TF 373 dedicated thread

[Jan Klimkowski]

This thread is dedicated to information about TF 373.

TF 373 appears to be a code phrase to describe western hunter killer Special Forces operations - quite possibly western death squads covertly sanctioned at very high political, military and intelligence levels.

Afghanistan war logs: Task Force 373 – special forces hunting top Taliban

Previously hidden details of US-led unit sent to kill top insurgent targets are revealed for the first time

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list.

In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

The United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had killed their loved ones "often come away empty-handed, frustrated and bitter".

Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down Jpel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.

On the night of Monday 11 June 2007, the leaked logs reveal, the taskforce set out with Afghan special forces to capture or kill a Taliban commander named Qarl Ur-Rahman in a valley near Jalalabad. As they approached the target in the darkness, somebody shone a torch on them. A firefight developed, and the taskforce called in an AC-130 gunship, which strafed the area with cannon fire: "The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA." In plain language: they discovered that the people they had been shooting in the dark were Afghan police officers, seven of whom were now dead and four wounded.

The coalition put out a press release which referred to the firefight and the air support and then failed entirely to record that they had just killed or wounded 11 police officers. But, evidently fearing that the truth might leak, it added: "There was nothing during the firefight to indicate the opposing force was friendly. The individuals who fired on coalition forces were not in uniform." The involvement of TF 373 was not mentioned, and the story didn't get out.

However, the incident immediately rebounded into the fragile links which other elements of the coalition had been trying to build with local communities. An internal report shows that the next day Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Phillips, commander of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, took senior officers to meet the provincial governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, who accepted that this was "an unfortunate incident that occurred among friends". They agreed to pay compensation to the bereaved families, and Phillips "reiterated our support to prevent these types of events from occurring again".

Yet, later that week, on Sunday 17 June, as Sherzai hosted a "shura" council at which he attempted to reassure tribal leaders about the safety of coalition operations, TF 373 launched another mission, hundreds of miles south in Paktika province. The target was a notorious Libyan fighter, Abu Laith al-Libi. The unit was armed with a new weapon, known as Himars – High Mobility Artillery Rocket System – a pod of six missiles on the back of a small truck.

The plan was to launch five rockets at targets in the village of Nangar Khel where TF 373 believed Libi was hiding and then to send in ground troops. The result was that they failed to find Libi but killed six Taliban fighters and then, when they approached the rubble of a madrasa, they found "initial assessment of 7 x NC KIA" which translates as seven non-combatants killed in action. All of them were children. One of them was still alive in the rubble: "The Med TM immediately cleared debris from the mouth and performed CPR." After 20 minutes, the child died.

Children

The coalition made a press statement which owned up to the death of the children and claimed that troops "had surveillance on the compound all day and saw no indications there were children inside the building". That claim is consistent with the leaked log. A press release also claimed that Taliban fighters, who undoubtedly were in the compound, had used the children as a shield.

The log refers to an unnamed "elder" who is said to have "stated that the children were held against their will" but, against that, there is no suggestion that there were any Taliban in the madrasa where the children died.

The rest of the press release was certainly misleading. It suggested that coalition forces had attacked the compound because of "nefarious activity" there, when the reality was that they had gone there to kill or capture Libi.

It made no mention at all of Libi, nor of the failure of the mission (although that was revealed later by NBC News in the United States). Crucially, it failed to record that TF 373 had fired five rockets, destroying the madrasa and other buildings and killing seven children, before anybody had fired on them – that this looked like a mission to kill and not to capture. Indeed, this was clearly deliberately suppressed.

The internal report was marked not only "secret" but also "Noforn", ie not to be shared with the foreign elements of the coalition. And the source of this anxiety is explicit: "The knowledge that TF 373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be protected." And it was. This crucial fact remained secret, as did TF 373's involvement.

Again, the lethal attack caused political problems. The provincial governor arranged compensation and held a shura with local leaders when, according to an internal US report, "he pressed the Talking Points given to him and added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story". Libi remained targeted for death and was killed in Pakistan seven months later by a missile from an unmanned CIA Predator.

