Pentagon's secret war against AQ

[mrmouth]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Since 2004, the Pentagon has used broad, secret authority to carry out about 12 attacks against al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, The New York Times reported on its Web site on Sunday.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants' compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission - captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft - in real time in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center at the agency's headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the CIA, according to senior U.S. officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of CIA-directed operations, senior U.S. officials said.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on evidence not sufficient enough to justify an attack.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policymakers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the U.S. officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that U.S. forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using different classified directives.

According to a senior administration official, the authority was spelled out in a classified document called "al-Qaida 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 obtain approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the order specified a way for Pentagon planners to receive permission 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," the official said, "the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly."

The 2004 order was a step marking the evolution of how the U.S. government sought to kill or capture Qaida 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, Bush issued a classified order authorizing the CIA to kill or capture Qaida militants around the world. By 2003, U.S. intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of al-Qaida's extensive global network, and 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, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaida militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently in recent years, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.

For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaida cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the time, U.S. officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaida operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a "fleeting opportunity" to neutralize the enemy.

Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the results of airstrikes. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, U.S. commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaida operatives had been killed.

But even with the authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.

The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of Navy Seals and Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.

Al-Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan's tribal areas, and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command hastily formulated a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the CIA about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.

Porter J. Goss, the CIA director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the CIA even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.

Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, pressed for years to get commando missions into Pakistan approved. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to U.S. troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for McChrystal, who is now director of the military's Joint Staff, declined to comment.

The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.

Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid in late October, however, was much more significant than the previous raids, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.

Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department about the military's proper role around the world, several administration officials said.

U.S. officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.

Senior officials of the State Department and the CIA voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the CIA had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador's knowledge or approval.

Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where U.S. commandos had not operated before.

Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provided a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries' consent.

Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination between the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.

The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.

Administration officials said that Bush's approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order - separate from the 2004 order - that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the CIA, on the Qaida network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.

Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the CIA to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Bush's top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.

There is no need for a new thread for this. Its off topic, but a good read.

Inside a U.S. hostage rescue mission

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spec ops conducts night raid in Afghanistan mountains

By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer

Posted : Monday Nov 10, 2008 13:45:44 EST

The American businessman lay shackled in a mud hut 8,000 feet up a remote mountain in Afghanistan, armed captors posted inside and outside to prevent any escape attempt.

Earlier in his captivity, he had made a run for it, but — barefoot and much older than the insurgents who held him — he was snatched back before he could get far.

After nearly two months in captivity and out of contact with anyone who cared about him, the hostage reviewed what his fate might hold — whether ransom negotiations or rescue efforts or a miracle might bring him freedom.

“One option was for the money to arrive and be ransomed,” the 61-year-old engineer from Ohio told Military Times, speaking on the condition that he remain anonymous. Another was “that they’d just get tired of me and let me loose.” A third was “some kind of military intervention,” he said. “In my mind I’d given a military intervention a one out of a hundred chance. Not that they couldn’t do it, but they’re busy and I’m not that important a fellow.”

On an airstrip many miles away, however, several twin sets of Chinook helicopter rotor blades were starting to turn as about 60 of America’s most elite troops prepared to prove him wrong. Members of a task force that Military Times agreed not to name, the commandos had been hunting for the businessman since soon after he went missing. Now they were ready to act.

This is the story of one of the most daring and successful U.S. hostage-rescue missions in years.

Stopped on the road

The American businessman and his Afghan partner in an engineering firm that employed 15 locals were driving home Aug. 20 from a funeral in Wardak province when they were stopped along the road by an armed man.
“Initially, there was one armed man who stopped us and demanded papers from my partner,” the American businessman said in a Nov. 6 telephone interview.

“That happens fairly often in Afghanistan,” said the businessman, who had worked in the country for nine years. “I didn’t think too much about it. ... Then he wanted to see my papers.”

After the gunman took an inordinate time examining his documents, the American realized something was wrong. “Things weren’t going the way they normally went,” he said. “We were taken to a local hiding place” and then to a more remote location.

The hostage-takers were no mere criminals, but members of the Hezb-i-Islami (Party of Islam) militant group of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a special operations officer familiar with the mission said.

A radical Islamist warlord, Hekmatyar was a principal beneficiary of U.S. covert aid during the war fought by Afghan mujahidin against the Soviet and Afghan communist forces in the 1980s but is now relentlessly hunted by U.S. forces along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The American’s wife, who worked with him in Afghanistan, realized something had happened to her husband when he failed to return home. At first, she and others close to him tried to negotiate through third parties with the kidnappers. Within about five days, the engineer’s Afghan partner was released when the duo’s company paid a ransom for him, but the kidnappers didn’t seem interested in exchanging the American for cash.

