JSoc:
Obama's secret assassins
The president has a clandestine
network targeting a 'kill list' justified by secret laws. How is that different
than a death squad?
US Navy Seals on a night mission in the Middle East. Seal
Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden, is a secret elite unit that works closely
with the CIA. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
The
film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in
the global "war on terror". It is also a record of something scary
for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our
nation's contemporary history.
Though
they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered
the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the
potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way.
The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US
assassins,
armed with ever-expanding "kill lists". It was JSoc that ran the
operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.
Scahill
and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and
insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who
are shell-shocked at how the "kill lists" they are given keep
expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.
Our
conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are
accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear
chain of command. As much as the US
military
may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness
compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of
extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.
JSoc
morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military
contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army,
into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state
resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more "flexibility" to expand its
operations globally.
JSoc
operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the
president of the United
States.
In the words of Wired magazine:
"JSoc operates with
practically no accountability."
Scahill
calls JSoc the president's "paramilitary". Its budget, which may be
in the billions, is secret.
What
does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force,
which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world? JSoc has already been sent
to kill at least one US citizen – one who had been indicted for no crime, but
was condemned for propagandizing for al-Qaida. Anwar al-Awlaki, on JSoc's "kill list" since 2010,
was killed by CIA-controlled drone attack in September 2011;
his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – also a US citizen – was killed by a US
drone two weeks later.
This
arrangement – where death squads roam under the sole control of the executive –
is one definition of dictatorship. It now has the potential to threaten critics
of the US anywhere in the world.
The
film reveals some of these dangers: Scahill, writing in the Nation, reported that President Obama called Yemen's President Saleh in 2011 to express
"concern" about jailed reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye. US
spokespeople have confirmed the US interest in keeping him in prison.
Shaye,
a Yemeni journalist based in Sana'a, had a reputation for independent
journalism through his neutral interviewing of al-Qaida operatives, and of
critics of US policy such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Journalist colleagues in Yemen
dismiss the notion of any terrorist affiliation: Shaye had worked for the
Washington Post, ABC news, al-Jazeera, and other major media outlets.
Shaye
went to al-Majala in Yemen, where a missile strike had killed a group that the
US had called "al-Qaida". "What he discovered," reports Scahill, "were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise
missiles and cluster bombs … some of them bearing the label 'Made in the USA',
and distributed the photos to international media outlets."
Fourteen
women and 21 children were killed. "Whether anyone actually active in
al-Qaida was killed remains hotly contested." Shortly afterwards, Shaye
was kidnapped and beaten by Yemeni security forces. In a trial that was
criticized internationally by reporters' groups and human rights organizations,
he was accused of terrorism. Shaye is currently serving a five-year sentence.
Scahill
and Rowley got to the bars of Shaye's cell to interview him, before the camera
goes dark (in almost every scene, they put their lives at risk). This might
also bring to mind the fates of Sami al-Haj of al-Jazeera, also kidnapped, and sent to Guantánamo, and
of Julian Assange, trapped in asylum in Ecuador's London embassy.
President
Obama thus helped put a respected reporter in prison for reporting critically
on JSoc's activities. The most disturbing issue of all, however, is the
documentation of the "secret laws" now facilitating these abuses of
American power: Scahill succeeds in getting Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the
Senate intelligence committee, to confirm the fact that there are secret legal opinions governing the use of drones in
targeted assassinations that, he says, Americans would be "very
surprised" to know about. This is not the first time Wyden has issued this
warning.
In
2011, Wyden sought an amendment to the USA Patriot Act titled requiring the US government "to
end practice of secretly interpreting law". Wyden warns that there is now a system of law beneath or behind the law that we can see
and debate:
"It is impossible for
Congress to hold an informed public debate on the Patriot Act when there is a
significant gap between what most Americans believe the law says and what the
government is using the law to do. In fact, I believe many members of Congress
who have voted on this issue would be stunned to know how the Patriot Act is
being interpreted and applied."Even secret operations need to be conducted within the bounds of established, publicly understood law. Any time there is a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly thinks the law says, I believe you have a serious problem."
I
have often wondered, since I first wrote about America's slide toward fascism, what was driving it. I saw the symptoms but
not the cause. Scahill's and Rowley's brave, transformational film reveals the
prime movers at work. The US executive now has a network of secret laws, secret
budgets, secret kill lists, and a well-funded, globally deployed army of secret
teams of assassins. That is precisely the driving force working behind what we
can see. Is fascism really too strong a word to describe it?
•
This article originally referred to Scahill and Rowley's documentary as Secret
Wars; this was amended to Dirty Wars at 5.20pm ET on 3 February. The phrase
"US kill list" in the subhead was also amended to "kill
list" in order to remove possible ambiguity
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