Obama and Petraeus Running Secret Wars (Updated)

By Steve Hynd

Reading Mark Mazzetti's revelation today that General Petraeus issued secret orders establishing secret  Special Operations Forces groups in "both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa" able to run black, off the books missions including "reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran", I had to wonder.

Have these ops been continuous since 2005 and just expanded incrementaly ever since or did Obama's Pentagon re-read a piece by Seymour Hersh written back then and think "Oh, what a good idea!"?

Back in 2005, investigative reporter Sy Hersh wrote:

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. 

The President�s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books�free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) �The Pentagon doesn�t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,� the former high-level intelligence official said. �They don�t even call it �covert ops��it�s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it�s �black reconnaissance.� 

And today in his follow-up piece to the NYT report, Marc Ambinder writes that the black program is both wider than Mazzetti's front-pager suggests and of entirely questionable legality:

Last summer, the White House authorized a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries and giving the military's combatant commanders significant new authority to conduct unconventional warfare.

The New York Times reported on one major operational plan...Other "ex-ords" signed by combatant commanders include provisions for secret American bases and operations in countries like Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and in the Dagestan region of the North Caucuses.

...There was little opposition to the expansion from the CIA's leadership, which was content to handle its traditional portfolio without having to resort to the type of paramilitary activities that, when revealed, invited intense scrutiny from Congress and the public. One exception is the CIA's Predator Drone program, which an official called a "stealth, but not denied capability." There are a few others.

By contrast, there has been almost no investigation of JSOC's activities during the Bush administration, and there is little oversight of the activities of the terrorism task forces that operate worldwide.

The Times reported that all operations are run by the National Security Staff, though it is not clear how many officials there are aware of the specific details.

"They naively think that because [Obama] told them to do it and to be responsible that they are not going to be unchecked," a military officer in contact with the National Security Staff said. "The real headline is that Petraeus is doing his own thing."

It is unusual for a combatant commander to be given the ability to ask civilians to collect intelligence in countries like Iran. It is not clear under what legal authority he can do so.

The common themes are striking: military black ops, deliberately designed to be beyond oversight, using soldiers out of uniform in both hostile and allied nations, operating under questionable legality, and in part aimed at Iran as well as at the terrorists who were the original justification for the program. And overarching all is the continued incremental takeover of all intelligence functions by the military.

Yet it's clear that Obama didn't just approve all this, but did so enthusiastically. Juan Cole writes:

My own view is that the United States was founded as a government of laws, not men, and that the siren call of covert operations is steadily undermining the rule of law. Blurring the line between military action and spying makes it impossible to talk about the covert missions, since they are typically classiified. The same is true for predator drone strikes.

Military action such as launching drones should be carried out by the uniformed military, not by CIA operatives or, worse, contractors. The former action would allow us to discuss the campaigns as free citizens of a republic. As it is now, often civilian contractors are piloting drones long-distance and we cannot so much as get a straight answer out of the elected officials. Where the US is striking at friendly countries, there should be a Status of Forces agreement to provide a legal framework for the actions.

And intelligence gathering should be carried out by the civilian such agencies. The more you make elements of the military actually intelligence assets, the more likely it is that the lines between them will get strained. That blurring could be bad for all troops. There is already a tendency in the ME for locals to see all Americans as CIA, and giving troops a lot of covert missions will reinforce these views.

