Abolish Secretive Special Ops Forces By Sheldon Richman
http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2015/06/abolish-special-ops-forces.htmlIt’s time to disband the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and all other secretive, unaccountable units of the U.S. imperial military. As is said about lawyers, if we didn’t have these units, we wouldn’t need them. The New York Times reported recently:
Team 6 has successfully carried out thousands of dangerous raids that military leaders credit with weakening militant networks, but its activities have also spurred recurring concerns about excessive killing and civilian deaths.
Afghan villagers and a British commander accused SEALs of indiscriminately killing men in one hamlet; in 2009, team members joined C.I.A. and Afghan paramilitary forces in a raid that left a group of youths dead and inflamed tensions between Afghan and NATO officials. Even an American hostage freed in a dramatic rescue has questioned why the SEALs killed all his captors.
We are expected to trust the government that those operations kill bad guys only. But why should we, when it has done so much to earn our distrust? It has long downplayed the civilian deaths inflicted by drones, bombers, and ground operations. The Times writes:
Even the military’s civilian overseers do not regularly examine the unit’s operations. "This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much," said Harold Koh, the State Department’s former top legal adviser, who provided guidance to the Obama administration on clandestine war.
Here we have a super-secretive unit of killers that is protected from accountability by its own.
William C. Banks, a Syracuse University expert on national-security law, told the Times, "If you’re unacknowledged on the battlefield, you’re not accountable." Members of Congress pretend to keep an eye on the military to prevent criminal behavior—but in fact they are integral to the corrupt system: with eyes turned away, they keep it going with large sums of money. "Waves of money have sluiced through SEAL Team 6 since 2001," the Times writes, "allowing it to significantly expand its ranks—reaching roughly 300 assault troops, called operators, and 1,500 support personnel—to meet new demands." And this is just one unit—though it is the most glamorized, having conducted the raid that reportedly killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011...The Times quotes James G. Stavridis, retired admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, who said, "If you want these forces to do things that occasionally bend the rules of international law, you certainly don’t want that out in public." By "bend the rules," Stavridis means, in the Times’ words, "going into undeclared war zones."
So politicians need secretive military units to fight undeclared wars—which would seem to violate the Constitution. The existence of secretive military units conducting private lethal operations should bother anyone who aspires to live in a free society. Their very nature offends common decency. Yet a propagandized population takes for granted that secrecy is legitimate and necessary for our safety in a terrorism-plagued world. Beyond the obvious objections to secretive military units, there is also this: U.S. intervention in the Muslim world makes people want to kill Americans, as government officials widely acknowledge. Secretive military units allow the national-security elite to engage in actions that provoke violence against Americans confident that Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force will neutralize any retaliatory threat. For our own safety, we must disband these squads of killers.
STOP THE BLOWBACK BY CUTTING OUT THE BLOW AND THE BLOWS....
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bemildred
(90,061 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Wholly owned, seeded or subsidiary.
Put these people to work building roads and hospitals, or something useful like that.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)we really don't know how many because of the total secrecy and even the black budgets that feed them.
newthinking
(3,982 posts)to things like this. (Or to bribery, etc)
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)or how they were taught or told.
With the use of super computers they can play out scenarios that can show them how to pull the wool over the public's eye.
Just try to get a FOIA done these days, the best days were right before Reagan changed the law. Hell.... even my records are classified
and things that were released ... in the 90s on.. which we have the papers on are now redacted ...... even though we have the original one they released with all the info....... think about that...... they redacted pages on their new release of the same page we have in the public record......... where there wasn't a redaction.
newthinking
(3,982 posts)Russia was not the first country to use "little green men".
This *is* the new warfare.
US Special Forces Are Operating in More Countries Than You Can Imagine
http://www.thenation.com/article/195409/us-special-forces-are-operating-more-countries-you-can-imagine
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)
newthinking
(3,982 posts)I don't know how old you are but in my many years it is pretty clear that most of the secretive war activity (not talking about spying etc, but war actions, overthrowing governments etc) fail and/or cause tremendous suffering.
A perfect example of how the "law of the commons" when applied to arms sales and foreign policy does not work is the middle east.
We have led the way to "no (or few) rules"; interests first.
Many countries are in agreement that ISIS needs to be stopped but most everyone involved is making their own plays. This would be easily stopped if all the players were able to get out of the "our interests first" and find ways to work together.
I know that is difficult to do because everything is fucked up. Even who we choose for allies. But this is going to continue until we claw our way out of the Machiavellian approach and beef up our cooperative resources.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)
GGJohn
(9,951 posts)We disband our special forces, what leads you to believe our enemies will do the same?
Sorry, but our SOF are needed in a dangerous world.
newthinking
(3,982 posts)But the idea that every problem can be resolved with them is entirely catastrophic. They should be used with restraint.
Have you read this? A lot has changed in the last 15 years.
US Special Forces Are Operating in More Countries Than You Can Imagine
What do you know about the special forces carrying out a secret war in more than half the nations on the planet?
http://www.thenation.com/article/195409/us-special-forces-are-operating-more-countries-you-can-imagine
As much as I wish other wise; the world is a nasty, brutal place. And we need killers to deal with it. I am sure the sheep thinks the sheep dog that protects the flock is a cruel brute. Until the wolves start howling.