“I’m an American and America’s been bombing them and they can’t get back, so if they get hold of an American, they’d like to get back at him,” the engineer said. “We’ve taken a lot of Afghan blood, so they wanted mine.”

In captivity

The task force was notified almost immediately of the kidnapping, which was kept quiet out of concern that publicizing it might place the hostage’s life in jeopardy and make locating him more difficult, the special operations officer said.

For five days, the kidnappers frequently moved their prisoners around the mountains. Then, after releasing the Afghan hostage, they kept the American in an open-air location for about 45 to 50 days, the businessman said. The kidnappers treated him “reasonably well,” he said. “The food was bread and water, ... but for some reason, my bread always turned out stale. ... Their bread when it’s fresh is good stuff, but after three days old, it’s not much fun anymore.”

Most of the time, two kidnappers were present. “I had one fellow who was with me the whole time — a young guy — and a second young fellow who was often with me, but not always,” he said. “Sometimes they traded off.”
At first, the kidnappers allowed the hostage to keep his hands and feet free, but then they put a chain and two padlocks around his legs. One day, when his captors had left him alone, the engineer broke the padlocks and tried to escape. He made it part way to the nearest house when one kidnapper saw him.

“The guy finally showed up and saw me going down across the valley, and his being about 21 years old and I’m 61, he kind of gained on me,” the engineer said. “I was barefoot, too. ... After that, they tied me up a lot more.”

The kidnappers eventually demanded a ransom for the engineer’s release that far exceeded what had been paid to secure his partner’s freedom. Deadlines came and went. “These fellows wanted either blood or money, and they weren’t getting it that way,” the engineer said.

After about 30 days, frustrated with the slow pace of negotiations, they let the engineer use a cell phone to call his wife.

It was the first of four calls to her he was permitted, allowing him to pass information to her in English, a language his captors did not understand.
The kidnappers moved the engineer for the last time about Oct. 9 or 10, when they put him in a one-room mud hut on a mountainside in Wardak’s Nirkh district, about 30 miles west of Kabul. Roughly a day later, he made the final call to his wife.

Those searching for him at last had a bead on where he was being held.
“The task force was able to locate [the hostage] using a variety of information collection measures,” the special operations officer said. He declined to be more specific, other than to say that human intelligence gathered mostly by Afghan security forces was a key factor, and the FBI also “played a very important role,” he said.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment, .but the engineer said that five or six days after he was kidnapped, his wife returned to the U.S., where she worked closely with the FBI.

Planning the rescue

Meanwhile, at a base in Afghanistan, the task force was planning an operation to free the American captive. But although hostage rescue falls squarely within the mission profile of the units that comprised the task force, any operation to liberate him promised to be extremely demanding.
“Although these men are combat-tested and have executed literally hundreds of kill/capture missions, hostage rescue is completely different,” the special operations officer said. “The pucker factor is significantly higher.”

Surrounded by “treacherous terrain,” the kidnappers’ location represented the most challenging aspect of the rescue mission, he said.

But the rugged remoteness of their hideaway appears to have led to fatal overconfidence among the American’s kidnappers.

“He had captors who thought we wouldn’t be able to deal with that terrain,” the special operations officer said.

That, the officer added, was a mistake. Seven years of experience in Afghanistan have enabled U.S. special operators to adapt to the unforgiving landscape.

“The terrain is really not a challenge any more,” he said. “It slows you down, but it slows them down, too.”

Nevertheless, the kidnappers apparently felt secure enough in their mountain lair to stay put for an extended period, rather than move their captive every day or two.

The ‘gold nugget’

This meant that unlike many similar situations in the past, the “gold nugget of information” regarding the hostage’s whereabouts did not quickly become outdated, said a civilian source familiar with the operation.

“The intel remained current for a more-than-expected amount of time,” allowing the task force time to plan the rescue, the civilian source said.
The element of surprise would prove critical.

As night fell Oct. 14, three Chinook helicopters flew into the mountains and inserted roughly 24 to 30 special operators — most of them Navy SEALs — about three miles from the kidnappers’ hideout to minimize the chance of being seen or heard.

As midnight came and went, the operators climbed slowly toward the objective for 4½ hours. At that altitude, the special operations officer said, “You can’t exactly exert yourself too much or you’ll be spent.” The commandos ascended 2,000 feet before pausing roughly 275 yards from the target.