In spite of this tension between political and military operations, TF 373 continued to engage in highly destructive attacks. Four months later, on 4 October, they confronted Taliban fighters in a village called Laswanday, only 6 miles from the village where they had killed the seven children. The Taliban appear to have retreated by the time TF 373 called in air support to drop 500lb bombs on the house from which the fighters had been firing.

The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 US wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.

The coalition put out a statement claiming falsely to have killed several militants and making no mention of any dead civilians; and later added that "several non-combatants were found dead and several others wounded" without giving any numbers or details.

This time, the political teams tried a far less conciliatory approach with local people. In spite of discovering that the dead civilians came from one family, one of whom had been found with his hands tied behind his back, suggesting that the Taliban were unwelcome intruders in their home, senior officials travelled to the stricken village where they "stressed that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers who did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities … [and] chastised a villager who condemned the compound shooting". Nevertheless, an internal report concluded that there was "little or no protest" over the incident.

Concealment

The concealment of TF 373's role is a constant theme. There was global publicity in October 2009 when US helicopters were involved in two separate crashes in one day, but even then it was concealed that the four soldiers who died in one of the incidents were from TF 373.

The pursuit of these "high value targets" is evidently embedded deep in coalition tactics. The Jpel list assigns an individual serial number to each of those targeted for kill or capture and by October 2009 this had reached 2,058.

The process of choosing targets reaches high into the military command. According to their published US Field Manual on Counter Insurgency, No FM3-24, it is policy to choose targets "to engage as potential counter-insurgency supporters, targets to isolate from the population and targets to eliminate".

A joint targeting working group meets each week to consider Target Nomination Packets and has direct input from the Combined Forces Command and its divisional HQ, as well as from lawyers, operational command and intelligence units including the CIA.

Among those who are listed as being located and killed by TF 373 are Shah Agha, described as an intelligence officer for an IED cell, who was killed with four other men on 1 June 2009; Amir Jan Mutaki, described as a Taliban sub-commander who had organised ambushes on coalition forces, who was shot dead from the air in a TF 373 mission on 24 June 2009; and a target codenamed Ballentine, who was killed on 16 November 2009 during an attack in the village of Lewani, in which a local woman also died.

The logs include references to the tracing and killing of other targets on the Jpel list, which do not identify TF 373 as the unit responsible. It is possible that some of the other taskforce names and numbers which show up in this context are cover names for 373, or for British special forces, 500 of whom are based in southern Afghanistan and are reported to have been involved in kill/capture missions, including the shooting in July 2008 of Mullah Bismullah.

Some of these "non 373" operations involve the use of unmanned drones to fire missiles to kill the target: one codenamed Beethoven, on 20 October 2008; one named Janan on 6 November 2008; and an unnamed Jpel target who was hit with a hellfire missile near Khan Neshin on 21 August 2009 while travelling in a car with other passengers (the log records "no squirters [bodies moving about] recorded").

Other Jpel targets were traced and then bombed from the air. One, codenamed Newcastle, was located with four other men on 26 November 2007. The house they were in was then hit with 500lb bombs. "No identifiable features recovered," the log records.

Two other Jpel targets, identified only by serial numbers, were killed on 16 February 2009 when two F-15 bombers dropped four 500lb bombs on a Jpel target: "There are various and conflicting reports from multiple sources alleging civilian casualties … A large number of local nationals were on site during the investigation displaying a hostile attitude so the investigation team did not continue sorting through the site."

One of the leaked logs contains a summary of a conference call on 8 March 2008 when the then head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, Amrullah Saleh, tells senior American officers that three named Taliban commanders in Kapisa province are "not reconcilable and must be taken out". The senior coalition officer "noted that there would be a meeting with the Kapisa NDS to determine how to approach this issue."

It is not clear whether "taken out" meant "killed" and the logs do not record any of their deaths. But one of them, Qari Baryal, who was ranked seventh in the Jpel list, had already been targeted for killing two months earlier.

On 12 January 2008, after tracking his movements for 24 hours, the coalition established that he was holding a large meeting with other men in a compound in Pashkari and sent planes which dropped six 500lb bombs and followed up with five strafing runs to shoot those fleeing the scene.

