Task Force 7 from Tosh

[Magda Hassan]

Magda: This was the unit I posted about their Mexico operations of last year (2009) in reference to Mexico's drug war. FWIW


"...... MAJ. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


".... Tosh It seems you were right on last year when you mentioned Task Force 7
The State Department said your were nuts there was no Task Force in reference to Mexico.
Could this be why justice is looking at you because State ratted you out? Hang tight friend C0-15.....".


http://www.thenation.com/blog/obamas-exp...overt-wars


The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration has substantially expanded the role of US special operations forces across the globe as part of what the paper calls Washington's "secret war" against al Qaeda and other radical organizations. Obama, according to the paper, has increased the presence of special forces from 60 countries to 75 countries. US Special Forces, the paper reports, have about 4,000 people in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan. "The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them," according to thePost. "Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group."
The expansion of special forces includes both traditional special forces, often used in training missions, and those known for carrying out covert and lethal, "direct actions." The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Balochistan) and the Philippines. These teams have also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC has also supported US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. The frontline for these forces at the moment, sources say, are Yemen and Somalia. "In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions," said a special operations source. "JSOC does a lot in Pakistan too." Additionally, these US special forces at times work alongside other nations' special operations forces in conducting missions in their home countries. A US special operations source described one such action where US forces teamed up with Georgian forces hunting Chechen rebels.
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Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater...





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One senior military official told The Washington Post that the Obama administration has given the green light for "things that the previous administration did not." Special operations commanders, the paper reports, have more direct access to the White House than they did under Bush. "We have a lot more access," a military official told the paper. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."
According to the Post: "The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States 'will not merely respond after the fact' of a terrorist attack but will 'take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.'"
Sources working with US special operations forces told The Nation that the Obama administration's expansion of special forces activities globally has been authorized under a classified order dating back to the Bush administration. Originally signed in early 2004 by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is known as the “AQN ExOrd," or Al Qaeda NetworkExecute Order. The AQN ExOrd was intended to cut through bureaucratic and legal processes, allowing US special forces to move into denied areas or countries beyond the official battle zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The ExOrd spells out that we reserve the right to unilaterally act against al Qaeda and its affiliates anywhere in the world that they operate," said one special forces source. The current mindset in the White House, he said, is that "the Pentagon is already empowered to do these things, so let JSOC off the leash. And that's what this White House has done." He added: "JSOC has been more empowered more under this administration than any other in recent history. No question."
The AQN ExOrd was drafted in 2003, primarily by the Special Operations Command and the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict and was promoted by neoconservative officials such as former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone as a justification for special forces operating covertly--and lethally--across the globe. Part of the order provides for what a source called "hot pursuit," similar to how some state police are permitted to cross borders into another state to pursue a suspect. "That's essentially what they have where they're chasing someone in Somalia and he moves over into Ethiopia or Eritrea, you can go after him," says the source.
"The Obama administration took the 2003 order and went above and beyond," says the special forces source. "The world is the battlefield, we've returned to that," he adds, referring to the Obama administration's strategy. "We were moving away from it for a little bit, but Cambone's 'preparing the battlefield' is still alive and well. It's embraced by this administration."
Under the Bush administration, JSOC and its then-commander Stanley McChrystal, were reportedly coordinating much of their activity with vice president Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Under the Obama administration, that relationship seems to have been more formalized with the administration as a whole. That's a change, as the Post notes, from the Bush era "when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." As a special operations source toldThe Nation, "It used to be the strategy was to insulate the president, now they directly interface with these people regularly."
Sources say that much of the most sensitive and lethal operations conducted by JSOC are carried out by Task Force 714, which was once commanded by Gen. McChrystal, the current commander of the war in Afghanistan. Under the Obama administration, according to sources, TF-714 has expanded and recently changed its classified name. The Task Force's budge has reportedly expanded 40% on the request of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and has added additional forces. "It was at Mullen's request and they can do more now," according to a special forces source. "You don't have to work out of the embassies, you don't have to play nice with [the State Department], you can just set up anywhere really."
While some of the special forces missions are centered around training of allied forces, often that line is blurred. In some cases, "training" is used as a cover for unilateral, direct action. "It's often done under the auspices of training so that they can go anywhere. It's brilliant. It is essentially what we did in the 60s," says a special forces source. "Remember the 'training mission' in Vietnam? That's how it morphs."

Jeremy Scahill

[Austin Kelley]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/noteboo...nd”-mexico

U.S. Military has Special Ops “Boots on the Ground” in Mexico
Posted by Bill Conroy - June 12, 2010

Task Force is Embedded with Mexican Troops, CIA Operative Claims

A special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations, claims a former CIA asset who has a long history in the covert operations theater.

