Obama’s Secret Wars

Jumping right in, our first headline is from November of last year, from CNS News:

Fast forwarding to yesterday morning we find this headline from Business Insider:

Al Qaeda is on the run so much that they’re apparently a real threat again just from running around so much, not that the threat ever actually diminished. (Drudge)

There were more drone strikes in Pakistan last month than any month since January. Three missile strikes were carried out in Yemen in the last week alone.

You don’t frighten us, English pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you….You don’t frighten us with your silly knees-bent running around advancing behavior! 🙂

Pop quiz. With whom is the U.S. presently at war?

At any other time in our nation’s history most Americans could have readily answered that question. Great Britain. Mexico. Spain. Germany. North Korea. North Vietnam. Iraq. Even college students who couldn’t name the vice president or their state’s governor would know who their non-college-material buddies were being sent overseas to kill or be killed by. These days the world is a bit more complicated.

There are the easy answers: the Taliban. Al Qaeda. Then the waters get a bit murky. One might justifiably ask if America is at war with Syria, or at least the Syrian government. Despite the fact that a majority of Americans oppose meddling in the Syrian civil war, Congress recently approved arming “vetted elements” of the Syrian opposition. Which vetted elements the Obama Administration intends to arm is anybody’s guess, as is how we intend to keep those arms out of the hands of non-vetted elements.

Are we at war with Iran? A cold war, certainly. What is America’s involvement in Syria’s civil war if not John McCain and Lindsey Graham’s attempt to poke a stick in the eye of Syria’s foremost ally?

What of America’s covert wars? Most experts agree that the U.S. is involved in at least three drone wars against Islamist “elements” in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.

If you ask President Obama who the U.S. is at war with he will usually say “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.” So who are these associated forces? And just how broad is this war we are fighting?

It is not just the American people who are in the dark. Even the U.S. Congress is unsure who America is at war with, Pro Publica’s Cora Currier revealed last week. A clueless Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) recently asked Obama’s Defense Department to provide him with a list of those associated forces. Levin, at length, received the Authorization for Use of Military Force list, but then refused to share it with the press and the American people. Apparently who we are at war with is a state secret.

A Pentagon spokesman later said that the government didn’t want to give those associated forces credibility by naming them. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks,” a spokesman said. That assumes the Islamists who might be expected to join these “associated forces” haven’t heard of these groups either. Or did not find them credible until they made the DOD’s enemies’ list. Jack Goldsmith of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law recently wondered why the U.S. government can acknowledge some enemy groups (al Qaeda and AQAP and elements of al Shabaab) without unduly inflating them, and not others. 

IS IT POSSIBLE that the Obama Administration doesn’t even know all the groups America is at war with? Last May, Michael Sheehan, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that he was “not sure there is a list per se,” notes Currier, and added that it is best to leave who the associated forces are to the experts.

All this secrecy comes at a time when it has been learned — thanks to Edward Snowden — that the NSA has been secretly compiling calling records from cell phone users. The records include who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted — for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. According to the Atlantic, “this ‘metadata’ allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and [to] build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It’s exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.”

Americans have accepted the obsolescence of fighting an old fashioned war on a traditional battlefield against uniformed armies. Now we are asked to go to war without even knowing who the enemy is. (Kinda like that gun-running Benghazi story– was that the Syrians or someone else?) One would think it hard to support (or object to) a war against unknown enemies. But then perhaps that is the point. “The secrecy … deflects painful scrutiny that [the Department of Defense] would rather avoid,” writes Goldsmith. Perhaps the real question we should be asking is, if Americans are not permitted to know who we are at war with, what else aren’t we allowed to know? (Spectator)

 

 

The Itch That Won’t Go Away…

But everyone go fuck themselves, I got mine! 🙂

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Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.

CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.

Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings.

The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.

In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, “You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well.”

Another says, “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation.”

“Agency employees typically are polygraphed every three to four years. Never more than that,” said former CIA operative and CNN analyst Robert Baer.

In other words, the rate of the kind of polygraphs alleged by sources is rare.

“If somebody is being polygraphed every month, or every two months it’s called an issue polygraph, and that means that the polygraph division suspects something, or they’re looking for something, or they’re on a fishing expedition. But it’s absolutely not routine at all to be polygraphed monthly, or bi-monthly,” said Baer.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd asserted in a statement that the agency has been open with Congress.

“The CIA has worked closely with its oversight committees to provide them with an extraordinary amount of information related to the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi,” the statement said.

“CIA employees are always free to speak to Congress if they want,” the statement continued. “The CIA enabled all officers involved in Benghazi the opportunity to meet with Congress. We are not aware of any CIA employee who has experienced retaliation, including any non-routine security procedures, or who has been prevented from sharing a concern with Congress about the Benghazi incident.”

Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack.

A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously.

While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency.

The lack of information and pressure to silence CIA operatives is disturbing to U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, whose district includes CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“I think it is a form of a cover-up, and I think it’s an attempt to push it under the rug, and I think the American people are feeling the same way,” said the Republican.

“We should have the people who were on the scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn’t any national security issue involved with regards to that,” he said.

Wolf has repeatedly gone to the House floor, asking for a select committee to be set-up, a Watergate-style probe involving several intelligence committee investigators assigned to get to the bottom of the failures that took place in Benghazi, and find out just what the State Department and CIA were doing there.

More than 150 fellow Republican members of Congress have signed his request, and just this week eight Republicans sent a letter to the new head of the FBI, James  Comey, asking that he brief Congress within 30 days.

In the aftermath of the attack, Wolf said he was contacted by people closely tied with CIA operatives and contractors who wanted to talk.

Then suddenly, there was silence.

“Initially they were not afraid to come forward. They wanted the opportunity, and they wanted to be subpoenaed, because if you’re subpoenaed, it sort of protects you, you’re forced to come before Congress. Now that’s all changed,” said Wolf.

Lawmakers also want to about know the weapons in Libya, and what happened to them.

Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.

It is clear that two U.S. agencies were operating in Benghazi, one was the State Department, and the other was the CIA.

The State Department told CNN in an e-mail that it was only helping the new Libyan government destroy weapons deemed “damaged, aged or too unsafe retain,” and that it was not involved in any transfer of weapons to other countries.

But the State Department also clearly told CNN, they “can’t speak for any other agencies.”

The CIA would not comment on whether it was involved in the transfer of any weapons.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) was on with Greta Van Susteren Thursday to discuss the Obama scandals.

“Including changing names, creating aliases. Stop and think what things are most calculated to get at the truth? Talk to people with first-hand knowledge. What creates the appearance and perhaps the reality of a cover-up? Not letting us talk with people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them around the country and changing their names.”