The report records that some 70 people ran to the compound and started digging into the rubble, on which there were "pools of blood", but subsequent reports suggest that Baryal survived and continued to plan rocket attacks and suicide bombings.

Numerous logs show Jpel targets being captured and transferred to a special prison, known as Btif, the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility. There is no indication of prisoners being charged or tried, and previous press reports have suggested that men have been detained there for years without any legal process in communal cages inside vast old air hangars. As each target is captured, he is assigned a serial number. By December 2009, this showed that a total of 4,288 prisoners, some aged as young as 16, had been held at Btif, with 757 still in custody.

Who are TF373?
The leaked war logs show that Task Force 373 uses at least three bases in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Kandahar and Khost. Although it works alongside special forces from Afghanistan and other coalition nations, it appears to be drawing its own troops from the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and to travel on missions in Chinook and Cobra helicopters flown by 160th special operations aviation regiment, based at Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul...an-taliban

[Jan Klimkowski]

Der Spiegel's initial take:

The Truth about Task Force 373

War Logs Cast Light on Dirty Side of Afghanistan Conflict
By Matthias Gebauer

The war logs cast light for the first time on the activities of the elite American unit Task Force 373, whose task is to hunt down senior Taliban in Afghanistan. Secret reports show just how cheap life is in Afghanistan -- and how often mistakes happen during missions.

It is late at night on June 24, 2009, when a unit of Task Force 373 heads out on one of its missions. Their target is a property with the code name of "Millersville," a small farm somewhere near the Pakistani border in eastern Afghanistan where the Taliban commander Amir Jan Mutaki is believed to be staying. According to a classified United States military document, he is supposed to have taken part in attacks on ISAF convoys on Highway 1. Mutaki will die later that night because of his role in the attacks.

Some of the TF 373 soldiers are traveling by helicopter, while others are on the ground. When they arrive at their target, everything happens very quickly. Six men, identified as "enemy" in a secret US military report, are shot down by a helicopter from the air. The US forces storm the farmstead. Inside, the special forces find two men, three women and six children, one of whom gets bitten by the US soldiers' attack dog. In addition, they seize materials for making bombs, grenades and multiple AK-47's. The operation appears to be a success.

It is only later that the men of the TF 373 unit find out that one of the men who was killed from the air was indeed their target, Amir Jan Mutaki. The aim of the deadly mission has been achieved.

Outside the ISAF Mandate

The June 2009 report is one of over 90,000 secret documents that have been freely available on the Internet since Sunday evening. They paint a picture of the war in Afghanistan that is closer, more authentic and more merciless than anything that has come before. In the case of the reports about Task Force 373, whose existence the US Army has kept secret for years, the documents perform a far greater function: They give for the first time an insight into the activities of a US special forces unit which operates in Afghanistan outside of the ISAF mandate.

The reports featuring TF 373, which appears in several hundred pages of the secret material, are some of the most sensitive documents of the thousands that have now been made available. There are many pieces of information that shed light on the toughest and most controversial aspect of the war -- the secret hunt for Taliban leaders carried out by special forces. The aim is to eliminate insurgents in Wild West-style -- without judges, evidence or trial. Such operations have been kept strictly confidential for years.

Until now, the special forces operatives have been kept largely sealed off, even from regular soldiers. Now anyone can read about their activities in the official military reports. It is also possible to use the documents to make deductions about the coalition forces' list of enemies, which is still top secret. The list, which has the clinical name of the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), includes Taliban, drug barons, bombmakers and al-Qaida members.

The list of targeted individuals is arranged according to process number and priority level. Depending on the case, the commandos are sometimes given the option to arrest or kill their prey. Nowhere in the available documents is that list printed in full, but a total of 84 reports about JPEL operations can be filtered out of the thousands of documents. It is not possible to work out from the documents exactly how many JPEL targets there are in Afghanistan, but the four-digit process numbers are enough to suggest that the total number of targets is large.

