GORDON DUFF: TARNISHED GLORY: THE MYTH OF "SPECIAL OPERATIONS"

WHEN DID “SPECIAL OPS” BECOME KIDNAPPING, DRUG DEALING, TORTURE and POLITICAL DIRTY TRICKS

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

What does  “Special Ops’ mean?  Why would a special operations command, JSOC, be answerable to our Vice President, a mentally unstable draft dodging hack from the oil industry?  Why would the CIA outsource its most secret projects to Blackwater, a GOP mercenary group with the worst reputation of any firm the US has ever done business with?

Years of kidnapping and torturing people based on mistaken identity, intelligence that is ALWAYS WRONG, chasing dead men, invading wrong countries and picking out allies that are gangsters, con men and drug dealers isn’t an accident, its policy.  Now we are told Blackwater, the CIA, MI-6, the Mossad and RAW work together, not only against Iran but in friendly nations also.  The stories we are told are that some of what is done is contracting for commercial clients and foreign governments and not anything involving fighting terrorism or protecting anyone, in fact, much the opposite.  When is a mercenary a gangster?  Are these missions or are they capers or hits?

Blackwater has become the punching bag for the press of late.  With accusations of close ties to the CIA and charges of murder and gangsterism floating around after years of more than empty accusations of massive incompetence, their name is abused most.

Are they the only ones?  When “private contractors” are involved in terrorism against US allies, the real scandal few are talking about in the US, and Blackwater’s name is brought up, is it really them or someone else?  There are dozens of companies involved, not just “Blackwater.”

We now know that Blackwater alone has an endless web of secret fronts making it impossible to trace what is done and for whom.  Other companies are doing the same, all unaccountable to the United States or her allies.

Many of these companies exist as offshore entities and are, thus, free to work for the highest bidder, be it Iran, Libya, Georgia, the Sudan or even Israel or India.

The charges against private contractors and “special ops” and intelligence organizations are these:

• Planning and executing terrorist acts inside Pakistan killing hundreds of civilians and targeting military and intelligence facilities
• Organizing revolutionary groups inside Baluchistan which are now fighting along side the Taliban along with organizing attacks inside Iran.
• Transporting narcotics and arranging international banking for warlords involved in opium
• Using rendition and torture to create falsified intelligence used to justify unnecessary military operations
• Manipulating and creating terrorist threats to influence American elections
• Private contractors are said to provide security and training for Iran and other countries unfriendly to the United States
• Creating a trade in phony terrorist suspects, innocent people who are bought and sold into years of torture, imprisonment and even murdered for profit.
• Facilitating terrorist acts in Western Europe and elsewhere through withholding vital intelligence or worse, much worse, in order to maintain an international climate of fear.
• Facilitating a world market in selling American secrets around the world which involved well known “think tanks” working for the US government, members of Congress and key White house and State Department officials.
• Maintaining high level contacts with terrorist leaders for reasons we can only guess.

The last charge and the most serious charge is also the most substantiated.  Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who was held under gag order by the Bush administration for 6 years has testified to the fact that the CIA under Bush was regularly communicating with Osama bin Laden until immediately before 9/11.  Her sworn testimony is available and a recap of her charges is available thru the American Conservative.

Evidence, to some degree, exists to support all of these charges but, although some investigations are going forward, any attempt to begin a comprehensive investigation of this massive national security threat is being blocked at every level.

What are the rationales for this pattern of abuse of power?  How could this be accomplished?  Let’s look at a few of the factors involved:

• Israel is the key to many issues, but not in the sense of Israeli security.  For instance, Israel is the largest arms supplier to India and many other countries, often reselling extremely sensitive US missile technology.  Israeli is also involved financially in oil and gas projects in many of the destabilized areas.
• Global security experts have long suspected that the “War on Terror” was little more than an excuse to keep the arms business going after the fall of Communism.  Revelations that most threats, from Iraq to “worldwide terror networks” have been overblown are now commonly accepted.
• Wide mistrust of America’s democratic system of government and legal protections by powerful groups, some of whom profited massively from rigged gasoline prices, financial deregulation and “no bid” war contracts, led to a marriage of special interest and politics in America that undermined Constitutional liberties and controls on corruption to create a much less free but seemingly “more efficient” corporate state.
• The world economy entered a period when the US could be realigned from its position of “economic powerhouse” to “milk cow.”  America could be “looted”, financial institutions made insolvent, real estate markets collapsed while America’s military forces could be used to secure global markets for multinational corporations under the guise of “spreading Christian values” or “ending tyranny.”
• The “information revolution” would make this, not only possible but expedient thru centralized control of media, TV and Radio and the ability to use the internet to systematically flood millions of households with continual irrational scares about poisoned vaccines, socialist conspiracies, gun seizures and mysterious plots.  Where media manipulation failed, hacking electronic voting machines would leave a semblence of democratic freedoms while eliminating all real public participation in government.
• One fact regarding 9/11 has always been known, one fact only:  Osama bin Laden, now known to have been working for the CIA on 9/11,  was not involved.  Since the debunking of the 9/11 Commission Report, much done by those who wrote it themselves, we are left with no proven facts involving this tragedy.

Some glimpses into these patterns of misconduct and conspiracy came up during the Edmonds interview with former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi, published in the American Conservative:

“GIRALDI: You also have information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asia and Bosnia. You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…

EDMONDS: I don’t know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s group, Fethullah Gülen.

GIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint Special Operations Command or CIA.

EDMONDS: Maybe in a lot of cases when they said State Department, they meant CIA?

GIRALDI: When they said State Department, they probably meant CIA.

EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.

There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.

GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?

EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.

GIRALDI: And, of course, none of this has been investigated.”

The last sentence is the most telling.  “None of this has been investigated.”  When discussing the Joint Special Operations Command, they are referring to General McChrystal and Vice President Cheney.  Drugs on NATO planes?  Flying terrorist leaders around the world?

Is this what we mean by “special operations.”  How does flying terrorists around and delivering narcotics protect us?  How many whistleblowers have been silenced?  These are the charges made against Blackwater, as printed in The Nation:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.

The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

Since these charges were made public, we have learned that this same company had been involved, on a massive scale, in US operations around the world.  We learned this week, from Brigadier General Asif Haroon Raja in Opinion Maker that Blackwater is accused of terrorist attacks against Pakistan:

“Having fully committed the army in fighting a futile US war on terror, RAW sponsored terrorists duly aided by Blackwater elements are playing havoc into major cities of Pakistan through almost daily bomb blasts and suicide attacks.”

Can America afford to continue with our current special operations command, be it CIA or JSOC or whatever the flavor of the day, if even a single of the seemingly endless charges made are true?

Is blocking investigations meant to protect America or to facilitate our own “evil doers?”

VT Senior Editor Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

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