There they established an objective rally point — typically, the site where a spec ops force stows unnecessary gear and puts security teams out while those making the final approach to the target transform into “pure assault mode,” said a source familiar with such missions.

From the ORP, an assault force of seven operators — all or almost all SEALs, according to the special operations officer — crept toward the objective.

Swift and sure

One of the commandos tossed a pebble against the hut’s tin door — a traditional way visitors announce their arrival in rural Afghanistan.
The rattle of the stone against the door failed to rouse the guards. “They were both zipped up inside their sleeping bags, sleeping,” one behind the hostage on the floor of the darkened hut and the other outside, the engineer said. But their prisoner was awake and suddenly alert.

“I heard the latch rattling and somebody came in,” he said. “The first guy came in with a LED light, and I just presumed that somebody was coming to visit. I didn’t think of it anymore until the second guy came in and I saw the silhouette of the first fellow. Then I knew it was U.S. mil that was coming in. I don’t know how many guys actually came into the room, but it was soon filled up, and it was soon obvious that I was being rescued.

“I don’t know what I said in English, but whatever I said I said it rather loudly evidently, because they said ‘Quiet!’ ”

The hostage’s aim was to quickly let the operators know who he was, but he understood their unease at the level of volume. “Sound carries so far, and they’d worked so hard to come down quietly across the mountain, and here I am shouting,” he said.

Nevertheless, “They knew who was who,” the engineer said. the SEALs quickly demonstrated that, aiming their silencer-equipped weapons to shoot and kill the kidnapper in the room before he could fire a round. The engineer said he heard the sounds of the operators shooting and killing a guard posted outside.

The SEALs turned to the now former hostage and told him they were there to take him back.

“I was in favor of that, 100 percent,” he said. “I was very surprised, very amazed and very happy.”

It was about 3 a.m. The operators and the newly liberated hostage began walking to the pick-up zone.

“Because of not having much exercise, I was doing OK, but I wasn’t doing good by their standards,” the engineer said.

“They saw a place that was wide enough to come down in with a helicopter and drop a cable down for me,” the engineer said.

But, the special operations officer said, bringing a Chinook to a hover at 8,000 feet at night in blackout conditions was “not an easy task” and was a testament to the aircrew’s skill.

the rescued hostage soon was safely back at the task force’s main base, where the task force gave him a thorough medical evaluation before turning him over to the U.S. Embassy.

Those in the task force were elated. The operation had been a spectacular success. The hostage was rescued unharmed and no friendly forces or non-combatants were hurt.

“It was a huge, huge win,” said the special operations officer, who described the rescue as “a perfect example of interagency cooperation across the board.”

Although the special operations forces had performed superbly, other organizations deserved to share the credit for the mission’s success, he said.

“To attribute the success of this to [special] operators or to a particular unit would be disingenuous,” he said. “They would never have gotten there or have been able to finish this without a whole lot of other people playing a key role.”

Although the task force viewed the mission as “an overwhelming success,” as the special operations officer put it, military sources said U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood did not want to publicize the operation after it was over.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment. But military sources said Wood’s view was that any publicity of Americans taken hostage in Afghanistan, even those who are rescued, encourages “the bad guys” to take more hostages and scares off Americans and other westerners from visiting or working in Afghanistan.
The special operators see the Oct. 15 rescue differently. To them, the fact that U.S. forces were able to rescue an American hostage from a location where the kidnappers felt secure “sends a very clear message to any extremist groups that [kidnapping Americans] will be handled with vigilance and unrelenting persecution,” said the special operations officer.

The kidnappers, he said, “paid a pretty heavy price for trying to pull in some money.”

[Caelius]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Since 2004, the Pentagon has used broad, secret authority to carry out about 12 attacks against al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, The New York Times reported on its Web site on Sunday.

Its good to know that one can always count on the NYT to willfully leak classified information in order to generate a story.....

[Boer]

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, we should go after al Qaeda where ever it is. On the other hand, launching operations in other countries is a good way to lose their cooperation (assuming they were giving us any), especially since the nature of this war means that we often wind up killing some civilians along with our targets. I just hope none of our guys get caught in side a country and paraded around as "evidence" that we are trying to undermine their government.

Its good to know that one can always count on the NYT to willfully leak classified information in order to generate a story.....

Would you rather have the government pulling all kinds of (this kind and domestically) and no one knowing.

[mrmouth]

Its good to know that one can always count on the NYT to willfully leak classified information in order to generate a story.....

Hear you, but I don't know if it changes much in terms of running successful future ops.

Public perception wise, it could be bad. I don't think many will notice though.