'Black Boxes'

Tracking down those targets is the task of TF 373, whose activities are clouded in secrecy. The members of the elite special forces unit do not wear names on their uniforms. Their overnight camps are always kept separate from those of other soldiers. When they go out on a mission, the normal ISAF command center is not informed about their activities. Their operational areas are sealed off as so-called "black boxes," so that ordinary troops do not get in the way -- or the firing line -- of the elite soldiers. Otherwise, the missions are not spoken about.

The men of Task Force 373 come from different branches of the military, including Navy Seals and Delta Force, and act like a pack of wolves. They receive their missions directly from the Pentagon. The special forces often manage to catch their opponents alive. The secret documents include several dozen entries referring to transfers of captives to the notorious terrorist prison at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul. At times the TF 373 soldiers arrive with prisoners several times in one day and hand them over to the guards.

Even Other ISAF Troops Don't Know About TF 373

But Task Force 373 prefers to hunt for "high value targets" such as top Taliban commanders or al-Qaida explosives experts. Those include enemies that no one wants to capture alive. Analysts say such targeted killings are a fact of life in the war in Afghanistan even though the US Army and the ISAF troops don't like to talk about such missions.

The documents don't just reveal the existence and activities of the Taliban hunters, they also show why these special units cause so much anger in the Afghan population. Mistakes made by special units are kept secret. One particularly sensitive report of a TF 373 operation dated June 17, 2007 is classified so secret that details of the mission must not be passed on to other ISAF forces. On this day the soldiers appear to have committed a particularly fatal error. The aim of the mission seems to have been to kill the prominent al-Qaida official Abu Laith. The unit had spent weeks watching a Koran school in which the Americans believed the al-Qaida man and several aides were living. But the five rockets they launched from a mobile rocket launcher ended up killing the wrong people.

Instead of the finding the top terrorist, the troops found the bodies of six dead children in the rubble of the completely destroyed school. One other child who was seriously wounded could not be saved even though a medic spent 20 minutes trying to revive him. Such a dramatic incident can't be kept secret and one day later the US army had to apologize publicly.

Routine Killing

The tone of the reports conveys how routine killing has become routine for the members of Task Force 373. One terse report on December 26, 2008 says an operation against a target identified as "Object Midway" cleared a number of compounds and found components for making improvised explosive devices. A brief entry lower down mentions that the soldiers killed 11 supposed insurgents and wounded one local Afghan civilian. The report makes no mention of the reason for the killing.

Even though it is an American unit, the revelations of its secret operations are likely to embarrass the German government. Some 300 soldiers from TF-373 have been stationed at the German military base Camp Marmal since the sommer of 2009. They operate as part of the Northern Regional Command, which is under German command.

Their presence was an awkward issue from the start and was something of a taboo even under Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who took over the ministry last October. His only reference to them was during a visit to the troops in November 2009 when he said vaguely that the Germans "are grateful for any help provided by the US Army." Elite troops had just spent five days attacking the Taliban bastion of Gul Tepa north-west of Kunduz. Some 130 people were killed, all of them insurgents, according to the US Army.

The Bundeswehr German army had refused to take part in the mission. The plans presented by a US major had look like a targeted killing operation against the Taliban.

US Army Offered Revenge for Taliban Attacks on Germans

Guttenberg's spokesman played down the war documents on Monday. The existence of TF 373 was "nothing new," he said, adding that cooperation between the Germans and Americans was working very well in the north. But German opposition parties are demanding information from the government. "From our point of view after reading the US documents it is disturbing how little the German government has told parliament about the operations of American special forces in German territory," said Omid Nouripur, the defense policy spokesman for the Green party.

The German Defense Ministry and Chancellery are aware of the targeted killing by US units of Taliban insurgents, many of whom are suspected of having committed attacks on the German army. But the government has never spoken publicly about this, partly because the killings don't fit in with the desired picture of the German mission. Germany doesn't want to be involved in the deadly hunt for the Taliban.


Last autumn, the Berlin government had said the "core mission" of Task Force 373 was simply the "reconnaissance and arrest of people who belong to al-Qaida or the Taliban leadership." That sounded a lot more harmless than the US war records that have now come to light.