I'm with Prof. Cole on that, and with Glenn Greenwald as he explains the lack of debate over such militirization, over the kind of power-grabs that Mazzetti has exposed today and over America's wars in general:

But the most significant factor in understanding this lack of debate is the fact that "war" is not some aberrational, temporary state of affairs for the country.  It's the opposite.  Thanks to Fred Hiatt and his friends, war is basically the permanent American condition:  war is who we are and what we do as a nation.  We're essentially a war fighting state.  We have been at "war" the entire last decade (as well as largley non-stop for the decades which preceded it), and continue now to be at "war" with no end in sight.  That's clearly true of our specific wars (in Afghanistan).  And, worse, the way in which The War, more broadly, has been defined (i.e., against Islamic extremism/those who wish to harm Americans) makes it highly likely that it will never end in our lifetime.  The decree that we are "at war" has been repeated over and over for a full decade, drumbed into our heads from all directions without pause, sanctified as one of those Bipartisan Orthodoxies that nobody can dispute upon pain of having one's Seriousness credentials immediately and irrevocably revoked.  With war this normalized, is it really surprising that nobody debates it any longer?  It'd be like debating the color of the sky.

That's why I always find the War Excuse for anything the Government does so baffling and nonsensical.  Any objections one voices to what the Executive Branch does -- indefinite detentions, presidential assassinations of citizens, extreme secrecy, etc. -- will be met with the justification that such actions are permissible "during wartime," as though "wartime" is some special, temporary, fleeting state of affairs which necessitates vesting powers in the government which, during "normal" times, would be impermissible.  

But the contrast between "war and "normal times" is totally illusory.  For the United States, war is normalcy.  The "war" we're fighting has been defined and designed to be virtually endless. 

That Obama has seen fit to continue arrogating to the Oval Office the ability to decide that Congress should be uninforned about and have no oversight over the U.S. military as it conducts operations in allied, neutral and potentially hostile nations is nothing short of a complete U-turn on the kind of President Obama promised to be and we should be debating it. Instead, the main debate seems to be over whether the NYT should have exposed these covert programs. That's missplacing your priorities, and then some.

Update - Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett:

Mazzetti�s article clearly raises urgent and disturbing questions about the direction of America�s Iran policy under President Obama.  It also provides important context for Iranian actions which are routinely derided in the American media as either paranoid or gratuitously vicious�e.g., the ongoing detention of three American hikers who illegally entered Iran last year, or the detention of the Woodrow Wilson Center�s Haleh Esfandiari in 2007. 

Mazzetti writes that

�General Petraeus�s September order is focused on intelligence gathering�by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others�to identify militants and provide �persistent situational awareness,� while forging ties to local indigenous groups.� 

If that is American policy, exactly how should Iran deal with three Americans who entered the Islamic Republic, without visas, by crossing the Iraqi-Iranian border in an area with no immigration checkpoints?  If what Mazzetti reports is American policy, why is every American academic who visits Iran not a legitimate subject of concern for Iranian security agencies?  We have known Haleh Esfandiari and her husband, Shaul Bakhash, for many years.  We do not believe that she is a security threat to anyone.  But the Bush Administration�s overt efforts to destabilize the Islamic Republic in the name of �democracy promotion�, as well as its anti-Iranian covert campaign, put Haleh in a position in which no innocent American should be placed by his or her government.  The Obama Administration�s policies will only exacerbate the risks to Americans�especially those of Iranian origin�who travel to Iran. 

Not to mention all the many things that could go wrong with sending JSOC teams into Iran...

Update 2 - Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:

If President Obama knew about this, authorized it and still supports it, then Obama has crossed a red line, and the president will stand revealed as an aggressive, militaristic liberal interventionist who bears a closer resemblance to the president he succeeded than to the ephemeral reformer that he pretended to be in 2008, when he ran for office. If he didn�t know, if he didn�t understand the order, and if he�s unwilling to cancel it now that it�s been publicized, then Obama is a feckless incompetent. Take your pick.

If Congress has any guts at all, it will convene immediate investigative hearings into a power grab by Petraeus, a politically ambitious general, and the Pentagon�s arrogant Special Operations team, led by Admiral Eric T. Olson, who collaborated with Petraeus. And Congress needs to ask the White House, What did you know, and when did you know it?

The answers to that pop quiz from Robert are "militaristic interventionist who conned the nation" and "Congress won't ask a damn thing other than 'do we need to vote more deficit money?'"