidneys are acting differently, your airways are starting to swell. Your mucosae are taking on fluid, so sometimes you get even total body swelling, or anasarca." In anasarca, the body balloons until it looks as if it's going to explode.
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