Almost as if it were offering a service, the US Army approached the German military command saying it could hunt down the Bundeswehr's enemies and kill them. After seven German soldiers died in two ambushes in April this year, a high-ranking US officer in Kabul promised General Bruno Kasdorf, the highest-ranking German ISAF officer, that US forces would hunt and kill the organizers of the attacks. In the subsequent weeks several Taliban were eliminated.

The targeted killings are being presented increasingly openly. After US special forces killed the new Taliban "shadow governor" of Baghlan, Mullah Jabar, just an hour's drive south of Kunduz, the joint communication center Kabul reported that he had been killed through "precise air strikes." There have been quite a lot of such reports in recent months. The German government will now have to explain how much it knows about the activities of TF 373.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/worl...59,00.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Afghan war logs: the secret special forces hit squads hunting Taliban leaders

Leaked documents reveal the existence of a "black" special forces unit called Task Force 373 which works to capture or kill any of around 2,000 Taliban leaders.

The unit, it has been reported, has worked like a death squad which searches out the target and kills him with little or no attempt at capture.

The Guardian, which received the documents, along with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, a German paper, said they showed that the squad has "killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path".

Very little was previously known about the activities of the units targeting the Taliban leadership, although some incidents have been reported and their basic existence has not been a well-kept secret.

Some people believe such "black ops" units are a legitimate tool of war but their critics say they are operating outside the full control of the government.

One of the incidents reported in the leaked documents relates to an attempt to target Qarl Ur-Rahman, a Taliban commander, near Jalalabad.

The Guardian reported: "As they approached the target in the darkness, somebody shone a torch on them.

"A firefight developed, and the taskforce called in an AC-130 gunship, which strafed the area with cannon fire: "The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA."

"In plain language: they discovered that the people they had been shooting in the dark were Afghan police officers, seven of whom were now dead and four wounded."

A second incident saw rockets fired at the hideout of a suspected Libyan Taliban leader called Abu Laith al-Libi.

The first reports claimed seven civilians were killed but it later emerged that they were all children and one was still alive but died 20 minutes later despite attempts to save its life.

A subsequent press release from coalition forces said the Taliban had used the children as a shield and, despite hours of monitoring, there had been no sign of them prior to the attack.

The initial internal report was marked not only "secret" but also "Noforn", which means it is not to be shared with the foreign elements of the coalition.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopi...aders.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Key 15A27543-B022-4736-AC31-71006B18794E
Date 2007-06-17 21:00:00
Type Friendly Action
Category Other
Tracking no. 2007-186-112133-0753
Title 172100Z TF 373 OBJ Lane
Summary NOTE: The following information (TF-373 and HIMARS) is Classified Secret / NOFORN. The knowledge that TF-373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be kept protected. All other information below is classified Secret / REL ISAF.

(S) Mission: O/O SOTF conducts kinetic strike followed with HAF raid to kill/capture ABU LAYTH AL LIBI on NAI 2.

(S)Target: Abu Layth Al Libi is a senior al-Qaida military commander, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) leader. He is based in Mir Ali, Pakistan and runs training camps throughout North Waziristan. Collection over the past week indicates a concentration of Arabs IVO objective area.

Result: 6 x EKIA; 7 x NC KIA, 7 x detainees

(S) Summary: HAF departed for Orgun-E to conduct link-up and posture to the objective immediately after pre-assault fires. On order, 5 rockets were launched and destroyed structures on the objective (NAI 2). The HAF quickly inserted the assault force into the HLZ. ISR reported multiple UIMs leaving the objective area. The assault force quickly conducted dismounted movement to the target area and established containment on the south side of the objective. During the initial assault, dedicated air assets engaged multiple MAMs squirting off the objective area. GFC assessed 3 x EKIA squirters north and 3 x EKIA squirters south of the compound were neutralized from air asset fires. The assault force quickly maneuvered with a SQD element on the remaining squirters. The squirter element detained 12 x MAMs and returned to the objective area. GFC passed initial assessment of 7 x NC KIA (children). During initial questioning, it was assessed that the children were not allowed out of the building, due to UIMs presence within the compound. The assault force was able to uncover 1 x NC child from the rubble. The MED TM immediately cleared debris form the mouth and performed CPR to revive the child for 20 minutes. Due to time restrictions, TF CDR launched QRF element to action a follow-on target (NAI 5). They quickly contained the objective and initiated the assault. The objective was secured and the assault force initially detained 6 x MAMs. The GFC recommended that 7 MAMs be detained for additional questioning. The TF CDR assessed that the assault force will continue SSE. The local governor was notified of the current situation and requests for assistance were made to cordon the AO with support from ANP and local coalition forces in search of HVI. A PRT is enroute to AO.