The U.S. unit, dubbed Task Force 7, since early 2009 , according to the CIA operative, has helped to uncover a warehouse in Juarez packed with U.S. munitions and under the control of drug traffickers; provide critical intelligence that led to the raid of a Juarez sweatshop that was manufacturing phony Mexican military uniforms; worked with the Mexican military in uncovering a mass grave near Palomas, Mexico, just south of Columbus, New Mexico; and, behind the scenes, cooperated with the Mexican Navy in hunting down a major narco-trafficker, Arturo Beltran Leyva -- who was killed by Mexican Navy special forces last December during a raid on a luxury apartment complex in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

“This task force [one of several in place in Mexico] is pretty heavily armed and is embedded with the Mexican military,” says Willaim Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, a former CIA contract pilot who flew numerous missions delivering arms to Latin America and returning drugs to the United States as part of the covert Iran/Contra operations in the 1980s. “These are boots on the ground ... seven to eight of them [in Task Force 7], working in a civilian capacity, meaning they are not in uniform.”

Plumlee stresses that the task force’s presence in Mexico pre-dates the Barack Obama administration, but that it remains active today. For obvious reasons, information on the unit’s precise location in Mexico now was not made available, though Plumlee says in the past the group has operated along Mexico’s northern border, including in Juarez — a border city south of El Paso, Texas.

Plumlee still has deep contacts in the U.S. intelligence world. His efforts to expose past CIA complicity in the drug trade are documented in a letter he sent in 1991 to then U.S. Sen. Gary Hart; in testimony he provided that same year to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and are spelled out in an exclusive story he provided to the San Diego Reader in 1990.

In addition, Narco News sources, including former DEA undercover agent Mike Levine, host of Pacifica Radio’s Expert Witness Radio Show, contend Plumlee is the real thing.

“Before I invited Tosh to come on the air,” Levine told Narco News previously, “because his story was so incredible, I vetted him through government agents, all of whom said he is the real thing. I have a copy of the air map he turned over to a San Diego weekly newspaper, bearing notations of all his drug flights, which first sold me on the guy.”

As evidence of his claims about the U.S. special operations task force operating in Mexico, Plumlee in early April last year provided Narco News with information he said he obtained from that task force detailing the Mexican Army’s investigation of a mass grave site located outside of Palomas, Mexico. About a month later, in early May 2009, the first press reports appeared in Mexican newspapers indicating that a mass grave containing at least seven bodies had been discovered at the same site identified by Plumlee.

At the time of the unearthing of the Palomas mass grave, Narco News chose not to release specific information about the U.S. task force for fear that it might compromise lives.

Since that time, however, Plumlee says task force members have become convinced, due to corruption and leaks within the Mexican government, that their presence in Mexico is now known to narco-trafficking organizations. In addition, in recent weeks, there have been a series of reports in mainstream newspapers, such as the Washington Post and The Nation magazine, indicating that U.S. special forces teams are operating in numerous foreign countries.

From a June 4 story in The Nation:

The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Balochistan) and the Philippines. These teams have also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC has also supported US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. [Emphasis added.]

Since the task force operations have already been exposed, at least to the extent that narco-trafficking organizations are surely aware of their presence in Mexico, Plumlee says making known in the U.S. the information about Task Force 7 may actually help to protect its members, via that public sunshine, despite the diplomatic embarrassment it might prompt – given the U.S. State Department and Mexican government’s sensitivity to admitting to any type of joint operations on Mexico soil.

In any event, it is not a particularly closely guarded national security secret that the U.S. Department of Defense is working cooperatively with the Mexican military. A statement put out by the White House back in March 2009 states the following:

DoD has been and is continuing to work with its Mexican counterparts to increase information sharing, interoperability, and training and equipping of counternarcotics forces.

In addition, a former U.S. government official who has experience dealing with covert operations and who also asked not to be named, says the presence of special operations forces in Mexico “is really nothing new in terms of how we have dealt with Mexico in the past.”

“Black operations have been going on forever,” the official says. “The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it’s a big scoop, but it’s nothing new for those who understand how things really work.”

In fact, U.S. special forces teams, including Delta Force and Navy Seals, worked with a Colombian task force known as the Search Bloc, and also, according to some reports, helped to train a paramilitary death squad known as Los Pepes, as part of the effort to hunt down and ultimately kill the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s.

Plumlee says he has no information or evidence that Task Force 7, or other similar units he claims are now embedded in Mexico as part of a drug-trafficking interdiction mission, are involved in training or assisting Mexican military units to carry out assassinations of narco-traffickers.

However, the former government official who spoke with Narco News says it would not be surprising if “assassinations [targeting high-profile narco-traffickers] were part of the mission.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the official says.

Stay tuned ….

[Peter Lemkin]

“Black operations have been going on forever,” the official says. “The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it’s a big scoop, but it’s nothing new for those who understand how things really work.”

Says it all really.....We 'own' Mexico...and most of the rest of the Planet....sadly ['cause we either bought it or bought those who run it or bought those who can kill those who run it or bought those who can kill those who can kill those who run it.....

"...the war is over; the good guys lost...."

Keep up the good work T!...maybe we can turn this shitcan around!....though, rather late in the 'day'....