1) Target was an AQ Senior Leader

2) Patterns of life were conducted on 18 June from 0800z 1815z (strike time) with no indications of women or children on the objective

3) The Mosque was not targeted nor was it struck initial reports state there is no damage to the Mosque

4) An elder who was at the Mosque stated that the children were held against their will and were intentionally kept inside

UPDATE: 18 0850Z June 07

- Governor Khapalwak has had no success yet in reaching President Karzai (due to the Presidents busy schedule today) but expects to reach him within the hour (PoA reached later in the afternoon ~ 1400Z)

- The Governor conducted a Shura this morning, in attendance were locals from both the Yahya Yosof Khail & Khail Districts

- He pressed the Talking Points given to him and added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story

- The atmospherics of the local populous is that they are in shock, but understand it was caused ultimately by the presence of hoodlums

- the people think it is good that bad men were killed

- the people regret the loss of life among the children

- The Governor echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this couldve been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area

- The Governor promised another Shura in a few days and that the families would be compensated for their loss

- Tthe Governor was asked what the mood of the people was and he stated that "the operation was a good thing, and the people believe what we have told them"

- Additionally, the people accused the Yahya Khail Chief of Police and his officers of corruption and collusion with TB in the area

- The Governor and the Provincial NDS Chief relieved the CofP and his officers, disarmed them, and they are currently detained and enroute to Sharana at this time unknown as to total numbers detained (MTF on this incident)
Region RC EAST
Attack on FRIEND
Complex attack FALSE
Reporting unit CJTF-82
Unit name CJTF-82
Type of unit None Selected
Friendly WIA 0
Friendly KIA 0
Host nation WIA 0
Host nation KIA 0
Civilian WIA 0
Civilian KIA 7
Enemy WIA 0
Enemy KIA 6
Enemy detained 7
MGRS 42SVB7220751882
Latitude 33.0050087
Longitude 68.70246124
Originator group UNKNOWN
Updated by group UNKNOWN
CCIR (SIR IMMEDIATE 7) Injury/Death of local national due to coalition actions
Sig Act CJTF-82
Affiliation FRIEND
D Colour BLUE
* WIA: wounded in action. KIA: killed in action. MGRS: Military grid reference system. CCIR: Commander's critical information requirement. Hover over underlined words for an explanation or see the glossary in full.

[Keith Millea]

From an older thread started by Tosh Plumlee.It should be noticed that this task force operates in many countries.Title of thread is "U.S Military assassination teams of today".I am unable to post the correct link.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive asassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive asassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.


AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.

The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo,” they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position.” He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an asassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an asassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Name some.

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.

We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the asassination wing continuing under President Obama?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Can't leave it hanging on a question like that....

Here's how Hersh replies:

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?

SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/97325

[Peter Lemkin]

From an older thread started by Tosh Plumlee.It should be noticed that this task force operates in many countries.Title of thread is "U.S Military assassination teams of today".I am unable to post the correct link.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive asassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive asassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.


AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.

The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo,” they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position.” He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an asassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an asassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Name some.

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.

We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the asassination wing continuing under President Obama?

While I do not have first hand or insider nor informer knowledge, it is my understanding that such death squads are not operative [generally] in multiple countries, but usually stationed in or specific for a country/area. Yes, some units are mobile enough to be moved, as 'needed' anywhere.... i.e. TF 373 doesn't [I'd guess] operate in any other country (other than over the Pakistani border). In other countries other TF XXX operate..... How far away from the SS or SA are we now.....?!??! Not far. In fact we have many - all TOO many such assassination squads, all over the world and in San Diego, and other, places awaiting deployment. We have also trained proxy death squads all over the world and train regularly at the [old name] 'School of the Americas', and other special forces bases in the U SS of A.

As for O-Bomb-Ya, he has put the face of what was termed by Gross as 'friendly fascism' on the whole cabal - playing good cop to Bush's bad cop, yet letting all continue as before....uninterrupted, except in the superficial rhetoric and 'Democratic' spin. IMO

[Jan Klimkowski]

Peter - I concur.

Here's some of the top level operational detail about TF 373 that has surfaced:

From The Guardian:

The leaked war logs show that Task Force 373 uses at least three bases in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Kandahar and Khost. Although it works alongside special forces from Afghanistan and other coalition nations, it appears to be drawing its own troops from the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and to travel on missions in Chinook and Cobra helicopters flown by 160th special operations aviation regiment, based at Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia

From Der Spiegel:
The men of Task Force 373 come from different branches of the military, including Navy Seals and Delta Force, and act like a pack of wolves. They receive their missions directly from the Pentagon. The special forces often manage to catch their opponents alive. The secret documents include several dozen entries referring to transfers of captives to the notorious terrorist prison at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul. At times the TF 373 soldiers arrive with prisoners several times in one day and hand them over to the guards.

(snip)

Even though it is an American unit, the revelations of its secret operations are likely to embarrass the German government. Some 300 soldiers from TF-373 have been stationed at the German military base Camp Marmal since the sommer of 2009. They operate as part of the Northern Regional Command, which is under German command.

Their presence was an awkward issue from the start and was something of a taboo even under Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who took over the ministry last October. His only reference to them was during a visit to the troops in November 2009 when he said vaguely that the Germans "are grateful for any help provided by the US Army." Elite troops had just spent five days attacking the Taliban bastion of Gul Tepa north-west of Kunduz. Some 130 people were killed, all of them insurgents, according to the US Army.

The Bundeswehr German army had refused to take part in the mission. The plans presented by a US major had look like a targeted killing operation against the Taliban.

[Jan Klimkowski]

I've also performed several searches of the New York Times coverage of the wikileaks material

TF 373 is conspicuous by its near total absence.

Here's what I could find - a passing mention as part of a section attempting to play down the wikileaks material:

The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.

White House officials vigorously denied that the Obama administration had presented a misleading portrait of the war in Afghanistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/....html?_r=3

As I wrote in another thread:

There is zero chance that the US govt, the UK govt, or NATO will ever officially admit to "running death squads".

Any politician or military leader sanctioning a death squad is prima facie guilty of a war crime.

Any "killings" (to use a neutral word) committed by such a "death squad" constitute extra judicial killing, and hence a war crime.

The killing of any civilian by a US, UK or NATO-approved "death squad" would be an aggravated war crime.

The documents provided by a courageous whistle-blower, and made available by wikileaks, are incredibly important evidence substantiating the claim that "TF 373", which appears to be code for covert US, UK and NATO special forces operations, does indeed include extra-judicial killings of both "human targets" and entirely innocent civilians.

It appears that "TF373" often behaves like a "death squad".

This will NEVER be officially admitted by the political and military leaders who have approved the operations of "TF 373".

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...01&page=19

In my judgement, the NYT's near total lack of coverage of TF 373 is partial confirmation of my suspicions.

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, Jan as I know you well know the NYT is in essence a Deep Political Asset - so no surprise there. A few independent reporters may not be compromised, but the editorial staff, ownership is! So, no surprises there.......The CIA even once bragged that the NYT was one of their 'assets'....perhaps one of their most relied-upon and important. Only the Washington Post and Washington Times are more so [IMO]...but the difference is minor. The PTB are shitting in their pants over the Wikileaks leak, yet trying desperately to put the best face [spin] on it......may the truth prevail.....as we are all running out of time.....and many are running out on their lives [millions!!!!!]...if not billions in an economic/political self-control sense.